Liminality and the Philosophy of Presence: A New Direction in Political Theory 2020046093, 2020046094, 9780367484545, 9781003039839

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Liminality and the Philosophy of Presence

This book departs from the attempt by political theory to confront the challenges of political life with new concepts, offering instead a mode of thought so far excluded from the canon of political theory: the philosophy of presence. Making the experience of liminality the very centre of thought, it shows how embracing ‘in-betweenness’ allows us to discern the limits of both the political order and contemporary political theory. Through an examination of the works of Gustav Landauer, Eric Voegelin, Simone Weil and Václav Havel, the author demonstrates the manner in which ‘in-betweenness’ may be cultivated by way of the philosophy of presence as a method of selfenquiry into existence as it is experienced subjectively. Arguing that since externalisation is the essence of politics and that the way to a more just society lies inwards, through a confrontation with liminality, this study of how to read philosophers of presence renders their work intelligible to the contemporary discourse of crisis and will appeal to scholars of social, political and anthropological theory and philosophy. Franziska Hoppen holds a doctorate in Politics and Government from the University of Kent, UK, and currently works as a journalist in Berlin, Germany.

Contemporary Liminality Series editor: Arpad Szakolczai, University College Cork, Ireland. Series advisory board: Agnes Horvath, University College Cork, Ireland; Bjørn Thomassen, Roskilde University, Denmark; and Harald Wydra, University of Cambridge, UK.

This series constitutes a forum for works that make use of concepts such as ‘imitation’, ‘trickster’ or ‘schismogenesis’, but which chiefly deploy the notion of ‘liminality’, as the basis of a new, anthropologically-focused paradigm in social theory. With its versatility and range of possible uses rivalling mainstream concepts such as ‘system’, ‘structure’ or ‘institution’, liminality by now is a new master concept that promises to spark a renewal in social thought. While charges of Eurocentrism are widely discussed in sociology and anthropology, most theoretical tools in the social sciences continue to rely on approaches developed from within the modern Western intellectual tradition, whilst concepts developed on the basis of extensive anthropological evidence and which challenged commonplaces of modernist thinking, have been either marginalised and ignored, or trivialised. By challenging the taken-forgranted foundations of social theory through incorporating ideas from major thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Dilthey, Weber, Elias, Voegelin, Foucault and Koselleck, as well as perspectives gained through modern social and cultural anthropology and the central concerns of classical philosophical anthropology Contemporary Liminality offers a new direction in social thought. Titles in this series 12 Modern Leaders Between Charisma and Trickery Edited by Agnes Horvath, Manussos Marangudakis and Arpad Szakolczai 13 Political Alchemy Technology Unbounded Agnes Horvath 14 Liminality and the Philosophy of Presence A New Direction in Political Theory Franziska Hoppen For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Contemporary-Liminality/book-series/ASHSER1435

Liminality and the Philosophy of Presence A New Direction in Political Theory

Franziska Hoppen

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Franziska Hoppen The right of Franziska Hoppen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hoppen, Franziska, 1990– author. Title: Liminality and the philosophy of presence : a new direction in political theory / Franziska Hoppen. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020046093 (print) | LCCN 2020046094 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367484545 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003039839 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political science—Philosophy. | Liminality. | Presence (Philosophy) Classification: LCC JA71 .H6395 2021 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046093 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046094 ISBN: 9780367484545 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003039839 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1

1

Liminality and the discourse of crisis

6

2

An introduction to the philosophy and practices of presence

22

3

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung

46

4

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis

79

5

Simone Weil – Malheur

115

6

Václav Havel – Neklid

150

Conclusion

185

Bibliography Index

201 213

Acknowledgements

I am deeply thankful to my PhD supervisor Dr Stefan Rossbach for his relentless support and guidance and for encouraging me to write this book. Without his attention, patience and trust, this project would not have happened. Sincere appreciation is also extended to Dr Iain Mackenzie for providing support, feedback and suggestions throughout the research and writing process, challenging my ideas and helping them grow. I would also like to thank the friends who gave many hours to reading this work, correcting mistakes and suggesting how it could be improved: Mohamed Niazi, Muzzafer Kutlay, Eske van Gils, Chris Henry, Ben Turner, Dr Sean Molloy, Paul Caringella and Elmira Esmaeili. Among them, I owe a special debt to Petr Barta for taking much time over the years to listen to and discuss this project and for lending me many books, especially from his collection of Czech authors, as well as to Mohamed Niazi for his insight, patience and love. The research community at the University of Kent, especially at the Department of Politics and International Relations, and at the Library of Congress Kluge Center, as well as the Hoover Institution Archives, has been vital in developing this research. Finally, I must thank my parents for their mental and moral support throughout the years.

Introduction

American novelist Kurt Anderson has recently diagnosed American society with a “lurch towards fantasy”. From satirical talk show host Stephen Colbert’s comical segment on “truthiness” (Colbert, 2017)1 to Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” Anderson writes: “The original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control” (Andersen, 2017). The problem which Anderson describes is not a tendency towards lying – as lying would presuppose some knowledge of truth. Rather, truth as a category appears to have often enough become altogether irrelevant – also in the realm of politics. This phenomenon can be observed around the globe and even lead to the coinage of the new term post-truth-politics, which has been assigned, for example, to Donald Trump accusing the media of fake news, to aspects of the Brexit-Referendum campaign, to Vladimir Putin’s insistence that there is no Russian occupation of the Krim, or to the German AfD party’s emphasis on citizens’ feelings over factual, statistical proof. Some political commentators even announced the West had reached the “age of post-truth politics” (Davies, 2016). Whether this term really corresponds to a new phenomenon or simply expresses heightened awareness of spin – the fact that it has emerged, that the discourse surrounding it juxtaposes politics as fantasy with politics as truth – deserves closer investigation. Moreover, “post-truth” is only one of a range of new prefixes that have recently been added to the political discourse in mainstream and critical political thought, seeking to diagnose modern Western politics: post-politics, anti-politics, meta politics, para politics, ultra-politics and infra politics, amongst others. Together they signify “a profound reorientation that occurs within the realm of political thought” (Bosteels, 2020, p.20). Although each of these concepts stands for a complex variety of characteristics and has originated in a different philosophical tradition, formulating either criticisms of the current form or propositions for new types, they share in common the notion that conventional political theory and practice are out of their depth. In the face of such widespread disdain for “truth” or confronted with the desertion of the political arena and growing support for anti-establishment

2  Introduction parties, much of the traditional concepts and tactics seems to have become redundant, while genuine possibilities to diagnose and treat the current crisis appear unavailable. Thus, it is argued, new ways of thinking and talking about politics are needed, original tools and actions, to fathom and to counter the crisis. Each new concept points to the insufficiency of the old one and testifies to a divide between experience on the one hand and theoretical tools on the other. This book refers to this conceptual reorientation as “discourse of crisis,” whereby “crisis” refers both to the perceived changes in political procedures and to the incapacity of theoretical tools to describe and explain these. Chapter 1 explores the origins and limits of the discourse of crisis. It is built on a dialectic that differentiates between the concept of “politics” on the one hand and “the political” on the other, serving today’s new concepts as basis to formulate their critique. Like the recently added prefixes, this dialectic initially responded to a crisis, when “politics” as a single term no longer seemed sufficient to describe the constitution of society. Thus arose the need to supplement “politics” by a further term. The concept was then split from within between its eo ipso, politics and the political. Whereas “politics” henceforward pointed to the ontic dimension of society, such as its practices of state governance, “the political” described society’s ontological dimension and the moment of its institution, accounting for the contingent. Yet, there was a further transition. Next, it was argued that the political has been colonised by politics. Managerialism, technocracy and populism, not least the echo chambers of social media campaigning, are said to have eradicated real alternatives: genuine choices, ideological clashes, dreams for the impossible and passion. The formal platform to encounter and engage with otherness has disappeared, it is argued, and with it the possibilities for self-realisation, the creation of political subjectivity. Hence, self-affirmation is sought elsewhere – in nationalism, racism, religious fundamentalism. Post-truth-politics, it might be argued, crowns the project. Not only do camps of different opinions not need to engage with each other anymore: oneself no longer needs to engage with oneself. Anyone may believe whatever they wish – and politics will reflect it. In sum, the discourse of crisis finds, today’s politics practices externalisation, which means the substitution of self-realisation with self-affirmation and the outsourcing of identity to external markers of identification. However, there are limits to this discourse of crisis: on the one hand, it is perturbed by the stagnation, fixation and suppression of debate and movement in politics. Thus, it tries to account better for the ontological dimension of society, having recognised its moving, changing character, the flux of events and multiplicity of becoming. On the other hand, by seeking to capture this ontological dimension in the various new concepts adding to ‘the political,’ the discourse precisely refuses to move beyond political discourse. This book argues: the supposed solution to the crisis is always further contraction, first a split of politics into its eo ipso and the political,

Introduction  3 then a dialectic between politics proper and its displacement. Thereby, the universe of this discourse becomes total. There is nothing outside of politics, nothing prior or beyond. Inside this universe, subject and the social exist only through, never without, politics. Hence, the crisis is considered political, requiring a political solution. Hence, new concepts and original solutions need to be sought – yet they only delve deeper into the political universe, fanning it out, increasing the surface. The discourse of crisis, this book argues, is symptomatic of the modern condition of permanent liminality, where the stage “betwixt and between” has ossified into permanent suspense. Sacrifice of the old and carnivalesque promises of the new are continually metamorphosing into each other: instead of an actual transition or progression, a movement of contraction occurs, of entanglement further and deeper into a chronic Schwellenzustand. In the first chapter, I seek to show that, first, the move towards new concepts, such as ‘post-truth-politics,’ ‘anti-politics’ or ‘post-politics,’ rather than pointing to a conceptual difference from “real” or “good politics,” forms a dialectic – and thereby perpetuates the condition of liminality. The metamorphosing here occurs on a conceptual, theoretical level – which nonetheless allows insights about the underlying experience: politics and political theory are indeed felt to be out of tune with the reality of society’s contingent ground. This is where the second chapter starts: it presents the “philosophy of presence” as an alternative gesture of thought – one that can make externalisation and the condition of permanent liminality visible. It exists independently of and has been excluded by the canon of contemporary political thought, being concerned with the question of the outside and beyond of politics as a derivative. It argues: externalisation is not an accidental characteristic of a deviated politics. Externalisation is the essence of politics. I will refer to this perspective as philosophy of presence. More than identifying externalisation and permanent liminality, it allows us to step out of it. The starting point, however, is the same as with the discourse of crisis: an existential tension, revealing existence in between a mundane order on the one hand, such as a particular political and social context, and another order, not of human making on the other, revealed precisely by that tension between knowledge and ignorance, timelessness and time and even between the profane and sacred. The philosophy of presence does not seek to overcome this tension but embraces this in-between position. This allows to reflect on the order of this world from another perspective, outside of politics, putting politics in its place. What is referred here as “practices of presence” are the attempts which cultivate the experience of presence. Instead of achieving self-affirmation like externalisation does, they dissolve the attributes and categories that define the self. Instead of gnostic withdrawal, they seek attunement in the here and now: refusal to comply with the preexisting order, the creation of new relationships, of new networks of community. Therefore, the philosophy of presence contributes two insights to the discourse of crisis: first,

4  Introduction externalisation is not an aberration, but the essence of politics. Second, the way towards a more just and free community does not lead via new political concepts and tactics but inwards via experience. It follows that the knowledge presented here is perennial, not factual. Its purpose is not intentionalist knowledge, gathered by a neutral pursuit of rationality. Presence cannot be willed, planned or repeated. The way in which it is experienced and translated will always differ. The philosophy of presence is merely the cultivation of the endless flow of presence as it reveals itself to each individual differently and at different occasions, yet in whose flow everything that exists already participates. It describes the dynamic process of being drawn towards the mystery of presence and attempting to attune one’s life towards an adequate “existence in truth.” The philosophy of presence hence is self-examination; its goal is authentic subjectivity. Practices of presence describe this exegetical method of self-inquiry into existence as it is experienced subjectively, inwardly. This work is then merely an example of how to read philosophers of presence, seeking to make their work intelligible to the contemporary discourse of crisis, underlining its relevance in making the limits of the political discourse visible. Studying the philosophy of presence inevitably leads to methodological difficulties. Presence is omnipresent and all-pervasive, inclusive and democratic, universally accessible qua being; it is experienced personally, expressed in a variety of symbols or not at all. It is perennial. There exists no canon of “philosophers of presence,” there is no school or “tradition” of the philosophy of presence in the narrow sense, no beginning, no conclusion, and there is no given list of philosophers. Consequently, in the selection of thinkers, there is initially an element of arbitrariness. However, this arbitrariness is gradually removed once the thinkers are explored in depth. In order to examine their particular philosophy, this thesis necessarily becomes itself a practice of presence. Because presence cannot be approached rationally, being the subjective and unmediated experience of a transcendent realm, the thinkers cannot be approached through superimposed categories, concepts or “-isms.” Rather, this thesis assumes an emic approach to their work, conveying their research in their own language by citing from their work, highlighting the attempts not to outsource language. The task is not to evaluate how logically coherent, right or wrong these thinkers’ thought and life is. The task is to restore presence. The four thinkers to be discussed in depth are German anarchist Gustav Landauer, German-American political scientist Eric Voegelin, French philosopher and activist Simone Weil and Czech dissident and first president of the Czech Republic Václav Havel. These thinkers have not yet been brought into contact with one another, and the theme of presence has yet to be specified in their work. However, despite having lived in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, responding to different political crises, each of these thinkers has a unique relevance to the discourse of crisis – a relevance I seek to clarify through these four chapters, focusing on their

Introduction  5 particular “practices of presence”: Absonderung, Anamnesis, Attention and Malheur and Neklid. As will be shown in the following chapters, these may serve as a therapy to the “lurch towards fantasy.”

Note 1 Stephen Colbert said: Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books – they’re all fact, no heart […]. Face it, folks, we are a divided nation […] divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart […]. Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen – the gut.

1

Liminality and the discourse of crisis

Modern Western politics appears to be in crisis. Traditional markers of political participation have been in decline for decades, anti-establishment parties across Europe have gained disproportionate voter support and creative types of informal participation are challenging and redefining our conventional understanding of politics as the decision making of state institutions.1 The popular discourse that formed in response has sought to capture this development with new concepts: “post-truth-politics,” “post-politics” or “anti-politics” have recently emerged amongst others.2 They imply: traditional political categories have been exhausted and conventional political theory has arrived at a deadlock. Consequently, questions about political ontology, the “essence” of politics, its limits and beyond have recently been of central importance. I refer to this discourse as discourse of crisis and seek to show how it becomes part of the crisis itself, employing a strategy that may best be described as contracting political concepts, as folding and thereby increasing the surface of the debate, a sort of metamorphosis that contributes – indeed – to a state of permanent liminality. In the following, I seek to show how the concepts of “imitation” and “permanent liminality” can allow us to step out of the discourse of crisis and explore the phenomenon which it revolves around – “externalisation” – from an alternative angle. For example, the conceptual split of politics into its eo ipso on the one hand and ‘the political’ on the other, between, moreover, politics proper and its displacement, allows the discourse of crisis to argue that violence, disorder or a ‘lurch towards fantasy’ have emerged not because the project of ordering society politically has failed as such, but because it was not political enough. The discourse contrasts a supposedly authentic politics that enables genuine selfhood through direct encounter and open engagement with its aberrant form which is said to externalise identity. As a consequence, it is argued, other types of antagonisms emerge on different planes, for example, as national or religious strife. Therefore, a truly emancipatory political theory and practice need to re-examine the political, re-accommodate the contingent and ontological dimension of society and re-create spaces for its emergence and interplay with politics as state, it is argued. This chapter will critically examine these assumptions.

Liminality and the discourse of crisis  7 The expression “externalisation” will be used throughout the following chapters in order to refer to the outsourcing of identity, whereby the dynamic and complex process of relating to oneself and to others, as well as the responsibility to act upon encounters and insights, is deferred to the external, political sphere. There, self-realisation is substituted by adherence to external markers of identity, which are upheld and protected through a complex panorama of categories, attributes and representations, everyday norms and rules. Thus, the inner life is represented externally. The expressions “politics of externalisation” and “project of self-assertion” refer to a politics whose purpose it is to uphold this system and which, once the self is outsourced, requires even more affirmation.

1.1 Introducing the discourse of crisis The double movement of an advancing decline of traditional markers of political participation on the one hand, especially party membership, voter turnout and political affiliation, and the growing support for anti- establishment, typically right-wing populist parties on the other hand, have been interpreted as a historically unprecedented crisis by the media,3 and multiple study and research groups have recently formed to investigate this crisis. While the phenomena of depoliticisation and the totalisation of politics have been discussed using new prefixes at least since the 1990s, these have recently been utilized with renewed frequency, capturing a general trend across most of Europe over the past three decades, with some variation within and across countries.4 Mainstream and critical political thought are re- examining and revitalising political concepts, categories, their essence and contours and have procured a variety of new concepts, typically recognisable by the “simple yet thought-provoking addition of a prefix” (Bosteels, 2010, p.205). These concepts include, apart from the more commonly used “anti-politics,” “post-politics” or “post-truth-politics,” for example, Jacques Rancière’s archipolitics, parapolitics and metapolitics, Alain Badiou’s version of “metapolitics” and “archipolitics,” Slavoj Žižek’s contribution of “ultra-politics,” a renewed use of James C. Scott’s “infrapolitics” as well as Roberto Esposito’s and Massimo Cacciari’s category of the “impolitical.” Whilst acknowledging the diversity and complexity of these concepts, it can be argued that they indicate a perceived inability of traditional concepts and categories of modernity to formulate a radical perspective in the face of a depoliticisation and/or a totalisation of politics. All of these new prefixes imply “a profound reorientation that occurs within the realm of political thought […]” (Bosteels, 2010, p.206). Most have in common elements of the thesis that the political has been neutralised, colonised or sublimated (Marchart, 2007, p.44ff).5 Whether the political is interpreted as moment of association or dissociation, it is either seen as neutralised by the social, subsumed by the non-political, foreclosed by politics itself, or retreating.6 The actual political moment in which ideas clash and hopes and passions sprout,

8  Liminality and the discourse of crisis the interplay between the structured social body and irreducible social conflict is seen as displaced and deferred. Therefore, part of these concepts has also been referred to as “figures of displacement.”7 In the following, this view will be referred to as “discourse of crisis”: it perpetuates the notion of a recent, dangerous turn within politics or political theory, whereby also the possibilities to create and sustain selfhood are foreclosed.8 However, according to political scientist Sheldon Wolin, “[t]he abolition of the political was proclaimed by almost every important thinker, and most projects for a future society excluded political activity from the routine of daily life” (2016, p.414). Yet, Wolin also argues that the phenomena to which today’s concepts of post-, anti- or post-truth-politics refer are extraordinary because the political is not sought to be negated, as romantic projects might have done, but instead substituted. This is manifested by a countermovement: on the one hand, the political moment proper is deferred through, for example, increasing management and bureaucratisation; on the other hand, more and more areas of life are politicised. Depoliticisation and the totalisation of politics are two sides of the same coin. Both externalise selfrealisation. The discourse of crisis seeks to flag this externalisation and examine its origins. It is worthwhile to look at two examples in more detail: a renewed use of the concept of “post-truth-politics” in media coverage and social science research has surrounded events such as the UK’s Brexit-referendum, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the far right German AfD party (Alternative for Germany) entering all stateparliaments across the country and other unprecedented gains of the far right across Europe. Post-truth-politics – albeit a contested concept with a number of interpretations, some of which challenge the notion of it being a new phenomenon – broadly refers to political rhetoric and decision making that occurs in the absence of, or disregard for, facts in favour of emotions and uninformed opinion. For example, according to journalist Alard von Kittlitz, this phenomenon appears when politicians are no longer trusted to tell the truth, so that truth as a relevant criterion is replaced with likeability (von Kittlitz, 2016). Further, in The Economist it is stated, [t]here is a strong case that, in America and elsewhere, there is a shift towards a politics in which feelings trump facts more freely and with less resistance than used to be the case. Helped by new technology, a deluge of facts and a public much less given to trust than once it was, some politicians are getting away with a new depth and pervasiveness of falsehood. If this continues, the power of truth as a tool for solving society’s problems could be lastingly reduced. (Roberts, 2016)9 Such post-truth-politics is not merely criticised for spreading lies and misinformation, but for ignoring facts altogether. Whereas lies are manufactured

Liminality and the discourse of crisis  9 consciously, presupposing some knowledge of truth, it is argued that in post-truth-politics truth has simply become irrelevant. Journalist Jeet Heer refers to this phenomenon as “bullshitting,” using the research of American philosopher Harry Frankfurt: Frankfurt’s key observation is that the liar, even as he or she might spread untruth, inhabits a universe where the distinction between truth and falsehood still matters. The bullshitter, by contrast, does not care what is true or not. By his or her bluffing, dissimulation, and general dishonesty, the bullshit artist works to erase the very possibility of knowing the truth. For this reason, bullshit is more dangerous than lies, since it erodes even the possibility of truth existing and being found. (Heer, 2015) By no longer engaging with the reality of facts, post-truth-politics is said to constitute a seamless extension of subjective opinion. Politicians mirror and express the same distrust of the political establishment as their voters. This allows them to claim that “we are the people” (a slogan from the G ­ erman far right party Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), that they possess the “courage to tell the truth” (another AfD slogan: Mut zur Wahrheit)10 or, as in the case of Donald Trump, that “I will always tell you the truth” (AP Archive, 2016) – even though this at no point involves courageously speaking truth to power, but merely mimicking emotions or opinions in order to foster support. This putative “truth” elevates the subjective feeling of one group of people, which is not bound by objective facts, to an alternative reality that enforces itself on the whole of the electorate.11 The debate about post-truth-politics then criticises not only the contagious void of logical or conceptual truth. It also takes note of the practical creation of a political universe where those who think differently and all that is testimony to the falsehood of subjective opinion are systematically excluded – this includes the discussion on social media “echo chambers” – to thereby halt exchange with otherness: truth is seen as externalised. Here, the discourse juxtaposes a new (depending on the viewpoint not so new) and artificial system with a truthful and genuine politics. Another example is the concept of post-politics, which too focuses on the foreclosure of engagement mentioned above. In a nutshell, a variety of theorists agree that technocratic managerialism has replaced clashes between political ideologies (Crouch, 2004; Krastev, 2014; Mair, 2013). This “third way” beyond left and right seeks to exclude antagonisms, divisions and unpredictability from the political domain (Giddens, 2013). This, in turn, is said to efface democracy and, ultimately, to foster violence. For example, Yannis Stavrakakis explains: In effect, negativity and its affective value are displaced from the ­political field and reinscribed in – at least two – depoliticized ways.

10  Liminality and the discourse of crisis They are either reduced to a “clash of enjoyments” between different civilizations (at the global level), or, in domestic terms, reduced to a lack of particular products – to a lack, in other words, that can be “ad‑ ministered” through acts of consumption: through the consumption of products, discourses, fantasies, and even politicians. Moreover, within the post‑democratic universe, this authority structure becomes increas‑ ingly immune from criticism. Any resistance is either reabsorbed into the Disneyland of consumerist jouissance in a more or less conformist/­ cynical way, channeled into obsolete reoccupations of a nostalgic type with antidemocratic implications but (fortunately) limited appeal, or pushed to violent acting out or passages à l’acte, both internationally and domestically. The result has been an increasingly complex and explosive short-circuit with a variety of serious parameters (personal, economic, ecological, political, security, etc.) and no obvious solutions. (Stavrakakis, 2017) Stavrakakis, too, describes the creation of a “universe” that becomes ­i ncreasingly complex and total. His argument that the suppressed nega‑ tivity of contestation deflects and erupts on a multiplicity of different, new battle grounds is often repeated. These new battles, it is typically argued, occur outside the traditional political domain, for example, at the national, religious and ethnic level instead. There, conflicts exemplify exactly the type of adversity (what Stavrakakis refers to as “negativity”) between two ­homogenous groups – for example, “the people” against “the elite,” or “the people” against “the immigrants” – that might have been the “we” versus “them” in the political arena. In other words, disdained ideological causes are ­transferred – or externalised – from an authentically political sphere to the private or cultural realm and thereby in effect allow structural, objec‑ tive types of violence committed within politics itself to recur uninhibited. Thus, theorists such as Alain Badiou or Slavoj Žižek have even argued that ­modern Western politics has created a “reality deprived of its own sub‑ stance, of the hard resistant kernel of the Real” (Žižek, 2013, p.13) whose purpose is to avoid confrontation with the Real of social antagonism. ­Politics, in the words of Žižek, has been reduced to an “art of the possible” (2009, p.199). The use of the concept of post-politics, then, bears resemblance to that of the concept of post-truth-politics: Both criticise that modern Western ­politics has turned into a system whose purpose is avoidance of the reality of social antagonism, and which thus fosters self-avoidance, whereby identity is outsourced into the world of appearance, so that the I is prevented from confronting itself in the face of difference, from engaging in the complex and dynamic processes of self-realisation autonomously and responsibly. This system produces an alternate reality wherein these categories and attributes of outsourced identity are mimicked so that indices of the former reality are hidden from view. It can therefore be argued that these two concepts at their

Liminality and the discourse of crisis  11 core criticise the phenomenon of self-assertion, achieved politically through the suppression of encounter and engagement with difference. Moreover, the discourse of crisis is sensitive to the impact on social relationships: when in a self-contained universe the I becomes reified not only will its own processes of unfolding and developing be repelled in the absence of engagement. Deprived of contact with the Real, also relationships with other members of that community may become fixated on the level of representation. From this perspective, the current prioritisation of security and order over freedom12 and growing support for xenophobic and fascist policies and views are seen as a further attempt at ossification and manifested fear of the Real and its potential to dismantle also the social system that has formed to uphold of self-assertion. Cultural Studies scholar Henry Giroux has summarised such effects of a politics of externalisation, using the concept of anti-politics: In the increasingly violent landscape of anti-politics, mediation disappears, dissent is squelched, repression operates with impunity, the ethical imagination withers, and the power of representation is on the  side of spectacularized state violence. Violence both at the level of the state and in the hands of everyday citizens has become a substitute for genuine forms of agency, citizenship, and mutually informed dialogue and community interaction. (Giroux, 2016) Externalisation, the discourse of crisis implies, is contagious throughout society: In order to function, it needs to be repeated, mirrored and reproduced, if necessary by force. Violence is inherent in this expansion. Firstly, it needs to “squelch dissent” to legitimise itself. Secondly, it is argued there exists a structural violence in replacing self-realisation, learning and knowledge through experience, with self-assertion, the cold mimicry of the status quo.

1.2 The political dialectic – a Girardian perspective This section examines the phenomena of externalisation and mimicry in more detail, yet introduces a new angle to the discourse of crisis, using French philosopher Renè Girard’s mimetic theory. Establishing a link between contemporary political thought and Girard’s philosophical anthropology might seem an unusual choice in this context – yet, as I seek to show by the end of this section, Girard allows us to move beyond some limitations that the discourse of crisis displays. Renè Girard (1923–2015), member of the Academie Francaise, understood himself mostly as a philosophical anthropologist, concerned predominantly with the role of violence in cultural origins and its illumination in biblical texts, Christian tradition or great novels. As a derivative, Girard was also concerned with the question of self-realisation and externalisation, yet he

12  Liminality and the discourse of crisis approached it not via political concepts but through his theory of ‘mimetic desire.’ According to this theory, what one desires in order to achieve selfrealisation and differentiation is not simply determined by an object’s intrinsic value, but by the value which other people attribute to it through shared desire. Girard believed that desire was neither subjective nor objective – merely mimetic – and that humans mimicked desire for its symbolic value, for the ontological status of the other (Girard refers to the other as “the model”). Thus, Girard found, “[d]esire projects a dream universe” (1965, p.18). Almost in line with the discourse of crisis, one could argue, Girard found that beyond what appeared to be differentiation and self-realisation really lied externalisation – a process that was recorded in novels, myths and, specifically, the bible. However, continuing from this theory, Girard offered another explanation for violence: desiring the same object, subject and model may turn into rivals. Precisely, Girard observed that “[t]he more we desperately seek to worship ourselves and be good ‘individualists’ the more compelled we are to worship our rivals in a cult that turns to hatred (2001, p.11).” The vigorous celebration of difference and individuality, Girard argued, which immerses us today more rampantly than ever, is an attempt to overshadow awareness of the identical – a lie that is increasingly hard to uncover, “because the most fervent imitation is the most vigorously denied (1965, p.15).” In other words, Girard observed that the feeling of being different and unique must be created artificially, as a simulacrum. The simulacrum, in turn, serves to eradicate awareness of the identical in order to persist. For Girard, such mimetic rivalry and its double idolatry were the primary sources of human violence (2001, p.11). On the one hand, “the scandal gratifies our craving for a sense of our own worth,” Girardian thinker Andrew McKenna concluded (McKenna, 2002). On the other hand, mimetic rivalry attracts other, simultaneous rivals. Equally shared frustration creates a homogenous, contagious mass (Girard, 2001, p.23). Ultimately, according to Girard, one grand scandal remains, society is about to be torn apart by rivalry (2001, p.24): the moment of the sacrificial crisis. To prevent the nemesis of culture, all separate conflicts condense to direct themselves at a surrogate victim, the scapegoat, substituted for all other possible victims. Through destruction, or expulsion of this arbitrary victim, social unity and order are re- established. The surrogate victim therefore has two functions: it is blamed for violence and chaos within society. Then, it is made sacred for having re-established order and reconciled society (2001, p.63). Meanwhile, the persecutors are trapped in the illusion of their victim’s guilt and their own passivity. Girard believed that descriptions of such scapegoating mechanisms functioned to seal these myths, keeping the victim mechanism in place, instead of confronting the truth behind the violence which had shattered the community. Whether in Greek myths or contemporary Europe, Girard argued, the universal foundation of society and the process which recreates and maintains its order is scapegoating (2001, p.66). For Girard, “the universe is full of

Liminality and the discourse of crisis  13 scapegoats” (1986, p.41) and “without victims the world would plunge into chaos” (ibid., p.63). How is this relevant to the discourse of crisis? Firstly, Girard suggested that externalisation is neither an accident, nor a side effect of a certain social or political system. Rather, he argued that social unity can be entirely dependent on externalisation. Externalisation does not occur because of the depoliticisation of politics or its totalisation, but because humanity is lost in a vast, open and unintelligible universe. To cope, Girard argued, society is based on a contractual lie. The realisation that mimetic desire does not actually make us different but rather identical and dependent on a mimetic model “is so well known to us and so contrary to our concept of ourselves, thus so humiliating, that we prefer to remove it from consciousness and act as if it didn’t exist” (2001, p.9). The victim that will function to remove this realisation from consciousness “is chosen not because it is different within the system, but different outside the system” (1986, p.21). It is the real difference of the victim in relation to the system – be it through a lifestyle, through indifference or rejection of others’ supposed “difference” – that signals to those living within a community that their supposed individuality is really merely mimetic. The scapegoat is not persecuted because it is different, but because everyone else is the same. The Other by his mere existence uncovers what individuals or a community have tried to disguise: that they could have been someone else, that life could have been different, that the system one has lived in and adhered to turns out not to be absolute, but to be absolutely fragile – a humiliating experience. Hence, Girard argued, “[m]en believe that they are free and open to the universal; anything that comprises this illusion terrifies us and stirs up the immemorial tendency to persecution (1986, p.22).” The victim, as the remainder of one’s own mimetic identity, must be destroyed or at least expelled from the community to recreate the illusion of difference. According to Girard, only if we understand that scapegoating implies not only the channelling of violence into an innocent victim, but also a much larger problem, which is our inability to reconcile society and our self-understanding, we can work on therapeutic measures. Until then, “the refusal of the real is the number one dogma of our time” (2001, p.71). The deferral of encounter and direct engagement, which the discourse of crisis sees increasingly displaced in the forms of post-truth-politics or post-politics, is, for Girard, precisely the foundation of the simulacrum of a meaningful order. Secondly, Girard allows us to approach the theme of violence – religious, ethnic, political violence – from another angle. In the discourse of crisis, subjective violence, carried out on the plane of racism, sexism or religiosity is seen as an expression of a suppressed, underlying political nature – the need for adversity which expresses itself in violent outlets if it is not channelled by the proper political system. Objective, systemic violence, too, is seen as deviation of politics proper. For Girard, however, such violence is chronic, not merely an outburst of suppressed rage. It is purposeful,

14  Liminality and the discourse of crisis sacrificial and cleansing: it is the very kit of the simulacrum of society that does not originate from having different views, but, on the contrary, from having the same views. Thus, Girard draws attention to another, third type of violence: the hatred of the other, from Girard’s perspective, is first and foremost hatred of oneself, for “[t]he wish to be absorbed into the substance of the Other implies an insuperable revulsion for one’s own substance (1965, p.55).” This describes the agony of being unable to look inside while one perpetually mimics the other: As the voice of pride swells, the consciousness of existence becomes more bitter and solitary. Yet it is common to all men. Why is there this illusion of solitude which doubles the agony? Why can men no longer alleviate their suffering by sharing it? Why is the truth about all men locked up in the deepest recesses of each individual consciousness? Each individual discovers in the solitude of his consciousness that the promise is false but no one is able to universalize his experience. The promise remains true for Others. Each one believes that he alone is excluded from the divine inheritance and takes pains to hide this misfortune. (Ibid., p.56f) Here, Girard described a painful, bitter gap between the experience of being on the one hand and existence in the simulacrum on the other. A universal yet not universalised experience. Finally, then, Girard could help open up the discourse of crisis: the paradox that he observed in modern capitalism – rampant choices on the one hand, similarity on the other and hence merely a broadening of the surface – can also be applied to the discourse of crisis: the move towards ever new concepts and specialisation, the sense of urgency and crisis, produce themselves such a fanning out that localises the solution in the outside: within political order. One key difference between Girard and the discourse of crisis, that makes visible this fanning out, is how they contextualise the self. For the discourse of crisis, selfhood and the political are seen to have no meaning in and of themselves. Rather, the subject produces the world of which it is a part and by which, at the same time, it is itself produced. Selfhood and the world are seen as co-constituting each other through social and political practices, none being prior to the other but both being indistinct entities. Humanness is defined through political experience or, vice versa, political experience as subjective-existential. In this postmodern subject, the distinction between individual and society is finally resolved. There no longer exists a coherent ‘self’ at all, but multiple, different identities at different times. As a consequence, for this de-centred subject knowledge of oneself as a thinking, feeling being through immediate experience of the self is replaced with the question of identification with external markers: association or dissociation. The discourse of crisis protects this understanding: it ties the underlying contingency of the social to the political – and

Liminality and the discourse of crisis  15 thus also to politics – and too argues that politics is the true expression of the human form and means by which subjectivity is acquired. Necessarily then, in the face of crisis, the political has to be re-examined, so that it may re-accommodate the contingent and ontological dimension of society and create spaces for its emergence and interplay with politics as state. Ultimately, this constitutes another form of externalisation. However, Girard, shows us that when faced with an increasing distortion of reality and an order that no longer seems to fit its own descriptions, it is worthwhile to focus precisely on the question of immediate experience of the self and thus also on the question of meaning. As Scott Cowdell argues, citing Girard’s French writing, what underlies the mimetic mechanism is really the desire for being (Cowdell, 2013). Girard believed that this desire was expressed, for example, in Don Quixote, Amadís de Gaula, In Search of Lost Time or Madame Bovary, and that their authors also revealed an intuitive understanding of mimetic desire and the logic of order it creates (Girard, 1965, p.3). The discourse of crisis, too, manifests this intuitive understanding, calling out a gap – between the experience of reality on the one hand and its depiction in structures of politics on the other. Yet, it cannot overcome itself. The “lurch towards phantasy” is viewed merely as the effect of a politics gone wrong – not as a quest for meaning gone wrong. The discourse of crisis does not consider that the problem of externalisation might be far more pathological. It thereby itself mimics the phenomenon which it ought to describe. In sum, then, I propose the following: it is common to refer, at least with the distinction between politics and the political, to a political difference. This emphasises the conceptual distinction and paradigmatic split between the two concepts – a founding difference to be conceived of as negativity because the social is never completed but remains subject to changing foundations, so that politics and the political are never the same. However, rather than as difference, it should be described as dialectic. Thereby, not the difference between politics and the political is emphasised but the systematic interaction and interdependency of both forces. Politics and the political generate and exhaust one reality, turning it into a system. In the following, I will introduce two concepts that might allow us to challenge that system.

1.3 Permanent liminality Since Girard published his work on mimetic theory, some developments occurred: in today’s ‘Global Village,’ where capital, services, populations, information and technological progress spread around the globe and where digital interconnectedness extends, it can be argued that also mimetic desire is spreading. Not only the neighbour may become a model of reference but indeed anyone in the world, while not only objects are desired but also symbols and experiences. Differences are disappearing, the “normality outside the system” shrinks. For example, today’s liberal, multicultural societies are

16  Liminality and the discourse of crisis compartmental, where – at least theoretically – everyone is different and yet united in their difference by a common adherence to tolerance. The latter, integration, as well as assimilation, and an increasing culturalization of politics often either keep the other at distance, avoiding confrontation, or they subsume difference entirely (Brown, 2006). In effect, the realisation of the mimetic nature of identity stays out. Thus, we can also observe a transformation in the processes of scapegoating. As Girard himself stated: scapegoating has become less lethal over time, but also more cunning (1986, p.41). On the one hand, education about past persecutions – and according to Girard particularly the Christian Gospel – has allowed contemporary society to gather an unprecedented level of understanding about the processes of persecution – albeit awareness of the dangers of imitation is still missing. On the other hand, the image of the Machiavellian manipulator still persists and, paired with the fatuous illusion of intangible societal progress, has impeded the ability to recognise new types of scapegoating (1986, p.40, 2001, p.20). Awareness of open acts of subjective violence, disturbing the order is strong. Sensitivity for objective violence, establishing the order, regressed. Thus, scapegoating today may be observed in the forms of indefinite detention, refugee camps, the prison industrial complex or simply in economic measures that serve to keep individuals in the lower strata of society. Each of these measures generate prolonged, chronic “scandals” in which the scapegoat is not sacrificed but conserved, ready for demarcation from it. Violence is seldomly sacrificial anymore. Rather, it now lacks a clear beginning and end – it has become all-pervasive. There is both an expansive, contagious quality to externalisation and to its operative mode, imitation, but also a totalising, exacerbating quality. In order to uphold and defend the logic of imitation, it requires a system, that, in turn, too, needs to be mirrored and further imitated. As the system is build up and perfected, more and more is at stake – a vicious-cycle. Professor of Sociology Arpád Szakolczai offers the concept of “permanent liminality” to describe this paradoxical condition. In anthropological research, liminality refers to a temporary condition of transition, “betwixt and between” an old and a new state, for example, during a transitory rite of passage. The concept of permanent liminality, then, describes a paradox. Modernity, Szakolczai argues, is caught up in a permanent transitioning, yet since it has lost all touch to reality, it is really transitioning into a void. The permanent movement creates stasis, as a purpose, meaning or goal beyond the mere transitioning is lacking. Examining the discourse of crisis through this lens can help to better draw out the phenomenon which the discourse of crisis itself problematises: its thinkers too are aware of a condition “betwixt and between,” of a gap between their own experience of reality on the one hand – described as flux and contingency forever escaping systematisation – and precisely this systematisation in the political order. This articulated gap too describes such a state of liminality – that the discourse itself, however, ossifies (Szakolczai, 2018, 2019).

Liminality and the discourse of crisis  17 This awareness is important: the intuitive understanding of imitative processes and externalisation is actually prevalent, from myths, legends and biblical tests to songs, fairytales and comic books. Maybe, then, they should be given more attention, like they are in anthropological research. A common concept in comparative anthropology is “the trickster.” It refers to a certain power or figure that is well known across the globe and times. Examples include Loki, a cunning and shape-shifting god in Norse mythology, Till Eulenspiegel, a trickster of German folklore or Shakespeare’s Puck. These figures occur out of nowhere and disappear into nowhere, existing outside time and space. They are described as offensive but also as coaxing, as idiotic yet cunning – but never wise. They have no real substance nor integrity, rather they are fractured beings, lacking the ability to really engage in human or social life, unable to feel real friendship or love. Instead, the trickster is entirely selfinterested and thus amoral. Moreover, it not only disrupts, bringing chaos and flux, it also seeks to alter the original form of reality, stimulating the creation of another, second order and convincing others that this change was necessary. The trickster is only ever described as a second-founder, mentioned only after the old deities, because it does not create something genuinely new. Rather, by imitation, it seeks to divide and conquer, separating the real from its image, and thus separating experience of the real from knowledge of the real. Its mode of operation is imitation and externalisation. An example may include Plato’s description of the Sophists, wandering teachers who promise fame and riches for money, claiming a perfect correspondence between reality and ideas, seeking to put an end to questioning – as opposed to the unity of experience and knowledge through continuous and open-ended participation in reality. From their “closed existence,” sophists incited political campaigns and escalated emotions. Like them, the trickster does precisely not seek an open existence guided by personal experiences. Like Girard’s rivals, the trickster too instead of moulding himself to the world, seeks to mould the world according to his vision. In other words, it may be described as a master of externalisation (Szakolczai and Horvarth, 2020). Yet, while the trickster has found recognition even in comic books, it has not yet found its way into academic discussion outside maybe anthropology, with almost no mentioning in contemporary social and political thought – even though, as argued above, the trickster logic also makes itself felt here (Szakolczai, 2019, p.144). This might show just how wide the divide between experience and knowledge has grown. The equation, however, is simple: what all these references, like Girard, draw attention to is a question that the discourse of crisis evades: what is our own, unmediated experience of reality – prior to imitation? Necessarily, this question cannot be answered by imposing an understanding merely externally through abstract, mental work but rather through personal participation within reality. Not reason is guiding the answer but rather unmediated personal experience. If, however, the notions of an essence, of nature or human nature – in other words of any faculty that can experience reality prior to social and political involvement  – have

18  Liminality and the discourse of crisis largely been eradicated, then the question of self-knowledge no longer makes sense. Instead, the individual is understood as a creature of reason and willpower solely, that may be anything it wants. Hence, when faced with a crisis, the solution is sought on the political plane. Here, we see what the concept of permanent liminality describes: a double movement of innovativeness and destructiveness. It is innovative because it implies constant change and transitioning, a flight into action and distraction. It is destructive because this flight takes the form of a contraction, its only direction is a void. The destruction of what was known – such as God, Nature and Tradition – through wars, revolutions and totalitarian regimes is celebrated alongside the promise of a new era of universal well-being and freedom. With each transition, rules, values and measures are temporarily lifted and suspended. Yet, the promises more often than not stay out. In this ever forward spinning process of globalisation, markets, technology and mediated mass democracy have too often not brought freedom and equality but instead exported and petrified inequality and poverty. According to Szakolczai, the “modern world is the outcome of a series of liminal crises leading to schismogenic developments, and ending up by placing the trickster logic at the heart of modern life, undermining participatory life” (2019, p.144). The discourse of crisis has duly noted that politics as state no longer or often not accounts for the social, which itself is never completed but remains subject to changing foundations. It is baffled by the unbridgeable gap between society and state, by this being lost in translation and its side effect: frustration and violence. There clearly is an awareness of imitation, liminality and its permanent form – symptoms which Szakolczai argues lie at the heart of modern life. The sacrificial logic that has destroyed order and the carnivalesque logic that has celebrated supposed freedom too form a dialectic, a universe in which both logics metamorphose into each other, as promises turn out to be false, leading to new destructions and new absurd, illusory promises. This perspective allows us to step out of politics, diagnosing the discourse of crisis and to seek for a therapy – how to proceed on this search will be discussed in the following chapter.

1.4 Conclusion Modern Western politics appears to be in crisis. The concepts of postpolitics, anti-politics and post-truth-politics are only a few of a range of new diagnostic tools that have recently emerged. Together they attest the apparent emergence of a politics of externalisation, characterised by the foreclosure of encounters and engagement. This phenomenon is typically interpreted as an aberration, one that raises questions about political ontology, the “essence” of politics, its limits and beyond. I have referred to this discourse as discourse of crisis. This chapter sought to focus on the phenomenon of externalisation itself. Introducing the works of philosophical anthropologist and expert on

Liminality and the discourse of crisis  19 externalisation René Girard, it tried to show: the tendency to evade encounter and engagement with the self and others, outsourcing identity and purpose, is so endemic it can be seen recorded in myths and biblical texts – where indeed it functions to seal the process itself. What the discourse of crisis considers a political problem requiring a political solution to Girard is of existential nature. Externalisation does not occur for a lack of political outlet, he argued, but, ultimately, because of a desire for worth, meaning and purpose – a hunger for being. Thus, mimetic rivalry and scapegoating cannot be treated merely politically, but rather by re-examining what was prior to imitation, what is “the real” that externalisation refuses. Girard, then, draws our attention to the re-examination of the relationship between I and myself – and yet, he was aware that this process implied humiliation, for one would have to face oneself. The concept of “permanent liminality” shows: the processes of “imitation,” “mimetic rivalry” and indeed externalisation are still relevant today and are also relevant outside niche-anthropology, namely to sociology and political sciences. It draws attention to the expansive and totalitarian nature of externalisation and thus challenges the widespread illusion that modern Western society has overcome its constraints, having created an unprecedentedly free and open world. Modern people are not less mimetic, it says, but rather more so. Once the self has become a hall of mirrors, and placed a distance between I and myself, externalisation becomes addictive: stone after stone is being lifted, in a frenzy of inventiveness to find the treasure – an insane quest for difference that ultimately fails. However, this restlessness inherent in the mimetic principle bears witness to an intuition: that self-worth, meaningfulness and purpose are not entirely fulfilled. And here lies hope. For this intuition is not only found in myths and biblical texts, in great novels and plays – it also shines through the discourse of crisis. Clearly, then, there is a faculty in which restlessness and externalisation are felt, made aware and recorded, where the “refusal of the real” can’t reach because “the real” still makes itself felt. There is, thus, another way to think about the self than as merely de-centred and there might be other forms of self-realisation than self-assertion. Yet, instead of latching on to this intuition and breaking with the toxic repetition of seemingly new vocabulary, further specialisation and original theories, the discourse of crisis merely forms another dialectic, repeating the universe which it finds faulty – it externalises itself. There is then, evidently, an inability to formulate this intuition, to bring the thought to an end and to act. The reason for that might precisely be the distance between I and myself in permanent liminality. The language of intuition and personal experience is hardly present in the social sciences. The task will be to return these experiences and their language to the human context, to return to political sciences the question of meaning and return to the curriculum, dominated by critique, a discussion about truth and wisdom.

20  Liminality and the discourse of crisis In the following, this book proposes: if we want to really understand the “lurch towards phantasy” that seems so prevalent today, we have to truly examine the phenomenon of externalisation. And if we seek to examine externalisation, we cannot merely follow rational concepts: this will be about personal, direct and unmediated experience – prior to imitation. And indeed, there are thinkers who have not only raised but also firmly followed their intuition and who have shown, through their work and life, how relevant this path is also to political theory and social life.

Notes 1 See, for example: Mair (2013), Crouch (2004), Krastev (2017). On the disenchantment with formal politics, see, for example, Stoker (2006), Hay (2007), Flinders (2012), Flinders and Wood (2015). 2 Post-politics became a popular term during the 1990s, specifically with the work of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto-Laclau. Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have most prominently dealt with the terms post-politics, post-democracy, meta-politics and parapolitics. The terms anti-politics and post-truth-politics became popular in the media discourse following Brexit. 3 For example, it is captured in headlines such as “Rage against the machine: the rise of anti-politics,” “an international tide of anti-politics, from left and right” or “era of anti-politics”(Jennins,2016;Lansdale,2014;Leonard,2014).http://www.theguardian. com/politics/2016/jun/04/eu-referendum-campaign-polls-fault-lines-politics. 4 For example, in the 2014 European Elections, 57 percent of Europeans did not vote (as many as 87 percent of Slovaks), while anti-establishment, Eurosceptic parties, such as Ukip and Front National, as well as Danish, Hungarian, German and Greek populist parties, received an unprecedented number of votes (European Parliament, 2014). Decline of participation is often explained with the decline of trust. For example, a European Commission Survey from 2012 found that only half of those interviewed felt that their voice counts in their country and only a third felt it counts within the EU. Eighty-nine percent of those asked agreed with the statement that “there is a big gap between the people’s opinion and the decisions taken by political leaders” (European Commission, 2012, p.22). 5 In that particular context, depoliticisation is defined primarily as the hegemony of conservatives and reformists in parliamentary consensus, paired with neoliberal capitalism. 6 See, for example, Hannah Arendt’s Truth and Politics, Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision, Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, Slavoj Žižek’s Violence, Alain Badiou’s Metapolitics and Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Jacques Ranciere’s Ten Theses on Politics and Disagreement, Chantal Mouffe’s On the Political and Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, Jean Luc-Nancy’s The Disavowed Community and Jean Luc-Nancy’s and Philippe LacoueLabarthe’s Retreating the Political. 7 Political theorist Oliver Marchart uses this term in his book Post-Foundational Political Thought, referring to Archipolitics, Parapolitics, Metapolitics, Ultrapolitics and Postpolitics, each belonging to traditional political philosophy and displacing politics. 8 The term “discourse of crisis” partly echoes Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito’s description of the current discourse. Reflecting on the positive reception of his book Categories of the Impolitical, originally published in Italian in 1988, he argued:

Liminality and the discourse of crisis  21 But it does speak to the sociocultural dynamics sparked by the events marking our most recent history, and particularly the extraordinary acceleration of the crisis – it might be better to say storm – that has struck all the political institutions of this country: not only the political parties, but also its socalled movements, not to mention ideologies as such […]. We can at least say that it remains an open question as to how far the proliferation of the term “impolitical” was driven by politics’ general loss of traction on society, culture, and the collective language. (1999, p.xiii) 9 Examples include Newt Gingrich’s statement, refuting statistics, that “I’ll go with how people feel, and I let you go with the theoreticians” (Siegel, 2016) or ­Michael Gove’s infamous statement that “[p]eople in this country have had enough of experts” (Deacon, 2016). 10 Two advertisement slogans of the AfD are “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the ­People) and “Mut zur Wahrheit” (Courage for Truth). 11 For example, when a talkshow host asked Georg Pazderski, regional chairman of the AfD Berlin who had been campaigning against supposedly criminalised migrants, why his party ignores the fact that 98 percent of migrants in Germany have no criminal record, he replied: “It’s not about pure statistics, it’s also about what citizens feel. That means what you feel is also reality” (van Laak, 2016). In order to fight crime committed by migrants and refugees, Pazderski’s agenda is built around creating strong, centralised institutions that would design programs of national counter-terrorism, ethnic profiling, a freeze on the admission of refugees, fast-track deportations and refusal of integration. All of Pazderski’s positions can be found on the homepage of the AfD party: https://www.afd.de/ tag/pazderski/. 12 Referring, for example, to various programs that allow for significant breaches into the privacy of citizens and extraordinary measures to protect the order of the state, such as the English Counter Terrorism and Security Act, recent ­updates to German anti-terror laws or the USA Patriot Act.

2

An introduction to the philosophy and practices of presence

The “discourse of crisis” that currently pervades modern Western political discourse diagnoses politics with externalisation: the foreclosure of encounters and engagement for the sake of self-assertion, leading to not being present in relation to oneself and the world and to not acting in moral self-direction. Using the concept of liminality, the previous chapter sought to show: the discourse of crisis itself perpetuates such externalisation, by continuously determining the contingent exterior or excess of politics by its interior, theorising each against the background of the assumption that selfhood cannot precede or exceed politics. Thus, the discourse of crisis, albeit seeking to counter the totality of politics, itself totalises the political. Instead of truly re-introducing the contingent into theory, it becomes itself another function of politics. This chapter introduces a more fundamental approach to externalisation. The philosophy outlined here has been neglected by the standard canon of modern mainstream and critical political thought and runs parallel to it. Yet, it can make an important contribution to the discourse of crisis’ reassessment of politics and its relationship to an outside. This book will refer to it as the philosophy of presence. It not only aids in making externalisation visible, it also formulates practices whereby presence can be restored and cultivated. As we have seen in the previous chapter, externalisation here is not understood merely as a deviation from politics but as its very essence, serving to defer presence by creating a universe in which the link between I and myself remains severed. Consequently, a solution to the crisis cannot be merely political. Instead, the philosophy of presence proposes self-examination. Unlike the discourse of crisis, it argues: there is another order, prior to and beyond politics, which can be made intelligible; the human being is, despite politics, capable of directly experiencing this order. It is, therefore, possible to step out of politics. However, as will be shown below, the experiences of presence are openended, ubiquitous, unpredictable, universally accessible qua being and hence are expressed differently each time. Consequently, there is no list of philosophers that could be presented, nor can it be produced. On the contrary, this book can merely participate in the philosophy of presence.

Philosophy and practices of presence  23 Laying the theoretical and methodological groundwork for the following chapters, it will be clarified here why this book presents a particular reading of four thinkers as philosophers of presence: not to provide a solution to today’s crisis but to offer a first exploration of a neglected philosophy still relevant to our contemporary “crisis.”

2.1 Outside politics: apolitics and the unpolitical Even though the dialectic of politics and the political has become common sense in mainstream and critical political thought, some scholars have questioned its validity, such as political theorists Inna Viriasova and Laurent Dubreuil, whose work will be outlined in the following.1 Viriasova and Dubreuil have responded to post-foundational political thought and to recent publications by Massimo Cacciari (The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason) and Roberto Esposito (Categories of the Impolitical), which have explored the limits and outside of the political. However, as Dubreuil points out, rather than being concerned with the real outdoors of politics “[t]hese thinkers acknowledge ruptures, dissent, fractures. But they immediately repatriate it to politics as quickly as possible” (2009, p.12), so that “in both cases, then, there is […] no exterior, but rather the exposition of a logical and inherent failure of politics to politicize (itself)” (ibid., p.18). Viriasova’s thesis Life Beyond Politics: Toward the Notion of the Unpolitical too seeks to challenge the belief that politics can account for the totality of human experiences and interactions and is the only ‘salvation’ to the current crisis (2013, p.5). Indeed, Viriasova criticises that the “great outdoors” of politics is not accounted for neither as a localisable space nor within theory, that instead it appears that modern politics has become a totality that cannot be overcome (ibid., p.1). Both liberal post-politics and critical political thought define authentic politics through their repression of the other: a (neo-)liberal conception of politics represses the political while critics of this conception tend to repress the outside of the political. The excess of politics is pulled back into the sphere of politics. Dubreuil makes a similar observation, arguing that the metamorphosis will always belong to the plane of politics; and it is only the definitions of this political plane that vary […]: the channelling of discontent, unease, and refusal through political action, be it administrative, bloodstained, molecular, spectacular, or something else. (2009, p.5) In other words, contemporary political thought has closed in on itself, constituting a self-contained field. Instead of finding real alternatives to post-, anti- or post-truth-politics, as it ostensibly proclaims, there only occurs “‘radical’ blaming of a portion, a facet, a conception of the political – to the benefit of another political way or space” (Dubreuil, 2009, p.5). Far from being radical or original, Dubreuil sees “a tireless and repetitive effort

24  Philosophy and practices of presence at conservation in these articulations and many others: Saving Concept Politics” (ibid., p.6). It appears unconceivable, Dubreuil argues, that a phenomenon could precede or exceed politics, remaining unaffected by its influence. Hence, politics is “the collective premise of a totalitarian organization of life” (ibid.). Dubreuil’s research is motivated by the opposite assumption that, firstly, politics is not truly total, but that there are aspects of life which are unlinked to politics and which it cannot govern and, secondly, that therefore the apolitical exists in the form of an “excess to be exceeded” (ibid., p.8). Exploring the possibility of a genuine outside, Dubreuil formulates a theory of “apolitics,” gestures which interrupt, oppose and therefore question the seemingly natural and total order of politics. They are not to be mistaken for the non-political, which, as in the theories of French philosophers Jacques Rancière or Alain Badiou, is typically a function of the political. Unlike this, the apolitical permits an outside and exposes the incoherence, the void, the danger of a political thing. Afterwards, little by little, all conventional association that makes up a City is threatened by the deictic refusal of a point, a situation, an authority. And so, social prescription, which defends its political organisation, incited the circumscribing of denunciation, or even equates it as a collective demand. Of course, we don’t have anything to put in the place of politics, which leads to the logical problem of the resurgence of certain categories and the empirical tension toward a return to order upon its absence. (Dubreuil, 2009, p.12) Whereas the task of politics is to manage life, apolitics opens a space for the possibility of exceeding mere management, making life more liveable. Anything from a discussion to a quarrel can serve as a starting point for apolitics. Its occurrence can neither be planned nor predicted, nor its definitive outcome and the quality of life it strives for. Apolitics is an experiment, a process and way of life or quality of living (ibid., p.20). Unlike politics, it is not a systematic program (ibid.). This suggestion is purposefully vague, allowing for the openness of experience. Viriasova proceeds from Dubreuil, because “contrary to Dubreuil’s understanding of apolitics, i.e., as instances of exposing liveable lives in terms of ‘a refusal’ or ‘a rupture that would not be integratable’ into politics,” she sees, “the unpolitical as the a priori of politics and not an instance of rupturing the political field” (Viriasova, 2014, p.86). To pursue her argument, she uses French philosopher Michel Henry’s (1922–2002) phenomenology of life. It criticised classical phenomenology for focusing solely on the process of intentionality: on the relationship between intending consciousness on the one hand and the intended object on the other. This presupposed that the intentionality of consciousness itself constituted the origin of appearance so that appearance was considered completely

Philosophy and practices of presence  25 intentional. Yet, this understanding negated the possibility of any reception that was not essentially of an exterior content. Classical phenomenology, Henry criticised, had reduced subjectivity to exteriority. Henry instead argued that the reality of appearance could not be found, if appearance was not examined before intentionality. Intentionality itself had to be rooted in a non- or pre-intentional mode of appearance – life itself, which is experienced or self-perceived immediately and immanently, prior to conscious reflection. The innermost essence of human existence is life, [l]ife is thus not a something, like the object of biology, but the principle of every thing. It is a phenomenological life in the radical sense where life defines the essence of pure phenomenality and accordingly of being insofar as being is coextensive with the phenomenon and founded on it. (Henry, 2008, p.3) Accordingly, life is auto-revelation, revealing itself in the form of the living, in the everydayness of personal experience, which is neither generated nor controlled by the subject. It is not separate from its form and its form is not separate from life. Henry’s phenomenology of life thus argues that world appearance is rooted in the original appearance of life. The origin and essence of this revelation, which precedes consciousness, is thus a self-revelation referring to nothing but itself. Viriasova uses Henry’s theory to refer to life as “the unpolitical.” Life manifests itself independently of representation, consciousness and thought; hence, it cannot be subjected to the domain of the visible or thought. Precisely, life is already primary, preceding the thinking ego and the ego’s relation to the world. It can never be made an object for a thinking subject and, because it forever remains impossible to objectify and to summarise life, it defines reality (Henry, 1993, p.214). To be precise, then, life is not exactly “unpolitical” but the a priori of politics (Viriasova, 2014, p.86). Hence, life is power on the one hand while at the same time revealing impotence because its radical immanence cannot think and objectify itself. The relationship between life and the living is one of immediacy and oneness, revealed, according to Henry, in auto-affection, self-appearing, referring to itself only. Yet, this unity does not mean total identity, because life is always more than the living. The living is rather constantly generated in life in a way that is completely passive, outside of the power of will. If there is any knowledge involved, it is that of an immediate self-“knowledge” of life that knows everything without speaking a word; “[l]ife is what knows itself without knowing it” (Henry, 2002, p.232). Yet, as life is prior to thought and vision, the knowledge which it reveals is only self-sensing. Hence, Viriasova declares this relation, this unity between life and the living as unpolitical. The unpolitical form-of-life: the relationality that is acosmic and embracing everything there is, prior to as well as the condition of being-in-theworld and its political relationality. There is more than the world. Life.

26  Philosophy and practices of presence The living being is living not by having a world but by being generated in life. (Viriasova, 2013, p.219) Hence, life and the living lie outside of and are prior to politics. Politics is secondary to life. However, this life has been “forgotten” with the advent of modernity, its biopolitics, the prioritization of being-in-the-world, and with the construction of the concept of the political as the negative unconscious of representative politics. Not only do we know less and less about life, Henry and Viriasova argue, we seemingly no longer seem aware that it even exists (Henry, 2002, p.38). Thus, Viriasova urges to affirm the primacy of the unpolitical, to think the unthought, to speak of the unspeakable and to get a glimpse of the invisible of life that persists in its irremediable indifference to politics, but not in order to make it fully present in language, in sight, in thought and in politics, but so that we can continue to live it as such, in mystery. (Viriasova, 2013, p.6) Viriasova grants the individual the ability to experience life’s selfrevelation simply because it is alive. The post-foundational adherence to the mechanistic ‘necessary contingency’ of foundations becomes the basic flux of human experience. Remembrance and opposition to the totality of politics will happen, simply because we are alive. Like Dubreuil’s ‘apolitics,’ Viriasova’s ‘unpolitical’ is not a program but something “which would allow something like the “soul” or the non-objective and non-objectifiable experience of living to play a role in determining what constitutes happy life, togetherness, and community” (Viriasova, 2013, p.2) Thus, the unpolitical is not a category removed from social life and politics. Recognition of the multiplicity of life’s self-revelations on the contrary opens up the possibility to experiment with a community that is not characterised by its adversity to a constitutive outside. In other words, community no longer has to be defined externally by adhering to certain attributes and representations. Rather, an “unpolitical community” can be formed internally, through the shared experience of, and therefore unity in, life, based on the primacy of life itself. Yet, this community cannot be known, discovered or taught, but is only intelligible through individual experience. There is no ideal or natural state of making life liveable, there is no proper politics. Rather, life is already continuous self-revelation. This, then, also challenges the notion of the rarity and grandeur of the political as the moment of the institution of the subject. Life itself is a force moving forward through everyone alive – an auto-revelation – and is already more than the living. In order to make that community possible and to resist the totalising tendency of modern politics and political thought, Viriasova ends her thesis with the argument that it is necessary to “remember life.”

Philosophy and practices of presence  27

2.2 Philosophy of presence While Viriasova ends her thesis with the imperative to “remember life,” and Dubreuil finishes his by describing apolitics as “scarcely a project, a fragile and risky understanding, where almost all that is needful is yet to be done” (Dubreuil, 2009, p.19), this section points to thinkers who have indeed “remembered life” and have attuned their existence in a range of “projects” in a plurality of ways. These thinkers are part of the philosophy of presence. Whereas modern Western politics is identified as a symptom of not being present in relation to oneself and to the world, the philosophy of presence seeks to restore presence. Unlike the discourse of crisis, which has severed experience from knowledge and therefore forever depends on politics to provide solutions to the excrescences of externalisation, the philosophy of presence seeks to restore this broken link, without ever having to rely on politics. Presence First of all, to outline the philosophy of presence, it will be necessary to explain what this chapter means by the term “presence”. For the past few decades, there has been a popularisation of this term, specifically in the culture of what some have referred to as New Age Spirituality (Sutcliffe, 2013). In the 1980s, the term “spirituality” received a subjective connotation, describing beliefs and practices which aim at growth and improvement of the human being’s inner core, at the increase of personal well-being and the reduction of anxiety and depressive symptoms achieved through practices of the self, such as Yoga or mindfulness (Sutcliffe, 2002, p.129). These more individualistic and less traditional approaches have usually lacked organisation beyond the local and temporary scale (Sutcliffe, 2013, pp.1–13; Tacey, p.2004). Many such practices of spirituality have also been incorporated by mainstream institutions and popular culture. For example, the Presencing Institute, originally a project by the MIT (Massachusetts Institute for Technology), describes itself as an “awareness-based action-research community that creates social technologies, builds capacities, and generates holding spaces for profound societal renewal” with the aim to create innovation (Presencing Institute, 2020). Presence, understood here as deep listening, being open beyond preconceptions, leading to a state of “letting come,” consciously participating in a larger field of change, is presented as a core capacity for change makers – leaders in business, education and government (Senge et al., 2005). Similarly, the practice of “mindfulness” has gained popularity in psychotherapy literature in the past decade, where it is seen as a beneficial add-on to psychotherapy clients (Davis and Hayes, 2011, p.198ff). Mindfulness is promoted as a type of meditation achieving a “state of active open attention to the present” (Psychology Today, 2020), a living in the moment, between, or rather despite, life happening. It is said to produce, amongst

28  Philosophy and practices of presence other things, enhanced self-control, tolerance, flexibility, concentration and mental clarity (Davis and Hayes, 2011, p.198f). Workshops, retreats, books, even telephone apps offer guidance on how to practice mindful meditation. For example, The Headspace App, which offers ten-minute guided meditations on your smartphone, has more than six million users worldwide and is worth over £25 million (Foster, 2016). Google, Apple, Sony and Ikea have adopted mindfulness as part of their employee packages (ibid.). While this surge of interest in presence indicates a search or even a need for engagement with the inner self in times where life seems increasingly out of balance,2 it has also been criticised. According to Žižek, for example, the Asiatic “ideological superstructure” of mindfulness and meditation serves as “perfect ideological supplement” to European technology and capitalism, promoting to let go of oneself and practice indifference in the face of global capitalism and constantly changing new technologies (Žižek, 2001, p.12). Such types of presence do not address the sociopolitical and economic causes for anxiety and depression, but merely help the individual to cope despite them, thus contributing to their perpetuation. According to social scientist Véronique Altglas, [c]ontrary to what many scholars assume, bricolage of religious themes is not evidence of individuals’ emancipation from social norms and structures. Indeed, there are striking correspondences between this form of religiosity, focused on self-realisation, and the type of selfhood demanded by neoliberal societies. The quest for self-realisation reflects social pressures upon individuals for permanent self-actualisation: flexible economies and the shrinking of the welfare state require that they become increasingly responsible for themselves and ‘freely’ pursue their personal interests. (Altglas, 2015) The type of presence sought out by contemporary new age spiritualities focuses on self-assertion as growth of self despite or amidst neoliberalism and capitalism. It even becomes part of the problem when it quantifies, markets and sells chunks of “presence.” While presence is sold as an experience – that has been neutralised from its original traditional context and psychologised, that is insular and extraordinary – this experience itself remains structured by societal, political, class and gender norms. The bricolage, in Altglas’ terms, is not random, but an abiding system. Thus, to describe the practices of mindfulness and spiritual meditations as “presence” is misleading: the individual may be more in touch with its own personal perception of the world, yet its relationship to the world and its agency therein remains omitted and structured by politics (King, 1999, p.10f). It is not present in relation to the world. Unlike contemporary, trending notions of presence, the gros of twentieth-century philosophy has formed in reaction to the “metaphysics of presence” and its resulting creation and ossification of hierarchies of order.

Philosophy and practices of presence  29 It has criticised the predominant philosophical prioritisation of what is over what is absent, and the presupposition of the existence of a self-knowing, autonomous agent for whom the world exists to the extent that it is present. Critics, such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, have challenged these preconceptions about the relationship between object and subject. Heidegger replaced the idea of human existence as continuous presence in the moment with the concept of duration, which acknowledges being as dependent on past and future, on a particular time, place and changing panorama of ideas and memories, which influence how the moment (in the present) is experienced. Memories or self-reflection could also constitute presence (Heidegger, 1992). Derrida’s deconstruction drew attention to the spatio-temporal frames in which truths had emerged and sought to undermine the hierarchies of order that metaphysics had installed. He explained thought as pluri-dimensional, in which neither speech nor writing had precedence (Reynolds, 2004, p.130ff). The critique of the metaphysics of presence thus targeted, firstly, privileging any mode of being-present, whether it is physical, temporal, in thought or speech, over the absent and, secondly, the resulting hierarchies of order, which included some and excluded others. Contemporary notions of presence as described above would not withstand this critique, because their promotion of indifference to the world ignores the multiple anchorages by which the individual inevitably remains attached to and still participates in the world and hence through its mere passivity perpetuates structures of power. The use of the term presence in this book however is influenced by yet another, older notion of presence, from within the Christian context, which combines both the element of inward experience that predominates in contemporary notions of presence and the ideal of social transformation inherent in the critiques of the metaphysics of presence throughout the twentieth century. The origins of this understanding of presence lie in the Eucharist. There, Christ is said to become present in bread and wine through consecration, either substantially (Christ is really present in the blood and wine) or symbolically for the purpose of ceremonial remembrance. In 1 Corinthians 11:23–26, Paul states, [t]he Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. While the empirical appearance of bread and wine does not change in the Eucharist, some Christians believe that their reality, however, does (transubstantiation describes the change when bread and wine become the body and

30  Philosophy and practices of presence blood of Christ, consubstantiation describes the presence of Christ alongside bread and wine). Religious Studies scholar Nathan Mitchell explains: [t]he appearances cease to be appearances of anything at all. Instead they become symbolic signs that enact and embody (that is, make present) what they signify. The consecrated bread and wine do not mean something new or different (for meaning is something we control) rather, they now belong to a new language – one we did not create and cannot control. (Mitchell, 2001, p.103) This new language is said to offer access to reality, to truth and to meaning. It thus counteracts the movement whereby with the advent of modernity, the covenant between word and world had largely crumbled: truth had become quantitative and empirical, belief in the uncontested ability of the senses to provide meaningful information about reality was questioned. The relation between word and object, sign and signified had become arbitrary. Divine presence, however, is associated with meaningfulness of language (Steiner, 1991, p.106ff). This becomes clear when Mitchell cites John Chrysostom: Christ did not give us just another fact to be recorded by the senses. Rather that everything grasped by our senses can also be understood by our spirit […]. If you had been without a body, Christ could have given you bare, disembodied gifts. But because spirit and body are joined, spiritual gifts are given to you in bodily form. (Mitchell, 2001, p.92)3 Thus the reality of Christ is said to be present within the symbols of bread and wine. The communicant who receives the sacrament is said to receive the gift of Christ as a whole, so Christ becomes present within him. Thereby, the communicant experiences the connection both to God and to the whole community of faith. Thus, the Eucharist is an opportunity for a renewal of personal commitment to God and his community in both spirit and bodily action. Apart from the Eucharist, Christ is said to be present in the Church, in liturgical celebrations, the sacrifice of the Mass, in His Word, in prayer and songs, for “[w]here two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). The concept of presence also o ­ ccurs in mystical writings, where the presence of God is described as pervading the material world (immanence), revealing a spiritual dimension within the seemingly mundane, or in descriptions of theophany, the revelation of God to humankind. In all of these accounts, the human being (its prayer, song or other meditation) becomes the locus of God’s self-revelation (Mitchell, 2001, p.91). Therefore, it can be argued that in Christianity, the concept of presence has at least two meanings. Firstly: there is present within and beyond the

Philosophy and practices of presence  31 reality of opaque objects (a church hall, a songbook, bread and wine), a divine reality, enveloping the material and mundane. This divine presence is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and intellect, immersing the individual within. It becomes visible, for example, in the challenges it poses to human language. On the one hand, language has an infinite potential to reinvent being and the world and to offer meaning. On the other hand, it constantly fails, proving, according to philosopher George Steiner, the existence of a transcendent fabric, a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding us, “[w]hat lies beyond man’s world is eloquent of God. That is the joyously defeated recognition expressed in the poems of St. John of the Cross and of the mystic tradition” (Steiner, 1967, p.39). Similarly, philosopher Stephen Costello has examined the works of poets and philosophers and found recounted in them what he refers to as a “flow of presence,” such as in the writings of Persian Sufi mystic Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207–1273), Spanish priest and theologian Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), Carmelite monk Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection (1614–691), Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), British writer Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965), Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967), Dutch writer Etty Hillesum (1914– 1943) or Irish writer Iris Murdoch (1919–1991). According to Costello, they describe presence as “a search for the experience of timelessness in time, a spiritual search for the never-ending One. This search is primarily an inner journey as one confronts one’s own self” (Costello, 2013, p.viv). The flow of presence is constituted by all the points of intersection between time and timelessness. Costello relies on Eric Voegelin’s essay “The Drama of Humanity,” in which Voegelin explains that a series of time is not a linear movement from past towards future but consists of present points, in which past and future are already contained. This presence also constitutes the individual’s presence in the here and now. A divine presence is within every present point in time, moving the soul which realises its existence caught in between time and timelessness (Voegelin, 2004, p.181f). Costello argues: We live in this In-Between, and if we are open, we live in the flow of presence, ‘which is neither time nor the timeless, but the flow in which time and the timeless meet. That is the time in which we exist. In this flow of presence, in-between, that is where all the [concerns] of man are transacted. (Costello, 2014, p.12)4 Secondly, presence describes the subjective experience in which the individual becomes present to this divine reality. In the Eucharist, there is said to occur a connection between Christ and the individual, as He becomes present in bread and wine and becomes the inner reality of the individual. Christ addresses the communicant directly; the communicant experiences directly. Becoming present can thus be described as the movement from forgetfulness to awareness – knowledge through direct experience. This religious

32  Philosophy and practices of presence approach to presence intimately connects being and experiencing with awareness of reality. It thus exceeds the postmodern conception wherein the criteria of reality, knowledge and truth are determined by human reason, perceptions and interests. Neither is it comparable to the idea that selfhood and the world are co-constituting each other through social and political practices, none being prior to the other. On the contrary, the Christian understanding of presence conceives of Divine Presence as a reality that is prior to and beyond the reality of the multitude of objects and that is yet universally accessible through the mere fact of being. The previous chapter has argued that it has become common sense in contemporary mainstream and critical political thought to associate the political with openness and flux – an index for the contingency of human order and the absence of a final ground and absolute certainty. According to this conception, flux and openness reveal themselves in rare political moments of opposition, whereby the subjected individual becomes a subject. However, according to the Christian conception, awareness of the mysterious “absence of ground” or of multiple grounds’ contingency and the resulting lack of certainty do not have to be tied to political moments. Rather, openness is recognised as, quite simply, an essential and omnipresent feature of reality, enveloping all of the material world. This feature may reveal itself in the Eucharist but also in more mundane, arbitrary life experiences. Moreover, whereas for the discourse of crisis, the contingency of grounds is rather akin to a mysterious “void,” which cannot quite be formulated, so that these thinkers continually fall back on the language of politics and pull the phenomenon back onto the plane of politics, for the philosophers of presence it is akin to a source – a reality that at once veils and unveils and which can, to an extent, be made intelligible. Because divine presence is a spiritual formative presence that moves human existence from within, knowing divine presence requires knowing oneself (which, however, does not mean to know the divine). Unlike contemporary approaches to mindfulness, such presence cannot be purchased, willed or learned through mimicry. Instead, it proceeds through revelation – and at the same time, it reveals the limits of human ability and knowledge, thereby having transformative potential. The experience of unity with God is also an experience of unity with the community of existence, for example, when participation in the Eucharist induces the feeling of participating in the community of faith, the homonoia. Therein, the particularities of name, race or religion no longer matter. Thus, it can be argued, it has a rather different trajectory to contemporary interpretations of mindfulness, where presence is meant to empower the self and help it grow. Instead, the self dissolves in the Christian conception of presence. Yet, this does not lead to quietism. The renewal of commitment implies attunement, acting upon those experiential insights, prescinding from imposing single, reductive images and orders. According to Nathan Mitchell, remembrance of Christ is to engage in corporate action: “Sacramental memory is a deed, not an idea;

Philosophy and practices of presence  33 a verb, not a noun: an action and outcome, not an object” (Mitchell, 2001, p.91). To attune to the flow of presence is to hearken to that which is lasting and to listen attentively to the silent voices of conscience and grace. This leads to a radical reorientation, the conversion or periagoge. The realities enveloped in the mundane become realised, partnership with God may be entered. Presence implies a response to revelation, the ordering of one’s life in its personal, social and historical dimensions. To be present thus means being present in relation to all spiritual, experiential insights on the one hand and material givenness, consciously accepting their tension, on the other. If the logic of post-, anti-, and post-truth-politics is to create a universe that realises and conserves self-assertion, externalising selfhood and thence foreclosing the necessity to confront difference within others and oneself, so that relationships are never direct but mediated by attributes and representations, so that, in other words, inner presence is lost, then presence is the moment of stepping out of this world of separation and back inward, where Divine Presence can be experienced directly and unmediatedly, dissolving the self. Presence serves as contrast agent, revealing beneath what had formerly been known the utterly unknowable, unthinkable and incomplete. It reveals, like the political is said to, the contingency of grounds and their perpetual motion. Yet, it does not limit this experience to the realm of politics. It is not an effect of the psyche or of politics, but an inherent feature of being. Presence is not political, it simply is. Explaining the terms “philosophy” and “practice” By philosophy of presence, this book means the following: if we understand presence as the never-ending revelation of divine presence to subjective experience, then a philosophy of presence does not refer to a fixed set of ideas, but is rather akin to zetema. This Greek term, derived from Plato’s Republic, describes an exegetical method of inquiry into existence as it is experienced subjectively, inwardly. It takes into consideration that the philosopher is already participating in the flow of presence, experiencing existential unrest and tension which causes the desire to know. According to political theorist Dante Germino, zetema presupposes the existence of a self-conscious intellectual and spiritual centre – to which Plato would have referred as psyche – that can experience being which transcends the world. The seeker whose zetema has led him to turn around (periagoge) can then aid in building a society that protects psyche (Germino, 1982, p.77). The philosopher’s (or zetetes’, seeker’s) purpose then is not understood as intentionalist knowledge gathered by a neutral pursuit of rationality, examining public truths through reasoned reflection and argumentation in order to overcome the dangers of dogmatism or esotericism. Rather, the philosopher’s task is authentic subjectivity: to make intelligible their own existence within the life within which they are immersed, beneath or despite ideology. It describes the dynamic

34  Philosophy and practices of presence and endless process of being drawn towards the mystery of presence and attuning one’s life towards an adequate “existence in truth,” which responds to the experience of presence (Voegelin, 2000, p.136f). Hence, zetema might also be translated with the German word Existenzerhellung, the clarification of existence, or with the Greek maxim “Know Thyself” (Webb, 1987). Zetema seeks to examine existence as it is genuinely experienced in between mundane reality and divine presence. According to political philosopher Eric Voegelin, [t]he inquiry, the zetema, is the conceptual illumination of the way up from the depth of existence […]. From the initial situation the inquiry proceeds through an analysis of experiences, which gradually brings new experiential materials into view and, at the same time, refines the initial meanings into the technical meanings of concepts. (Voegelin, 2000, p.83) The use of the term philosophy in this book thus points to an existential process and endless inquiry into lived reality, driven by openness instead of the desire for final answers and accepting the imperfect correspondence between ideas, reality and symbols. Finally, embracing this incongruence, the “philosophy of presence” then also implies attunement: a transformation of life in accordance with experience. Such a philosophy is inevitably tied to what this book refers to as practices of presence: the ways in which presence is remembered, made visible and cultivated so that it will be not merely arbitrary but habitual. Such practices are not to be mistaken for “methods” or “techniques.” Both terms imply particular, systematic procedures, aiming at effectiveness. Rather, this book associates “praxis” with the French Carmelite monk Brother Lawrence (1614–1691) who articulated a spiritual program of surrendering to God and perfecting resignation. Published posthumously as “The Practice of the Presence of God,” it consists of the constant attention to the “inward excitement” of God in the soul, practicing love and adoration towards what moved the soul, being in continual conversation with God, thanksgiving and asking for strength, accepting whatever affliction God had brought into one’s life, and at the same time, doing all tasks selflessly and “purely for the love of God,” instead of aiming at certain goals. Brother Lawrence argued, [w]e need only to recognize God intimately present with us and address ourselves to Him every moment. We need to beg His assistance for knowing His will in things doubtful and for rightly performing those which we plainly see He requires of us, offering them to Him before we do them, and giving Him thanks when we have completed them. The Practice of presence here is a lifework. (2016)

Philosophy and practices of presence  35 Brother Lawrence was aware of his fallibility and the experimental nature of these practices. Yet, there was no end-goal to presence but to “maintain a simple attention and a fond regard for God, which I may call an actual presence of God. Or, to put it another way, it is a habitual, silent, and private conversation of the soul with God” (ibid.). These practices of presence hence refer to the attempt to cultivate the presence of God in the soul. If the term “presence” implies continuous revelation, then the term practice is also associated with Hannah Arendt, Paulo Freire and August Cieszkowski. They tie the term to everyday action (Arendt), to the unity of reflection and action (Freire) and to the orientation towards transformation, rather than withdrawnness (Cieszkowski). Hence, the term “praxis” might imply more appropriately, than the term “method,” the procedural nature of the cultivation of presence, the manifold ways of experiencing and “stepping out,” the confusion, perplexity and amazement which these experiences imply, and the continuity of experiential learning, everyday action and attunement (rather than imitation). “Praxis” underlines the everydayness of presence and its democratic element according to which anyone can “step out” and attune their existence. Moreover, it emphasises the connection between contemplation and action or, more precisely, between passive, pre-reflective, supra-sensual experience within the soul on the one hand and its enactment in the political and social realm on the other, moving away from the idea of presence as “mindfulness” and growth of self. The open-endedness of practices of presence might even be compared to the mystical via negativa, the attempt to “unlearn,” or “forget” prejudices, mimicry, finite knowledge and finite self – or methods – giving up any positions and attributes, so that the knower does not model the world into its concepts, but lets herself be modelled by truth. Where self-responsibility or selfrealisation is substituted by politics, so that experience and knowledge are foreclosed, the philosophy of presence reconnects search and action.5 Thus, as the following chapters seek to show, it may be posited as an antidote to the logic of the age of politics.

2.3 Methodology: how to select and discuss philosophers of presence We can now reformulate the core problem which this book focuses on: the separation of experience from knowledge, manifested in the phenomenon of externalisation, managed by politics and upheld by political philosophy to the extent that, while it seeks to account for contingency, it fails to really move beyond the totality of politics and the political, thus ultimately reaffirming externalisation. Through its inquiry into personally lived, immediately experienced reality, the philosophy of presence restores the separated link between experience and knowledge and thereby makes externalisation visible. Practices of presence describe the experiences and meditations through which presence has been recovered and remembered.

36  Philosophy and practices of presence The aim of this book is to clarify these practices’ contribution to contemporary political thought and specifically to the criticism of the discourse of crisis as introduced above. This endeavour, however, is faced by two methodological difficulties. Firstly, how the philosophers of presence are to be discussed and, secondly, according to which criteria they are to be selected for discussion. The discussion Presenting the work of philosophers of presence implies that this book eschews pieces of factual, objective information in favour of subjective descriptions of continuous participation in revelation. Knowledge of being is not achieved by making oneself or existence an object of reflection using conceptual thought. Rather, the philosophy of presence grasps one’s own life as at once veiling and unveiling truth, so that knowledge cannot be willed, but is received. This occurs through letting go of oneself completely and, in silence and passivity, allowing existence to reveal itself. Hence, this book is concerned with aletheia, truth that is the unveiling of being to mind – precisely not the degree of correspondence between proposition and fact, sense data and a priori categories of understanding. On the one hand, this approach is concerned with a more open concept of knowledge, a democratic knowledge which no longer offers the select few access, but anyone who is. On the other hand, it implies that knowledge is always also subject to the particularities of individual being, determining the way in which presence is understood, discussed and cultivated, varying from experience to experience and person to person. Consequently, philosophers of presence cannot be approached through superimposed categories, concepts or “isms”. Rather, this work lets them tell their own, individual stories. In doing so, this book avoids making any totalising claims about the philosophy of presence, nor does it account for the entirety of each philosopher’s work. It does not state what their “solution” to the crisis of contemporary politics is, nor does it evaluate or critique their effectiveness. Instead, it remains open to their ideas, participating in the presence of each thinker. Moreover, as presence continues to flow and the philosophers continue to seek to make their being intelligible, there is neither a beginning nor a conclusion to the philosophy of presence. Similar to Mahatma Gandhi, who in an interview summarised his philosophy as “[m]y life is my message,” meaning that his life was a single experiment to live in truth, a force born in the soul and hence selfless, without a certain predetermined goal, so the philosophers of presence attempt to stay true to themselves (Gandhi, 2001). In the process of this attempt, they are involved in politics and articulate their philosophies. This means, firstly, that this book will give considerable attention to their biographies, showing how experience, theory and attunement develop and coincide. Secondly, the format of this book becomes part of its argument. If presence is not a subject to be defined and engaged with

Philosophy and practices of presence  37 rationally, then it cannot be “employed” to solve a crisis. As Voegelin has argued in his essay “Immortality:” “[t]he philosopher can help to make revelation intelligible, but no more than that […]. For the philosopher is a man in search of truth; he is not God revealing truth” (Voegelin, 1990, p.79). Thus, by following these thinkers’ attempts at presence, this book becomes itself an act of presence: it remembers and cultivates presence as it is recounted in four different life stories, allowing presence to reveal itself therein, and marvels at these stories to the extent that they touch upon something which resonates, without the goal of solving the crisis. What the philosophy of presence really is as such cannot logically be proven. It can merely be experienced. Voegelin argues: Theory as an explication of certain experiences is intelligible only to those in whom the explication will stir up parallel experiences as the empirical basis for testing the truth of theory. Unless a theoretical exposition activates the corresponding experiences at least to a degree, it will create the impression of empty talk or will perhaps be rejected as an irrelevant expression of subjective opinions […] theory has no argument against a man who feels, or pretends to feel, unable of re-enacting the experience. (Voegelin, 1987, p.64f) In short, the philosophy of presence matters to the extent that it has an impact on the reader. Moreover, the type of knowledge presented here is perennial, it already exists and simply requires excavation. This necessarily requires a moment of stepping out, unlearning the logic of the world of externalisation and falling into perplexity, akin to what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has referred to as “radical amazement”: wonder, perpetual surprise, bafflement, incomprehension (Heschel, 2017). Discussing the philosophy of presence, ultra-subjective experiences will be recounted, experiences formulated in very different vocabulary and style. Seeking to cultivate presence while not being consumed by politics and political discourse, this language does not objectivise but is what may be described as a personal language of the soul, whose character is symbolic. Consequently, this book adopts an emic approach to these thinkers’ work, representing the language which the philosophers themselves have used, quoting from their work, and attempting to capture its indigenous meaning. While the texts of Gustav Landauer and Eric Voegelin have been read in their original languages, German and English, and occasionally been translated by myself, in the case of Simone Weil and Václav Havel, this book has relied solely on English translations. Yet, much of Simone Weil’s work was published posthumously, often ordered by the editors. In some cases, this has been done by her close friends such as Joseph Marie Perrin and Gustave Thibon who assembled Waiting for God, Gravity and Grace or Simone Weil as We Knew Her. Also, not all of Weil’s work has been translated into

38  Philosophy and practices of presence English, there still exists a larger amount of French literature, which has not been included in this book. In the case of Havel, this book relies on the ­English translations of his major prose works, as translated primarily by Paul Wilson. This includes Havel’s biography To the Castle and Back (2009), Letters to Olga (1998), Summer Meditations (1993).6 At other times, authors have provided their own translations, such as, in some cases, David S. ­Danaher in Reading Vaclav Havel. The works examined here constitute Havel’s and Weil’s major, translated works. Finally, it is important to say that these thinkers’ style of writing can be described as an-archic: they oppose archism, the belief in an absolute truth as such, and refuse to become authorities. In its immediate and experimental self-exegesis, the philosophy of presence defies systems, abstains from providing formulae for appropriate political responses, places responsibility on the individual herself and thus works towards responses that are subjective and local. Reading, examining and depicting their work, this book has too sought to remain open to their explorations and respect their own refusal to be couched by categories or “methods.” It has therefore proceeded to pick and align relevant passages in what may be described as a collage. Therefore, it was at times appropriate to mix passages dealing with the same concept across a longer time span, citing not just from one essay but multiple related passages across the thinkers’ lifework. In his essay “The Author as Producer,” Walter Benjamin argued: What matters, therefore, is the exemplary character of production, which is able, first, to induce other producers to produce, and, second, to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better, the more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is, readers or spectators into collaborators.7 Like Benjamin (and like the four thinkers), this dissertation invites the reader to self-exegesis, to achieving meaning through their own authority (Benjamin, 1999, p.460). A similar example of such a systemless approach to writing is Robert Musil’s essayism. The incommensurability of European life and European ideology, he argued in the early twentieth century, had settled also in language, itself now dominated by “either-or” instead of “both-and,” either endorsing rationalism, facts and precision while attacking the realm of the soul or endorsing irrationalism, refuting the importance of facts (Luft, 1984, p.153). Consequently, his works miss an authoritative account, instead they juxtapose the objective and subjective perspectives of events and scientific language alongside individual subjective experience, leaving a total solution open (ibid., p.124). Musil considered essayism as the only appropriate mode of thought and writing in modernity, where the overabundance of total ideologies could only be countered by refusing axiomatic and systematic philosophy and by supporting provisionality, uncertainty, openness and possibility instead. Essayism thus opens a discursive space

Philosophy and practices of presence  39 between objective fact and subjective experience, embracing the abstruseness of the tension, and hence, abstaining from first and last principles and universal, monological truth claims. Instead, essayism adopts an inductive attitude, seeking to access the world openly (ibid., p.101). The selection Inevitably, the selection of philosophers of presence presented here will not be exhaustive. Presence is ubiquitous, inclusive and democratic, universally accessible qua being. It is a perennial phenomenon, erupting and emerging without logic or pattern, potentially at any moment. The experience of presence is personal, immediate, varying, differing between persons and contexts and will be described in manifold symbols or not at all. Therefore, there exists no canon of “philosophers of presence.” Nor is there a “tradition” or “school of thought” in the narrow sense: it has no origin, no evolution, no clearly definable boundaries with other schools of thought. It belongs to no particular scholarly field but suffuses them. As such, there is no pre-established “list” from which a selection could be made. At the same time, to pursue such an exhaustive list in this book would necessarily entail the application of some pre-established criteria, which would already impose a limited perspective. Consequently, this book will provide an initial foray into “presence” as a theme – one that is relevant to our contemporary discourse of crisis. The subsequent selection of four thinkers to be discussed in depth then contains an initial necessary arbitrariness, which has taken into consideration the particular nature of presence. The four philosophers of presence to be discussed in the following chapters are German anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), German-American political scientist Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), French philosopher and activist Simone Weil (1909–1943) and Czechoslovakian dissident, last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel (1936–2011). What has drawn me to these particular philosophers of presence is their confession of weakness. Aware of their existence in a tension, between the here and there, they are always a little bit out of place, at the margins of society. And yet, instead of brushing away their experience as a mistake, they have accepted this tension as a real condition, making an effort not to get consumed by it. Pursuing self- examination throughout their lives, their initial vulnerability turns into strength. These four thinkers have not yet been studied together and compared – some might even consider them contradictory.8 Yet, despite their different backgrounds, theoretical focuses and activities, they share in common a critical perspective on politics as externalisation. Each writes against the background of ideological mass movements of the twentieth century, from National Socialism to Soviet post-totalitarianism. Yet, each also connects in a remarkable way to the contemporary discourse of crisis and its finding that externalisation lies at the core of post-, anti- and post-truth-politics

40  Philosophy and practices of presence and, ultimately, politics itself. At the beginning of this chapter, I have argued that the discourse of crisis is incapable of formulating a theory that does not define the exterior of politics by its interior so that there is ultimately no exterior at all. Contrary to that, these four thinkers do provide an outside of politics and a more fundamental perspective on the discourse of crisis: they state that externalisation is not a crisis of politics, but its very essence; that consequently the way out of externalisation does not lead via new political ideas and concepts, but inwards, where knowledge about order is already present. Their therapy is not political reform, but practices of making this knowledge present to the mind yet again. Therefore, these four thinkers can be read as philosophers of presence. According to Gustav Landauer, the first thinker to be discussed, politics becomes necessary when the individual has been separated from their spirit. He argued: “Where there is no spirit and no inner coercion, there is outer force, regulation and state […]. Where there is spiritlessness, there is the state. The state is the surrogate of spirit” (2012a, p.35).9 Spirit describes a faculty that experiences what Landauer refers to as the constant movement of becoming and being, the changes and finality of mundane human life on the one hand and the compressed totality of existence, past and future, on the other, connecting it to the universe. Politics, for Landauer, is the means by which this movement is suppressed, akin to a wedge driven between being and becoming. Yet, “politics” is no abstract, fixed entity, but actively formed and reaffirmed social relationships, purposefully creating a reality around the wedge. Hence, [t]he state is no reality that exists independently from the people. There is no ‘state’ on the one hand, and people who live in it on the other. The ‘state’ much rather belongs to what people do and understand. People do not live in the state. The state lives in the people. (Landauer, 2010, p.249) The purpose of the state is to dry out the flow within the spirit, to replace life in the openness of becoming and being with a firm foundation, to eliminate chance and experimentation with regiment. Yet, Landauer insisted that knowledge could be recollected, that it was never new but already always present. Precisely, he argued that the universe from which issues the flow of being and becoming, and which manifests itself in the spirit as its “shifting, moving, flowing” (1921, p.3),10 provides the spirit with knowledge of order. Hence, instead of ordering the world externally via politics, the task is to become the world spiritually. I propose to read Landauer’s concept of Absonderung as a practice of presence, describing a movement inwards through the “dark, fatal gate of our instincts and the terra abscondita – the ‘hidden land’ of our soul, to the universe which ‘passes through us’” (Landauer, 2010, p.88).

Philosophy and practices of presence  41 Eric Voegelin, the second thinker to be discussed, spoke of politics as a necessary means – for survival and to create “[o]ut of a shapeless vastness of conflicting human desires […] a little world of order, a cosmic analogy, a cosmion […]” (Voegelin, 1997, p.225). Hence, unlike the discourse of crisis, Voegelin emphasised that politics is never descriptive of reality but always evocative, a tool for world-creation. The source of order is consequently the order of the soul, hence, he posits, “the order of the soul as the source of order in society” (Voegelin, 2000, p.65). While Voegelin argued against the conception of a linear movement history, he did state that since the advent of modernity in the West, the order of society had continually declined, having produced a new vision of the human being that “becomes increasingly self-enclosed and finite in its orientation” (1997, p.144). The ideological mass movements of the twentieth century were hence no political deviation but the logical consequence of a long-endured nosos, a disease of the soul: The man who suffers from the disease of contraction, however, is not inclined to leave the prison of his selfhood, in order to remove the frictions. He rather will put his imagination to further work and surround the imaginary self with an imaginary reality apt to confirm the self in its pretense of reality; he will create a Second Reality, as the phenomenon is called, in order to screen the First Reality of common experience from his view. (Voegelin, 1990, p.185) Similar to Landauer, Voegelin states that politics has served to create and to conserve a reality in which the individual is separated from its own experience so that it too concludes that political reform will not eliminate the root causes of the crisis. Instead, Voegelin proposed to counter contraction with Anamnesis, the recollection of experiences that have “excited consciousness to the ‘awe’ of existence” (2002, p.36) and “opened sources of excitation, from which issue the urge to further philosophical reflection” (ibid., p.37). These are experiences of moments prior to and outside of politics, which had wrongly been forgotten, revealing the forgotten as knowledge in the mode of oblivion and thereby reconnecting the individual to the “ground of being.” I argue that Anamnesis constitutes a practice of presence that can be read as a therapeutic approach to the crisis of contemporary politics. The third thinker, Simone Weil, was certainly known for her criticism of party politics, which also addressed questions of bureaucracy and power in a broader context. According to Weil, formal politics substitutes the activity of the mind. Its norms, rules and regulations govern life to the extent that they replace responsibility where the individual itself should be in charge. Weil argued: [n]early everywhere instead of thinking, one merely takes sides: for or against. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind. This is an

42  Philosophy and practices of presence intellectual leprosy; it originated in the political world and then spread through the land, contaminating all forms of thinking. This leprosy is killing us; it is doubtful whether it can be cured without first starting with the abolition of all political parties. (2014, p.34) The essence of politics is externalisation because it adopts the activity of the mind for the mind. Like Landauer and Voegelin, Weil assumed the existence of a transcendent realm beyond and prior to the reality of politics, which manifests itself as a presence flowing in the soul where it is experienced directly and continually needs to be brought to the mind in order to attune one’s existence to it. Struggling her whole life with illnesses and physical suffering, Weil embraced malheur as a way of remembering this flow. The complete arbitrariness and senselessness of human suffering, which can neither be controlled nor averted, she argued, reveals beneath the order of politics a transcendent, suprahuman order, outlining the limits and pettiness of the bureaucratic, political apparatus. The latter is incapable of satisfying the desire for the good, no matter how hard imagination tries to fill this void. After Weil experienced what she later referred to as moments of encounter with God, she argued: “Here below, God cannot be perfectly present to us because we are flesh. But God can be almost perfectly absent to us in extreme affliction. It is for us on earth the unique (only) possibility of perfection” (Weil, 2009, p.75). It is when the limits of humankind are realised and one wishes for relief, yet realises God is absent – malheur, a practice of presence – that we are present. The distance to God reminds those who experience it of God. Finally, the plays and prose of the fourth thinker, Václav Havel, play with the theme of presence, and its absence, both in a post-totalitarian context and the West. To him, systems, ideologies and apparatuses have: deprived us – rulers as well as the ruled – of our conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual humanity. States grow ever more machinelike; people are transformed into statistical choruses of voters, producers, consumers, patients, tourists, or soldiers. In politics, good and evil, categories of the natural world and therefore obsolete remnants of the past, lose all absolute meaning; the sole method of politics is quantifiable success. (Havel, 1991, p. 258) Politics is seen as eradicating conscience by assuming its role, using ideology. It is tempting to follow ideology, Havel argues, because in times of upheaval and crisis, it offers clarity, order and structure, “an immediately available home” (1989, p.11). Ideology affirms existence from the outside, attributing everyone with a name, a category, a role and a purpose. However, those who accept this ideology are no longer living in moral self-direction, in truth,

Philosophy and practices of presence  43 but live a lie – “[u]nder the mantle of existential self-affirmation, existence is confiscated, alienated, deadened” (Havel, 1997, p.74). Yet, Havel argued, the totality of ideology is always interrupted and contained by neklid, a restlessness of the soul and an inkling that obedience is merely an excuse. He stated, [b]etween the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss: while life, in its essence, moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self-organisation, in short, toward the fulfilment of its own freedom, the post-totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline. (Havel, 1989, p.43) Neklid, however, alludes to the existence of a reality outside of the ostensibly absolute totalitarian dictatorship and made Havel aware of his not acting in truth. Hence, Havel argued in favour of a revolution of consciousness, a pre-politics or anti-politics that follows upon neklid. It is argued in the following that Havel is a philosopher of presence. These authors will be considered in chronological order. The advantage of this approach is that it encourages seeing connections between the thinkers’ work and the reoccurrence of key themes and motives across the four different contexts and languages, thereby augmenting the sense of the collage. For example, the themes of totalitarianism, identity, community, ideology and transcendence strongly echo throughout their writings. Havel as the final figure to be discussed allows this book to return full circle to the question of what occurs when presence settles in the political arena, when the philosophy of presence and the state meet.

2.4 Conclusion Having outlined the limits of the discourse of crisis in Chapter 1 and problematised the condition of permanent liminality, this chapter introduced an alternative gesture of thought, existing outside the canon of modern mainstream and critical political thought, independent from the hegemony of politics, challenging it. The “philosophy of presence” argues that externalisation – not being present in relation – is not a deviation from politics, but its very essence, yet that, at the same time, it is possible to retrieve presence and to move beyond politics, cracking open permanent liminality. The aim of the following chapters will be to outline the philosophy of presence and to examine its relevance to the contemporary discourse of crisis. As presence is personal and immediate, not a factual and empirical piece of objective information, this book has to abstain from superimposing theories or methods for its analysis and can only suggest how to read philosophers of presence, inevitably constituting a participation in their presence. A specific focus will lie on what I refer to as practices of presence, the ways in which presence is cultivated. Gustav Landauer, Eric Voegelin,

44  Philosophy and practices of presence Simone Weil and Václav Havel share a critical and detached perspective on conventional politics as a system of externalisation – as “surrogate of the spirit” (Landauer), “second reality” (Voegelin), “intellectual leprosy” (Weil) and “post-totalitarianism” (Havel) – which connects to the discourse of crisis. The book now proceeds to explore in depth Gustav Landauer’s Absonderung, Eric Voegelin’s Anamnesis, Simone Weil’s Malheur and Václav Havel’s Neklid in the following four chapters.

Notes 1 Another interesting thinker to have criticised the recent “ontological turn” in political theory is Lois McNay (2014). She discusses the ontological turn in, amongst others, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, William Connolly, James Tully and Wendy Brown. McNay argues that the ontological distinction between politics and the political tempts its proponents into “social weightlessness,” a term borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu. She also criticises the philosophers who employ the dialectic of ignorance and/or incuriosity with regards to the reality of social existence and social suffering, stemming from weariness of mass society and hence leading to a relapse into a conservatism that attaches identity solely to the political. These thinkers, McNay argues, overlook that part of the reason that citizens are not always passionately engaged in the political or claim political agency is that they are exhausted from already being subjected to and suffering from the physical and psychological consequences of material inequality. 2 See, for example, how Gianni Vattimo and Jacque Derrida seek to make sense of a “religious revival” and “return to the sacred” (1998), arguing that the sense of threat and loss of meaning push people to search for purpose in religion. See also Vattimo’s examinations of the postmodern return of religion (2002; Vattimo and Rorty, 2005). 3 Citing John Chrysostom’s Sermon 82.4-5 on Matthew’s Gospel. 4 Citing from Voegelin, The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers 1939–1985, p.181. 5 The notion of “practices of presence” might also resonate with the spiritual exercises originally developed by Ignatius of Loyola, a sixteenth-century Spanish priest and founder of the Jesuits. These exercises are composed of a number of meditations, prayers and contemplations, exercised during a – typically monastic – retreat. The seeker will undergo four “weeks” of exercises, completing different stages of spiritual development, preceded by spiritual self- examination and aided by a director. The aim is to achieve deeper spiritual experience and selfless execution of God’s will. Today, Jesuits offer these retreats in varying lengths, curtailed to the needs of different groups of people, including online training. Compared to the practices of presence discussed above, such spiritual exercises are more schematic and rigid, limited in time and still often exercised in a secluding/secluded retreat. The four thinkers to be examined in this book, however, should be seen as particularly modern thinkers. Their practices of presence have catapulted them straight into politics, where ideology had become the motor for mass movements taking over the thinking of entire nations. Hence, their practices of presence are far from a retreat, carried out against the political environment, and leading to a philosophy brought into this very context. See Paprocki (2020). An interesting discussion can also be found in Costello (2013, p.121ff). 6 For an interesting discussion about the problems of translating Havel’s work into English, see Paul Wilson’s interview at the Library of Congress (2017). Another

Philosophy and practices of presence  45

7

8

9

10

factor that needs to be taken into consideration for a discussion of Havel’s work is the conditions and circumstances under which Havel wrote – this applies most notably to his Letters to Olga, written from prison, which had to pass censors. Havel was neither allowed to write about philosophical or political ideas, nor about everyday life in prison. Thus, he developed techniques for disguising his thoughts through mundane stories, yet when asked about their meaning by his biographers could at times not remember the original message. Walter Benjamin (1999, p.777). James R. Martel (2014) discusses Benjamin’s anarchic approach: not only politically, but also theologically, Benjamin opposed arche, a first principle or absolute truth that could determine human existence. Specifically, Benjamin’s distinction between mythic violence (human attempts to absolutise order, making themselves God) and divine violence (God’s unpredictable interruption, dismantling this order as fake) is interesting. However, as this book is concerned with the theme of presence, Benjamin is not studied in further detail. His ‘anarchic method’ of writing is merely used as an example here for how to approach the questions raised in this methodology chapter: whether and how can one write scientifically about a mythic subject. Relevant is also Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, written between 1927 and 1940, using the means of literary montage to collect personal observations, pictures and quotes, bundled in 28 different folders. Sylvie Courtine-Denamy has compared the work of Eric Voegelin and Simone Weil (2012). Athanasios Moulakis has published separately on both Simone Weil (1998) and Eric Voegelin. Gustav Landauer and Eric Voegelin have been compared by Franziska Hoppen, tracing the importance of a ‘mystical anarchism’ for the political theory of both thinkers (2017). My translation. German original: “Wo kein Geist ist und keine innere Nötigung, da ist äußere Gewalt, Reglementierung und Staat. Wo Geist ist, da ist Gesellschaft. Wo Geistlosigkeit ist, ist Staat. Der Staat ist das Surrogat des Geistes”. My translation. German original: “Fortbewegung, Weitergehen, Fliessen”.

3

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung

Today, Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) is considered one of Germany’s most renowned anarchists of the late nineteenth century. Yet, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, his ideas antagonised fellow anarchists – and not only them. If his particular way of thinking may be categorised at all, then best as mystical anarchism1 – one that I propose to read as a practice of presence. While Landauer initially did participate in a German anarchist scene still influenced by the Sturm und Drang period, an emotional, proto-romantic movement, a crisis of meaning lead him to reacquaint himself with religious scholarship – in particular with the writings of German mystic Meister Eckhart (circa 1260–1328). Instead of merely analysing the sites of conflict in fin de siècle Germany externally via political thought, Landauer began to examine the spiritual prerequisites that had made the turbulent, violent atmosphere possible. His diagnosis was unusual: Landauer argued that politics functioned as a surrogate of the spirit, being itself a symptom of spiritlessness. Alleviating the crises could not lead via politics itself, he argued, but only via re-examining the spirit and its experiences of the world prior to the influences of state and capitalism. Instead of ordering the world politically, the task was to become it spiritually. Landauer’s own, experimental quest was to step out of the rule of politics – a process which he referred to as Absonderung, literally meaning truncation and practically describing the reconnection to the spirit as the most basic, primordial as well as universal experience of existence and thus source of knowledge. This Absonderung, I will argue in the following, constitutes a practice of presence. Its goal was far from withdrawal. To Landauer, Absonderung was part of a tangible and concrete call to action: to Antipolitik. This is a concept that Landauer developed throughout his work and which passes into subjects of economics, culture and religion (Kuhn, 2010c, p.50).2 It may be read as an alternative to politics – and, yet, it is precisely not that. Landauer wrote extensively on matters of politics, culture, literature, religion and art, in newspaper articles, short novels, poetry and theatre plays. This chapter relies on works that have either been published in German or translated into English. Yet, much of his writings remain archived and only little of it has been translated. Still, scholars have focused on various

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  47 aspects of his work, such as his romantic socialism (Lunn, 1973), his impact on Jewish libertarian thought (Breines, 1967), his mysticism and its influencers, such as Meister Eckhart (Hinz, 2000), his utopian politics or his influence on key figures of German anarchism or literature, such as Martin Buber, Hermann Hesse, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch or Paul Celan. Parts of these works will be taken into consideration here, too.

3.1 Biography In 1918, one year before his death, Landauer formulated a succinct diagnosis of modernity – one that at the same time summarised the chief motivation and theme throughout his work. He argued: modernity’s key traits were disjointedness and disparity, between politics on the one hand and culture on the other, between the aesthetic and the ethical, science and religion. Not only was society increasingly atomised, he argued. Also the individual was separated from her inner core. Thus, he argued, “we are piteously divided” (Landauer, 1921, p.142).3 In contrast, Landauer’s early upbringing may be described as relatively sheltered. He was born in 1870 into a Jewish middle class family in southern Germany’s Baden Wuerttemberg. Throughout his life, he would identify with the region of his upbringing, Swabia. According to Landauer’s biographer Eugene Lunn, rural Swabia then was characterised by “a system of free peasant proprietorship” and “marked by an absence of socially polarised classes; instead of big industrialists and factory workers, small scale merchants and handicraft workers made up the urban population and the social structure of the area” (Lunn, 1973, p.19). Indeed, it is important to note that at that time much of Germany underwent rapid industrialisation. Landauer’s upbringing, in contrast, shaped what he later referred to as a “völkisch romanticism,” a deep belief in tradition, decentralisation and independence, which is also reflected in his later call to build independent socialist settlements in the countryside, outside of the systems of state and capitalism, in order to realise the true nature of human beings. However, for Germany as a whole, these were turbulent years. The German Empire was formed from a confederation of various individual states one year after Landauer’s birth. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck sought to secure the country’s power against its neighbouring states with a program of “blood and iron” – war and technology. Industrialisation, despite having started almost a century later than in most other European nations, had transformed the German landscape in less than a decade from an empire of largely rural communities into one of the world’s leading economies. Unprepared for the masses of migrating workers and the unemployed, cities grew ripe with poverty and violence. As the character of work transformed, a sense of alienation, uselessness, anonymity and nihilism prevailed (Link-Salinger, 1971, p.6). Tightly knit community structures dissolved amongst a loss of social cohesion (Maurer, 1971, p.13ff).4 Traditional values, including religious values, gave way to materialism, disenchantment and secularisation

48  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung (Link-Salinger, 1971, p.6f). Nationalism and a firm belief in Germany’s invincibility flourished. In short: Germany’s fin de siècle was characterised by the loss of traditional order, a world “in which ‘being’ has been overtaken by ‘becoming’; the well-defined had given way to the ‘possible’” (Hof, 1970, p.5), where all values, especially “German values” and the question of identity and belonging, had to be re-evaluated. And while rural Swabia may have been more sheltered from these developments, they did influence the realm of the arts, literature and the school curriculum throughout the country. Hence, according to the biographers Gabriel Kuhn and Siegbert Wolf, Landauer “was certainly a son of the new Germany. The notions of state, nation, and people are central themes in his thought – both generally and in specific relation to German identity” (Kuhn, 2010, p.9). Thus, it comes to no surprise that Landauer already as a student began to ponder the theme of division. In one of his essays, he recalls a longing for “purity, beauty, and fulfilment,” unanswered by the nationalistic curriculum,5 which praised German rootedness and destiny instead (Lunn, 1973, p.23).6 School meant “alternating states of nervous anxiety and relaxation, the ludicrous theft of time, freedom, and dreams, and an obstruction to my own desires, investigations, and experiments” (Landauer, 2010c, p.64). Only music, literature and poetry provided meaning for Landauer, in particular the romanticism of Wagner and Schopenhauer. Reflecting on this early division between inner desire and outer force, Landauer explained, the reason for my opposition to society, as well as the reason for my continued dreams and my outrage was not class identity or even compassion, but the permanent collision of romantic desire with philistine limitation. This is why I was (without knowing the word at the time) an anarchist before I was a socialist, one of the few who had not taken a detour via social democracy. (Ibid., p.64) Later at university, where Landauer studied German and English literature, he remained a secluded literary Bohemian and an advocate of romantic individualism, with little awareness of the political, economic and social concerns of his time and without a record of political or social engagement. Yet, growing more culturally active, Landauer began to write numerous poems and short novels.7 Therein are reflected early anarchist ideas, yet, according to cultural historian Eugene Lunn, they describe a “personal struggle against society, and for ideals he never clearly defined. This rather unconscious anarchism of these years amounted to a vaguely conceived apolitical rejection of philistinism” (Lunn, 1973, p.28). Only during the late 1880s, whilst studying the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen did Landauer develop

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  49 a more vitalistic and activist individualism (ibid., p.28). Retrospectively he argued: it was Ibsen who turned my youthful dreams of beauty into a desire for realisation; it was Ibsen who forced me, with irresistible power, to no longer ignore reality, to no longer ignore society and its ills, but to be aware and critical and rebellious. (Landauer, 2010c, p.64) Similar to Nietzsche, emphasising willed activism, Ibsen’s plays placed a creative individual in opposition to bourgeois society with its suffocating social norms. From this, Landauer developed an optimistic “cult of experience and life” (Lunn, 1973, p.31), a strong belief in volition, vitalism and philosophical voluntarism.8 He had fused his earlier romanticism, which considered the human being rooted in community and nature, with voluntarism and activism to form a program for “individual self determination and community integration” (Landauer, 1973, p.35). The individual, Landauer now believed, could transform itself consciously. With his move to Berlin in 1891, Landauer became politicised. The German capital had become a Weltstadt, a centre for industry and commerce. Yet, it was also shaped by social tensions and conflicts, mass demonstrations and a heightened awareness of social and political problems, especially amongst the literary circles which Landauer attended. Witnessing real economic and political struggles for the first time, he wrote, I find, however, that I no longer have time for the enjoyment of beauty and can experience it only in passing. My inner life has changed in the last years and I have broken away from the picture of the world which I had previously acquired in my life […]. I must absorb new worlds into myself, my spirit needs new nourishment. From the depth of the spirit alone nothing can be created without a steadily increasing fund of experience of the world.9 Searching for this “fund of experience” and for answers to injustices and inequalities, Landauer began to involve himself in various political organisations.10 Of these, Die Jungen is of particular importance. It opposed Germany’s reformed Socialist Democratic Party (SPD) that had recently grown into a mass party and set the tone in socialist politics, by criticising its bureaucratic and centralised authority, its passivity and tactical reformism. Landauer’s early impressions of the SPD as ostensibly promoting worker’s rights yet internally displaying despotism, authoritarianism and intolerance were another manifestation of the theme of division and a catalyst for his later formulations of Antipolitik.

50  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung Landauer developed his ideas on this subject by writing for the publishing collective “Der Sozialist,” founded in 1891. The opening sentences of the first edition stated: Our goal is the economic and social liberation of the working class. We struggle against authority and servitude in every form, the material as well as the spiritual. This goal can be achieved through the negation of bourgeois private property, especially through the socialisation of the means of production. (Lunn, 1973, p.5611 Landauer soon became its editor and published most of his writings in the magazine until 1915 (ibid., p.56),12 turning his “defining publishing venture” (Landauer, 2010, p.23) into a nationwide flagship for anarchist thought. Thus, Landauer quickly rose to the top of the German anarchist scene. A policeman referred to him in 1893 as “the most important agitator of the radical revolutionary movement” (Kuhn, 2010c, p.23).13 Unsurprisingly, he was arrested numerous times and served several minor prison sentences until 1901. Yet, the anarchist scene, itself growing at that time, struggled with internal divisions. And also Landauer changed his mind on more than one occasion. Until 1894, he had campaigned for anarcho-syndicalism. Yet, the more he directly engaged with workers, the more disillusioned he grew. Both workers and activists alike, Landauer argued, waited for a vanguard, a saviour to free them from capitalism and the state, thereby omitting their self-responsibility. Consequently, Landauer’s focus shifted towards consumer–producer cooperatives as a way of forming new communities. This remained an important element throughout his work, shaped and developed by the works of Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde amongst others (Kuhn, 2010c, p.45). Simultaneously, Landauer began to distance himself from fellow socialists and anarchists. Both in 1893 and 1896, he had been expelled from the Congress of the Second International for attempting to unite both anarchists and anarchists with socialists. In turn, he increasingly rejected both what he perceived as oversimplified class analyses by some Marxists and propaganda of the deed. “Anarchism-socialism” is a term coined by Landauer to define his new activist venture. It means: “[a]narchism is the goal that we pursue: the absence of domination and of the state; the freedom of the individual. Socialism is the means by which we want to reach and secure this freedom: solidarity, sharing and cooperative labor” (Landauer, 2010, p.70). With that statement, Landauer alienated both socialists and anarchists alike, and also the readership of Der Sozialist ceased (Lunn, 1973, p.119). As a result, Landauer withdrew from the public, avoided anarchist events for the time being and

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  51 instead increasingly engaged in philosophical reflection, whilst also lecturing on literature. This was the beginning of what biographer Ruth Link-Salinger has referred to as a period of maturation (Link-Salinger, 1977, p.2). Landauer reframed earlier ideas and concentrated them in a “vast idealist metaphysical system” (Lunn, 1973, p.122). This process was helped by a prison term. Imprisoned for half a year from August 1899 onwards, Landauer prepared his friend’s and linguistic critic’s Fritz Mauthner’s papers for publication, titled Beitraege zur Kritik einer Sprache. One of Mauthner’s core arguments was that language, while useful for communication, could not provide knowledge of reality. As the individual and the world were completely separate, Mauthner argued, no real knowledge of the world was possible. Landauer further developed this insight in his essay Skepsis and Mystik, published shortly after his prison sentence in 1903. Here, the theme of division begins to focus on the individual itself: its experience of the world cannot be fathomed in language, its search for truth about the nature of reality is limited by its own limiting experiences. However, Landauer continues to argue: it is possible to gain a non-linguistic, mystical access to the world. This, then, appears to reflect parts of late medieval mystic’s Meister Eckhart’s sermons, which Landauer had also translated during the same prison term (Meister Eckhart, 2020a). This idea became the cornerstone of Landauer’s Antipolitik. Indeed, after 1901, Landauer’s writings were increasingly characterised by the argument that since the order of the world is already within the individual, instead of ordering the world politically, the task is to become the world mystically.14 According to Thomas Hinz and Kurt Ruh, Eckhart’s Traktat der Abgeschiedenheit (treatise of truncation) appears to have been of particular relevance to Landauer (Hinz, 2000, p.113). Therein, Eckhart portrays truncation as freedom from oneself and all things, the return to God through reassessing that which God has placed within the soul (Meister Eckhart, 2020a). That being said, Landauer did not promote mystical withdrawal from the world, but remained truthful to his belief in action, merging it with his newly formulated mystical ideas. Hence, [o]ne would misunderstand me deeply if one believed that I preach quietism or resignation, or that I demand the renunciation of action or social engagement. Oh, no! One acts with others; one pursues municipal socialism; one supports farmers’, consumers’, and tenants’ cooperatives; one creates public gardens and libraries; one leaves the cities and works with spade and shovel; one simplifies one’s material life for the sake of spiritual luxury; one organises and educates; one struggles for the creation of new schools and new forms of education. However! None of this will really bring us forward if it is not based on a new spirit won by the conquest of one’s inner self (Landauer, 2010, p.89)

52  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung Released from prison, Landauer re-immersed himself in political activism. Most notably, he founded the Sozialistische Bund (Socialist Union) in 1908.15 It aimed to create small, independent and artistic communities, cooperatives and settlements as the basic cells of a new, socialist culture – one that created favourable conditions for that “conquest of the inner self.” Yet, like most of Landauer’s projects, the Socialist Union was dissolved in 1914, having long suffered from lacking commitment by its members. Some scholars have interpreted these premature endings of Landauer’s projects and their failure in attracting large numbers of followers as the result of an inherent naivety, typical of intellectual, middle class circles (Lunn, 1973, p.196ff). However, it can be argued that this criticism itself oversimplifies Landauer’s endeavour, which was precisely not an immediate revolution of society, measurable in quantitative results, but sought to aid the individual in its self-conquest. In 1918, Landauer engaged in his probably most puzzling and disputed episode of activism, seemingly contrary to his rejection of politics. In 1919, the SPD had declared Germany a republic, bringing to an end the Kaiserreich. During the preceding November Revolution, members of the independent SPD (USPD), under the leadership of Landauer’s friend Kurt Eisner, had overthrown the Bavarian monarchy in 1918 and declared Bavaria the first German state to become a republic, the Bavarian Democratic and Social Republic. The USPD established thousands of councils across Bavaria through which workers, peasants, soldiers, academics, students, groups with various interests self-governed. Landauer had high hopes for Bavaria, where the developments reflected his vision for a federalised Germany based on local, grass roots democracy (Lunn, 1973, p.291). In October 1918, Landauer had written, “[t]rue politics, the politics that goes back to Laotzu and Buddha and Jesus, is not the art of the possible but the “impossible.” What is happening today is nothing but “impossible” things, except that they are real” (Maurer, 1971, p.188). According to Lunn, Landauer’s enthusiasm during the German Revolution (1918–1919) and the establishment of the council republic in Bavaria was “unbounded” (Lunn, 1973, p.296), seeing in it a confirmation of his year-long efforts. Eisner summoned Landauer in 1919 to aid in the political affairs and he subsequently became the People’s Delegate for Culture and Education, occupying himself in the Revolutionary Worker’s Council (RAR), driving forward the construction of further councils. However, these were soon controlled by trade union leaders. Landauer’s long-term hopes for the republic differed from others’, many of which treated the republic as a means for creating a dictatorship of the proletariat, while yet others were, in the Bavarian tradition, more moderate and conservative. Landauer, on the other hand, had sought to include all members of the public in a democracy based on decentralised Räte. He even imagined a federal Bund of decentralised control emerging from the local level, from communities cohered according to historical and cultural meaning – this being the realisation of his vision for the Sozialistische Bund. However, during the following months, Landauer

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  53 experienced a sharp disappointment and a growing feeling of isolation: “The entire spirit of renewal which would have led to self-determination, and the self-government of new institutions and voluntary associations, has evaporated” (Lunn, 1973, p.309).16 Eisner was assassinated in February 1919 by a right-wing student. While the SPD won the elections, its opposition, pushed by Landauer, declared The Bavarian Council Republic on April 7. Subsequently, the SPD sent military units into Munich to arrest the opposition. Landauer was arrested and stomped to death by the Freikorps which the SPD government had sent for a day later on May 2, 1919. Having grown up in fin de siècle Germany and its turbulent political scene, Landauer rejected formal politics as an elitist and hypocritical affair, quixotic to the needs of the people it claimed to represent. Yet, his disillusionment with the political opposition, ignorant to the realities of the working class, was also pivotal in convincing him that informal politics was no means for change either. It was politics itself, its superimposed structure of mediation, which prevented people from taking responsibility themselves. With the insights gained during his “period of maturation,” particularly through the ideas of Fritz Mauthner and Meister Eckhart, Landauer was able to see and to formulate the most profound element in the theme of division: the separation of the individual’s experience of reality from her life in the social and political realm. Thereupon, Landauer’s Antipolitik encapsulated the belief that all forms of division, the most sophisticated of which is politics, originate from the individual’s own alienation from herself and from the world she experiences. Thus, Antipolitik also implies that politics needs to be overcome altogether, not through political means, but through separating oneself from the realm of politics, remembering the world within one’s self, reconnecting with the true community of being.

3.2 Landauer’s description of politics The following section explores in detail Landauer’s conceptualisation of politics as an imaginary, expedient reality and as surrogate for true community, emerging from the separation of the experience of reality from knowledge of reality. The aim of this section is thus to clarify Landauer’s Antipolitik. To do so, it is worthwhile to begin with what is probably his most widely quoted statement, often used to summarise the particular branch of anarchism he advocated: Disappointed with the theories and practices of contemporary anarchists, Landauer published an article critiquing the misconception of the state as a reified institution that can be overcome by violent revolution, directly addressing anarchists who focused on criticising the illegitimate rule of the state (archein). Published in 1910 as ‘Schwache Staatsmaenner, schwaecheres Volk’ (‘Weak Statesmen, Weaker People’), the essay states: A table can be overturned and a window can be smashed. However, those who believe that the state is also a thing or a fetish that can be

54  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung overturned or smashed are sophists and believers in the Word. The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently. The absolute monarch said: I am the state. We, who we have imprisoned ourselves in the absolute state, must realise the truth: we are the state! And we will be the state as long as we are nothing different; as long as we have not yet created the institutions necessary for a true community and a true society of human beings. (Landauer, 2010, p.214) Far from being a singular centre of top-down power, Landauer argued, the state consists of the micro-power and network structures of each of its members. It is precisely because “we are the state,” that we have the power to organise differently, though it requires, and is only possible if, we first recognise the fact that it was we who have “imprisoned ourselves” and that, consequently, there is no state to be overcome, but only ourselves. For Landauer, power and potentiality lie in the hands of the oppressors as well as the oppressed, its frontline running through each individual. The essential problem to which Landauer’s above statement drew attention was thus the difference between the lived reality of social relationships with their own micro-forces on the one hand and their petrification within the imaginary construct and ideological excuse of the state as an abstract, external entity on the other. To those who lived in fear of the state and to those planning to smash it, Landauer replied, we speak of the state without thinking. This word designates nothing but a definite condition of a public-legal nature in which we persist with our wills. It is the reification of what are in fact fluid and spiritual relations; it does injury to our perception because we take an expedient for naked reality. (1921, p.103) Landauer clarified that he did not consider the state as a given reality, but merely as a word. In other words, he argued that politics functions like language, which can create only a reflection of the world, an image of an image, produced with our simple sense. Politics, like a language which believes to express truth, delimits the complexity, openness and fluidity of the world, creating a simplified, manageable version of reality – its “surrogate” (Landauer, 2012a, p.35). Thus, Landauer stated: “In reality the parties of grammar are completely identical with the parties of politics” (Landauer, 2012b, p.108). The state only pretends to be a reified institution and central unity, creating subjects alongside its artificial norms and orders, practices, discourses, technologies and essential identities, and determining who is powerful and powerless, rational and irrational, and what is possible and impossible. Consequently, Landauer’s aim was not to shift those parameters

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  55 through yet another political measure, but to destroy the state as a whole by exposing its artificiality and expediency. As shown above, Landauer’s conception of politics extended beyond mere state-related activity and expanded the conventional definition of politics to include “any fight, that is led for or against word-constructs as if they were reality” (Landauer, 2010a, p.181).17 Indeed, in his work, the term politics does not merely refer to activities of governance but to any construction and conservation of expedient reality. In doing so, he removes the term from its particular political context, arguing that the activities of governance within the state are themselves only symptomatic of a wider, more profound problem, namely the creation of expedient reality as a whole. Therefore, it can be summarised that Landauer’s critique of politics is not directed against archein, the ruler, but against arche itself. American anarchist Benjamin Tucker defined arche as “a first principle, an element; then first place, supreme power, sovereignty, dominion, command, authority; and finally a sovereign, an empire, a realm, a magistracy, a government office” (Tucker, 2011, p.112). Arche describes the curtailment of reality, it makes out of becoming an existence (Landauer, 2010a, p.306),18 replacing fluidity with a system, with clarity and logic. It grounds the ungroundable. Arche is that which “steps between human and human, and human and ground wherever genuine relationality, free spirit, has withered” (Landauer, 2012a, p.145),19 to foreclose direct and open engagement (Landauer, 2010a, p.122). It delimits, controls and governs the relationships an individual has to herself, to others and to the world, making this government pass for reality. Its function is obliteration. The state is only symptomatic of arche. Consequently, Landauer argues, “we must realise the truth: we are the state,” we are arche (2010, p.214). Landauer’s Antipolitik is based on the argument that arche is created through human volition and that its subject persists in this “definite condition” with their own will. It is precisely not a state (archein) which creates a people but, on the contrary, a people which create and organise symbols and ideological systems (arche), such as the state, as their consciously chosen mode of self-interpretation. Hence, [t]he state is no reality that exists independently from the people. There is no ‘state’ on the one hand, and people who live in it on the other. The ‘state’ much rather belongs to what people do and understand. People do not live in the state. The state lives in the people. (Landauer, 2010, p.249) In other words, there is no “thing” that can be smashed, the state is only an illusory construction (Landauer, 1921, p.142), a “spook” (Landauer, 2010c, p.249) and “perfected nothingness” (Landauer, 2010a, p.121).20 According to Landauer, the need for such symbolism arises when meaning and purpose, identity and coherence can no longer be extracted from

56  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung reality. Out of this situation of loss of ground grows the need for an alternative provider of meaning and order: to create in this spiritlessness, this absurdity, this confusion, this need and squalidness order and the possibility to live on […]. The state with its schools, churches, courts, prisons, factories, the state with its army and police, the state with its soldiers, public servants and prostitutes. Where there is no spirit and no inner coercion, there is outer force, regulation and state […]. Where there is spiritlessness, there is the state. The state is the surrogate of spirit. (Landauer, 2012a, p.35)21 It is important to note from this statement that the state with its universalising symbolism both originates from arche, the desire to create a foundation, and, at the same time, functions to prevent arche from becoming aware to itself, i.e., it reinforces and absolutises its foundation. Thus, while the state is a human creation, it also requires its creator’s constant service, delivered in schools, churches, courts, prisons, factories. It is necessary at this point to explain what Landauer means by the term spirit, one that is of vital importance in his work, referring to neither intellect nor soul (Kuhn, 2010c, p.12). It is best explained in an essay from 1908, titled “Die Lehre von den Geistigen und vom Volke” (The Teachings of the Spirit and of the People). Therein, Landauer depicts Geist (spirit) as a movement of Sein and Werden, being and becoming, that contains the basic movement of history, culture and thinking, but follows no evolution. Once the individual has freed itself from spiritlessness, it can, through Geist, think and live communally. Landauer writes: We are a wave amongst waves, a thing amongst things, says Brunner. Futile things which are always, incessantly, without any end or beginning or a break, annihilated, sunken, converted, swimming in time from place to place; and so there is within us an infinite, ever-lasting swimming, blurring, washing ashore, elapsing, a sponge that moves through the water and consists of many holes. This is one perspective. This is the becoming […]. But then there is the other one, Being: that which is safe, that which is not our shabby existence, but our essence, our Archeus, our eternal inheritance, our being-in-the-world […]. There is no evolution, because there never existed a beginning. (Landauer, 1921, p.235f)22 With the term ‘spirit,’ Landauer refers to the experience that lies in between and encapsulates both being and becoming. Philosophy is always motivated by this experience, Landauer argues, even if it refers to other themes, “because the superstition, the surrogate which the people have instead of their spirit, changes and cannot rest, because it is erratic and haunted, like everything that

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  57 stands on no ground, and this undergrowth needs to be mown always again” (ibid., p.236).23 The spiritlessness, to which Landauer referred above, then does not describe the absence of spirit but its suppression – a process that, according to Landauer, always fails, spirit being the basic experience of life. Thus, only when the spirit is continually suppressed can the state deliver meaning: the state is not an invention made at a single point in time, but in order to manifest itself, it requires continuous self-denial and the repetition of its illusionary reality (“Schein der Wirklichkeit”). Repetition ultimately becomes so all-pervasive that the state indeed assumes the position of reality. Schools, churches, courts and prisons – that Landauer enumerated above – will educate new generations of teachers, priests, judges and guards, whose repetition of the logic of arche will increase repression. Consequently, Landauer observed that, life in these times is an amalgamation of substitutes for spirit. After all, we need something that makes human community possible and that guides it. Where there is no spirit, violence takes over, and the state and the related forms of authority and centralism become consolidated. (Landauer, 2010c, p.135) Eventually, the state gathers momentum (Landauer, 2012a, p.36). Through the processes of repetition and projection, the separation of the people’s own experience of reality as a fluid and open relationship from their knowledge of reality is ossified. The problem, thus, is not the state itself, not even arche, but ultimately the people’s self-negation, the suppression of their own experience of being. Landauer argues: it is “not a particular type of state that causes oppression, but self-coercion, self-denial, and the worst of all emotions: mistrust towards others and oneself. All this is engrained in the notion of the state itself […]” (Landauer, 2010c, p.173). And he asks: “Is it not like a game of echo? What are the people afraid of? The people. Who obstructs the masses? The masses. You are your own enemy!” (2010a, p.140).24 It follows that politics is inherently antonymous to community. The cornerstone of arche is the divorce of experience from order. If arche is to be maintained, every encounter or moment that could remind of, or induce, the fluidity and openness of reality has to be eliminated. Consequently, according to Landauer, the way in which we encounter ourselves, others and the world is governed by politics. In that milieu, the resulting society can only be a collection of separated individualities, attributes and representations (Lunn, 1973, p.106)25 coexisting within their enclosed, segmented spaces as “a mad cluster of purposes” (Landauer, 2010a, p.117),26 force and self- constraint, interacting only alongside the governed nodal points of legislated existence. Society, then, is but an infinite deferral of direct engagement (2010a, p.89) in a complex network of expedient reality. To Landauer, this rigidification is incompatible with life (2012a, p.148), it is dehumanising and impersonal (ibid., p.101), for “there is clarity only in the land of appearances and words.

58  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung Where life begins, systems end” (2010c, p.91). Only that which has resources to grow, to change and to transform, to create and to produce itself can be considered alive (2012a, p.149). Yet, under the regime of politics, “death is the atmosphere between us” (ibid., p.26).27 Because arche needs to repeat itself continuously to survive, society grows ever more dehumanising; it is an inherently violent construction, whose “state, laws, administration and executive are only names for people which, because they lack possibilities for life, torture and rape each other; names for violence between people” (ibid., p.146).28 Consequently, the transformation of society cannot happen within or through politics, for to accept politics as reality would mean its perpetuation. Landauer is not interested in improving the political system, but in making it altogether superfluous. He seeks to unmask the appearance of the totality and absoluteness of rules and norms, revealing politics as expedient reality, so that their creators be confronted with their own self-denial. Yet, the state is braced: political systems change and progress – a movement that, according to Landauer, constitutes a folding up and stretching, a zooming in, a contracting in on itself. The state merely grinds down misery’s sharp corners if it gets too harsh; it provides insurance-, custody-, and trade laws of all kinds, so that capitalism won’t perish with its worst consequences, so that our system of injustice and the senseless production and distribution of goods can continue. (2012a, p.13129 This is a process that Landauer refers to as “perfect imitation” (Landauer, 1921, p.248). Every time the lie about its alleged reality is exposed, for example, by an experience of fluidity, politics accommodates the experience or retaliates by re-affirming its lie even louder: borders are enforced, fences rise, deviance is persecuted and punished, so that the state hides his nothingness with lies (Landauer, 2012a, p.36).30 In a vicious cycle, the more the state mimics itself, the bigger its lie of meaning and purpose grows, the more devastation a little crack causes. Put differently, the more powerful the state grows, the more threatening otherness becomes. Consequently, [i]t is clear why ‘the state’ and ‘the capital’ receive so much care: because the sad little fellows do not know how to help themselves and need the state and the capital to stand on their own feet and feed themselves. (Landauer, 2010a, p.84)31 In turn, the more the state crumbles, the more frenzied its help will be sought. When the state’s subjects grow self-irresponsible (ibid.),32 when the people forget their potential, power and ability (ibid., p.99),33 the state steps in to further distract, defer and deviate. Landauer’s argumentation implies that arche’s contraction simultaneously leads to the expansion of expedient

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  59 reality into all fabrics of life. Politics, de jure, has to totalise and to radicalise. The totalitarian politics of the twentieth century, Landauer suggests, might not have been an exception, an accident or deviation of politics, but its logical conclusion. There is, then, undoubtedly a negative prognosis in Landauer’s conception of politics. The more the state grows, the more helpless the people become, the more they depend on the state, which perpetuates violence and the feeling of meaninglessness (Landauer, 2012a, p.138). This is precisely the vicious cycle which Landauer observed in fin de siècle Germany: an endlessly searching society hopelessly compensating for the lack of meaning with rage and frenzy (Landauer, 2010a, p.216). Massiveness of boredom, pitiful waste, that hides behind the laughter and chatting and busy actions. Hollowness and destitution of the restless man. Always walking, sometimes slowly, sometimes busily through the melee; at times his view is depressed, soon he stares emptily and wondering; he searches, he searches; what is it that he is searching, the poor soul? Is it that he has nothing inside himself and, therefore, plunges himself in tired greediness, full of dull longing, onto the surface of things, so that it provides him with something? Does deep inside him doze the longing and does he wander in restless search, without knowing what, without him knowing that he is searching, through the wild and moving streets. (2010a, p.96)34 Never before, Landauer argues, have people been less self-responsible and weaker than now. The end of the world, he writes, seems as close as never before (2012a, p.118). Yet, it is precisely this moment of despair and misery, which Landauer envisioned as the most potent turning point. Arche necessarily contains the seed for its self-destruction. It is precisely the lack of genuine, authentic connection within society, the violence with which functioning and purpose is enforced, its inhumanity and lifelessness that produce a continuous and ineradicable searching (Landauer, 2010a, p.164). The state “is there for the people, yet it cannot help the people; […] the people are there for the state, yet it cannot mean anything to the people” (ibid., p.121).35 Eventually, the people will become too angry, too frustrated, too lonely, to uphold the illusion. That which “makes the spark catch fire is always the stupidity, brutality, or weakness of those who govern” (2010c, p.170), so that [t]he first step in the struggle of the oppressed and suffering classes, as well as the awakening of the rebellious individual’s spirit, is always outrage, a wild and raging sensation. If this is strong enough, realisations and actions are directly connected to it […]. (Landauer, 2010c, p.191)

60  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung The “misery has to rise in Germany for the creative spirit to emerge” (ibid., p.321). From a moment of anger or despair, the people might realise that the state which they fear and fight is not merely an external body, but that it too lives within themselves, guarded by their complacency and passivity (ibid., p.293). The state’s poisonous inhibition and destruction of culture is, therefore, at the same time, its remedy: the state is a pharmakon (Landauer, 2010a, p.121).36 At the beginning of this section, Landauer had argued: politics functions to substitute the spirit. The spirit, the basic human experience of life, between being and becoming, hints at the openness of reality. However, politics, according to Landauer, seeks to govern reality, creating an image of it: arche. Yet, according to Landauer, reality – being more than the human spirit can comprehend and thus transcending human means of suppression – continues to reveal itself and reveal the limits of arche. Consequently politics, to remain legitimate, cannot but attempt its own expansion and totalisation. In this perpetual cycle of mimicry, the creators of this political system eventually succumb to permanent self-denial. Therefore, Landauer argues, politics is essentially violent and dehumanising. Landauer’s Antipolitik then is not merely a rejection of formal politics, but the belief that political change ultimately merely reinforces the legitimacy of politics. True change can only occur through separation from the realm of politics, via remembrance of the spirit and attunement.

3.3 Landauer’s description of reality Landauer’s philosophical journey, which had begun as a reaction to concrete examples of political failures by both the mass parties and anarchist opposition, thus took on a new direction. After his “period of maturation,” where he acquainted himself with the works of Fritz Mauthner and Meister Eckhart, Landauer focused on the question where the existential flight from reality, of which politics was symptomatic, had originated and how it could be addressed. At the centre of his thought and political activism was no longer just the question of how to practically overcome a certain type of politics, economics and culture, but, more profoundly, his Antipolitik asked how a restoration of the broken link between the experience of the spirit and a responsive social order was possible. Mere reforms would no longer suffice (Landauer, 2010c, p.89). Hence, “[n]one of this [activism] will bring us forward if it is not based on a new spirit won by the conquest of the inner self. What we are waiting for can only come from ourselves…” (ibid.). The following section explores how Landauer envisioned this return from expedient reality to reality itself via remembrance of the spirit. First of all, it is necessary to clarify how Landauer described reality. To do so, it is worthwhile to note that he commonly interchanges the terms “reality,” “nature” and “world”, yet they appear to designate the same meaning. This designation implies three different and gradated levels. Landauer

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  61 distinguishes between the human experience of the world, the world itself and the wilful creation of a Weltanschauung (Willems, 2001, p.42). Being in the world, existing in it, implies the continuous generation of new and different sense experiences which are reflected in language metaphors. Human judgement of the world is consequently tautological, because [t]he world floods towards us and with our few, poor holes of our contingent senses we receive what we can grasp, and glue it to our old stock of words, because we have nothing else, with which we can hold it. (Landauer, 2020, p.637 To believe that sense experience and materialism alone could reflect truths about the world, according to Landauer, is “belief in God” (ibid., p.45). The “world” itself transcends sense experience and language. It is not entirely clear which faculty is designated with the experience of the world: Landauer refers to the Seelenhafte (the soulness), at other times simply to “the individual.” This Seelenhafte within the individual is defined as a “function of the endless universe” (ibid., p.7),38 a faculty partly human and partly universe, where the active universe reveals itself to the passive, experiencing individual. Thus, the individual is able to experience forms of the universe directly from within, which yet transcend her intellect and language. With the latter, she can merely negate what the universe, or the world as such is, or approximate her experience of it via metaphors – because it is “unfathomably rich” by human standards (ibid., p.6).39 The Seelenhafte is thus the locus of the non-linguistic, non-rational, mystical access to the world. Contrary to mere sense experience of the world which, processed by the intellect, might give the individual knowledge, the second, mystical experience of the world discloses that the essence of the world is undisclosable and that ultimate knowledge of it is unattainable for the individual. The third experience of “world,” then, refers to the creation of a new Weltanschauung, produced with volition from both of these levels of experience. Yet, this worldview is always a fiction and a game, “an image of an image.” Based on this threefold conception of experiencing and approaching the world, religious studies scholar Joachim Willems argued that Landauer adhered to a “mystical anthropology” (Willems, 2001, p.82).40 Because there is a Seelenhafte, a function of the universe within the individual, a “worldly spark,” mystical access to the world, is possible. Through its Seelenhafte, the individual can unite with the world, yet only to the extent that she grows to know that she cannot know her essence. As the world is both within the human being and mysteriously transcends it, so that all reality is experienced at once as being and beyond being, the individual is caught in between. Landauer’s mystical anthropology is the basis for his Antipolitik, because it implies that reality can merely be hidden through arche, but it cannot be destroyed, the “worldly spark” can be forgotten, but it cannot disappear. This is because the world, being not just being but also beyond being, cannot be

62  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung mastered or contained by human faculties. Therefore, even within expedient reality, the “worldly spark” can be remembered. Landauer asks, [h]as not everything that we have lost been inside us and came with us into this world, and how true is it and has to be reiterated again and again that in reality nothing gets lost and everything is there to be won, because our inheritance [i.e. the universe] rests within us undetachably, not time-barred, and only has to be shaken and moved and retrieved again. (Landauer, 2010a, p.100)41 Mystical access is never lost but merely forgotten, “the connection is never broken, but our superficial mind cannot remember its origins, cannot recognise the ever-present source in ourselves, and does not allow it to flourish” (Landauer, 2010c, p.106). Consequently, Landauer’s Antipolitik can be described as a movement of remembrance, of retrieving and of re-accessing the worldly spark, the function of the universe within the Seelenhafte. Likewise, when he refers to his program of anarchism-socialism, he describes it as “a movement of the spirit. To bring the people to the spirit, to awaken their own spirit, this is our task” (2010c, p.211).42 Landauer defines the term “spirit” precisely as the active force that arises when “knowledge, emotion and will unite”43 (Kuhn, 2010c, p.10), when, in other words, the first, sensual, and the second, mystical experience of the world are consciously and actively brought together in new knowledge, from which action arises. This “[s]pirit never disappears entirely” (Landauer, 2010c, p.136). Thus, the ability to overcome expedient reality, or arche, is already and at all times present within the individual, which carries the primordial function of the universe within its Seelenhafte and can excavate and re-access it. To remember reality thus implies to forget all that one believed to know about the world of separative existence and to consider one’s pure, primordial experience of the world as a source of knowledge. He writes, “[l]ife needs forgetting as much as it needs remembering” (ibid., p.135). Anarchism-socialism is the process by which one “knows thyself” and, thereby, un-knows and forgets arche. Moreover, Landauer’s mystical anthropology allows his Antipolitik to argue that because the individual herself is the locus of the world’s selfrevelation, only the individual herself is able to experience unmediated reality, before she receives knowledge about reality by a third authority. In other words, the Seelenleben is the most primary reality with which an individual knows and judges all other reality before an intermediary, such as language, politics and other systems could interfere with her experience. Thus, the mystical access to the Seelenleben is not an elitist affair of a few select individuals, but universally accessible, in fact a most basic and natural component of everyday experience. Consequently, Landauer’s anarchism-socialism, which is referred to as “movement of the spirit,” insists that its task is not to

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  63 convert others to anarchism, but that each individual herself has to grasp her own life and search, her direct and unmediated relationship with reality as the primary instrument in her quest for reality. This is why Landauer, when seeking to define anarchism, strictly warned about considering it as a system of thought and action that ought to be brought to all of humanity and planned out for them for the future, for “this is yet another fallacy: that one can – or must – bring anarchism to the world” (Landauer, 2010c, p.87). This constituted an imposition of one’s own idea of freedom onto others, an act no different from the violence and tyranny anarchists sought to oppose. Rather, anarchism was a mode of being, “a matter of how one lives” in the present here and now, for already “the core of anarchy lies in the depths of human nature” (ibid., p.87). Hence, Landauer’s mystical anthropology is necessarily an-archic: it reveals supposedly absolute and total systems as illusory, as an intermediary usurper between experience and knowledge, supplanting direct knowledge and guiding action, and which thus can only be overcome by reassessing spirit. Yet, how exactly can this mystical access be gained, especially if an expedient reality has already been constructed? According to Landauer, the fact of existence itself will arouse remembrance of reality. Being in the world inevitably implies “points of moments and feeling, natural echo, remembrance, self awareness” that induce cracks of openness and fluidity in the Scheingebilde of arche (Landauer, 1921, p.1).44 Thus, “there is a lot of hidden awareness and secret knowledge inside, but they [the individuals] don’t allow it to surface” (Landauer, 2010c, p.226). Reality re-asserts itself by penetrating experience, for example, through encounters, events or contingencies, love or music, whose meaning transcends the logical and fathomable realm of sense and reason, and thus, as mystery, arouses a cause for speculation within consciousness. Hidden within ourselves, in dreams, observations, art, action, love, despair, or happiness, there awaits spirit (Landauer, 2012a, p.26). Sometimes, one simply ought to be a careful spectator of one’s own life (Landauer, 1921, p.10), thus “[l]et us return completely to ourselves, then we may truly find the universe” (Landauer, 2010c, p.98). Out of those numerous moments grows the awareness of the flux of reality, its “shifting, moving, flowing” (Landauer, 1921, p.3).45 The world is realised as a constant becoming, which reveals itself to each individual differently at different times, thus producing infinite worlds, which continuously renew both themselves and the individual. For Landauer, “[n]ature is the birth of collected powers, a release, a deliverance, always from the whole to its parts, from the focal point into dispersion” (Landauer, 1921, p.158).46 In conscious existence, “time and world would be the imperishable silence of the imperishable new, silence without space, consistency without substance, continuance without continuance, me and yet the world” (Landauer, 2020, p.20).47 Consequently, the rigid and absolute symbols of arche necessarily come into conflict with primary reality, so that expedient reality ceases to

64  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung have meaning. This conflict serves as impetus and departure for the search for truth about reality (Landauer, 2012b, p.122). Thus, [t]he way to a newer, higher form of human society passes by the dark, fatal gate of our instincts and the terra abscondita- the “hidden land” of our soul, which is our world. This world can only be constructed from within. We can discover this land, this rich world, if we’re able to create a new kind of human being through chaos and anarchy, through unprecedented, intense, deep experience. Each one of us has to do this. (2010c, p.88) Antipolitik then claims that instead of transforming the world “into the spirit of man, or into the spirit of our brain” (ibid., p.98), which had dragged the world down to that which could be grasped by reason and the senses, the individual should raise herself to the world, through experience. The world is “unfathomably rich,” he writes, “the world is without language. […] Language, the intellect, cannot serve us in bringing the world closer. But as a speechless part of nature the human being transforms itself into everything, because it touches everything. This is where mysticism begins” (Landauer, 2020, p.6).48 Mysticism to Landauer describes this deep, intense experience of being: Let us allow the world to pass through ourselves, let us be ready to feel the world, to experience it, to allow ourselves to be grasped and seized by it. Until now everything has been divided into a poor, weak, active I and an unapproachable rigid, lifeless, passive world. Let us instead be the medium of the world, both active and passive […] let us now transform ourselves into the spirit of the world. (Landauer, 2010c, p.98) The world is not something outside of the individual that can be explored from the separated position of the observer, but is rather, already within the individual – “[t]he world is inside you, you are everything” (Landauer, 1921, p.200).49 The experience of being the world, thus, renders a distinction between an inside and outside, objective and subjective superfluous. The individual is no longer an objective observer of reality, but is herself reality. Instead of just perceiving the world, according to Landauer, the task and duty is to find the world within oneself and to become it (Landauer, 2010c, p.100). Hence, Landauer’s Antipolitik is the argument that it is possible to make politics as the external ordering of the world superfluous, because the natural order of the world already resides within the individual. Antipolitik is the individual’s realisation that she can become the world. Yet, as the world itself is both being and beyond being, human senses and intellect fail to comprehend it. The “movement of the spirit” is thus necessarily a movement in openness and confusion.

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  65

3.4  Absonderung: towards the “true community” The way towards Antipolitik, it was discussed above, is unmediated, deep experience. This is also the precondition for what Landauer identified as true community. This section focuses on Landauer’s particular practice of presence, on Absonderung or separation, through which this re-immersion into reality can be cultivated – a necessarily an-archist movement, implying a separation from the reality of arche. Landauer best described Absonderung in a lecture called “Through Separation to Community” which he delivered in 1900. He argued: The conclusion is that we must cease descending to the masses. Instead, we must precede them. At first, it might seem as if we were walking away from them. But we can only find the community that we need and long for if we - the new generation - separate ourselves from the old communities. If we make this separation a radical one and if we as separated individuals - allow ourselves to sink to the depths of our being and to reach the inner core of our most hidden nature, then we will find the most ancient and complete community: a community encompassing not only all of humanity but the entire universe. Whoever discovers this community in himself will be eternally blessed and joyful, and a return to the common and arbitrary communities of today will be impossible. (Ibid., p.95) Towards the end of the lecture he clarifies: Through separation to community – what this means is: let us risk everything, so that we can live as complete human beings; let us get away from the superficiality of the authoritarian common communities; let us instead create communities that reflect the world community that we ourselves are! We owe this to ourselves and to the world. This call goes out to all who are able to listen! (Ibid., p.108) Absonderung is described as a process of self-annihilation: becoming a nobody in the terms of society, a nobody from the perspective of arche, moving beyond its delimiting names, races, religions, colours, countries or nations, and yet, it means becoming a somebody in the highest spiritual sense of the term. Separation means that the an-archist has to kill her self, in the mystical sense, in order to be reborn after having descended into the depths of their soul. They will be able to say of themselves, in Hofmannsthal’s words: ‘I have rid myself of anything common in me as completely as I have left the soil underneath my feet.’ Only those who

66  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung have journeyed trough their own selves and waded up deep in their own blood can help to create the new world […]. (Landauer, 2010c, p.89f) In his essay “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism,” Landauer wrote that the imaginative, particular “I kills itself so that the world-I can live” (ibid., p.96). Whereas under arche, one had constructed a specific self, a rigid I, limited by her own imagination, the specific quality of an an-archist’s “world I” is that it has no quality, because mystical access reveals that the world hides a reality that cannot be fathomed and that, consequently no attributes can serve to characterise one’s own or any other’s being. Thus, separation implies that “I leave behind the only thing that seems certain within myself. I now flood out into the uncertain world of hypotheses and fantasies” (ibid.). Only arche can promise certainty, a system, foundation and answers. Mystical access can merely offer a continuous quest. Hence, when the “World-I” annihilates the “I”, confusion, bewilderment and perplexity replace the simplistic limitations and reductive images of arche which the “I” had used to confine its self. The influence of Meister Eckhart According to Thomas Hinz, Landauer’s concept of Absonderung was profoundly influenced by his translations of Meister Eckhart’s sermons during his imprisonment and by Eckhart’s concept of Abgeschiedenheit (“truncation”). To comprehend this connection and Landauer’s use of the term, it is worthwhile to look at Eckhart’s Traktat der Abgeschiedenheit (“treatise of truncation”). Eckhart wrote: You will find that real truncation is nothing but that the spirit remains fixed like a large mountain against a small wind, against all circumstances, be they happiness or misery, harm or dishonour. This unmoved truncation brings humankind into closest unity with God. God is God because of his unmoved truncation, and from this he has his purity and his simpleness and his immutability. If a human being wants to become one with God, insofar as a creature can achieve unity with God, it has to be truncated. And you should know: the emptiness of all creatures is God’s fullness, and the fullness of a creature is God’s emptiness. (Hinz, 2000, p.117)50 According to Eckhart, Abgeschiedenheit is the highest virtue a human being can achieve to approximate God. By becoming “empty,” which may be understood as a state of complete passivity, no human emotion is left to overshadow the flow of God. So, only God remains and is everything to be experienced. Instead of raising oneself to an image or concept of God, one is filled by Him. One becomes present to God. Eckhart speaks of this becoming present as “eternal birth” (Eckhart, 2020b). The Gottvater gives birth

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  67 to himself in the human soul. Through this act, the human being herself becomes God (Hinz, 2000, p.130). Yet, the emptiness persists to the extent that instead of a direction, a path or goal, this experience only shows that nothing which human reason and language construct can approximate what is experienced. According to Eckhart, [t]runcation and purity cannot pray for favours, because who prays for favours desires something from God that may become his own, or which God shall take from him. Yet, the truncated heart desires nothing and possesses nothing which it would like to rid itself off. Therefore it is free from all prayer, because its prayer is nothing but being one with God. (Eckhart, 2020b)51 And [w]hen truncation reaches its highest stage, conscience becomes unconscious, love loveless and light dark. Therefore we can accept what the master says: blessed are the poor in spirit, which have left all things to God, as He had them, when we did not exist.52

The true community As the individual’s absolute attributes are questioned and her relativity is realised, she remembers the “most ancient and most complete community” (Landauer, 2010c, p.96). That to which Landauer refers with the term “world-I” describes both the core of a unique creature of the present, the individual, and, within herself, an unbreakable community, which is “by far more noble and older than the thin influences of state and society” (ibid., p.104). This community to which the individual is inherently connected is composed not simply of ancestors, but of all of existence, predating the planet itself and reaching back “into eternity; an eternity that can never be imagined too eternal” (ibid., p.117). To illustrate this statement, almost every material known to science was created from elements born in stars as these died and incorporated into new generations, so that “everything which lives, lives once and for all” (ibid., p.102). Landauer argues, [w]ithin the seed lives the plant, as the seed is only the quintessence of a chain of previous plants; humanity derives its true being from the humanity of the individual, as this humanity of the individual is only the heritage of the endless generations of the past and all its mutual relations. That which happened is what becomes, microcosm is macrocosm, the individual is the people, the spirit is the community, the idea is the Bund. (Landauer, 2012a, p.123)53

68  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung From this perspective, there never existed isolated bodies, neither cause nor effect (Landauer, 2010c, p.99), because everything is present and eternally alive (ibid., p.102). The community which Landauer envisioned is situated within the individual, so that “everything that appears to us as separated, is in the reality of infinite space and infinite time only a single, large connected whole” (Willems, 2001, p.25).54 Thus, that which “we find in the deepest depths of our selves is community, humanity, divinity” (Landauer, 2010c, p.105). Individuals who are one with their innermost self do not just perceive their ancestors, “they do not perceive anything as external; they are this memory, they do not possess it” (ibid., p.106). True community is not situated within the individual, it situates her and turns out to envelop, surround and contain from its potentiality in the soul that which was first outer and visible. Yet, seemingly paradoxically, Landauer claims that “our most individual is our ever most common;” that true individuality is only possible with the discovery of such community and that, even more, “true individuality is the expression of the community’s desires in the individual” (Landauer, 2010c, p.105). What is meant by this is that under arche, individuality is imaginary, limited by the constructs of expedient reality and its protective mechanisms; heterogeneity, multiplicity, becoming are obstructed. There is no possibility for the individual to truly overcome her imaginary representation without destroying arche, too. Thus, what is deemed individualisation under arche is merely a product of “[t]he clarity of our sensual perception […] which we project onto the outside world in order to control it” (ibid.). According to Landauer, individualism under arche is atomised, forceful isolation, while inwards the individual adheres to the logic of arche. Rather than individuality, it is sameness. Only through Absonderung can the individual fully exhaust her possibilities. She finds herself immersed in a community that constitutes “an unbreakable chain that comes from the infinite and proceeds to the infinite […]” (ibid., p.102). Through deep experience, the world is no longer a multitude of facts, objects and individuals which each possess an independent reality on their own and are divorced from any order, but they become gateways to the nominal realities beyond them. To be aware of this community is to be able to unveil “community, humanity, divinity” in all forms of existence, meaning that behind every phenomenon, there lie visible inexhaustible realities and, therewith, infinite possibilities for reformulating cosmologies. To Landauer, the world is a soul stream (ibid.). His an-archist Antipolitik therefore seeks to realise a social individualism, for individuals are “points of passage, electrical sparks of something greater” (ibid., p.101). Through each genuine encounter with themselves, others and the world, they can change, transform, become and exercise their true multiplicity. Therefore, rather than having in common their shared belonging to a certain, delimiting construction of arche, for example, nationality, Landauer argues that all individuals have in common their humanity, for

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  69 [j]ust as each human comes from the bottomless depth of time, he also – like all his predecessors – comes from never-ending, boundless, infinite space. What is visible, tangible, and material in a human’s life always comes from the outside. It always changes. What constitutes a human beyond metabolism, and what connects him to himself as well as to his predecessors (which is one and the same), is an invisible principle of form, conscientia et causa sui, memory; the Archeus that forms itself as well as this microcosm and the eternal unity, the Weltgeist. There is no difference between speaking of predecessors I have and predecessors I am. I am the environment from which I derive. Likewise, there is no difference between speaking of successors I have and successors I am. I am the environment which I become. There is, however, a difference between you and me, between world and world. To me you are only a fragment, yet at the same time – like me – you are an entire world; and I am only a fragment to you, yet at the same time – like you – I am an entire world. (Landauer, 2010c, p.118) This statement clarifies that behind the outer multiplicity of existence, there lies its inner unity, which derives from a common origin. It is because of this common origin that you are only a fragment to me yet I acknowledge that you are, like me, an entire world. An-archist humanity, therefore, “does not mean equality, but an alliance of the plenty” (Landauer, 1921, p.133).55 It means the realisation of humanity as “an organism that changes permanently, that always manifests itself in new individual shapes” (Landauer, 2010c, p.103). Landauer consequently argued that the true community could be realised from its potentiality to actuality when enough individuals went through the conquest of the inner self, and only then formed communities, which would slowly begin to replace the state. Only through individual experience will “anarchists and anarchy exist, in the form of scattered individuals, everywhere. And they will find each other” (Landauer, 2010c, p.88). True community, in other words, cannot be brought to the people. The aim of Antipolitics is, rather, to bring together and establish communities for those that have already found each other to provide, outside of politics, the possibility to journey onwards and attract others. He writes, [w]hoever brings the lost world in himself to life – to individual life – and whoever feels like a true part of the world and not as a stranger: he will be the one who arrives not knowing where from, and who leaves not knowing where to. To him the world will be what he is to himself. Men such as this will live with each other in solidarity – as men who belong together. This will be anarchy. (Ibid., p.89) Landauer’s vision of true community does not offer a blueprint. To do so would be to create another arche. However, there were of course practical

70  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung demands. For example, the realisation of the anarchist-socialist program in the form of the Socialist Bund included concretely planned socialist settler communities in the countryside, which sought to foster personal development and collective action (ibid., p.305). The Socialist Bund was an autonomous, self-governing, bottom-up organisation, envisioning village factories where work and play, labour and education could be united (ibid., p.197). Landauer referred to the establishment of these enclaves as a revolutionary process, not as a unique moment in time, but as a permanent deed, a process “to actively turn the truth in our minds into social reality” (ibid., p.260). The resulting societies should form across Germany and the world, to develop a community that would slowly and gradually allow the spirit to materialise and, in turn, aid others in freeing their spirit. Then, a “society of societies” would be formed, a community not connected by arche, but by spirit, for spirit, in turn, “creates reality and efficacy. This spirit is called Bund” (Landauer, 2012, p.52).56 Despite Landauer’s more concrete and practical suggestions and programs, it must be clear that his anarchism-socialism did not seek to “begin with the absolute and does not approach the absolute. A religion, which connects us all, is not to be expected. What I call socialism is not perfection, perfection exists only in our words […]” (Landauer, 1921, p.32).57 There will and cannot be a completed vision for true community, for that would disregard the nature of reality. Antipolitik seeks to “turn this world into a world of becoming, of transition, of infiniteness, diversity, unpredictability, inextricableness” (Landauer, 2010c, p.135). This, Landauer argued, will be true order (Landauer, 2010b, p.35), even more, it will be natural, for socialism is not something that has to be invented, but which can be reached when we experience and trust ourselves (Landauer, 1921, p.32), for spirit is always common spirit, spirit is connection and freedom, spirit is human Bund… and where there is spirit there is a people, and where a people is, there is a wedge which pushes forward, there is a willingness, and where there is willingness, there’s a way. (Landauer, 2012a, p.20)58 Landauer emphasised that this community would be one of learning, of experimenting and changing. He argued that “[a]ll these are little beginnings, nuclei, cells. Yet how much does happen there, when the people, the masses are assailed by the spirit of initiative, of joyful producing, of entrepreneurship, of hope!” (Landauer, 2010a, p.139).59 Hence, “reality lies in movement and true socialism is always only beginning, is always only one which moves” (ibid., p.142).60 Life in community and in freedom first has to be learned and practiced (Landauer, 2010b, p.60), and “there are hundreds of ways, we must break with seeing each improvement only in relation to

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  71 our highest and ultimate goal” (Landauer, 2010, p.90). Systems belong to arche, yet [a]narchists have been for too long fond of systems and attached to rigid, narrow concepts […]. Only when anarchy becomes, for us, a dark, deep dream, not a vision attainable through concepts, can our ethics and our actions become one. (Ibid., p.91) Not least, “[w]rong ways are ways too. Maybe the right destinations can only be reached by wrong ways” (ibid., p.294). Finally, then, the purpose of the true community is not merely to transcend the rigidity of society under arche, to alleviate misery and restore selfresponsibility, creating conditions that allow for multiplicity and becoming. Rather, its purpose is to intensify the experience of being and knowledge of the world. The ultimate essence of reality cannot be known by the human being. The spark of the world which it carries within itself contains forms that have neither cause, matter, nor attributes which the human mind could refer to. Yet, the knowledge that can be gained is that reality is not a self-subsistent truth, but its various phenomena and events refer to and reflect realities that belong to the realm of mystery. The thingness of the world thus conceals a truth beyond; it reflects the realities that conceal a higher level of meaning. The anti-political practice of Absonderung is the process by which these levels of meaning can gradually be unveiled, moving from outwardness to inwardness, penetrating into what appears as fact to move beyond the purely external level of meaning and reach inner significance. All reality, one comes to realise, consists of things and the beyond of things (ibid., p.69). True community not only allows for infinite becoming in a mysterious world, but for making the world’s mystery more knowledgeable through deep experience.

3.5 Conclusion This chapter has discussed Gustav Landauer’s practice of presence, Absonderung. His key demand may be summarised as such: instead of ordering the world politically, the task is to become it mystically, via Absonderung. Landauer’s anarchism was not merely directed at the archein, such as the state, capitalism and other oppressive structures of control. Instead, he identified politics as a symptom and arche as its root cause: the fact that “we are all piteously divided.” Precisely, Landauer problematised the separation of experience from knowledge, in other words of the inner life from its outer form and spirit from body – because arche had been placed between them. Landauer sought to demonstrate that arche as first principle and a beginning delimits and structures thought

72  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung and that it later metamorphoses into power, authority and government to protect and conserve this division. The complex web of mimicry, upheld by norms, conventions, representations and attributes, creates an expedient reality, encompassing its new self-interpretation. Politics, he proceeded to show, functions not only to omit reality, but it seeks to become reality itself. With this argument, Landauer introduced a gesture of thought that differed from many fellow anarchists’. Because he viewed politics as the substitute of spirit, he believed that the crisis of politics could not be overcome through mere political and economic reform. Instead, Landauer proposed Absonderung as a way to reconnect to the spirit and therewith to the order of the world as it flows through the individual. Spirit for Landauer forms the essence of the individual, in it the world always flows and reveals itself. Thus, he believed the spirit exists prior to and transcends the realm of politics. It is primordial, the first experience through which the individual gets to know the world. The world, in turn, is not only matter but non-being resides within – and a common origin of all being. Landauer implied: beyond the multiplicity of existents lies a unity of existence. This is the one large community and the order of the spirit that is present within us and to which, through Absonderung, we can become present ourselves. Landauer’s Antipolitik, then, describes the process of attunement that springs from the remembrance and cultivation of the spirit, from Absonderung, and which manifests itself in everyday acts of uniting experience with knowledge, word and deed. The resulting “true community” is not a blueprint for yet another particular community. It necessarily has to be an experiment. Yet, it is one that can be attempted by anyone who has remembered the spirit.

Notes 1 See, for example, Maurer (1971). 2 Some scholars have referred to Landauer as such an “Antipolitiker.” Landauer himself used this description in the late 1890s, making reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of politics in Ecce Homo, in which he refers to himself as “the last anti-political German.” Nietzsche’s critique of politics is an extension of his critique of the ideas of the Enlightenment, such as of the Cartesian notion of a rational, autonomous subject, which, he argued, had been institutionalised in nineteenth-century politics and political ideologies, especially regarding ideas of freedom and individualism. Nietzsche’s opposition, however, was not merely directed against a particular type of political system and ideology, but against the nineteenth-century political spectrum as such, which he considered a symptom of the West’s modern cultural decadence and decline. Yet, Nietzsche did not abandon political thought and activity altogether, but sought to transcend modern politics and create a new politics, comprising a new subjectivity and new political freedom, reaching its apex with the politics of the Übermensch. See, for example, Lewis Call, “Nietzsche as Critic and Captive of Enlightenment”, PhD diss, University of California, 1995. 3 My translation. German original: “Wir sind kläglich gespalten.”

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  73 4 German steel production, roughly equivalent to that of France in 1880, exceeded its closest rival by almost four to one by 1910. Germany’s coal output increased seven times over between 1870 and 1913, a period in which British coal production increased less than two and a half times. Between 1860 and 1910, Germany’s industrial output per head outstripped that of Britain, France and the USA. In just 12 years, machine production increased by 160 percent, mining by 69 percent and metallurgy by 59 percent. Whereas 63 percent of the population lived in the countryside when Germany was unified in 1870, on the eve of the First World War, 60 percent lived in towns. 5 Eugene Lunn cites the study Das Selbstverständnis der Deutschen (Stuttgart, 1961) by Erich Weymar, which notes a common trend in German high-school history textbooks during this period, discussing the destiny of the German Volk and a unique Germanic mission, while emphasising the virtues of rootedness in and sacrifice for the Volk. Modernity was condemned and blamed for the breakdown of community life and the atomisation of society. Lunn (1973, p.23). 6 According to Lunn, Baden was a centre for such liberal nationalism and “lower middle class organisations of small-scale entrepreneurs, artisans, and independent peasants,” which are elements found in Landauer’s later political orientation. 7 Many of these can be found in Wolf (2013, 2014). 8 Ibid. (pp.31–34). Landauer’s appreciation for Nietzsche is reflected in his novel Der Todesprediger, written in 1890. Yet, Landauer criticised Nietzsche’s apparent egoism, his aristocratic elitism and negative attitude towards human solidarity. Nietzsche, Landauer argued, lacked the ability to feel loving oneness with the world. 9 ibid, 40. Quoting from a letter dated April 29, 1891, Gustav Landauer Archiv, folder X.2. 10 Charles Maurer’s, Ruth Link-Salinger’s and Eugene Lunn’s biographies provide detailed information on Landauer’s early activism. He was involved with the Friedrichhagener Dichterkreis, a group of intellectuals and artists, with radical Marxist students then still firmly involved in the SPD and he joined the Freie Volksbühne, which produced for predominantly working class audiences, consisting of radical students and mostly orthodox Marxists. Of particular importance was his membership in the group Die Jungen (Young Ones), which opposed Germany’s reformed SPD, that had recently grown into a mass party, setting the tone in socialist politics. Die Jungen criticised its bureaucratic and centralised authority, its passivity and tactical reformism and proposed, instead, a libertarian alternative to state politics (Lunn, 1973, p.50). 11 Citing Landauer, “Unser Zweck,” Der Sozialist, Nov. 15, 1891. 12 Citing the article “Unser Zweck,” Der Sozialist, Nov. 15, 1891. 13 Citing from Landesarchiv Berlin, Pr. Br. Rep.30 Berlin C: Polizeipraesidium, Tit. 95, Nr 16346: Der Schriftsteller Gustav Landauer 1892–1902. 14 These include, in particular, “Durch Absonderung zur Gesellschaft,” 1900 (Through Separation to Community), “Anarchistische Gedanken über den Anarchismus,” 1901 (Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism), “Skepsis und Mystik,” which relies heavily on the theories of Mauthner and Eckhart, published in 1903 (Doubt and Mysticism), “Revolution,” 1912 and “Aufruf zum Sozialismus,” 1911 (Call to Socialism). 15 In the Socialist Union, Landauer met the Jewish poet Erich Muehsam, who later became one of the leaders of the Bavarian Revolution 1918–1919, and the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who formulated a libertarian, religious socialism. The relationship between Buber and Landauer was based more on their mystical philosophies than on their political affinities. Lunn (1973, p.79). 16 Citing Gustav Landauer, Sein Lebensgang in Briefen Volume II, edited by Martin Buber, Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag Retten und Loening, 1929.

74  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung 17 My translation. German original: “Politik its keineswegs bloß Gesetzgebung; Politik its jeglicher Kampf, der für oder gegen Wortgebäude, ale wären sie Wirklichkeit, geführt wird.” 18 My translation. German original: “Das ziehen sie nicht genug und oft gar nicht in Betracht: dass jedes Bestehen ein immerwährendes Entstehen ist […].” 19 My translation. German original: “Er tritt überall da hindernd zwischen Mensch und Mensch und Mensch und Boden wo die echte Beziehung, Freigeistverkümmert ist.” 20 My translation. German original: “Der Staat ist ein vollendetes Nichts.” Landauer’s use of the term “spirit” will be discussed in the second part of this chapter. 21 My translation. German original: Um in dieser Geistlosigkeit, diesem Unsinn, diesem Wirrwarrr, dieser Not und Verkommenheit Ordnung und Möglichkeit des Weiterlebens zu schaffen, ist der Staat da. Der Staat mit seinen Schulen, Kirchen, Gerichten, Zuchthäusern, Arbeitshäusern, der Staat mit seinen Gendarmen und seiner Polizei; der Staat mit seinen Soldaten, Beamten und Prostituierten. Wo kein Geist und keine innere Nötigung ist, da ist äußere Gewalt, Reglementierung und Staat. Wo Geist ist, da ist Gesellschaft, wo Geistlosigkeit ist, der Staat. Der Staat ist das Surrogat des Geistes. My translation. German original: 22 Wir sind Welle unter Wellen, Ding unter Dingen, sagt Brunner. Immer, unausgesetzt, ohne irgendein Ende oder einen Anfang oder eine Pause kommende, vernichtete, versunkene, verwandelte, in der Zeit von Ort zu Ort schwimmende nichtige Dinge; und sind so in uns selbst ein unendliches fortwährendes Schwimmen, Verschwimmen, Anschwemmen, Verfließen, ein Schwamm, durch den Wasser geht und der aus vielen Löchern besteht. Das ist das eine. Das ist das Werdende. […] Dann aber das andere, das Sein: das Sichere, das nicht unsere lumpige Existenz, sondern unsere Essenz ist, unser Archeus, unser ewiges Erbteil, unser Weltsein. […] Es gibt keine Entwicklung, weil es nie einen Anfang gegeben hat. 23 My translation. German original: [d]enn der Aberglaube, das Surrogat, das das Volk für den Geist hat, der entwickelt sich und hat kein Bleiben, weil er unstet und ruhelos ist wie alles, was auf nichts steht, und dieses Gestrüpp muss immer von neuem gemäht werden. My translation “Ist es nicht wie ein Echospiel? Was fürchtet das Volk? Das Volk! 24 Wer hindert die Massen? Die Massen! Ihr selbst seid eure Feinde!” 25 Lunn notes Landauer’s distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), the former being a living, changing organism, in which the people come together freely through the spirit, the latter a mechanistic sum of individuals, ordered by the state. 26 My translation. German original: “Der Wahnsinn des Staates ist, dass er ein Zweckgebilde ist. […] Was die Menschen im Staat vereinigt, ist ein wirrer Haufen von Zwecken.” 27 My translation. German original: “Tod ist die Atmosphäre zischen uns.” 28 My translation. German original: “Nur darf man nie vergessen, dass das alles, Staat, Gesetze, Verwaltung und Exekutive, nur Namen sind für Menschen, die, weil ihnen die Lebensmöglichkeit fehlt, sich gegenseitig quälen und vergewaltigen, Namen für Gewalt also zwischen den Menschen.”

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  75 29 My translation. German original: “Der Staat schleift dem Elend, wenn es gar zu groß wird, die Ecken ab; er sorgt durch Versicherungs-, Schutz-, und Gewerbegesetze aller Art, dass der Kapitalismus nicht an seinen schlimmsten Konsequenzen zu Grunde gehe, dass es mit unserem System der Ungerechtigkeit und der sinnlosen Produktion und Verteilung der Güter weitergehen kann.” 30 My translation. German original: Und dieser Staat, der überdies ein Nichts ist und sich, um das Nichts zu verhüllen, lügnerisch mit dem Mantel der Nationalität bekleidet und diese Nationalität, die ein Feines, Geistiges zwischen den Menschen ist, lügnerisch verbindet mit einer Land- und Bodengemeinschaft, die nichts damit zu tun hat. 31 My translation. German original: wird es wohl klar sein, warum ‘dem Staat’ und ‘dem Kapital’ so viel Obhut überlassen ist: weil die traurigen Wichte sich nicht selber zu helfen wissen und Staat und Kapital brauchen, um auf den Füßen zu stehen und die Mäuler füttern zu können. See also Gustav Landauer, “Einkehr,” in Antipolitik. 3.1, p.180. 32 My translation. German original: “Lahme, faule, im Denken heruntergekommene, denkfaule und liederliche Zeit.” 33 My translation. German original: “Die Arbeiter sind “eng und eingeschnürt”, sehen sich “zu wenig als solche, die sich selber und damit die Welt wandeln sollen”, sind in der Gegenwart gefangen wie “schwermütige Tiere.” 34 My translation. German original: Massenhaftigkeit der Öde, erbarmungswürdige Ödigkeit, die sich hinter Lachen und Plaudern und geschäftigem Tun versteckt. Hohlheit und Entbehrung des rastlosen Mann. Er geht immer, bald langsam, bald schnell, durchs Gewühl; sein Blick ist bald niedergeschlagen, bald stiert er leer und fragend vor sich hin; er sucht, er sucht; was sucht er nur, der Unselige? Ist es so, dass er nichts in sich hat, und sich voll müder Gier, voll dumpfer Sehnsucht auf das Aussen stürzt, damit etwas für ihn sei? Schlummert tief drunten in ihm die Sehnsucht und wandert er nun in rastlosem Suchen, ohne dass er weiß, was, ohne dass er weiß, dass er sucht, durch die wild bewegten Strassen. 35 My translation. German original: “Es stellt sich heraus, dass der Staat um der Menschen willen da ist, dass er aber den Menschen nicht helfen kann; dass die Menschen um des Staates willen da sind, dass er aber den Menschen nichts bedeuten kann.” 36 My translation. German original: “Unzweckmäßig und Undurchführbarkeit. Es ist kulturhemmend und kulturbedrohend, dass der Staat die Tendenz hat und haben muss, nicht nur die Zwecke vereinigter Menschen zu erreichen, sondern Selbstzweck zu sein.” 37 My translation. German original: “Die Welt strömt auf uns zu, mit den paar armseligen Löchern unserer Zufallssinne nehmen wir auf, was wir fassen können, und kleben es an unseren alten Wortvorrat fest, da wir nichts anderes haben, womit wir es halten können.” 38 My translation. German original: [e]ine Funktion oder Erscheinungsform des unendlichen Weltalls.” 39 My translation. German original: “Diese Welt aber, die Natur, in ihrer Sprachlosigkeit und Unaussprechbarkeit, ist unermeßlich reich gegen unsere sogenannte Weltanschauung, gegen das, was wir als Erkenntnis oder Sprache von der Natur schwatzen.”

76  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung Willems has argued that Landauer adopted the main features of Meister Eck40 hart’s mystical anthropology, according to which a godly spark inheres in the human being which is therefore both united with God, yet, since it is only a spark, it cannot become God. 41 My translation. German original: Wie ist alles, was wir verloren haben, einst in uns gewesen und mit uns zur Welt gekommen, und wie ist es wahr und muss stets neu gesagt werden, dass in Wahrheit nichts verloren und alles zu gewinnen ist, weil unser Erbteil unverlierbar, unverjährbar in uns ruht und nur erschüttert und bewegt und herausgeholt werden muss. Wenn ihr nicht werdet, wie ihr als Kinder wart, wenn ihr nicht werdet, die ihr seid. 42 My translation. German original: “Der Sozialismus ist eine geistige Bewegung. Die Menschen zum Geist, zu ihrem eigenen Geist zu erwecken, das ist unsere Aufgabe.” 43 In a speech during the Bavarian Revolution, a few months before his death, Landauer offered one of the most concise definitions: “Geist is when knowledge, emotion and will unite and become an active force.” Citing from “Der Krieg und die Revolution” [The War and the Revolution], in Gustav Landauer und die Revolutionszeit 1918–1919 [Gustav Landauer and the Revolutionary Period of 1918–1919], edited by Linse (1974, p.98). 44 My translation. German original: “Dasein setzt sich aus Momentpunkten und Gefühlspunkten zusammen, natürliches Weiterklingen, Erinnerung, Selbstbewusstsein.” 45 My translation: German original: “Fortbewegung, Weitergehen, Fliessen.” 46 My translation. German original: “Natur ist Entbindung gesammelter Kräfte, ein Loslösen, Erlösen, immer aus den Ganzen zu den Teilen hinaus, aus dem Brennpunkt in die Zerstreuung.” 47 My translation. German original: Lebte die Zeit in uns als das, was sie ist, dann ware Ewigkeit nicht vor oder hinter, sondern in uns. […] Zeit und Welt wäre ewige Ruhe des ewig Neuen. Ruhe ohne Raum, Stetigkeit ohne Stoff, Bleiben ohne Bleiben, ich und doch die Welt. 48 My translation. German original: Die Welt ist ohne Sprache. […] Die Sprache, der Intellekt, kann nicht dazu dienen, die Well uns näher zu bringen, die Welt in uns zu verwandeln. Als sprachloses Stück Natur aber verwandelt sich der Mensch in alles, weil er alles berührt. Hier beginnt die Mystik. In the twentieth century, the term “mysticism” became populated with the notion of an extraordinary and private, insular experience, occurring beyond the range and scope of sense and reason, thus being ineffable. This particular, Western understanding only gained prominence towards the end of the nineteenth century and is a byproduct of the processes of secularisation and the growing chasm between Church and State following the European Enlightenment. The personal, experiential dimension of the religious was elevated, theology’s hermeneutic and liturgical dimensions marginalised. However, in the intellectual environment surrounding Landauer, mysticism was a common symptom of the predominant opposition to positivism and materialism, scepticism about progress and the desire to develop a consciousness that defies scientific thinking. During this time developed, firstly, the nationalistic mysticism that is focused on blood, body and race as a source of wisdom and from which the Germanentum and antisemitism rose; secondly, trans-religious mysticism in the form of occultism, theosophy, anthroposophy or monism and, thirdly, a restorative-utopian mysticism that played a particular role in the

Gustav Landauer – Absonderung  77 German-Jewish circles. Landauer’s mysticism, like that of his friend Martin Buber’s or Franz Rosenzweig’s is still influenced by the Enlightenment, reason and spirit (Hinz, 2000). 49 My translation. German original: “Die Welt ist in euch, das Ganze seid ihr.” 50 Meister Eckhart, translated by Gustav Landauer, “Von der Abgeschiedenheit,” quoted in Hinz. My translation. German original: Nun sollst du erfahren, dass richtige Abgeschiedenheit nichts anderes ist, als dass der Geist gegen alle Umstände, sei es Freude oder Leid, Ehre, Schaden oder Schmach, so unbeweglich bleibt wie ein breiter Berg gegen einen kleinen Wind. Diese unbewegliche Abgeschiedenheit bringt den Menschen die größte Gleichheit mit Gott. Denn dass Gott Gott ist, das hat er von seiner unbeweglichen Abgeschiedenheit, und davon hat er seine Reinheit und seine Einfachheit und seine Unwandelbarkeit. Will daher der Mensch Gott gleich werden, soweit eine Kreatur Gleichheit mit Gott haben kann, so muss er abgeschieden sein. Und du sollst wissen: Leer sein aller Kreaturen ist Gottes voll sein, und voll sein aller Kreatur ist Gottes leer sein. 51 My translation. German original: Abgeschiedenheit und Reinheit kann nicht bitten, denn wer bittet, der begehrt etwas von Gott, was ihm zu teil werde, oder was Gott ihm abnehmen soll. Nun begehrt aber das abgeschiedene Herz nach nichts und hat auch nichts, dessen es gerne ledig wäre. Darum ist es allen Gebets entledigt, und sein Gebet ist nichts anderes als mit Gott einförmig sein. 52 My translation. German original: Und wenn die Abgeschiedenheit aufs höchste kommt, so wird sie aus Bewusstsein bewusstlos und aus Liebe lieblos und vor Licht finster. Darum können wir auch annehmen, was ein Meister spricht: Selig sind die Armen des Geistes, die Gott alle Dinge gelassen haben, wie er sie hatte, als wir nicht waren. 53 My translation. German original: Im Samen wohnt das Gewächs, wie der Samen ja nur die Quintessenz der unendlichen Kette von Vorfahrengewächsen ist; aus dem Menschtum des Individuums empfängt die Menschheit ihr echtes Dasein, wie dieses Menschtum des einzelnen ja nur das Erbe der unendlichen Geschlechter der Vergangenheit und all ihrer gegenseitigen Beziehungen ist. Das Gewordene ist das Werdende, der Mikrokosmos der Makrokosmos; das Individuum ist das Volk, der Geist ist die Gemeinschaft, die Idee ist der Bund. My translation. German original: “Alles, was uns gesondert und getrennt er54 scheint sei in der Wirklichkeit des unendlichen Raumes und der unendlichen Zeit nur ein grosses, zusammenhängendes Ganzes.” 55 My translation. German original: “Menschheit heisst nicht Gleichheit, sondern Bund des Vielfältigen.” 56 My translation. German original: “Geist schafft Wirklichkeit und Wirksamkeit. Dieser Geist heisst Bund.” 57 My translation. German original: “Sozalismus knöpft nicht ans Absolute und geht nicht aufs Absolute zu. Eine Religion, die uns alle verbindet, ist nicht zu erwarten. Was ich Sozialismus nenne, ist keine Vollkommenheit, Vollkommenheit ist nur in unseren Worten.” 58 My translation. German original: “Geist ist Gemeingeist, Geist ist Verbindung und Freiheit, Geist ist Menschenbund […] und wo Geist ist, ist Volk, wo Volk ist, ist ein Keil, der vorwärts drängt, ist ein Wille; wo ein Wille ist, ist ein Weg.”

78  Gustav Landauer – Absonderung 59 My translation. German original: “Das alles sind kleine Anfänge, Keime, Zellen. Aber wie viel geschieht da, wenn erst der Geist der Initiative, des frohen Schaffens, der Untenehmerlust, der Hoffnung über das Volk, über die Masse kommt!” 60 My translation. German original: “Die Wirklichkeit ist in der Bewegung und der wirkliche Sozialismus ist immer nur beginnender, ist immer nur ein solcher, der unterwegs ist.”

4

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis

To write an introduction to a chapter about Eric Voegelin is not an easy task. The German-American political scientist refused to be categorised and defined. He objected to having a particular method associated with him. And he purposefully sought not to come up with “original” insights. On the contrary, Voegelin believed that a lack of originality was a sign of authentic philosophy. And yet, he produced 34 collected volumes, a myriad of articles and correspondences, gave lectures and interviews and constantly revisited, revised and updated his work, even on his deathbed (Rossbach, 2005).1 On top of that, Voegelin practiced a style of writing that may be described as challenging in the least. For the purpose of introduction, however, it may be said that Voegelin was motivated by a search for truth. And that this search was prompted by a feeling of in-betweenness not unlike the discomfort that Landauer described. This feeling became pronounced during life under National Socialism and evolved further from witnessing the rise of other ideological mass movements, unleashing violence across the globe. But the sense of inbetweenness also included everyday experiences such as dreams, ecstasy, love, meditation, fear, awe and bewilderment. Together, Voegelin found, they hinted at a confusing fact: that there is an order which is not of human making and which envelops, flows through and involves one regardless of personal preferences. In other words, Voegelin arrived at an age-old conclusion: that at the centre of his existence, the human being is unknown to itself and that from this disconcerting ignorance may arise the anxiety of existence (Voegelin, 2001, p.1). This insight shaped his contribution to political theory: in order to escape anxiety, Voegelin argued, some people create what he referred to as “second realities.” Importantly, Voegelin believed that it was political ideas that created and upheld these alternate worlds: political ideas were not descriptive of reality but formative. And if the problems of human order in society really originated in the order of consciousness, experiencing reality, then a corrupt order, such as National Socialism, was the symptom of a disease of the soul – corrupt not merely for its violence, but for the attempt to close consciousness off through the political imposition of an ersatz-reality.

80  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis This interrelationship between the truth of order as it emerges in consciousness and the practical incarnation of that order in societies lies at the core of Voegelin’s work. However, Voegelin also provided tools to see beyond second realities: a philosophy of consciousness to make visible ideology and recover the primal sense of inadequacy or in-betweenness. Voegelin argued that a philosopher had to engage with her own consciousness, before she could make claims about the order of society. It is this engagement, this method of recovery that Voegelin referred to as Anamnesis, the Greek term for remembrance. I argue that Anamnesis is a practice of presence: an activity by which latent knowledge is raised to the presence of consciousness. From it arises a philosophy, which is not a piece of objective truth, but a continuous effort – one that may lead to more bewilderment than certainty. While Voegelin is often referred to as a “conservative” thinker who opposed political activism, his work may also be understood as a call to action: firstly, his philosophy emphasises the primacy of subjective, prescientific knowledge via personal experience. Secondly, Voegelin repeatedly stressed that a “civilisational crisis” was not inevitable but that, on the contrary, since subjective knowledge was primal, “everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order” (2000a, p.261). This may sound like a threat. But it really means: change is not merely achieved via political reform but by the restoration of order in the soul – a step anyone may take. Thereby, Voegelin allows us to think community beyond state, borders, nationalities and particular attributes and rather as a likemindedness, originating in shared experience.

4.1 Biography Eric Voegelin was born in the German city of Cologne in 1901 and grew up in Vienna, Europe’s centre of modernism. There, since the German revolution of 1848, a vibrant political environment had prevailed, leading to swift modernisation of education, press and local self-government, causing profound changes in social and cultural structures (Luft, 2003, p.15ff).2 Like Germany, Austria had experienced late but rapid industrialisation. In just 50 years, between 1850 and 1900, the capital transformed from a rather medieval town to a modern city whose population quadrupled, largely due to the influx of migrants, who were predominantly poor workers and Jews from the Habsburg Empire’s nations (Luft, 2003, p.15). By 1910, a year before Voegelin’s family moved to Vienna, it had become the world’s fourth largest city (Decker, 1991, p.22). While its overall climate was shaped by economic competition and social ambition, Vienna’s cultural milieu was influenced by German humanism, enlightenment and individualistic tradition, promoting rationalism against the background of an emancipatory, free personality and dignity of the human being, thus clashing with political and economic elites. Fin de siècle Vienna oscillated between a feeling of impotence,

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  81 regression and uncertainty on the one hand, predominant amongst workers, and a belief in progress on the other, shared by the bourgeoisie. The destabilisation and dissolution of old values and traditional social bonds had provoked a magnified demand for a stable cultural belonging and essence. Philosophical, artistic and political movements promoted a return to the spiritual powers of German culture, away from disenchanted, modern civilisation.3 This fostered a Gefuehlskultur, a hypertrophy of feeling and conservatism, introversion and passivity, establishing itself as a refuge from and an alternative to politics and as the new means to cultivate the self. Amidst the stark contrast between the plutocracy and urban poor, and amidst the search for certainty and identity within a whirl of innovations, each proclaiming independence from the other, rivalling mass parties began to flourish, in particular nationalist, anti-Semitic and socialist parties, rallying with homogenising ideologies. Ruled by the Buergertum, however, they soon caused further disillusionment and lack of purpose amongst their followers (Luft, 2003). Austrian writer Robert Musil, to whom Voegelin frequently referred in his work, characterised fin de siècle Vienna in his masterpiece Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man Without Qualities”) as such: The contradictions were unsurpassable. The Superman was adored and the Subman was adored, health and the sun were worshipped, and the delicacy of consumptive girls was worshipped; people were enthusiastic hero-worshippers and enthusiastic adherents of the social creed of the Man in the Street. One had faith and was sceptical, one was naturalistic and precious, robust and morbid, one dreamed of ancient castles and shady avenues, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, jewels, hashish, disease and demonism, but also of prairies, vast horizons, forges and rolling-mills, naked wrestlers the uprisings of slaves of toil, man and women in the primeval garden and the destruction of society. (Musil, 1979, p.59) Musil criticised this frenzied externalisation of Viennese society, seeking reference points in outwardness and substituting it for subjective experience, turning the capital into “the metropolis of kitsch and the value vacuum of the epoch” (Luft, 2003, p.17). The consequences of such externalisation, Musil wrote, were devastating, because [w]e stabilize our ideals like Platonic Pythagorean ideas, immovable and unalterable, and when reality does not conform to them we are in a position to regard this very fact, that reality is only their “impure realisation”, as characteristic of their ideality. We strive to conform the incalculable curve of being to the rigid polygon that passes through our fixed moral points by breaking the rectitude of our principles into ever new angles, but still without ever achieving the curve […]. As everyone

82  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis knows, in order to approximate to reality we must burden each ideal with so many limitations and disclaimers that hardly anything is left. (Musil, 1995, p.113) Instead of attuning to the experiences of reality, the Viennese of Musil’s description sought to attune reality to their external reference points. Each claiming to possess the right ideals, this inevitably caused conflict and imprisonment within the limitations of one’s own ideological system. Voegelin included such excerpts of Musil’s work in his own and even used some of his expressions, such as “second reality.” According to Voegelin, Musil and his language had dismantled the expressionist paradigm’s presupposition of reliable, stable and universal categories as a disguise for the shapelessness of the self and as an attempt to evade the multifariousness and complexity of the self (Freed, 2011, p.7; Zisselberg, 2004, p.25). This diagnosis of fin de siècle Viennese society was decisive for Voegelin’s own diagnosis of ­twentieth-century Western society.4 Several other parallels can be found between The Man Without Qualities’ protagonist, who wants to essay life in a fluid and open world, and Voegelin’s description of primordial man as the basis for anti-political community.5 Especially Musil’s theme of the separation between experience and knowledge echoes through Voegelin’s description of his experience of reality: With the seventeenth century begins the incredible spectacular of ­modernity – both fascinating and nauseating, grandiose and vulgar, exhilarating and depressing, tragic and grotesque – with its apocalyptic enthusiasm for building new worlds that will be old tomorrow, at the expense of old worlds that were new yesterday; with its destructive wars and revolutions spaced by temporary stabilisations on ever lower levels of spiritual and intellectual order through natural law, enlightened self-interest, a balance of powers, a balance of profits, the survival of the fittest, and the fear of atomic annihilation in a fit of fitness; with its ideological dogmas piled on top of the ecclesiastic and sectarian ones and its resistant skepticism that throws them all equally on the garbage heap of opinion; with its great systems built upon untenable premises and its shrewd suspicions that the premises are indeed untenable and therefore must never be rationally discussed; with the result, in our time, of having unified mankind into a global madhouse bursting with stupendous vitality. (Voegelin, 1990, p.55) This statement formulates a first description of ideology: as madness, as “a pneumopathological state, a loss of personal and social order through loss of contact with nonexistent [imaginary] reality” (ibid., p.56). As the contact with reality is lost, the creations of alternative realities, the kit of which is ideology, expedite. Rational discussion is no longer possible. It was this

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  83 aftershock of fin de siècle Viennese culture, which motivated Voegelin to explore its underlying causes and consequences (2005, p.118).6 Another thinker who influenced Voegelin from an early stage is journalist Karl Kraus. Shortly after World War I and amidst rising nationalism and rampant anti-Semitism, Kraus wrote critical analyses of Austrian politics and, in particular, of Nazism’s perversion of language. In doing so, Kraus observed a breakdown of language, where, he argued, words no longer represented thoughts and deeds and thus had become meaningless: (Daviau, 1961, p.49) Believing that language – words, their absence and the manner of expression – was indicative of the type of mentality portrayed, he detected a loss of spiritual and cultural values. Kraus himself strove for the most appropriate form of expression, yet was aware that “[t]he problem of the identity of word and character are as unavoidable as fate” (cited in Bodine, 1975, p.306).7 Thus, he urged speaker and writer to never cease to doubt the form and content of language, and the relationship between words und characters. Defining language as such a chimera, Kraus raised Voegelin’s awareness to the power of language, which, he argued, rather than describing objective reality, reflected subjective experience of and one’s relationship to reality. Voegelin began to understand language as a trail to the experiences it expressed and subsequently himself sought to restore and regain authentic language within his research, considering it as a form of resistance to ideologies.8 Later, Voegelin repeatedly cited from Kraus, especially from his analysis of Nazi language, Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht, published in 1933 (Voegelin, 1999a, p.197f). In 1919, Voegelin began studying politics at the University of Vienna, a leading centre for sciences and finished his doctorate under Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann (Sandoz, 1981, p.35).9 However, having been introduced to a variety of intellectual disciplines and circles, Voegelin was dissatisfied with his university’s approach to conducting sciences and felt it was “dominated by methodological arguments about epistemology” (Porter, 2002, p.155). Neo-Kantianism shaped the intellectual climate, reacting to the romantic, metaphysical character of idealism and emphasising that, in principle, full objective knowledge of the world was possible if methodologies from the natural sciences were adopted into social sciences. Methodology had replaced ontology, Voegelin argued, and the scientific method constituted the object of science. Thus, also political sciences focused on developing sharply defined concepts of the subjects under investigation, failing to see that their definitiveness did not hold in reality (Cooper, 1999, p.67ff). Pre-scientific, subjective knowledge through personal experience was evaded; knowledge was understood as objective fact passed down from teacher to student. For Voegelin, this constituted the opposite of neutrality, namely what he later referred to as the biased (Voegelin, 2001b, p.80) creation of a closed, dogmatic edifice […which] allows us, on the strength of its ability totally to explain everything, to declare every divergent opinion

84  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis as unscientific, unreal, as conditioned by class background or material motives, etc, thus devaluing every opinion in its concrete demand for validity. (Ibid., p.83) Later, Voegelin advised his students to read Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Heimito von Doderer or Thomas Mann if they wanted to understand ideology and the great problems of contemporary Germany, rather than study the conventional literature in the canon of political science (Voegelin, 2002, p.389).10 In 1923, Voegelin’s suspicion about abstract, general statements and principles was reaffirmed when he met Eduard Meyer, a German historian of antiquity, whose research was based on the belief that genuine science had to incorporate the principal, essential and natural connection between experience and knowledge. Meyer taught Voegelin the technique of understanding a historical situation through the self-understanding of the person involved, which remained a principle within Voegelin’s research ever since (2005, p.15). One of Meyer’s core arguments was that the growth of historic material in the nineteenth century had allowed historians to debunk the notion of a unilinear history and the hitherto dominant scheme of Antiquity followed by the Middle Ages, followed by Modernity. Instead, it initiated the search for new categories to depict this history in theory.11 Voegelin’s awareness of and emphasis on the significance of experiential knowledge increased profoundly during his stay in the United States, where he held fellowships at the universities of Harvard, Wisconsin and Columbia from 1924 to 1926. There, he encountered the American and English philosophy of common sense, leading to a breakthrough in his intellectual development. Common sense philosophy holds that every individual possesses a certain degree of instinctive rationality, an original source of knowledge derived from everyday experiences of the world and prior to will and education, constituting the prerequisite for philosophical inquiry. It is “a human attitude which incorporates a philosopher’s attitude toward life without the philosopher’s technical apparatus” (Voegelin, 2005, p.28).12 Rather than blocking reality with methodological systems, this common sense readily adapts to changing circumstances and new insights. Thus, the research Voegelin encountered in America was conducted in a manner the polar opposite to what he had learned at the University of Vienna: “[it] is almost too much to say that rules were followed; they were not followed, they were found” (Voegelin, 1995, p.5). This encounter with common sense philosophy decisively impacted Voegelin’s understanding of political science. In a lecture from 1965, he clarified, There are no principles of political science, because there are no propositions. Rather, the ‘propositions’ of political science are common-sense insights into the correct modes of action concerning man’s existence

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  85 in society[…].Whenever attempts are made to construe commonness insights, which relate to the order of man’s entire existence, as “propositions” according to the model of the natural sciences, and whenever attempts are made to seek in their background “principles”– putative axioms that could take the place of the real source of order – any such attempt is an assault of the structure of the realm of man’s being. (Voegelin, 2002, p.409f) The notion of self-interpretive experiences, expressed though symbols, became a principle at the heart of Voegelin’s work (Voegelin, 2005, p.81), subsequently driven by the pursuit of tracing the crises of human existence back to their original articulation within personal, individual experience (Sandoz, 1981, p.23). According to political scientist Barry Cooper, Voegelin became a greater positivist than the targets of his critique, for “no positivist ever insisted more steadily than has Voegelin that experience must guide thought, that general terms can have as real referents only individual concrete objects or events” (ibid.). In 1927, Voegelin returned to the University of Vienna, where he began lecturing in 1929 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1936. Until 1938, with the exception of his first book On the Form of the American Mind which reflected on his insights gained in America (1995), Voegelin’s research focused on analysing the rise of ideological mass movements, utilising his newly acquired tools.13 Specifically, he argued that in National Socialism, religious conceptions had been transferred to world immanent entities, for example, when Hitler was displayed as the dispenser of truth and saviour of the German nation, or the Third Reich interpreted as the climax of history. Voegelin had become interested in studying religious philosophy, with a particular focus on the Middle Ages, especially on St Thomas Acquinas, who had explored the identity between the truth of God and the reality of the world. This exploration exceeded common sense philosophy, according to which practical knowledge about the order of the world was universally accessible via experience, adding that it was possible to gain even higher, luminous knowledge of divine order and one’s meaning within it, beyond particular, mundane existence. Voegelin argued: “The order of things in Truth, is the order of things in Being.” This sentence from the Summa contra gentiles means ontologically that the divine intellect, as the first cause of the universe, has impressed itself into the structure of the world. It means methodologically that the orderly description of the world will result in a system describing the truth of God. It means practically that every being, and in particular man, has its ratio, its meaning, in the hierarchy of divine creation and finds the fulfilment of its existence by ordering it toward its ultimate end, that is, toward God. (Voegelin, 1997b, p.207)

86  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis Because the human intellect carries the imprint of the divine intellect, Voegelin concludes, using human intellect means revealing truth about the divine intellect – “practically, the intellectual enterprise means the orientation of his mind toward God” (ibid.). The influence of Aquinas can be seen, firstly, in Voegelin’s later definition of philosophy. For Aquinas, philosophy was the ordering of the self-manifestation of God via the human intellect. The aim of philosophy was truth, recovering Intellect, or God. Secondly, Aquinas seemed to imply that the truth of God could not be destroyed but was always experienced within the world (God’s creation) and that it was visible to every human being, being reflected by it. Voegelin, too, began to characterise the attempt to overcome the identity between God and the world, as in the case of National Socialism, as a spiritual disease – an attempt to cover up or defer truth as it was experienced by the intellect – a notion which formed the centre of his later work, as will be shown in the following sections (ibid., p.65). After having expressed severe criticism of National Socialism,14 Voegelin fled Austria in 1938 and took a position as tutor and instructor at Harvard. There, he was asked to write a concise, introductory political theory textbook. As he waded through medieval, then Christian, Greek and Israelite sources, his History of Political Ideas expanded from antiquity to the nineteenth century, reaching theoretical paralysis in 1945. He explained, I had written my “History of Political Ideas” well into the nineteenth century…On occasion of the chapter on Schelling it dawned on me that the conception of a history of ideas was an ideological deformation of reality. There were no ideas unless there were symbols of immediate experiences […]. I was not yet in a position really to understand where the concept of ideas had come from and what it meant. (Voegelin, 2005, p.65ff) It was the Walgreen lectures of 1951, later published as The New Science of Politics, which brought his philosophical breakthrough. Voegelin explained that a History of Political Ideas was a senseless undertaking, incompatible with the present state of science. Ideas turned out to be a secondary conceptual development, beginning with the Stoics, intensified in the High Middle Ages, and radically unfolding into concepts which are assumed to refer to a reality other than the reality experienced. And this reality other than the reality experienced does not exist. Hence, ideas are liable to deform the truth of the experiences and their symbolization. (Ibid., p.80) Therefore, I had to give up the “ideas” as objects of a history and to establish the experiences as the reality to be explored historically. These experiences,

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  87 however, one could explore only by exploring their articulation through symbols. (Ibid.) Instead of a linear movement beginning with Classical politics, Voegelin found a plurality of symbolisms, periods of order and disorder, of which not all were historically connected. Consequently, he abandoned his work on the textbook and embarked instead on a study of symbols and the experiences which engendered them, as well as of the deformation of symbols into doctrines when the direct contact with reality was lost. This research formed the five volumes of Order and History, published between 1956 and 1987, beginning with the Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires, up to Israelite revelation and Greek thought, about which Voegelin later said, “some of the most obvious things about this deformation I discovered rather late, only in the 1950s and 1960s” (2005, p.80). In Search of Order, volume five, is a “conclusion” not just to the series Order and History but it is a reflection on Voegelin’s lifework, albeit unfinished and shorter, due to his death before completion. After having researched and lectured under a full professorship at Louisiana State University since 1946, Voegelin moved to Munich from 1958 to 1969 and participated in rebuilding the department of politics and founding the Geschwister Scholl Institute at the Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich. Supervising numerous PhD students, Voegelin is said to have created “a new force on the intellectual scene, one little loved by ideologists of the left or the right” (Sandoz, 1981, p.85).15 His most famous lecture series was entitled Hitler and the Germans and held in 1964, considered by some of his students and other scholars as “his most elaborate and outspoken analysis of the spiritual level of contemporary German intellectual life and, in general, of German political culture” (Clemens, 1999, p.2). It explored the origins of the complicity of Germans in National Socialism and their current treatment with their own past, coming full circle with Voegelin’s early readings of Kraus and Musil. Notably, Voegelin abstained from examining the German leadership but instead explored the mentality, the state of consciousness that enabled the “second reality” in which race theories and violence had flourished. In 1969, Voegelin received a position as Distinguished Scholar at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, where he remained until 1974. Until his death in 1985, he lectured across the country and continued his publications – the last of which was the fifth volume of Order and History. With regards to his research, Voegelin himself resembled Musil’s Man Without Qualities. His awareness of the limits of human understanding led him to reject any positioning and categorisation of his work, refusing to discuss his methodologies (Voegelin, 2005, p.74). Instead, he constantly revised earlier statements when new material arose – hence, it is not entirely accurate to speak of Order and History as a “conclusion” – and refined and expanded his language respectively (Rossbach, 2005, p.83ff).

88  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis Stefan Rossbach has drawn parallels between Voegelin’s non-position and the mystical via negativa, a stylistic figure which, instead of positively affirming what God is, negates the attributes and definitions that human language can formulate to refer to it (Rossbach, 2007, p.225). The latter delimits God, the former leaves open what God may be. By avoiding conclusions, the via negativa ensures openness, affirming the unthinkability and intangibility of reality (Soelle, 2001, p.65).16 It proceeds as necessary method from the unknowing of, in Voegelin’s case, ideology, the “garbage heap of opinion,” and second realities. In an exchange with Leo Strauss, Voegelin once complained: However, the idea of a ‘system’, of the possible exhaustive penetration of the mystery of the cosmos and its existence by the intellect, is itself a Gnostic phenomenon, a drawing in of eternity into the time of the individual thinker.17 Strauss in turn is cited complaining that “[h]e excludes the possibility of a non-empiricist and non-mystical philosophy” (Sandoz, 1992, p.122). In fact, the only position Voegelin accepted was that of a mystical philosopher (Sebba, 1977, p.665). Rossbach cites Gregor Sebba recounting an exchange with Voegelin: “when I argued that against a statement calling him a mystic philosopher he wrote back: ‘This will shock you, but I am a mystic philosopher’” (Rossbach, 2007, p.113). To Voegelin, philosophy was simply “man’s loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it” and hence it was necessarily noetic and mystical: experiencing life fully, instead of studying it from the outside.18 Voegelin’s via negativa resulted in a humility which sought, as he once told Gregor Sebba in 1933, to return “back to the source, where the water is clearest,” through meditative exegesis and experience away from cluttering ideology (Sebba, 1977, p.658). Michael Morrissey notes, [t]here is nothing “original” in Voegelin, who believed the lack of originality was a characteristic of authentic philosophy. What appear to be obscure neologisms in Voegelin’s writings are actually restored ancient symbols. They are the result of a rescue mission, a return to simplicity, a recovery of lost insight as originally formulated. (1999, p.15)

4.2 Voegelin’s conception of politics The following section explores Voegelin’s critique of modern Western politics. It is useful to begin with a question Voegelin scholar Athanasios Moulakis has posed: “whether political societies represent a truth that legitimises their existence or whether the political is ultimately little more than

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  89 an imaginative construct that has no ontological foundations” (Sandoz and Hollweck, 1997a, p.18).19 If one abstracts this question and calls to mind the beginning of this thesis, Moulakis’ question is not too different from the one that emerges from an analysis of the discourse of crisis: does politics describe or evoke reality, in short, is there an outside of politics? To answer this question, it is worthwhile to begin with one of Voegelin’s poignant discussions of the origins of political community, his introduction to the History of Political Ideas, written in 1940. There he stated, [t]o set up a government is an essay in world creation. Out of a shapeless vastness of conflicting human desires rises a little world of order, a cosmic analogy, a cosmion, leading a precarious life under the pressure of destructive forces from within and without, and maintaining its existence by the ultimate threat and application of violence against the internal breaker of its law as well as the external aggressor. The application of violence, though, is the ultimate means only of creating and preserving the political order, it is not its ultimate reason: the function proper of order is the creation of a shelter in which man may give his life a semblance of meaning. (Voegelin, 1997a, p.225) These attempts at rationalising the shelter function of order, which according to Voegelin constitute all Western, historically recorded societies, are what he referred to as “political ideas” (ibid.). One of his most central insights was that the political idea and symbol are exegetic, formative of reality, “not an instrument of description of a political unity but an instrument of its creation” (ibid.). Politics is described as the externalisation of the individual’s form of mind, a process of creating a world of order which is analogical to the individual’s experience of the cosmos with the purpose of providing meaningful shelter. Political society gives symbolic expression to the intimation of order welling up in human consciousness. It comes about in a process of calling forth, of naming and fixing, the elements and patterns of order. In that sense, societies are evocations, objectivations of the spirit. (Voegelin, 2000b, p.16)20 Here, Plato’s influence on Voegelin becomes visible. Discussing Plato’s Republic, he summarised: [t]he right order of man and society is […] an embodiment in historical reality of the idea of the Good, of the Agathon. The embodiment must be undertaken by the man who has seen the Agathon and let his soul be ordered through the vision, by the philosopher. (Voegelin, 2000c, p.47)

90  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis Throughout his work, Voegelin adopts Plato’s much cited argument that society is man writ large, that the order of the soul is the source of order in society. It follows that if society is corrupt, it ought to be seen not merely as the effect of a policy, but also as an expression of a disease of the soul, a nosos. At the core of Voegelin’s work lies the diagnosis of such a “spiritual crisis” infesting the twenty-first century. However, every form of order, every shelter function, he emphasised, remains an experiment, inevitably suffocating from its own closure and hubris – the limitations of human experience and expression – giving way to new analogies and interpretations. This process of order can be directed either towards attuning human existence to the cosmos, or towards attuning the cosmos to human existence (Voegelin, 1997a, p.225).21 The political order According to Voegelin, each people in history are faced with the challenge of creating a field of order “for survival in the world and, at the same time, for partnership in the order of being that has its origin in the worldtranscendent divine Being” (Voegelin, 2000b, p.67). The structure of being in the cosmos, Voegelin argued, is quaternarian, “God and man, world and society” (Voegelin, 2001c, p.280). It is mysterious in origin and unchangeable throughout history, a timeless, universal constant and therefore also the “primordial community of being” (ibid.). Therein, the human being always stands in relation to both God and world; society is a manifestation of this relationship, the “soul of man writ’ large,” while all being, world and society happens within God, the divine ground of being.22 Thus, reality is not an objective fact about which one can speculate from the outside, but a something within which one involuntarily and inevitably already participates. The human being always remains, an actor, playing a part in the drama of being and through the brute fact of his existence, [is] committed to play it without knowing what it is […]. There is no vantage point outside existence from which its meaning can be viewed and a case of action charted according to a place, nor is there a blessed island to which man can withdraw in order to recapture his self. The role of existence must be played in uncertainty of its meaning, as an adventure of decision on the edge of freedom and necessity. (Voegelin, 2001a, p.281) Thus, despite the increase of knowledge regarding the world’s structure and forces, the mystery of its formative origins – the ‘why’ and ‘what for’ – remain unanswered. The desire for fulfilment, for “maximum participation in being” (Webb, 1981, p.39), creates an existential tension, which may express itself in a philosophical quest for meaning in arts, poetry, music, worship, etc. This “appetite” for truth requires balance, motivating the continuous quest for order and meaning (Sebba, 1977, p.674). Again, it has to be

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  91 noted that this tension, that reality, cannot be “proven” empirically, because it remains a personal experience. It can only be pointed to. As briefly discussed above, Voegelin argued, then, that the history of order, rather than following a linear progression from compact to differentiated knowledge, was complex and unilinear, “not a stream of human beings and their actions in time, but the process of man’s participation in a flux of divine presence that has eschatological direction” (Voegelin, 2000d, p.50). Depending on the kind of participation in the quaternarian structure, there were independent developments, false turns, obscurements and ideological deviation. Moreover, “the pressure of the tension in reality…tends to disrupt the ordered whole of intracosmic things” (ibid., p.117). Any form of political order is essentially unstable vis a vis the experienced cosmos, thus inevitably carrying the seed for its own destruction. Thomas Hollweck even argued that Voegelin’s philosophy of order was just as much a philosophy of revolution, not seeking remedy in the form of stable order, but seeking to raise awareness to the inherent inability to ground order effectively and thus, it could be argued, provide guidance for the creation of experimental open societies (Hollweck, 2012, p.116f). To Voegelin, “[t]he process of history, and such order as can be discerned in it, is not a story to be told form the beginning to its happy, or unhappy, end; it is a mystery in process of revelation” (Voegelin, 2000d, p.6). However, Voegelin did believe that the symbols of truth as principles of ordering society had continually declined in the West since the beginning of modernity in the seventeenth century, producing a new vision of the human being that “becomes increasingly self-enclosed and finite in its orientation” (1997c, p.144). This vision transpired to be the culmination of a centuries’ long disappearance of the experiential centre of knowledge. Although he argued that the externalisation of knowledge was a tendency inherent in the conditio humana and therefore to a degree present in any society, it appears that modernity’s new vision of the human being can be traced back to what Voegelin identified as the Ecumenic Age, spanning from Cyrus’ conquest of Media in 550 BCE to the fall of the Roman Empire. It was characterised by imperial conquest and empire building with the mere aim of expanding the ‘truth’ of societies’ shelter function. Lacking an affirmative character and substance, these empires were “organisational shells,” unable to substitute culturally for the cosmological orders they violently destroyed, thus leaving a trail of obliterated concrete societies behind. The ensuing misery and absence of meaningful political order, Voegelin argued, caused a flight into spiritual life and the emergence of plentiful and diverse religions which attempted to conserve truth in fixed scripture and dogma. Thus, the Ecumenic Age marked the institutional bifurcation of order, separating political from spiritual life into State and Church as two distinct institutions in charge of independent realms of life. Both political and spiritual ecumene engaged in imperial conquest to spread ‘truth’ and centralise power until they embraced each other in an attempt to increase effectiveness.

92  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis As such, knowledge was noticeably objectivised, reduced to facts passed down through a hierarchy of authority. Individual consciousness as the locus of reality’s self-revelation and experiential centre of knowledge was increasingly separated from the order of society. The truth of existence as experienced in the soul, where it functioned as the basis for life in cosmological societies, was foreclosed (Voegelin, 2000d, pp.36–44). According to Kenneth Keulman, the ideological deviation of modern, Western societies is intricately connected to its original institutionalisation within the Ecumenic Age. He stated that [t]his risk [of reducing understanding of the cosmos to a mere opinion] has been fully realized in recent history, and goes a long way toward accounting for the intellectual confusion of modernity. Much of the history of the modern period consists of a revolt against the symbols inherited from the Ecumenic Age. The meaning of these symbols was deformed through theological and metaphysical dogmatism. By adding more doctrine, however, the modern revolt only succeeded in compounding the problem, so that contemporary errors were stacked on top of medieval ones. The net result is a great block of accumulated symbols that serve only to eclipse reality. (Keulmann, 1990, p.146) This suppression of knowledge through institutionalised order has become a self-aggrandising problem, dimming awareness of how to access the link between experience and knowledge to the extent of total cluelessness. According to Voegelin, “[t]here has never been such a terrible period of deformation as today” (2010, p.85).23 The normalisation of deformation has a consequence that “life in the insane asylum of our time has become such a habit for many that they no longer react in a sensitive manner to the grotesque events on the public scene” (Voegelin, 1990a, p.34). Modern Western society, he argued, is continuously removing itself further from the source of knowledge. Philosopher Thierry Gontier aids in clarifying that for Voegelin modernity means, an age of closeness, at the spiritual as well as the political level: the transformation of thought experience into a systematic rationality closed in upon itself […], the closing-off of society around the symbols of ‘nation’ and ‘race’[…], and finally the closing of the soul and society in relation to their transcendental foundation of meaning, and the resultant loss of the philia politike understood in its classic sense (the homonoia of the Greek, philosophers, the likemindedness of the Christians) in favour of the reduction of mankind to the status of a being exclusively ruled by his passions (the Hobbesian Leviathan). (Gontier, 2015, p.28)

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  93 “The political age” The following section explores in detail Voegelin’s analysis of ideological derailment in modernity, reaching its climax in the twentieth century. As has been argued above, Voegelin believed that the separation of the spiritual from the practical, of the personal from the political, had been institutionalised in the Ecumenic Age. Moreover, he believed that this separation characterised a flight from “uncertain truth” (ibid.) and an attempt to escape the conditio humana, “the real agony of man’s existence in the tension of imperfection and perfection” (Voegelin, 1990, p.315). Elsewhere, Voegelin referred to this phenomenon as being pulled towards the “magic of the extreme” (ibid.), lured by the temptation of certainty, stability and meaning as opposed to the vastness and meaninglessness of the cosmos. He also named it libido dominandi, the will to power and domination of the very cosmos which subjects the human being to its forces (Voegelin, 2000a, p.270). Derailment signified an inability to cope with the essential weakness and limitation of the human condition, demonstrating a lack of trust in the personal encounter with reality, and an unwillingness to accept one’s responsibility in the quaternarian structure (Voegelin, 2001a). Voegelin wrote, all these are part of a cultural process dominated by a flight of magic imagination, that is, by the idea of operating on the substance of man through the instrument of pragmatically planning will […]. The climax of this outburst is the magic dream of creating the superman, the manmade being that will succeed the sorry creature of God’s making; this is the great dream that first appeared imaginatively in the works of Condorcet, Comte, Marx, and Nietzsche, and later pragmatically in the Communist and Nationalist Socialist movements. (2000d, p.191) However, since the human being, qua conditio humana, cannot but participate in reality, Voegelin argued that deviation is always exercised in full awareness of reality proper (2000e, p.49). The deviator “really does commit an intellectual swindle, and he knows it” (Voegelin, 2000a, p.267). Thus, eclipsing reality by attuning order to magic imagination always leads to existence in Zwielicht (twilight). Voegelin therefore referred to this process, with reference to Plato and Aristotle, as nosos, meaning disease of the soul (1999a, p.115), as “loss of reality,” “refusal to apperceive,”24 “pneumopathology,” “stupidity” and “escapist yearning for a refuge behind pseudoscientific propositions that absolve responsibility” – amongst other things (2001b, p.16). However, the eclipse of reality is no easy work: the thinker can seize control of being with his system only if being really lies within his grasp. As long as the origin of being lies beyond the being

94  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis of this world; as long as eternal being cannot be completely penetrated with the instrument of world-immanent finite cognition; as long as divine being can be conceived of only in the form of the analogia entis, the construction of a system will be impossible. If this venture is to be seriously launched at all, the thinker must first eliminate these inconveniences: He must so interpret being that on principle it lies within the grasp of his construct. (Voegelin, 2000a, p.273)25 Thus, a new, imaginary self is created, no longer open and subjected to the cosmos, but enclosed in its selfhood (Voegelin, 2010, p.6). From this enclosed self issues an imaginary reality in which transcendence and remainders of the beyond of this world are transformed into non-reality (Voegelin, 1990a).26 The individual no longer participates in this order with the fullness of her being, but only with her self-truncated, bifurcated being, whose experiential centre is omitted. Only then is it possible that “the image of the world becomes the world itself” (Voegelin, 2000e, p.53), so that its system constitutes a “second reality” (Voegelin, 2002a, p.389),27 a “dreamworld” (Voegelin, 1990a, p.317), functioning to foreclose primary reality. He explains, [W]hen the first reality, which is the expression of spiritual substance, cannot be developed because of the absence of such substance, in its place there will develop an artificial reality – that is, a reality that has the external form of reality but which is not substantially supported by the spirit. We enter here upon a realm of spirit like non spirit or anti-spirit, which finds its representation on the plane of politics in the ideological mass movements. (1990a, p.51) In second reality, politics is necessary to create, enforce and maintain the “anti-spirit” required for upholding the ersatz reality and to suppress genuine reality; it is there to “construct a world picture from which those essential features of the constitution of being that would make the program appear hopeless and foolish have been eliminated” (Voegelin, 2000a, p.304). In modernity, such politics has been profoundly supported in its function by scientism, the generalisation of the view of modern science whereby reality is knowable through the quantitative methods of natural sciences to embrace the whole of reality, considering it to be the determining factor for understanding what reality is and how it is to be known. Scientism uses its social effectiveness in the service of antispiritual revolt and for the purpose of civilisational destruction […]. The advancement of science and the rationality of politics are interwoven in a social process that, in the perspective of a more distant future will probably appear as the greatest power orgy in the history of mankind. (Voegelin, 2000d, p.170)

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  95 With the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century, the understanding of knowledge had significantly transformed from the purpose of contemplating experiences of the cosmos for attunement, towards its domination. As science was interpreted as the key to such knowledge, politics ensured that all other ways of comprehending and enduring the world followed the primacy of science. Hence, [t]he partisans of the political world view typically believe that the world is in principle knowable; if some unknown regions or specific facts remain, this is due to an imperfection that will be overcome with further progress in science. […]. This determines the general form that, once it is filled with emotionally loaded contents, gives rise to a concrete political world view qua religious system. (Voegelin, 2001b, p.83) While spiritual and religious leaders in the Ecumenic Age used scripture to justify imperial conquests, in modernity, political theory functioned as an aide to politics, “on the enterprise of recreating, by continuous evocative practices, a cosmion in existence” (Voegelin, 1997a, p.229). Thus, Voegelin explained, in principle, the state has no interest in political science nor in a public airing of the question why certain people rule and others obey; furthermore, the faculties of jurisprudence and political science serve primarily as training facilities for state employees, for whom knowledge of and loyalty to the law is desirable, whereas too much speculation about foundations is not; and, finally, educational practice in dogmatic juristic specialities, which in themselves do not require any in-depth scientific and research activities, might be detrimental to the attitude required for the solution of much more difficult questions. (2001b, p.127) Such politics not just enforces and seeks to conserve ignorance of the truth of reality, it also “actively prevents the cultivation of human substance and corrodes the surviving elements of cultural tradition still further” (Voegelin, 2000d, p.193). As a consequence, “[t]here is no longer any sacral permeation from the highest source; rather, it itself has become an original sacral substance” (ibid., p.59). Here, the difference of modern politics to that of the Ecumenic Age becomes visible. In both ages, politics serves to prevent the imaginary self from becoming aware to the fact that it is mere imagination. Yet, modern politics appears to have replaced the salvationist function which in the Ecumenic Age was sought in the spiritual realm, the outside of politics. Today, the distance to the experiential centre appears particularly far. In modernity, as in the ecumene, existence is non-public, yet in the absence of spirit, society lies enwrapped by the totalising illusion of politics

96  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis (Voegelin, 1990a, p.27). To Voegelin, “the public” of modernity is a mere mass of existential subjects, externalising their responsibility onto authorities (ibid., p.26). Consequently, Today, the most strongly standardising, person-destroying influences issue from the political sphere. The so called “politicising” of the citizens, their active participation in political life, is unavoidable in a democracy by its very nature, because this is the form in a democratic state by which the great majority of citizens are shut out of politics. […]. The modern form by which a mass democracy is organised is spiritually the most dangerous to the individual personality, for the political propaganda fills the spirit with abstract cliches, which are infinitely distant from an essential genuineness of the personal, and therefore radically negate the best and unique features of the entire human being under circumstances when they mould it. (Voegelin, 2003, p.237) Thinking outside politics appears to have become impossible. This, it could be argued, is the characteristic of what may be referred to as the Political Age. The particular community In order to successfully eclipse genuine reality, the contracted self requires a second reality that is upheld and protected through external reference points which mimic and reflect the fiction. This is where the particular society emerges, replacing primordial community and common humanity in the quaternarian structure. Here, Voegelin’s dictum that political ideas are exegetic, an instrument of creation rather than description, applies too. The particular community is not imposed from the outside, but emerges as fiction from the inside, revealing itself “as an idea, as thought construct in the minds of people sharing in it, and precisely by appearing in the subjective idea the community also became objective reality…” (Voegelin, 1997c, p.150). Yet, particularity also reflects the loss of common, universal humanity. This is the reason particular communities flee from each other’s sight and encapsulate themselves. The particular community can only overcome “its fear of its forlornness by claiming for itself the status of ‘world’ and regarding all others as ‘non-world’. We recognise fear as the deepest root of the new idea of community in its individual features” (ibid., p.152). In such a community, where the divine ground of being is missing – the transcendent reality that is the source of the pull towards participation – humankind, which is imago dei, experiences dehumanisation through its loss of dignity based on its human theomorphic nature (ibid., p.87). A culture of conformity forms, characterised by the rage for distinction and cult of individuality, choosing from the permissible catalog of external references

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  97 (Voegelin, 1990s, p.21). Interaction is limited to that between adherents of the second reality. Thus, [i]nterpersonal relationships are severed, nonhuman spiritual structures confront one another, and man is transformed into a machine component that runs alone mechanically in the gearbox, abstractly fighting and killing toward the outside […]. In the believer’s realm of experience, the existence of man loses its reality. Instead the state takes over the reality and makes itself into the only true reality from which a stream of reality is allowed to flow back to the people, providing them with new stimulus in the role as parts of the superhuman reality. (Voegelin, 2000a, p.29) Hence, Voegelin declared “[t]he destruction of the xynon, the commonality in the spirit, as the root of the evil” (1990a, p.34), of all externalisation. Yet, state and nation ultimately prove insufficient in containing the cosmos, requiring ever more radical means of suppression and defence, enforcing illusion, thereby continuously widening the gap between bios and logos and, in a vicious cycle, increasing the feeling of disillusionment, godforsakenness and homelessness (Voegelin, 1999a, p.262). Consequently, [t]he quest for the meaning of life degenerates to aesthetic operations with symbols of transcendence, to a game with masks of nonobligatory obligation […]. The world immanent phenomena of power, conflict, instinct, class, nation and race were laden with the meaning of nonexistent realities and thereby became masks of transcendence. We notice as characteristic the phenomenon of a despairing affirmation of the world-immanent game of life that takes up the problem of a transcendence and loads this world-immanent game of life with a meaning it in fact does not have […]. The divine eternity is transposed into an everlasting, self-repeating game of immanence. The hiddenness of the ground becomes the superficiality of the game, and in the hiddenness proceeds the man who plays it. But is he still human? (Ibid., p.263) Finally, the question arises why derailment occurs in the first place, why a potentiality for spiritual disease and willingness to submit oneself to one’s self-truncated imagination exists in the first place. Voegelin emphasised that the final reason could not be discerned and had to remain a mystery.28 To address this mystery, he referred to the “evil in God’s creation,” meaning the freedom that is given to the individual to decide to either reflect the radiance of the divine ground or reject it; the potentiality inherent within the conditio humana to decide for the latter. This evil is not God’s, but purely human, with which each individual has to struggle self-responsibly. Evil is “[t]he temptation to fall from a spiritual height that brings the element of

98  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis uncertainty into final clarity down into the more solid certainty of worldimmanent, sensible fulfilment,” which, “nevertheless, seems to be a general human problem” (Voegelin, 2000a, p.313). Rather than having to struggle with the burden of responsibility oneself, evil can be “transferred from an internal problem of the soul to an external problem of an unsatisfactory state of things which may be overcome by intelligent and concerted action of man” (Voegelin, 2000d, p.50). In modernity, politics is the transferral of evil. However, the underlying problem, the belief in the possible salvation from evil and perfectibility of mankind, from which follows the attempt to change the order of being via politics (ibid., p.297), remains the same from the Ecumenic to the Political Age, causing, precisely, evil. Evil is, essentially, the search for certainty, clarity and ground, a grave form of being lost. A preliminary answer to Athanasios Moulakis’ question, posed at the beginning of this chapter, whether political societies represent a truth that legitimises their existence or whether the political is ultimately little more than an imaginative construct that has no ontological foundation, might be: “A human community cannot endure without the practical achievement of community formation, but if it militates in principle against theoretical orientation, it could destroy the achievement that is peculiar to the theiotaton” – the divinest part in the psyche, the nous that participates in the divine nous and responds to the ground (Voegelin, 2001b, p.88).29 The political society can vary in degrees of attunement, being either aware of its lack of ultimate knowledge regarding the meaning of existence and therefore ordered openly towards the transcendent ground, or it can seal itself off within a second reality, seeking to push openness into oblivion. However, [e]very political order is in some part an accident of existence. The mystery of existential cruelty and guilt is at the bottom of the best order […]. By social convention this mystery of guilt is not admitted to public consciousness. (Voegelin, 1998a, p.83) While politics is inevitable, it always remains a surrogate.

4.3 Voegelin’s experience of consciousness and reality Despite the pervasiveness of second realities in the twentieth century and despite the impossibility of circumventing the need for myth in the creation of order, Voegelin argued that resistance and a return to the first reality were always possible. The key for that argument can be found in Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness. According to Voegelin, it is the experience of reality that gives rise to the desire to evade it. Yet, it also contains the key for resistance to evasion: The faculty of this experience, Voegelin argued, is consciousness. On the one hand, consciousness appears situated within and contained by the

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  99 body, making external reality an intelligible and intending “Thing-Reality” (Voegelin, 2000e, p.29). On the other hand, consciousness is used to think about itself. Somehow, it is distinguished from “thingness.” It can grow aware of itself and is ultimately experienced as no less real than reality itself. Thus, it cannot be reduced to that which is contained within. Rather, consciousness is located “in between” the experience of being on the one hand and the experience of some being added to the experience of being that is other than the existent things. It is both enclosed from the cosmos surrounding it, as well as itself being a cosmic principle (Voegelin, 2000c, p.16). Consequently, the human form is both identical with and different from the cosmos. The cosmos discloses itself to consciousness, yet only ever in its undisclosability, not in its essence. Thus, [c]onsciousness is a subject intending reality as its object, but at the same time something in a comprehending reality; and reality is the object of consciousness, but at the same time the subject of which consciousness is to be predicated. (Voegelin, 2000e, p.30) To put it differently, one can discern that reality is more than “ThingReality,” because consciousness is more than a thing. Reality is also an “It-Reality,” a mysterious force beyond things, already existing independently from consciousness. Voegelin used the Greek word metaxy, meaning in between or middle ground, to refer to the structure of consciousness, designating an intermediary and intermediate reality, between “birth and death, ignorance and wisdom, immanence and transcendence, imperfection and perfection, time and eternity, mortality and immortality, apeirontic depth and noetic height, reaction and salvation, the One and the Many, the Beginning and the Beyond” (Morrissey, 1999, p.17). Consciousness is human participation in the divine and divine participation in the human. As long as there is consciousness, the human being cannot be merely human, yet neither can it become merely godly and leave its humanness behind (ibid., p.33; Voegelin, 2002a, p.33). As Voegelin argued that consciousness can only be experienced qua consciousness, it follows that no generically valid propositions regarding that experience can be made. Voegelin stated, [t]here is no absolute beginning for a philosophy of consciousness. All philosophising about consciousness is an event in the consciousness of the philosopher and presupposes this consciousness together with its structures. Inasmuch as the consciousness of philosophising is not “pure” consciousness but rather the consciousness of a human being, all philosophising is an event in the philosopher’s life history; an event in the history of the community with its symbolic language; an event in the history of mankind, and of the cosmos. No “human” in this reflection

100  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis on consciousness and its nature can make consciousness an “object” to be confronted; the reflection is rather an orientation within consciousness with which he can push to its limits but never cross them. (2002a, p.81) Consciousness, therefore, is bound by the individual’s particularity, and yet, regardless of the particularity, remains the “sensorium of transcendence, of the movements and countermovements in the tensions of being” (Morrissey, 1999, p.19). According to what may be referred to as Voegelin’s mystical anthropology, reality always reveals itself within this sensorium, in spite of the degree of imagination (Voegelin, 2002a, p.67). Thus, [t]here is no imaginative oblivion without remembrance […]. There is, furthermore, no remembrance or oblivion without the existential consciousness to which the acts in reflective distance pertain. And finally, there is no existential consciousness without the reality in which it is conscious of occurring (Voegelin, 2000e, p.56) In other words, reality cannot be destroyed, but merely be hidden and pushed into oblivion; “The reality of God can be masked with an imaginary nothing, but it cannot be filled with an imaginary something” (Voegelin, 2010, p.26).30 Even when in oblivion, the individual continues making, “experiences that impel toward reflection and do so because they have excited consciousness to the ‘awe’ of existence,” inviting to philosophical reflection. This awe arises from everyday experiences,31 because “[t]he total being is an apex of mind, animal and vegetative animation, inanimate matter. Death, sleep, dream, illness, fear, ecstasy, mystical submersion to God, spiritual self-involvement of meditation, all of which serve as vantage point for speculation” (Voegelin, 1997c, p.19). Awe is the reaction to encountering noumenal realities beyond the phenomenal world, which, despite escaping reason and intellect, are natural. Voegelin stated, [m]an is not a self-created, autonomous being carrying the origin and meaning of his existence within himself. He is not a divine causa sui; from the experience of his life in precarious existence within the limits of birth and death there rather arises the wondering question about the ultimate ground, the aitia or proto arche, of all reality and specifically his own. […] this questioning is inherent in man’s experience of himself at all times. (2002a, p.92ff) Thus, it is reality itself, revealing itself within consciousness, which induces speculation about the “what for?,” “where from and to?” and “why” of existence. Reality is always already present in consciousness.

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  101 Consequently, consciousness is the most primary reality with which the individual knows and judges all other reality. In a review of French priest and writer Ernest Dimnet’s book “What We Live By,” published in 1932, Voegelin praises his aim to lead the reader back to himself from the daily hustle and bustle in which he is lost. It seeks to instruct him to see clearly his own person and its possibilities of development…. It raises in the reader the belief that he too, however little special intellectual schooling he may have, is called to participate in the community of spirit. (Voegelin, 2003, p.229) The primacy of the individual, personal, direct relationship between experience and knowledge, which every individual possesses regardless of her background, is the key to resisting deformation. Before any intermediary between experience and knowledge, any authority, can impose its view about the order of reality, the individual already has immediate access; it merely needs to become present to it. Therefore, Voegelin approved of Dimnet’s claim that there are no spiritual elites and no masses lost to the spirit, but only members of a community who can advance equally to the essence of their person and whom the individual who has reached this goal through the advantage of circumstances is obliged to provide help. (Ibid., p.233f) The power of the individual is emphasised as opposed to that of the masses, arguing that knowledge will radiate from the individual which has turned around, attracting others to create a new order.

4.4 Anamnesis Voegelin proposed that this essential interconnectedness of being and knowing can be remembered and recovered from within the state of oblivion through the practice of anamnesis. It refers to the process of remembering those experiences which had drawn oneself towards reflection, experiences that have “excited consciousness to the ‘awe’ of existence” (Voegelin, 2002a, p.36) and “opened sources of excitation, from which issue the urge to further philosophical reflection” (ibid., p.37). Anamnesis brings to knowledge that which has wrongly been forgotten, revealing the forgotten as knowledge in the mode of oblivion, where it has aroused such existential unrest that it had to be raised to knowledge through remembrance. Anamnesis is an experiential descending into consciousness with the aim to clear out “all ideological junk to make the conditio humana visible once again” (Voegelin, 1999a, p.72). Voegelin placed particular emphasis on recounting childhood

102  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis or pre-reflective experiences of transcendence in space or time that had raised questions about mind and reality, moments of awareness through which some elements of reality were revealed as obscure, demanding interpretation (Keulmann, 1990, p.56). In his book Anamnesis, Voegelin recalled 20 memories of experiences, which occurred during the first ten years of his life. They were elementary moments always present with him as memories, because they had made him aware of space, time, matter, history, wishful dreams and wishful times. Through recalling truths about the “order of reality,” Voegelin argued, these anamnetic experiments simultaneously initiate a process of unlearning and unknowing the imaginative limitations of the second reality, recovering “the human condition revealing itself in consciousness when it is smothered by the debris of opaque symbols” (Voegelin et al., 2004, p.242). The more one turns inward so that consciousness becomes aware to itself, the more it reveals It-Reality to include or envelop Thing-Reality. The individual moves out of the totality of Thing-Reality towards a conscious in-between position with Thing-Reality on one pole and It-Reality on the other, both forming one reality. Voegelin stated that it is “the nature of the irrupting experiences and of the excitation they induce, together with the result of an “attunement” of consciousness to its “problems” [which] seem to [him] to be the determination on which depend the radicalism and the breadth of philosophical reflection” (Voegelin, 2002, p.85). Hence, anamnesis is the process of “recapturing reality in opposition to its contemporary deformation…” (Voegelin, 2005, p.121), the precondition for philosophy, the primary form of resistance, as will be discussed later. Yet, anamnesis has a deeper purpose than recovering reality. When consciousness becomes aware to the movement of the divine presence within, it becomes itself “present” in the sense that it seeks to attune its life to the presence of God (ibid., 71f). God, the divine Ground, is a flow of presence within human consciousness. Voegelin argued, [e]xistence in tension which is consciousness moves in two dimensions at the same time; it is eternal and mundanely timebound. So you can express this existence only by the term…the flow of presence, meaning thereby the intersection of time and the timeless. That is called the presence. (Voegelin, 2004, p.63f) He also stated that the flow of presence is neither time nor the timeless, but the flow in which time and the timeless meet. That is the time in which we exist. In this flow of presence, in-between, that is where all the [concerns] of man are transacted. (Ibid., p.213)

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  103 Through anamnesis, the individual cultivates the conscious experience of the flow of presence within. Attunement then means approximation to God. This can manifest itself, for example, externally in a leap in being, at the individual level as an increased sensitivity or awareness in life, or, at a societal level, as the change from cosmological to anthropological society. The flow of presence is, essentially, an ordering force that becomes effective when one places “the immanent present within the immanent process under the judgment of the [divine] presence” so that one is present. And yet, Voegelin was at pains to emphasise that anamnesis and presence do not reveal truth – merely its undisclosability. When consciousness becomes explicit to itself, it causes fundamental bewilderment, because [a]t the centre of his existence man is unknown to himself and must remain so…this situation of ignorance with regard to the decisive core of existence is more than disconcerting: it is profoundly disturbing for from the depth of this ultimate ignorance wells up the anxiety of existence. (Voegelin, 2001a, p.1) Hence, luminosity is not to be equated with illumination, the reaching of an objective fact of truth, but it is the movement from suffering from estrangement to the prevalent order, toward suffering from bewilderment (ibid., p.318). Despite increased luminosity, existence remains dependent on its divine causation, and this has remained the fundamental philosophical problem throughout the centuries of human existence. As Voegelin writes, “the discord between truth and untruth does not disappear when it becomes conscious as the truth of existence” (1990a, p.336). To be conscious of one’s existence is to know that one knows nothing at all. Moreover, [t]here is no vantage point outside existence from which its meaning can be viewed and a course of action charted according to a plan, nor is there a blessed island to which man can withdraw in order to recapture his self. The role in existence must be played in uncertainty of its meaning, as an adventure of decision on the edge of freedom and necessity. (Voegelin, 2001a, p.1) Remembrance and presence “merely” make visible the existence of mystery (Voegelin, 1990, p.184ff). That which is made present, is not, as the surface language suggests, a something lying around to be accepted, or rejected, or resisted; imagining ‘truth’ as a thing would deform the structure of consciousness in the same manner as does transformation of the symbols ‘reality’ and ‘Beyond’ into things for purpose of manipulation […].The symbols arise from the human response to the appeal of reality, and the response is burdened by its character as an event in the reality to which it responds. (2000e, p.37)

104  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis The response to the flow of presence is therefore still delimited by the fact that reason and language alone cannot express transcendence. It means that “[t]he mystery is the horizon that draws us to advance toward but withdraws as we advance” (Voegelin, 1990a, p.326). It follows that the quest about reality is never ending, because reality itself is in constant motion (Voegelin, 2005, p.159). Voegelin referred to this motion as “exodus,” an unstoppable and unexplainable (Trepanier, 2010, p.89) movement within reality, moving beyond itself, an “ultimate transfiguration of reality” (Voegelin, 2000f, p.291). The Beyond, then, has an indefinite number of meanings as it reveals itself to every person differently, constituting “different events in the philosopher’s life” (ibid., p.133). Consciousness and resistance It is this “plurality of middles, validating a plurality of quests, telling a plurality of stories, all having valid beginnings,” which explains Voegelin’s discontent for utopias and blueprints and his deep suspicion of collective action (Voegelin, 2000e, p.42). He objected to any programme that promised a path out of human misery and to any faith in the perfectibility of mankind, be it fascist, communist or anarchist (Voegelin, 1975, pp.217–240). Instead, he continuously emphasised human fallibility, limitation and lack of knowledge, pushed into oblivion by the socialist and anarchist theories which he criticised and which attached evil to political institutions – an imaginary and generalised evil (Voegelin, 2001a, p.227f). Yet, far from promoting pessimism or political quietism, Voegelin appeared as political pragmatist, urging action and experimentation. He argued, One can, indeed, not root out traditional vices at a moment’s notice; but there is a limit beyond which delay is impermissible. And that all men are not good and therefore all things cannot be well, is sound admonition to a perfectionist; but it easily can become a cover for condoning crimes. What makes this argument so flat is the renunciation of the spirit as the ultimate authority beyond the temporal order and its insufficiencies. (2000d, p.203) Voegelin’s emphasis on the unattainability of human perfection did not mean suspension of action, but rather awareness that even if preliminary political goals had been reached, the limits and potentialities of consciousness would remain and therefore had to be included in any considerations.32 Mere passivity and inaction would be inconsequential, both aiding destructive forces and corrupting one’s own quest for truth. For example, Voegelin’s major criticism of Christianity was that it had substituted faith in the afterlife for order in mundane society and redemption for social remedies, thus leading to a disengagement of the life of the spirit from political life and

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  105 to its corruption by the Roman Empire, thereby ultimately contributing to the creation of the context which allowed disordering mass movements to flourish (2001a, p.227f). Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness, then, appears to be more hopeful and radical than assumed at first sight. Firstly, by placing emphasis on individual ability, responsibility and accountability to grapple with reality, each and every individual is called into action. His philosophy is a call to anamnesis, to re-discovering one’s experiential centre of knowledge and to reordering one’s existence and relationship to the rest of existence. Individual introversion affects external relationships and thus has the potential, though Voegelin did not consider it likely, to create a socially dominant mass. Secondly, acknowledging the plurality of quests and stories prevents those relationships from succumbing to linearity and systems. Instead of there being one tactic and blueprint to answer the quest for order, Voegelin appears to endorse the inevitability and advantage of plentiful action, creative responses, diverse approaches, of, in other words, learning and creativity. Finally, Voegelin’s emphasis on fallibility, rather than intending pessimism, ensures the individual that through failure one learns and fails better. In a discussion of the Sermon of the Mount, Voegelin argued: We have to recall that the Sermon of the Mount is not a code for the life in the “world”; it is addressed to men who live in between the worlds of eschatological expectation. In historical existence, entangled in the network of social obligations, man has to pay his debt to nature and is obliged to commit acts in violence of the sermon. If he is struck on the right cheek, he will not turn his left, but hit back in defence of his life, his family and his community. But in hitting back, he will do good, as a Christian, to remember the Sermon, and to be aware that in define he is involved in guilt and that the man who struck him may have had quite as excellent “worldly’ reasons for the attack as he has for the defence. Both are involved in a common guilt, both are engulfed in the inscrutable mystery of evil in the world, and in their enmity both have to respect in each other the secret of the heart that is known only to God. (Voegelin, 1999b, p.281) In genuine reality, there is no a priori moral law from which a posteriori consequences can be derived. Rather, one is doubly bound, having to follow the insights gained from the flow of reality within consciousness, while also having to accept responsibility for the kind of action one takes. This attempt to engage in a quest for truth constitutes resistance par excellence – and Voegelin reclaimed the term philosophy for it, the love of wisdom that conceives of truth in transcendental terms and is oriented towards openness, as opposed to philodoxy, the love of opinion which seeks correspondence between ideas and reality, a manifestation of closed existence (Voegelin, 2000e, p.27). Philosophy, to Voegelin, is a movement resisting

106  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis the untruth of the prevalent disorder in an effort to attune disordered existence again to the truth of reality. Thereby, a new field of existential order is created, competing with those whose claims have become doubtful (Voegelin, 2000d, p.25). Philosophy here is understood as a never-ending, continuous challenge, effecting the order of society itself. With reference to Plato, Voegelin argued: Philosophy, thus, has its origin in the resistance of the soul to its destruction by society. Philosophy in this sense, as an act of resistance illuminated by conceptual understanding, has two functions for Plato. It is first, and most importantly, an act of salvation for himself and others, in that the evocation of right order and its reconstitution in his own soul becomes the substantive centre of a new community which, by its existence, relieves the pressure of the surrounding corrupt society. Under this aspect Plato is the founder of the community of philosophers that lives through the ages. Philosophy is, second, an act of judgement…. Since the order of the soul is recaptured through resistance to the surrounding disorder, the pairs of concepts which illuminate the act of resistance develop into the criteria (in the pregnant sense of instruments or standards of judgement) of social order and disorder. Under this second aspect Plato is the founder of political science. (2000c, p.68f) Complete knowledge is not humanly attainable, but philosophy presupposes its hypothetical possibility. According to Thomas W. Heilke, Voegelin understands philosophy as an education, from ignorance and compact knowledge to differentiated knowledge towards the truth of God. Thus, philosophy requires the whole soul to turn around with new insights, out of disorder towards new ways of life, a lifelong task. Philosophy is not only diagnostic, but therapeutic (Heilke, 1994, p.736). It appears, then, that Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness could be one of courage, to take action even from within the depths of ideological deformation;33 of hope, to fail, learn and fail better; of solidarity, understanding that every human being shares the burden of consciousness; and of free, creative association and experimentation.

4.5 The true community Voegelin argued that outside politics, there lies a pre-political, primordial community which can be known only through introversion, descending into experience. Since, according to Voegelin, to be human is to be a divine form, a divine self-expression both different from and identical with God, everything that needs to be known, is contained within this primordial selfhood and, as explained in the previous section, the task is to awaken to, verify and realise this knowledge via anamnesis. Thus, his idea of true

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  107 community is not based on a “new man,” but on the resurfacing of the “true man”: Contrary to the possibility that the order of being might be unknowable for man or that man with his capacity for mental order might confront a being without order, reality demonstrates a remarkable agreement between order of the mind and order of being […]. The experience of being activates man to the reality of order in himself and in the cosmos […]. The background of the experience of being is the primary experience of the cosmos in which man is consubstantial with the things of his environment, a partnership that in philosophy is heightened to the wake consciousness of the community of order uniting thought and being. (Voegelin, 2002, p.79) The question of true order is thus addressed from a transpolitical perspective, which envisions realised theomorphic humanity at the core of social order. Thus, the human being can only become the model for societal order when it has let itself be ordered by the divine, participating in divine substance and hence when it has become theomorphic. According to Michael M. Morrissey, “[t]he theomorphism of the soul, we may say is the supreme principle of the conception of order that originates in the experience of transcendence and leads to the discovery of history” (Morrissey, 1999 p.25). Yet, as discussed above, knowledge of God is knowledge of His mystery. His essence remains unknowable and unattainable, bereft of names and attributes, thus only leading to perplexity and bewilderment. Thus, reality is realised as beyond being, the divine ground of which all being is the first auto-determination, issuing from and returning to. Through making consciousness present, this inner unity is revealed beyond the outer multiplicity. Thus, the human being, rises thereby to the Imago Dei which it is his destiny to be. Spirit in the classical sense of nous, is what all men have in common […]. Through the life of the spirit, which is common to all, the existence of man becomes existence in community. In the openness of the common spirit there develops the public life of society. (Voegelin, 1990a, p.7) It is that “[m]an is man insofar as he is Imago Dei, and insofar as he is Imago Dei are all men equal as participating in the reality of God and thus united with God…” (Voegelin, 1999b, p.205). From the realisation that no human being can dictate ultimate knowledge of order which only God possesses, arises the humbleness that is openness and reason, as opposed to doxa, which emerges from cultivating participation in the transcendent Logos. This humbleness, Voegelin argued, is what makes possible the public life of society which has room for reason to develop and to flourish, resembling the

108  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis Aristotelian homonoia, or likemindedness, which is the dynamic movement of participation in God ordered by the common sense of what is required morally and practically to achieve community within this movement. Realising existence as Imago Dei, the logos of God makes visible the disordering forces of society, allowing the individual to attune its bios. Thereby, the individual gradually moves beyond and out of particular society and its order of separation. The contemplation of reality is thus complementary to action. According to Voegelin, [i]t is Heraclitus’s achievement to understand the distinctly human character of the participation in being. He asserted that the agreement of the soul with the logos, in the midst of strife and flux, is the condition necessary for human community. Only by following the logos, which is common in every soul and which transcends the world of multiplicity and individuality, can a true community come into existence. (In Morrissey, 1994, p.61) The purpose of true community, however, goes beyond mere practical order. It is more profoundly to participate in and approximate the divine, to increase knowledge thereof and integrate life to achieve higher degrees of freedom, to return to the pre-existential reality in the divine ground of being. Therefore, [w]ith regard to the transcendent source of order in the soul, all men are equal. The discovery of transcendent divinity as the source of order is paralleled by the discovery of mankind. ‘Mankind’ in this sense is not a particular group of human beings at any given time, but indeed the ‘open society’ of all men extending into the unknown future. The idea of ‘mankind’ has nothing to do with the idea of a ‘world-government’ established over a group of contemporaneously living human beings. (Voegelin, 1991, p.76ff) Voegelin’s conception of this true community, the ‘open society’ was influenced by Henri Bergson’s ‘Open Society,’ which is not a concrete society, but a “symbol which indicates man’s consciousness of participating, in his earthly existence, in the mystery of a reality which moves towards its transfiguration. Universal mankind [or the open society] is an eschatological index” (Voegelin, 2000f, p.376). This society is not an object of the external world, but a form of order that is “knowable only from the perspective of participation in it” (Voegelin, 2001a, p.1) by virtue of participation in the mystery of being. It is not a categorical imperative but a guideline for being in the world, already inherent within the individual. It is open toward transcendent reality and opposed to the particular, pathologically closed society, which in its revolt against the tension of existence turns away from the transcendent by creating an imaginative, immanent hierarchy of being.34

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  109 Thus, Voegelin’s anti-politics appears to be the suggestion of a possibility of departure from the political model as the external ordering of the world: through introversion towards “the politeia in the soul, with the perspective that this course opens into existence in a spiritual community beyond temporal organization of government” (Voegelin, 2000c, p.171). The open society is inevitably anti-political in the sense that it is based on experience of and approximation to the divine ground. Politics, however, arises as the wedge driven between experience and knowledge, upholding their separation to maintain and protect the myth of the possibility of a societal system – it is the antithesis to the open society. Yet, to what extent is the open society merely an archetype “laid up in the heavens” and to what extent can it be realised in the here and now? Saying that existence is a state of tension between different poles is to affirm that the open society can never prevail within time and the world but must represent a goal forever beyond the reach of humankind. Yet, every known society in history has expressed its experience of order through mythical, revelatory, theocratic or ideological symbols or otherwise, yet not exclusively noetic. This is, because noetic truth functions only as corrective (Morrissey, 1999, p.30). In sum, experience of true community only aids as a guideline in transcending the rigidity of the society within second reality, but it also allows for an intensification of individual existence in attunement to the order of the cosmos. According to Voegelin, “the ultimate, essential ignorance is not complete ignorance. Man can achieve considerable knowledge about the ‘order of being’, and not the least part of that knowledge is the distinction between the knowable and the unknowable” (2001a, p.40ff). While the ultimate essence of Truth cannot be known, it can be known that the world is not a self-subsistent truth, but that its various phenomena and events refer to and reflect the reality that belongs to the realm of mystery (Voegelin, 1987, p.61).

4.6 Conclusion Underlying the breadth and depth of Voegelin’s concepts is a single, perennial and spiritual problem, one that he argued had merely taken different shapes throughout history, culminating in the ideological mass movements of the modern era: the loss of contact with reality. At their core, both his early writings from the 1930s and later meditations in the 1980s deal with the various shapes that the phenomenon of “second realities,” alternatively referred to as “radical stupidity,” “pneumopathology” or the “magic of the extreme” can take. At the same time, these works form an appeal against such avoidance of reality: seeking to retrace the original experiences of reality, reconnecting experience and knowledge. In doing so, Voegelin had no expectation to discover a final solution, nor did he seek to provide his readers with objective facts of truth (Heilke, 1999, p.57). Rather, his work may be seen as articulations of self-reflection and meditative exegesis, asking the

110  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis same of its readers: to acknowledge that existence is played out in an insurmountable tension, the metaxy, and to embrace this tension. Politics, Voegelin argued, provided a shelter function from this tension – and thus necessarily required myth. However, myth and politics being inevitably rigid, they cause friction with an individual’s experience of the cosmos. Thus, just as the emergence of politics is inevitable in the creation of order, Voegelin stated, so is its decline. While Voegelin was critical of utopianism, communism or anarchism – the isms that also Landauer warned against – and declared any attempt to strive towards an ideal society and perfected mankind as futile – he was not a pessimist. On the contrary, precisely his awareness of the tension at the core of existence allowed him to raise strong and hopeful demands for experimentation and learning with regards to the creation of order. Thus, Voegelin may not only be read as a philosopher of order, but also as a philosopher of revolution (Hollweck, 2012, p.116). According to Voegelin, reality not only infinitely transcends each being, phenomenally giving the impression of a vast and meaningless cosmos, but it also flows through and is present within each being, establishing a direct, unmediated and experiential relationship between the individual and reality itself (2000e, p.29). This implies, firstly, that each individual is able by the bare fact of her existence to gain knowledge of the world through experience of being in the world. Voegelin not only rejected spiritual elitism, he directly appealed to individuals to re-connect knowing and being (Voegelin, 2003, p.229). This process of recovering participatory experiences through which the individual is awakened to the reality of order within herself, transcending her little world of order and particularity towards openness is what Voegelin referred to as Anamnesis – a practice of presence. Secondly, to restore this link is to make visible the destructive forces of ideology, authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Arguing that politics is the objectivation of a subjectively generated idea, formative of reality, Voegelin implied that the people themselves can turn around, step out of politics and work towards establishing a new order. While a truly open society may only ever be a goal beyond reach, this goal instigates an existential attitude of openness and a movement of attunement to the cosmos that increases luminous knowledge and therewith a certain existential freedom that may radiate towards others. From this movement may arise the homonoia, a community of likemindedness.

Notes 1 Rossbach cites the file “Notes and research material on Philosophy and History,” which contains “12 languages of order.” Myth (ancient oriental), myth (Hellenic), revelation, philosophy, metaphysics, theology, apocalyptic, gnosis, neb-platonic systems, mysticism, ideology, philosophy of consciousness. Likewise, for disorder, Voegelin found the words, egophany, pneumopathology, doxic reason, resistance to reality, deformation of existence, refusal to apperceive, schizophrenia, second reality.

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  111 2 The profound ambiguity of liberal Vienna was the paradox between the promotion of an emancipatory tradition and the free personality of German humanism on the one hand and the actual commitment of the liberal political and economic elite to capitalism and their support for competitive individualism, economic competition, social ambition and achievement on the other. 3 Musil too grew up in this environment. His work deals with the incommensurability between, on the one hand, scientific materialism, which radicalised the Enlightenment values of reason, objectivity and humanity and, on the other, philosophical irrationalism, characterised by the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche or Richard Wagner. 4 Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer influenced Voegelin’s use of the concept “second reality,” as well as his distinction between “simple and intelligent stupidity.” See, for example, Hitler and the Germans. In Anamnesis (2002a, p.389), Voegelin states: If, for instance, one wishes today to gain information about the great problems of thinking about order in Germany, one would be well advised to read the literary works of Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Thomas Mann, Heimito von Doderer […] rather than the professional literature of political science. 5 Invoking Musil’s Man Without Qualities, Voegelin argued, [t]he man without qualities is contrasted with the qualities without the man. The hero lives in a shadowy relationship with himself. He doesn’t recognise his qualities as his own because they operate as qualities of a particular role and not as the qualities of a man. The qualities are classified within specific contexts. The ‘man without qualities’ can do this and that; he merely carries out different roles. The qualities are defined in terms of their social function. But no man belongs to them. In this context, the expression “spirit” has become meaningless; there’s no longer any meditative experience. The hero finds out that he doesn’t love himself. Aristotle had defined nous as the core of personality. If man doesn’t love this core, and thus his own self, he has lost contact with reality […] The self-love implicit in ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ also implies love of the divine. But in Musil, the hero doesn’t love himself because he doesn’t have a self, and so the world becomes an apparent reality. Musil thus has performed a decisive analysis of the breakdown of contact with reality. (1999a, p.253) 6 There, Voegelin stated, “[t]he motivations of my work, which culminate in a philosophy of history, are simple. They arise from the political situation.” 7 My translation. German original: “Das Problem der Deckung von Wort und Wesen ist unvermeidlich wie ein Schicksal.” 8 Voegelin argued that reading Karl Kraus’ Die Fackel and Der Sozialist was indispensable for a serious study of National Socialism (2005, p.17ff). For further discussion of Karl Kraus, see Jay F. Bodine, “Karl Kraus’ conception of language, Donald D. Daviau, “Language and Morality in Karl Kraus’ Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit,” Modern Language Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1961): 46–54. 9 Originally, Voegelin wanted to study Law, which, however, required one year more at University than he could afford. During his studies of politics, Voegelin also engaged with students of courses on theoretical physics, history or history of art and studied alongside the students of Freud, through which he grew acquainted with the latter’s and Otto Weininger’s theories. Voegelin wrote his thesis in Sociology on “Interaction and Spiritual Community.” His supervisors were dissimilar: Kelsen, the legal positivist known for his “Pure Theory of Law” and author of the Austrian Constitution of 1920 worked on empirical

112  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis

10 11

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social criticism of Marxism and fascism, considering parliamentary democracy the best form of government, while Spann rejected collective government for not taking into account society’s natural inequalities and, with his antidemocratic, anti-parliamentarian and authoritarian theories influenced German nationalist students and militia groups. From Kelsen, Voegelin learned about Greek philosophy, in particular about Plato and Aristotle, German idealism and analytical theory of law. The relationship between Kelsen, Spann and Voegelin is well explained in Trepanier and Mc Guire, 2010. Voegelin also praised the works of Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry and James Joyce. For more information on Voegelin’s use of Eduard Meyer’s historical research, see: Voegeliniana, Occasional Papers, NO 68A, Geschichtsphilosophie Vorlesung SoSe 1965 Teil I, 25.5.1965, p.32. Especially, Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums in eight volumes was important for Voegelin, examining Egyptian, Near Eastern and Greek history. For original sources on Common Sense Philosophy, see, for example, George Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, originally published in 1868 or James Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in opposition to sophistry and scepticism, originally published in 1805. Voegelin published Race and State (1933), The History of the Race Idea (1933), The Authoritarian State (1936), Modernity Without Restraint (1938). The first two were forbidden by the National Socialists soon after their publication. Race and State (1933), The History of the Race Idea (1933), The Authoritarian State (1936). Voegelin strongly criticised the race theories of National Socialism against the background of philosophical discussions about the relationship between body, mind and soul. He traced their origin and asked why they were particularly rampant in Germany. Hannah Arendt later said of Voegelin’s research on this matter that it was the “best intellectual history on the concept of race” (“die beste geistesgeschichtliche Darstellung des Rassenbegriffes.”), in 1962 (p.245). Among the thinkers who were lastingly influenced by Voegelin are, amongst others, Gerhart Niemeyer, Flannery O’Connor, David Walsh, Marion Montgomery, Russell Kirk, James L. Wiser, Ellis Sandoz, Dante Germino and Jürgen Gebhardt. The practice of the via negativa is typically attributed to Dionysius to whom God was utterly unknowable and beyond everything. Soelle cites Dionysius stating: It has no power, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is neither knowledge nor truth. It is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither one nor oneness, divinity […]. (Ibid., p.67)

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Also Saint Thomas Aquinas describes how, after a mystical experience during mass, he lost his speech, upon which he stopped teaching. Voegelin to Strauss, 4 December, 1950. Cited in Cooper and Emberley (2004, p.73). For more on this, read Erfourth (2013). Citing Athanasios Moulakis. Reading Voegelin one needs to distinguish between “concepts,” a term which refers to meaning generated and limited by analytic and scientific discourse and “symbols,” the expressions of experiences of reality. For more on this, read Cooper (1999). Voegelin argued that the attempt to rationalise the cosmion through political ideas can be traced back through the whole history of Western societies back to the Assyrian and Egyptian empires.

Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis  113 Voegelin used the term “the divine ground of being,” as well as “the ground” or 22 “the divine” as symbols, representing the mysterious origin of human life. As they refer to something that lies beyond the reach of human reason, and hence, is mysterious, these symbols are merely an analogy. 23 German original: “Es hat noch nie eine solche entsetzliche Periode der Deformation gegeben wie heute.” 24 The German term for this is Apperzeptionsverweigerung, adopted from Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer (1896–1966). 25 “Analogia entis” refers to the analogy of being, the idea that the being of the world offers an analogy to God through which we can understand Him. 26 Therein, Voegelin refers to T.S. Elliot’s Choruses from the Rock to explain his concept of “second reality.” Elliot writes: The endless cycle of idea and action, endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries brings us farther from God and nearer to the dust. 27 Voegelin attributed this term to Robert Musil, while it originally stems from Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer, who described it as a flight from life, an attempt to rather change the world than oneself. 28 In “Understanding in Quest of Faith,” Rossbach cites Voegelin’s answer to the question why “God create[d] the world which is in such disorder that one has then to be saved from its disorder” with “We just don’t know.” Transcript of a lecture entitled “The Beyond and its Parousia,” given at Santa Clara University, 16 October 1982, at a conference on “The Meaning of History,” Stanford Hoover Institution Archives, Box 85, File 85.10, p.25. 29 Theiotation is a concept derived from Aristotle, who used it to refer to the divine nous. In Voegelin, it too describes the spiritual core of the human being, connecting it to the divine, from which grows the political community. 30 German original: “Die Realität Gottes kann mit imaginärem Nichts ausgeblendet werden, aber es kann nicht mit imaginärem Etwas gefüllt werden.” 31 Voegelin scholar Michael Morrissey explains this further, stating These experiences cannot be proved any more than sense experience can be proved. Yet there is nothing esoteric about such experiences. Insofar as everyone experienced reality, everyone has experiences of transcendence, at least on a limited level. A philosopher who experiences his or her consciousness as transcending discovers the ground of philosophizing, and no special belief is required to substantiate it, for it is self-evident. To deny the self-transcending nature of one’s consciousness would be to deny one’s own experiences. Such a denial is certainly possible, but then one would not be operating rationally; one would be closed to the reality one is trying to investigate. One may arrive at a number of different conclusions but one cannot in good faith deny the nature of transcending consciousness. (1994, p.43) 32 In support of his striking students, Voegelin argued, “Every leftist student is as much against the communist establishment as against our establishment. They are against doctrine. Their solutions are wrong but their revolution is right” (Voegelin, 2011).

114  Eric Voegelin – Anamnesis 33 Voegelin (citing Father Delp in 1999a, p.197): “We are somehow lacking the great courage that comes not from hot blood and youthfulness nor unbroken vitality, but from the possession of the Sprit and the consciousness of the blessing we have received.” 34 Gontier provides a detailed account of Bergson’s influence on Voegelin and on Voegelin’s independent development of the concepts of openness and closeness before his reading of Bergson (2015, pp.23–38).

5

Simone Weil – Malheur

French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) was in many ways an enigmatic and fascinating thinker – one who, like Landauer and Voegelin, defied categorisation. She was educated by elite institutions, yet toiled in factories. She may be described as a mystic, yet also as a militant. She was an activist, yet also an exile. Her vast ouvre of essays, notes, articles and letters contains political as well as religious philosophy, work on ethics, as well as on aesthetics. This chapter will focus on a theme in her work that is probably most commonly discussed: the theme of suffering. On the one hand, Weil’s life was shaped by extreme sensitivity to and compassion for the suffering of others, especially under the consequences of totalitarianism, igniting a stern desire for truth and justice as well as an equally stern social activism. On the other hand, Weil herself was afflicted with extreme physical and spiritual pain, yet embraced it. From this embrace, arose an act, which I propose to read as a practice of presence: malheur, the exacerbation of suffering, describes a movement beyond the limits of social and political order through a conscious acceptance of the precarious position between – as Weil would have put it – gravity and grace, between God’s force on the hand and the human capacity to return his love on the other. In the works of Gustav Landauer and Eric Voegelin, we have already come across the themes of in-betweenness and tension. For Weil, too, these play a prominent role. Weil argued that humankind experiences reality in between a profane realm on the one hand, the natural domain which is accessible to human senses and intellect, and, on the other hand, a sacred realm, the supernatural domain from which issue eternal principles and obligations, pulling the human soul towards it yet recoiling from full view. This produces an insurmountable tension, she argued, as well as provoking a constant search and longing for truth and justice. Similarly to Landauer and Voegelin, also Weil considered politics a system to manage this tension, precisely: to manage its externalisation. She even argued: politics is essentially totalitarian, seeking to establish a human “empire of might” (Weil, 1977b, p.160) in order to suppress the sacred. It is through the practice of attention, Weil argued, that tension could be experienced consciously. Yet, it is malheur – which I argued constitutes a

116  Simone Weil – Malheur practice of presence – the loving embrace of this tension of existence, accompanied by the spiritual and physical suffering and social degradation that life entails, which make a real stepping out of politics possible. Against society’s apparent loss of a sense of spiritual vocation, Weil envisioned a form of community which originated in this sacred inspiration, entering the human soul from the sacred realm, rerooting society spiritually and morally. And she was hopeful for the future of Western civilisation: The desire for truth and justice, she argued, as well as the potentiality for attention and malheur, constituted the essence of human personality. Much of Weil’s work, consisting predominantly of notes and unfinished essays, was organised and published posthumously. As Weil herself appears to have purposefully avoided following a systematic order within her work, favouring the style of the essay which meditates on a theme openly, the order of later publications might not necessarily coincide with her own disposition. This chapter references from across different publications, yet engages solely with English translations of her work.

5.1 Biography Weil was born in Paris in 1909 as the second child of a cultured and wealthy, agnostic Jewish middle class family, entrenched in the professional bourgeoisie and remaining firmly outside the Jewish community. She grew up in France’s belle époque, characterised by political, economic and cultural optimism, economic affluence, regional peace and a vast array of technological, scientific, cultural and artistic innovations. Yet, Weil was sickish from infancy, susceptible to weakness and disease throughout her life, and, compared to her brilliant brother Andre, she was a mediocre student, suffering from self-doubt, a tendency to mistrust herself and a nervous fear of failing (McLellan, 1990, p.7). Yet, from early childhood, she also showed an, “almost pathological receptiveness to the suffering of others” (Du Plexis Gray, 2001, p.15), recounted in numerous anecdotes, which highlight her empathy for the poor and unjustly treated, and her obstinacy and untenableness in wishing to help. Weil herself notes that, “[w]hile only a child, in everything that I read or heard tell of, I always put myself instinctively, by indignation rather than pity, in the place of all those who suffered constraint” (­McLellan, 1990, p.8). Disappointed with her “mediocre” intellectual faculties, Weil experienced a serious crisis of confidence at the age of 14. In her Spiritual Autobiography she recounts, I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me. I did not mind having no visible successes, but

Simone Weil – Malheur  117 what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides. I preferred to die rather than live without that truth. After months of inward darkness, I suddenly had the everlasting conviction that any human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, if only he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention on its attainment. He thus becomes a genius too, even though for lack of talent his genius cannot be visible from the outside. (2009, p.23) Weil’s crisis had originated in her intuition that a transcendent reality existed from which eternal principles, such as truth, beauty, goodness and virtue, would issue and through access to which human potential could be fully developed, yet which she herself could not access through conventional modes of knowledge. Rather, a qualitatively different, experiential type of knowledge, namely attention, was required – a term which she described at this stage as a concentrated, passive waiting for transcendent reality to reveal itself (Moulakis, 1998, p.224). As opposed to factual knowledge acquired through intellectual imitation, Weil envisioned such an experiential insight as universally accessible, regardless of intellectual background. The potentiality of this insight constituted an essential component of being human. This early intuition appears to have been formative of Weil’s philosophical development, which continuously returned to the notion of attention, refining and developing it, throughout her life. In 1925, Weil entered the Lycée Henri IV, where her thought was lastingly influenced by Emile Chartier, known as Alain. In his philosophy classes, students had to explicate experiential insights in the format of short, meditative essays, cautious of systematic thought – a trait which Weil maintained throughout her life (ibid., p.15ff). In line with French popular philosophy, Alain accepted Descartes’ mind-body-dualism, raising Descartes’ endurance of animosity – that the mind can neither be observed nor described and that it does not abide by the same laws as one’s body – to an absolute criterion of philosophy (ibid., p.85): one ought to courageously will endurance, Alain argued, in order to avoid reducing this animosity, instead of accepting, for example, physicalism (ibid.). This is reflected in Weil’s own development of the notion of attention, described precisely as, “conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting [attente]”.1 Moreover, Alain considered Stoics teachers of courage, arguing they “had a clear and expressive word for the soul and the spirit; they called it ‘government’ [gouvernement]; following our pleasant folk custom, I would prefer to call it ‘guidance’ (“steering wheel” [gouverne]). Your steering wheel: your inner life” (Moulakis, 1998, p.88). Similarly, Weil considered self-control,

118  Simone Weil – Malheur the conscious directing of all action which places the body under control of the mind as liberty (ibid., p.86) and as a principled guideline (ibid., p.87). Descartes’ endurance of animosity, Stoic resoluteness and Alain’s promotion of courage each prioritised conscious action over its actual outcome. This form of selflessness, action without regard for its consequences in order to achieve liberty, gained central importance in Weil’s critique of politics, which she described precisely as its opposite, namely self-interested action. Hence, she states, [w]e can easily accept the fact that the results of our actions are dependent on accidents outside our control; what we must at all costs preserve from chance are our actions themselves, and that in such a way as to place them under the control of the mind. (Weil, 2004, p.83) Weil’s occupation with the work of Descartes may come as a surprise, as he is usually considered responsible for the divide between science and metaphysics. Yet, Weil used Descartes to argue against the authority of one over the other, instead seeking a philosophical base that emphasises the individual as capable of achieving knowledge through her mere, ordinary, everyday experience of being. Like Descartes, she was also extremely critical of self-deception, the escape from animosity. To know oneself, the only thing one could surely know, to her held the same value as scientific knowledge (Frost and Bell-Metereau, 1998, p.40ff). In Weil’s adolescent writings, then, the theme of purity as a means for social and political change appears, further refining her notion of attention. In an essay for Alain, meditating on Grimm’s fairytale of the “Six Swans,” Weil praises a princess’ power of endurance and attention as a means of restoring justice and truth (Avery, 2008, p.23). Similarly, her essay “The Beautiful and the Good” stated, [t]o save the world it is enough to be just and pure; which is expressed by the truth of the Man-God who redeems the sins of humanity by justice alone without any political action. We must therefore save ourselves the spirit of which external humanity is the myth. Sacrifice is acceptance of suffering, the refusal to obey the animal in ourselves, and the will to redeem suffering humanity by voluntary suffering. Every saint has poured the water away; every saint has refused all happiness which means being separated from the sufferings of humanity. (McLellan, 1990, p.14)2 In these essays, Weil equated the duty towards others/humanity with the duty towards one’s self, which consists of embracing the suffering implied in the tension of animosity – a form of self-mastery. Throughout her life, Weil’s thought remained related to Alain’s, whom she considered, alongside

Simone Weil – Malheur  119 Plato, Descartes, Kant and Husserl, a true philosopher (Mc Lellan, 1990, p.83). According to Athanasios Moulakis, “[u]nder his influence Weil’s epistemological as well as moral impulse took on the contours of an anthropology and cosmology that encompasses the treatment of the political realm” (1998, p.80). Classmates remembered Weil as political, a “categorical imperative in skirts” (McLellan, 1990, p.25), bluntly confronting them with responsibilities to sign petitions; possessing “telescopic sensitivity” (ibid., p.25) and a heart “that could beat right across the world” (Moulakis, 1998, p.41).3 While activist acquaintances from the early 1930s recall her as a communist (ibid., p.46), Weil never officially joined any party and avoided identification with a particular label (McLellan, 1990, p.20). Instead, she expressed solidarity with those excluded from exclusive categories, the poorest and most disadvantaged in society. Not unlike other idealistic intelligentsia, Weil adopted a dress-code during adolescence which she maintained throughout her life, consisting of a medieval-like cape, “the clothes of a ragtag soldier or a poor monk” (Du Plexis Gray, 2001, p.19). In line with her early and lasting rejection of physical and sexual contact, this has been interpreted variously as a result of her mother’s encouragement to ignore her gender (McLellan, 1990, p.5), as an attempt to aspire after her brother by suppressing female characteristics (Nevin, 1991), or as a sign that Weil was afflicted with schizophrenia due to her severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. She was male in everything but body, and she did a very proficient job of destroying that hated body by starving it for years and finally killing it outright. (Mahoney, 2011, p.258) Yet, it appears equally likely that Weil simply sought to defy gender norms, class expectations and consumer culture, that instead she wanted to embody her ethical commitment to selflessness as part of a wider quest for political, economic and spiritual truth in a global capitalist society caught up by wars, fascism and over-consumption (Frost and Bell-Merteau, 1998, p.26). Between 1928 and 1931, Weil studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, hub of France’s intelligentsia, where she published her first articles, focusing on the concept of work. According to Weil, the harshness of physical work provides, “a certain contact with the reality, the truth, and the beauty of the universe and with the eternal wisdom which is the order in it” (Weil, 2005a, p.80). Concretely, she argued, during work, time represents the division between what one has and what one wants to create, what one is and what one wants to be, revealing time (and space) as the fundamental condition of human existence, and thereby exposing the limitations of the human desire to infinitely create. Hence, Weil argued, the reality of life is encountered only through activity, which “makes us experience in the most exhausting manner the phenomenon of finality rebounding like a ball; to work in order

120  Simone Weil – Malheur to eat, to eat in order to work” (1963, p.179). Moreover, Weil considered work the means by which the individual re-creates its life, seeking equilibrium between itself and the surrounding forces of nature, which may be interpreted as an extension of the praxis of self-control (ibid., p.178). Work is “the only way from me to myself,” forming, “the bond of identity combining the empirical and noumenal self” (in Moulaki, 1998, p.95). She explained, I’m always a dual being, on the one hand a passive being who is subject to the world, and on the other an active being who has a grasp on it; geometry and physics help me to conceive how these two beings can be united, but they do not unite them. Can I not attain perfect wisdom, wisdom in action, that would re-unite these two parts of myself? I certainly cannot unite them directly, since the presence of the world in my thoughts is precisely what this powerlessness consists of. But I can unite them indirectly, since this and nothing else is what action consists of. Not the appearance of action through which the uncontrolled imagination makes me blindly turn the world upside down by means of my anarchist desires, but real action, indirect action, action conforming to geometry, or, to give it its true name, work.4 And: [m]an’s greatness is always to recreate his life, to recreate what is given to him, to fashion that very thing which he undergoes. Through work he produces his own natural existence. Through science he recreates the universe by means of symbol. Through art he recreates the alliance between his body and his soul. (Weil, 1963, p.178) In short, Weil believed that the individual experiences her own value through work, providing her existence with meaning. Thus, to Weil, work constitutes precisely the concrete form of courage that brings about liberty, i.e., self-mastery and submission to reality. Weil’s interest in the theme of work developed against the background of a general idolisation of the worker in her generation, accompanied by opposition to capitalism, parliamentarism, materialism and technocracy, challenging the prevalent ideas about inevitable progress. This was, because a certain structural and technological backwardness in France, following late industrialisation and World War I, had led to unemployment, bankruptcies, fear of a loss of social status and a chronic lack of stability in government. Activists on the left and right equally opposed mechanisation, rationalisation and scientific management. Also Weil’s fellow pupils, mostly of bourgeois background, glorified work as the means to reconnect society with its roots (Moulakis, 1998, p.34), whilst also seeking to motivate workers themselves to reconstruct their identity and dignity.

Simone Weil – Malheur  121 Between 1931 and 1934, Weil taught philosophy at a girls’ school (McLellan, 1990, p.38ff), where she continued to alienate authorities with her political activism: she supported union workers, fed beggars in the school cafeteria (ibid., p.54), asked parents to lodge refugees (ibid., p.56) and used unconventional teaching methods, such as telling her students that the baccalaureate was only a convention (ibid., p.40).5 Simultaneously, Weil taught local workers the Greek language and philosophy, thereby seeking to enable them to connect intellectual and manual work by reclaiming the bourgeois’ monopoly of knowledge. According to biographer Thomas Nevin, Weil was a Hellenist, an avid reader of Greek texts, which sometimes could take on the meaning of a Gospel to her. Such a text, Nevin writes, was Plato’s Timaeus, in particular the passage, “[t]he origin of this world came as a mixture and combination of necessity and intelligence, intelligence ruling over necessity by persuading it to bring most of the things created toward the best” (Nevin, 1991, p.125). Since 1931, Weil also collaborated with Revolution Prolétarienne, a leftwing revue syndicaliste-communiste, in which the majority of her writings were published during her lifetime. However, Weil’s immense workload resulted in growing weakness, aggravated by her ongoing refusal to eat sufficiently or to use heating – her way of showing solidarity with the poor. Since her last years at the Ecole, Weil also suffered constant, violent headaches. Once, “[a]t a certain point in time exhaustion and increasing pain made me feel that a horrible collapse [déchéance] of my entire soul was imminent to the extent that for several weeks I tormented myself with the question whether dying was not my bounden duty” (in Moulakis, 1998, p.227). These headaches continued throughout her life (McLellan, 1990, p.94). In 1932, Weil travelled to Germany, hoping to witness amongst the workers a genuine, functioning alternative to fascism. Yet, she observed that just as in France, bureaucratic organisation prevented meaningful resistance: The problem is: to find some way of forming an organization that does not engender a bureaucracy. For bureaucracy always betrays. And an unorganised action remains pure, but fails. The “revolutionary syndicalists” are against bureaucracy, I know. But syndicalism is itself bureaucratic! And even the revolutionary syndicalists, discouraged, have wound up by coming to terms with the bureaucracy. (in Petrement, 1976, p.150f) Weil argued that bureaucracy forecloses willed action, substituting it with regulated chores. From an organisational perspective, communist and fascist parties seemed increasingly similar to Weil cross-nationally. Thus, in 1934, she withdrew completely from any political activity, except for theoretical work, “possible participation in a great spontaneous movement of the masses” (Moulakis, 1998, p.66), and “anti-colonialism and the campaign

122  Simone Weil – Malheur against passive defence exercises” (ibid., p.67). She concluded that whether in party politics, syndicalism or revolutionary movements participating even from a distance, in the play of forces which control the movements of history is not possible without contaminating oneself or incurring certain defeat. Nor is it possible, without great lack of conscientiousness, to take refuge in indifference or in an ivory tower. Thus there remains the formula of the “lesser evil”, so discredited by the use which the social-democrats have made of it, as the only applicable, provided it be applied with the coldest lucidity. (2004, p.137) During her leave, Weil drafted Oppression and Liberty, a summation of her intellectual position following her syndicalist past. Amongst other things, she described managerial society as the climax of the absence of liberty, pushing individuals into passivity. Thus, citizens of modern, Western societies were “perhaps, of all those that have followed each other in the course of human history, the ones which will have had to shoulder the maximum of imaginary responsibilities and the minimum of real ones” (Weil, 2004, p.114). Following her ethical commitment to unite thought and action, research and spiritual exercise, and seeking to find pure social reality, Weil began factory work herself in 1934. Her initial excitement was quickly replaced by shock about the atomisation of workers, their obedience, docility, lack of dignity and political consciousness (McLellan, 1990, p.98). Soon, she began to feel “this mental void inside [her], this absence of thought indispensable to the slaves of a modern machine” (Petrement, 1976, p.234). Through factory work, Weil had “received the mark of slavery” (Weil, 2009, p.25). This experience fundamentally changed Weil’s existential outlook: “I shall know joy again in the future, but there is a certain lightness of heart which, it seems to me, will never again be possible” (1965, p.15). It too had an effect on her philosophical outlook. Whereas she had previously argued that one could will liberty, she now realised that oppression beyond a certain degree only engendered submission. This experience was processed in her introduction of the concept of malheur (affliction), which, unlike suffering, implies physical pain, spiritual distress and social degradation. While Weil continued factory work, attempting to reconquer her sense of dignity, she never succeeded in making the kind of deep contacts with workers she had envisioned, and was, predominantly, met with a lack of interest (McLellan, 1990, p.111). After her factory experience, Weil had various profoundly influential encounters with Catholicism, providing deeper meaning and purpose to her experiences of malheur, processed in her writings between 1938 and her death. Her first encounter occurred during a holiday in a Portuguese fishing village in 1935, where she observed wives of fishermen during a profession of

Simone Weil – Malheur  123 mourning, which despite their seeming malheur radiated vibrant joy about God’s creation. There, she first identified Christianity with the religion of slaves to which she herself could not help but feel to belong (ibid., p.103ff). Her second encounter occurred in 1938 in the Abbey of Solesmes, where Weil attended a range of services. Therein, [b]y an extreme effort of concentration I was able to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all. (Weil, 2009, p.26) Her third encounter happened several months afterwards, when Weil began regular recitations of George Herbert’s poem Love (III) (McLellan, 1990, p.137). During one of these, in another fit of pain she felt while completely unprepared for it (I had never read the mystics), a presence more personal, more certain, and more real than that of a human being; it was inaccessible both to sense and to imagination, and it resembled the love that irradiates the tenderest smile of somebody one loves. (Weil, 1965, p.140) In this moment, she adds, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me” (McLellan, 1990, p.137). These encounters constitute three examples of attention in which Weil found God to reveal Himself to the empty mind, turning malheur, whose outward results “are nearly always bad” (Weil, 2009, p.43), into an experience within which “the splendor of God’s mercy shines” (ibid., p.44), precisely by becoming aware of the fact that his apparent absence is merely separation, the distance placed between God and creation, within which the individual can consciously partake. Motivated to pray, which she had previously refused in fear of autosuggestion, Weil began to regularly recite the “Our Father,” practicing attention and thereby deepening her mystical insights (McLellan, 1990, p.175). She described: At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second and sometimes the third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object

124  Simone Weil – Malheur of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence. Sometimes, also, during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person, by His presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than of that first occasion when He took possession of me. (Weil, 2009, p.29) Again, Weil emphasised that these insights could not be willed but resulted from consent given to God to penetrate the soul, whilst selflessly denying oneself in the process. This is not in contradiction to Alain’s influence. Animosity here is not overcome, it is “willed” to manifest itself in its clearest form by being completely passive and not evading pure experience. Hence, [i]n my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them. In the Fioretti the accounts of the apparitions rather pulled me off, if anything, like the miracles in the Gospel. Moreover in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in a smile on a beloved face. I had never read any mystical works because I had never felt any call to read them. God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics so that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact. (Ibid., p.27) Thus, it is not surprising that Weil, as child of agnostic parents and in line with her conviction that true knowledge was revealed, had considered God, as a problem the data of which could not be obtained here below, and I decided that the only way of being sure not to reach a wrong solution, which seemed to me the greatest possible evil, was to leave it alone. (Ibid., p.22) However, despite later accepting the mysteries of the Trinity, Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, despite developing a strong friendship with Father Perrin, a French Priest, who asked Weil to join the Catholic Church, she refused being part of what she considered an exclusive designation (McLellan, 1990, p.180).6 In 1940, Weil’s family fled from Nazi-occupied Paris to New York, where Weil desperately sought to be sent back to aid English resistance (Bingemer, 2015, p.33). She had contributed to resistance all the while (McLellan, 1990, 157) and was repeatedly arrested, yet, to her dissatisfaction, never imprisoned (ibid., p.170). Whilst back in England, Weil expressed dissatisfaction

Simone Weil – Malheur  125 with not being sent into active service to France. In 1943, she wrote The Need for Roots, analysing the crisis of modern civilisation and providing suggestions for the reconstitution of post-war France. The concept of uprootedness, discussed therein, will be introduced in the following. However, Weil’s health had been declining rapidly and she still refused eating more than French soldiers were rationed, weakening herself further by prioritising work over sleep. Eventually, Weil was admitted to hospital with severe tuberculosis and, still refusing to eat sufficiently, died soon afterwards in August 1943 (ibid., p.226). Her death has been perceived as enigmatic (for example, Cameron, 1977). However, it may be argued that her life was the expression of an attempt to increase knowledge of reality via attention and to embrace its animosity in malheur. Her biographer Richard Rees concluded, “whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love” (Rees, 1966, p.191).

5.2 Weil’s critique of politics The following section discusses Weil’s critique of politics through her concept of rootedness, or its antonym uprootedness (Ricciard, 2009, p.75ff). Weil introduced these two concepts in her final and probably most wellknown work, The Need for Roots, written in 1943, wherein she discussed what she interpreted as a social and spiritual disease that has befallen twentieth-century Western civilisation. Yet, the concept of rootedness remains somewhat vague within her work, being “one of the hardest to define” (Weil, 2005b, p.43), yet also, “perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul” (ibid.). On the one hand, it is described as the conditions of birth, family, place, profession, social surroundings and civic life, including communities and nations, which provide the individual with a shared narrative. A shared narrative, one that conserves meaningful elements of the past, can provide the individual with a moral, spiritual and intellectual basis. Yet, the term rootedness does not merely refer to a passive condition, limited to a certain material, spatiotemporal reality. Rather, it also implies an act: the conscious re-connection to a transcendent universe that is embodied within this reality in order to mould a future. Weil argued: The future brings us nothing, gives us nothing; it is we who in order to build it have to give it everything, our very life. But to be able to give, one has to possess; and we possess no other life, no other living sap, than the treasures stored up from the past and digested, assimilated, and created afresh by us. Of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital than this one of the past. Love of the past has nothing to do with any reactionary political attitude. Like all human activities, the revolution draws all its vigour from a tradition. (Ibid., p.51)

126  Simone Weil – Malheur In other words, the means by which to create a meaningful society today, Weil argued, were already present within humankind. Therefore, I propose to read her description of rootedness as the effort of bringing these treasures to presence, to process them and to assimilate them to the here and now, thereby creating meaningful existence. Weil really described a movement towards attunement, an attempt at wholesomeness or being-at-one. To understand this, it is worthwhile to explore how Weil used the root metaphor in earlier works. For example, she wrote, “it is the light falling continually from heaven, which alone gives a tree the energy to send powerful roots deep into the earth. The tree is really rooted in the sky” (1977b, p.328) and, likewise, “[t]he city gives one the feeling of being at home, but that feeling must be rooted in the absence of a place” (Weil, 1963, p.34). Here, rootedness describes a situation both within the mundane and the sacred, which envelops the mundane. From this perspective, a rooted individual would be one that is, too, actively, consciously, creating meaning from its situation within and in-between both realms. Even further, it can be argued, rootedness is to be understood as the very embrace of flux, for Weil also makes clear: one should not be fenced in by the past, “[o]n the contrary, never was plenty of fresh air more indispensable. Rooting in and the multiplying of contacts are complementary to one another” (2005b, p.49).7 The same, then, holds true for a rooted community: it is not fixated in past traditions and delimited by, say, borders, but rather an open, breathing and active bond (ibid., p.41). The opposite, Weil argues, are modern, Western societies. They manifest the exacerbation of the uprootedness, culminating in twentieth-century totalitarianisms, wars and mass migration. The multiplicity of encounters, the branching out and the active creation of meaning from within a situation of in-betweenness, she argued, had been replaced by something rather brute: a unidirectional relationship between the individual and the state, portraying itself as the only, final provider of ground (ibid.). Thus, uprootedness not only describes the loss of a certain space and traditions, such as they occur, for example, through military conquest – Weil refers to the Roman project of forming artificial cities across the Mediterranean, destroying the natives’ lifestyles, Hebrew enslavement of Palestinians, European colonial projects or Hitler’s use of the proletariat (ibid., p.44). But “[e]ven without a military conquest, money-power and economic domination can so impose a foreign influence as actually to provoke this disease of uprootedness.”8 Uprootedness thus not merely refers to a political phenomenon, but also to a loss of spiritual ground and hence to a malaise of the soul whose relationship to itself as a ground of experience and source of knowledge is severed. Whereas rootedness refers rather to an act, uprootedness refers to a state, one that she describes as “apathetic stupor,” “inertia” or “drowsiness” (2005b, p.46), as passiveness, in other words. This was precisely why she believed that it was “by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed” (Weil, 2005b, p.47).

Simone Weil – Malheur  127 How does this passiveness occur? In The Power of Words, written at the age of 25, Weil offered some answers. She argued, [o]ur lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits: and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related either to one another or to any concrete facts. (Weil, 2005a, p.243) Or put the other way around: I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever that I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself. There is nothing that I might not lose. It could happen at any moment that what I am might be abolished and replaced by anything whatsoever of the filthiest and most contemptible sort. (Ibid., p.90) Weil describes a fundamental existential problem: we are placed inside the flux of “changing, varying realities” which we can neither fully fathom nor master and which are thus irreconcilable with our desire to be in ultimate charge of our lives. This inability, she argues, evokes externalisation: the search for reference points not within experience itself but through outside abstractions. Weil argued, We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this world is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness […].But as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies […]. Men feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more suddenly than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. (Weil, 2009, p.139) The term ‘necessity’ here refers to the physical, chemical, biological order that prevails over the material world and which can be recorded through facts and thus be made intelligible albeit not be mastered entirely. Uprootedness can be understood as the attempt to evade necessity, by replacing it with man-made necessity: government. The need for such a government arises, “from the fact that it is intolerable to suppose that what is most precious in the world should be given over to chance” (Weil, 2005a, p.297). To be uprooted, then, is to have lost touch with reality and to be

128  Simone Weil – Malheur engaged in the attempt to create a new one. Europe during the 1930s, to Weil, was a perfect example. Concretely, she speaks of a pervasive divide where, “nothing is made to man’s measure; there exists a monstrous discrepancy between man’s body, man’s mind and the things which at the present time constitute the elements of human existence; everything is disequilibrium” (1977b, p.27). Politics, economics and culture, she argued, appeared to perpetuate this divide instead of seeking to overcome it, so that “[i]n every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: The ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends” (Weil, 2005a, p.242). Such extremes of uprootedness, Weil argued, were unprecedented (Weil, 2009, p.51). How could this have happened? Weil believed that uprootedness was self-propagating: Because artificial constructs were created from it, their creators required affirmation. Hence, Weil argued, the uprooted wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows. That is a factor making for social stability. (Weil, 1963, p.6) And further, “[w]e have gained importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else” (Weil, 2005b, p.217). Cohesiveness and stability within an uprooted society, Weil argued, depend on the equal dispersion of uprootedness – Landauer’s and Voegelin’s principle of mimicry and reflection that uphold the particular society also applies here. Hence, the state of uprootedness possesses an inner drive for expansion – all the while never really resolving the forlornness that meaninglessness has created. A vicious cycle emerges, in which there is a seduction in whatever helps us to forget the reality of the obstacles. That is why upheavals like war and civil war are so intoxicating; they empty human lives of their reality and seem to turn people into puppets. That is also why slavery is so pleasant to the masters. (Weil, 2005a, p.72) At its strongest, uprootedness not only targets the human being, but the very existence of reality itself, for “[i]f through excessive weakness we can neither call forth pity nor do harm to others, we attack what the universe itself represents for us. Then every good or beautiful thing is like an insult […]” (ibid., p.217). In this ever widening cycle of uprooting, Weil argues, “[i]t seems fairly clear that contemporary humanity tends pretty well everywhere towards a totalitarian form of organization” (1977b, p.35).

Simone Weil – Malheur  129 Power The discussion of uprootedness inevitably leads to a discussion of power. As mentioned above, the programme of uprootedness can only be pursued, maintained and justified through a continuous increase in power (Weil, 2005a, p.158). Power can only expand, Weil argued, through seeking to also crush, or rather, avoid reality, because “in order to be stable it must appear as something absolute and sacrosanct, both to those who wield and those who submit to it and also to other external powers” (ibid., p.255). Yet, reality, in turn, always infinitely exceeds human faculties and comprehension and thus mastery and thereby proves to be an obstacle to self-expansion. A vicious cycle ensues, an outbidding so to say, whereby power seeks to establish an “empire of might” (Weil, 1977b, p.123), which “extends as far as the empire of nature,” in the attempt, indeed, to govern nature itself. This is what Weil named the monotony of evil: never anything new, everything about it is equivalent. Never anything real, everything about it is imaginary. It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. […]. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself. (Weil, 1963, p.69) Power has transformed from a means towards an end in itself, for owing to its essential incapacity to seize hold of its object, [power] rules out all consideration of an end, and finally comes, through an inevitable reversal, to take the place of all ends. It is this reversal of the relationship between means and end, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for all that is senseless and bloody right through history. (Weil, 2005a, p.161) When unlimited aspiration meets limited possibilities and the finitude of individual existence, power can no longer expand, but only contract into itself, becoming ever more complex and total within the governable realm. Thus, “[i]f the State has morally killed everything, territorially, smaller than itself, it has turned territorial frontiers into prison walls to lock up people’s thoughts” (Weil, 1977b, p.204). It follows for Weil, as her teacher Alain proclaimed, that “[a]ll power is absolute” (Moulakis, 1998, p.152) and essentially totalitarian. Consequently, Weil argues, the history of humanity cannot simply be told as one of progress but rather, on the contrary, as one of monotonous power seeking. The search is merely clothed in progressively sophisticated ways, so that “[a]ll the absurdities which make history look like a prolonged delirium have their root in one essential absurdity, which is the nature of power” (Weil, 2005a, p.255). Moreover, it is important to stress that to Weil power not only caused suffering for those subjected to it but also for those exercising it (ibid.,

130  Simone Weil – Malheur p.160), for, “so pitilessly as might crushes, so pitilessly it maddens whoever ­possesses, or believes he possesses it” (1977b, p.123). Both oppressor and oppressed become “brothers in the same misfortune” (ibid.): in the ­reification of life to fixated abstractions securing power. Human history, Weil argued, “is simply the history of the servitude which makes men – oppressors and oppressed alike – the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus receded living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels” (ibid., p.120). Ultimately, any rule over the human being, having to eliminate the autonomy of its subjects, has as its radial consequence their death. However, Weil also believed that underlying even the expansion of power was ultimately, deep down, an awareness of the pull of the sacred. Even the banality of monotony is, at its core, a response to the sacred – just not by consent but by evasion. Indeed, [t]he love of power amounts to a desire to establish order among the men and things around oneself, either on a large or on a small scale, and this desire for order is the result of a sense of beauty. […] This unsatisfied appetite, the desire to keep on increasing, is due precisely to a desire for contact with universal beauty, even though the circle we are organising is not the universe. It is not the universe and it hides it. Our immediate universe is like the scenery in a theatre. (Weil, 1977a, p.99) Therefore, it can be argued that uprootedness cannot entirely succeed in its program of diminishing transcendent reality – because there will always be a reminder, even if it is just a trace in the appetite for something that power cannot entirely satisfy. Bureaucracy and state So far, Weil has argued that in the pursuit of evasion, power, which attempts to achieve and to portray itself as sacrosanct leads to “an ever-increasing disorder, and [is] ruined by a waste in proportion to that disorder” (Weil, p.1977b, p.33), which, in turn, endangers those in power. In this vicious cycle of self-perpetuating disorder, bureaucracy becomes a necessary tool. With its technical superiority, precision and machine-like efficiency, it is required to coordinate the drive for power. Bureaucracy, in turn, requires the state, “the bureaucratic organisation par excellence” (1977b, p.34). For Weil, the State embodies and centralises totalitarian power and hence is tasked by its very existence with controlling and destroying other forms of knowledge and organisation (1977b, p.40). The state, “far from producing beings capable of building up a human society, models all those subjected to it – oppressed and oppressors alike – according to its own image” (Weil,

Simone Weil – Malheur  131 1977b, p.36), and thereby, “degrades man to the point of making him love it […]” (ibid.). Beginning with the rise of totalitarian power in the sixteenth century, she argues, [e]very new development for the last three centuries has brought us closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognised in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else […]. Even in the domain of intellect the State has become, thanks to the diplomats it confers, almost the only source of effective authority. (1962, p.136) Since its origins, the State has become the central element of conquest and destruction (Weil, 1977b, p.35), Weil argues, as well as the centre of economic and social life. Yet, a clear definition of “the state” is missing in her work. In fact, she states that an exact definition would be difficult (Weil, 2005b, p.114). However, it appears that its elusiveness and the impossibility of a definition are precisely the states’ main characteristics, being the kind of illusionary, fixed and isolated abstraction which Weil mentioned in The Power of Words, substituting concrete existence. In the same essay, Weil wrote, when a word is properly defined it loses its capital letter and can no longer serve either as a banner or as a hostile slogan; it becomes simply a sign, helping us to grasp some concrete reality or a concrete objective, or method of activity. (2005a, p.242) The State, however, retains its metaphorical capital letter. While its actions are real, its meaning remains empty. Consequently, the political universe, is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property […]. Each of these words seems to represent to us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. (Ibid.) For Weil, political vocabulary and the wars fought in its name were essentially and inevitably hollow (ibid., p.250, 241). The fascisms and totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, uprooting Europe, were, ultimately, fought

132  Simone Weil – Malheur to maintain an illusion and to evade reality. Thereby, the particular type of politics to which a state subscribes was irrelevant for Weil because [w]hether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus – the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others. (1956, p.55) It is therefore not the state per se, understood as an organised political community under one government, which is problematic but the totalitarian power embodied within an abstract, uprooted state, positing itself as intermediary between the individual’s own experience and authority (Weil, 1977b, p.185), and requiring as its driving force devotion, sacrifice and the complete denial of oneself (ibid., p.158). Hence, [t]he State is a cold concern, which cannot inspire love, but itself kills, suppresses everything that might be loved; so one is forced to love it, because there is nothing else. That is the moral torment to which all of us today are exposed. (Ibid., p.197)

The collective, nation and political party According to Weil, the realm of the social within the state is no longer formed by a dynamic branching out of roots, but merely by governed relationality. For example, the nation: originally, Weil argued, the nation was understood as a sovereign, which rooted people exchanging free thought based on immediate experience (Weil, 2005b, p.41). However, the modern nation has been reduced to a numerical and territorial agglomeration and political unit, defined by its recognition of the authority and control of the State (Weil, 1977b, p.209), thus being itself inseparable from the State (Weil, 2005b, p.96). The apparent unity of totalitarian society, which has replaced direct relationality, Weil argues, attributes “a sacred character to the collectivity” (2005a, p.76), yet which, instead of mediating ascension, “chains us to the earth” (ibid., p.141). Such collectivity, to Weil, is a mimicry of the faith in God, whereby the soul, which would otherwise find itself in the bewildering in-between of profane and sacred, is put at ease within the “sacred” profane from which the sacred itself is foreclosed (Weil, 2009, p.129).

Simone Weil – Malheur  133 In such a collective, Weil continued to argue, thought was no longer possible. This is, because thought for Weil was an individual activity following individual, direct experience; hence, thought alone was capable of judgement (Weil, 1977b, p.30) and only thought could have thought itself as its object. This means that in a knowledge exchange, the thought of the other cannot be encountered directly, as a meeting between “I” and “You,”, but requires a third instance. This, according to Weil, is reality (or necessity) made available via work. Encounters only occur between “I” alongside another “I” before a common “it” (necessity), mediated by work. Yet, totalitarian, uprooted society substitutes “it” by governing how individuals relate to one another, thereby reducing the possibility for thought and thus thought itself to such a subordinate role, “that one may say, by way of simplification, that the function of verification has passed from thought to things” (ibid., p.32), into the hands of bureaucracy. Critical thought is practically destroyed. In that sense, Weil argues, totalitarian societies of the twentieth century are unprecedented, because “[n]ever has the individual been delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking” (1977b, p.27). In this critique originates Weil’s contempt for party politics and her weariness of democracy and majority rule. Weil reasoned: the French republican idea was developed from Rousseau’s notion of general will, according to which there exists one truth and one justice. Reason, which is identical in all men, perceives and chooses what is just, whereas crime is motivated by passion. Consequently, seeking consensus, each citizen’s opinions coincide inasmuch as they are just and differ inasmuch as they are motivated by passion, presupposing the absence of collective passion and the possibility for each member to freely think and debate (Weil, 2014, p.5ff). However, the reality of French politics, Weil argued, never achieved anywhere near such democracy (ibid., p.9). Rather, its political parties followed the logic of any uprooted collective, generating collective passions, exerting collective pressure by means of propaganda and seeking as an ultimate goal their expansion, hidden behind the myth of public interest (ibid., p.11). In line with the above, Weil argued that the power which parties seek can, firstly, never be fully achieved and secondly requires “killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice” (ibid.), so that, not a single mind can attend to the effort of perceiving, in public affairs, what is good, what is just and what is true. As a result, nothing is decided, nothing is executed, but measures that run contrary to the public interest, to justice and to truth. (Ibid., p.24) Liberty as unity of thought and action is foreclosed; the capacity for attention is reduced to running chores, so that thought is no longer compelled

134  Simone Weil – Malheur by the desire for truth, but by the desire to conform to pre-established rules (ibid., p.28). Hence, Weil argues, [the] essential tendency of all political parties is towards totalitarianism, first on the national scale and then on the global scale. And it is precisely because the notion of the public interest which each party invokes is itself a fiction, an empty shell devoid of all reality, that the quest for total power becomes an absolute need. Every reality necessarily implies a limit – but what is utterly devoid of existence cannot possibly encounter any form of limitation. It is for this reason that there is a natural affinity between totalitarianism and mendacity. (Ibid., p.14) Weil then proceeds to claim more radically: Nearly everywhere instead of thinking, one merely takes sides: for or against. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind. This is an intellectual leprosy; it originated in the political world and then spread through the land, contaminating all forms of thinking. This leprosy is killing us; it is doubtful whether it can be cured without first starting with the abolition of all political parties. (Ibid., p.34) In short, Weil identified politics as a necessary requirement emerging from uprootedness with the purpose of centralising and controlling the expansion of power to desacralise reality. The uprooted collective, rather than providing conditions for free thought and spiritual and moral development on the basis of which a community exchanges and coheres, forecloses thought, replacing it with a drive for monotony.

5.3  Weil’s experience of reality The following section explores Weil’s experience and description of the nature of reality and human personality, forming the basis for her theory of resistance to uprooted politics and collectivity, and her vision for an alternative, rooted community. Weil adopts what may be referred to as a panentheistic view, according to which reality originates in God, who is both within all of creation and yet extends infinitely beyond it, both hiding and revealing himself, having placed matter and the totality of space and time as the distance between himself and creation (Weil, 1963, p.33). Weil explains creation as, not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation. God and all his creatures are less than God alone. God accepted this diminution […]. God permitted the existence of things distinct from himself and worth infinitely less than himself. By this creative act he denied

Simone Weil – Malheur  135 himself, as Christ has told us to deny ourselves. God denied himself for our sakes in order to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for him. This response, this echo, which it is in our power to refuse, is the only possible justification for the folly of love of the creative act. (2009, p.89) Because creation issues from and contains God, yet God is infinitely other, too, there is both infinite identity between God and creation and, at the same time, infinite distance (ibid., p.74), so that the world “is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through” (Weil, 1977b, p.118). According to Weil, God had created humankind and the world, because he desired to be known and loved. Thus, she viewed all of creation as an act of love by God (2009, p.74), out of love for himself, so that “[a]t each moment our existence is God’s love for us. But God can only love himself. His love for us is love for himself through us” (Weil, 1963, p.28). Human existence is God’s waiting and begging for the human being to return this love. Thus, instead of ruling the universe himself, God created two forces to rule instead: necessity, which He attached to matter, including the psychic matter of the human soul, and human autonomy, which provides the authority to make free, individual choices (Weil, 2009, p.99). Weil argued, [s]o that there should be between Him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he has chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he had communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. (Ibid., p.141) The curtain of space, time and necessity which creates the distance between a withdrawn God and creation, which prevents the individual from being exposed to God’s radiation directly, allows the individual to decide whether to return God’s love or not (Weil, 1963, p.35). Therefore, the distance itself is to be loved, for it can remind the individual of God. This can be summarised as, [t]he love between God and God, which in itself is God, is this bond of double virtue: the bond that unites two beings so closely that they are no longer distinguishable and really form a single unity and the bond that stretches across distance and triumphs over infinite separation. The unity of God, wherein all plurality disappears, and the abandonment

136  Simone Weil – Malheur […] these are two forms expressing the divine virtue of the same Love, the Love that is God himself. (Weil, 2009, p.74) Weil identifies two movements in God’s creation. All matter is governed by mechanistic necessity, or gravity, implying the Newtonian laws of physics and analogous deterministic laws of nature, above all drawing the human being away from God (descent) and impelling it to expand its own power within the universe. Necessity forms the reality of the natural world so that “[t]he part of man which is in this world is the part which is in bondage to necessity and subject to the misery of need” (Weil, 2005a, p.224). While the mechanistic workings of necessity can be made intelligible, its origins remain mysteriously unintelligible to the human faculties. The second movement within the universe is grace, which describes the resistance to gravity through the autonomous decision to return the love of God. Weil explains that, [m]an can never escape obedience to God. A creature cannot but obey. The only choice offered to man as an intelligent and free creature, is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If he does not desire it, he perpetually obeys nevertheless, as a thing subject to mechanical necessity. If he does desire obedience, he remains subject to mechanical necessity, but a new necessity is added on, a necessity constituted by the laws that are proper to supernatural things. Certain actions become impossible for him, while others happen through him, sometimes despite him. (2009, p.76) Grace can be understood as consent to God, consciously desiring obedience and thereby for a moment overcoming gravity. For Weil, God has created the world and has allowed the individual to be something. Grace is to become nothing but a slave obeying God, in order to allow God to become everything again (Weil, 2005a, p.102). Thus, Grace is de-creation, ascending to God. Three domains of reality Against this background of the origin and structure of creation, Weil argues that reality consists of three domains, which are not spatially or temporally different, but describe degrees of visibility or unveiling of one single reality (Weil, 2009, p.3). The natural domain contains what is intelligible to the human senses and intellect, susceptible to human will, “all things that are purely natural, close, easily recognisable by intelligence and imagination, among which we can make our choice, arrange them to fixed and finite ends” (ibid.). Therein, contradictions occur when human will collides with necessity, revealing the infinite disparity between human desires and possibilities. When necessity becomes conscious through experiencing

Simone Weil – Malheur  137 contradiction, the supernatural domain is realised as suffusing natural reality, being “the real presence of God in everything which imagination does not veil” (ibid., p.112). The supernatural implies everything which is absolutely independent of the human being (ibid., p.3), “a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties” (Weil, 2005a, p.221) and which is yet within and extending natural reality. Weil identifies the natural domain as the foundation of facts, which are contingent, and supernatural reality as the foundation of eternal principles of the good, beauty, truth, justice, legitimacy (ibid., p.222). The experience of existential contradiction reveals the human condition as mysteriously neither wholly within natural reality, nor able to access supernatural reality, which only ever reveals itself to the limited human faculties through its inaccessibility and unintelligibility. Rather, human existence lies in-between, only able to perceive “terrestrial manifestation of this reality” (ibid.) in the form of contradictions, which, in other words, are “the only realities: they are the criterion of the real” (Weil, 2005a, p.259). Thus, the path to knowledge of reality leads through the experience of contradiction and the resulting state of bewilderment and confusion, whereas the absence of contradiction and bewilderment reveals imagination (ibid.). Contradiction is experienced within the third domain, the human soul or heart (which Weil appears to use interchangeably), constituting the sole human faculty which, through contradiction, can bring to consciousness the peculiar in-between structure of existence in reality. This domain consists of “things which without being under the empire of the will, without being related to natural duties, are yet not entirely independent of us” (Weil, 2009, p.4). The soul/heart receives “the pressure of God” (ibid.), pulling from the natural to the supernatural domain. From this domain issues a feeling of being “outsiders, uprooted, in exile here below” (ibid., p.115), as the soul clearly sees the distance between the natural and supernatural, yet lacks the means of overcoming it, thus suffering from a natural, constant state of longing, “which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world” (Weil, 2005a, p.222). This experience of the domains of reality, in which “looking and eating are two different operations,” is, “man’s greatest affliction, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death…” (Weil, 2005a, p.260). Eternal beatitude, on the other hand, which is unattainable by the human being during its life, “is a state where to look is to eat” (ibid.).

5.4 Attention and malheur Through grace, it is possible to increase knowledge of reality. Weil suggests two particular practices, attention and malheur, to realise grace. These practices are founded on Weil’s mystical anthropology, which assumes that “[i]f we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire […]. We only have to draw aside the veil of unreality and we shall see that

138  Simone Weil – Malheur they are given to us in this way” (Weil, 1963, p.20). Each human being by the mere fact of her existence already possesses the ability to directly connect to the knowledge already present within the universe and the soul – this knowledge merely needs to be unveiled. Grace thus begins with recognising the tension between natural and supernatural. Weil stated: This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration […]. When we have learned to hear the silence, this is what we grasp more distinctly through it. (2009, p.143) Elsewhere, Weil writes, [a]s one has to learn to read or to practice a trade, so one must learn to feel in all things, first and almost solely, the obedience of the universe to God. It is really an apprenticeship […]. Whoever has finished his apprenticeship recognises things and events, everywhere and always, as vibrations of the same divine and infinitely sweet word. (2009, p.78) In all matter of the natural world, including the soul or heart, Weil argued, can be discerned the symbols or reflections of God. To practice seeing His reflections is the first task of grace, which is not accomplished once and for all, but which remains a lifelong, existential challenge. Weil promotes the learning of seeing and listening as meditation in the form of attention, which describes an effort of active passivity, stillness and waiting to become a vessel to which reality reveals itself. Precisely, [a]ttention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it. (Weil, 2009, p.62) Importantly, attention must not be willed and not seek a particular outcome. Contrary to an effort to achieve factual knowledge which seeks to

Simone Weil – Malheur  139 acquire a certain object, attention requires surrendering to pure experience (Weil, 2005a, p.232). Rather, attention is wholly selfless, an act in which “I have to deprive all that I call I of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived” (ibid., p.233). Then, the individual is open to be permeated by the supernatural, experiencing in its soul or heart “the gateway to eternity. The infinite is an instant” (ibid.). Attention then is an instant of pure presence, in which reality in all three domains reveals itself, bringing to consciousness the in-betweenness of existence defined by its distance to God. It is similar to, “lightning flashes. Instants when everything stands still, instants of contemplation, of pure intuition, of mental void, of acceptance of the moral void. It is through such instants that he is capable of the supernatural” (Weil, 1963, p.11). Exposure to the timeless, spaceless, formless of the supernatural, realised as enveloped within natural reality, creates an awareness that recognises the limitations of human conceptions of space and time, and faulty fixations of thought. Therefore, Weil considers attention the intermediary act which makes detachment from these limitations possible (2005a, p.259), and through which “the good” consequently descends from the supernatural world into the human soul or heart to be spread from there through action into community (ibid., p.222). Something that could initiate, or provoke attention, Weil argued, was the beauty of the world, understood not as an attribute of matter but as a relationship between the world and the individual senses (2009, p.103). In modern Western societies, Weil argued, where knowledge of and respect for religion had decreased, a sense for beauty nonetheless remained (ibid., p.102f). This sense of beauty, according to Weil, was the commonest and most natural way for God to approach. Moreover, she argued, if the truth about reality was really desired with an empty soul, without seeking a particular content, it would be received (Weil, 2014, p.22), because truth is all the thoughts that surge in the mind of a thinking creature whose unique, total, exclusive desire is for the truth. Mendacity, error, are the thoughts of those who do not desire truth, or those who desire truth plus something else. (Ibid., p.20) and, “if we ask him for bread, he will not give us a stone” (Weil, 1963, p.41). To not turn away from revelation, but to continuously pursue “intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention” (Weil, 2005a, p.91), despite the effort it requires and the difficult, bewildering insights about human existence which it imposes, in other words to accept experience, is what Weil calls love. Therefore, “the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love” (ibid., p.292). It is humble acknowledgment of, on the one hand, the limitations of knowledge concerning the order of reality, stemming from the distance between God and creation, and, on the other hand, acknowledgement of the infinite ways of experiencing and knowing, which

140  Simone Weil – Malheur dethrones any supposed human monopoly of knowledge while embracing learning. According to Weil, [t]o empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the centre of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centres and that the true centre is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the centre of each soul. Such consent is love. (2009, p.100) This love is not a state or condition, but a continuously renewed act of deciding on the direction of the soul (ibid., p.81).9 The ability for attention and love, Weil argues, “constitutes a link which attaches every man without exception to that other reality” (2005a, p.222). Regardless of their particular circumstances, each human being issues from and is able to reconnect to God. This link means that “[a]ll human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter” (ibid., p.223). This common centre is the only logical and legitimate basis on which Weil embraces universal respect towards and protection of human beings (ibid.). Yet, Weil also believed that attention and love alone did not suffice in making independent reality perfectly visible, as any remaining attachments to the world taint visibility by transferring the human self into it, manufacturing illusions. A perfect view, she argued, is only possible through absolute detachment, achieved by the highest degree of selflessness, which constitutes the annihilation of self, for, “[i]t is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him” (Weil, 2005a, p.143). While contact with God can also be achieved through joy, Weil focused on its opposite, extreme suffering, which she refers to as malheur, to achieve detachment. This is discussed in depth in her essay “The Love of God and Affliction”. While God can never be perfectly present through attention on account of limited human faculties, she argued, He can be almost perfectly absent in malheur (Weil, 2009, p.75). As it is only contact to God which matters, not whether it has been established through joy or malheur (ibid., p.78),10 the latter “is the only possibility of perfection for us on earth” (ibid., p.75). Malheur, which as a concept first emerged during Weil’s factory work, describing a combination of physical pain, distress of the soul and social degradation (ibid., p.81), is distinct from suffering, because it constitutes “an uprooting of life” (ibid., p.68), a device for pulverising the soul; the man who falls into it is like a workman who gets caught up in a machine. He is no longer a man but a torn and bloody rag on the teeth of a cogwheel. (Weil, 2005a, p.90)

Simone Weil – Malheur  141 Malheur is the cold anonymity which reifies those it affects from human beings into things, depriving them of all hope for warmth (Weil, 1977a, p.73) and future and thus inducing the feeling of an absence of finality which could release the afflicted from pain (Weil, 2009, p.115). Thus, malheur is extreme suffering, alongside irreducible hatred and repulsion (Weil, 2005a, p.282), which is by its nature inarticulate (ibid., p.85). And yet, Weil considered malheur rewarding. Most importantly because it demonstrates the absence of logic, pattern or predictability to suffering. It makes the individual present to chance underlying life and, thus, exposes necessity/gravity as the ordering force of reality (1977a, p.73). Accordingly, Weil considered malheur a marvel of divine technique. It is a simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal and cold. The infinite distance separating God from the creature is entirely concentrated into one point to pierce the soul in its centre. (Ibid., p.80) In extreme malheur, God is not only felt to be distant, but to be absent altogether. Similar to negative theology, precisely the absence of God affirms his existence. To pay attention to the suffering of others and to contemplate their suffering exposes oneself not only to the other person’s misery but also to the possibility of malheur as such. It means to contemplate senselessness while – and this is the difficult task – not resigning from loving the world (Jesson, 2013, p.190). Blaming someone or something for suffering can be less painful, assuming a cause, a pattern, and thus the possibility of a solution, than to think that anyone can be made to suffer anytime. Hence, in order to feel and practice compassion, one must resign one’s demand for sense. To suffer unconsoled, refusing to flee from the void which suffering creates by filling it with imagination, “which perpetually tends to stop up the cracks though which grace flows,”11 is to approximate, to become present to God (Weil, 2009, p.70). To suffer malheur consciously means to, renounce the past and future around a present which is always falling away. Memory and hope destroy the wholesome effect of affliction by providing an unlimited field where we can be lifted up in imagination, but faithfulness to the passing moment reduces man truly to be nothing and thus opens to him the gates of eternity. (Weil, 1963, p.xxi) The possible gift of purposefully unconsoled malheur is the experience of non-being, loss of personality and nothingness, the disappearance from the multiplicity of particular existents into the unity of God. As the individual possesses nothing on her own except the power and autonomy to say ‘I’, her only possible free act is the destruction of the ‘I’, which can only be accomplished by extreme malheur (Weil, 2005a, p.102). It is sin, Weil argues, to

142  Simone Weil – Malheur assume that one’s self, or ‘I’, originates within oneself, rather than in God, and is distinct from God. On the contrary, Weil clarifies, nothing in the “I” which is of value did not originate in God, who has given the ‘I’ as a loan. By reducing the individual to nothingness, malheur reveals this relationship between God and I; by embracing nothingness, the individual returns the loan to God, becoming a host to God and, thus, in a sense, God himself, who enters her soul (Weil, 2009, p.36). Hence, [h]e whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces it finds himself nailed to the very centre of the universe. It is the true centre; it is not in the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God […] this nail has pierced cleanly through all creation, through the thickness of the screen separating the soul from God. (Ibid., p.81) To thus embrace and accept malheur is pure obedience, a “supreme virtue,” Weil argued (1963, p.38ff). This can be furthered by wilfully detaching oneself from uprooted societies, which implies accepting the past, forgiving debts, renouncing material possession, practicing attention, accepting death, obeying God and embracing the void. In other words, detachment is also purposefully [t]o uproot oneself socially and vegetatively. To exile oneself from every earthly country. To do all that to others, from the outside, is a substitute (ersatz) for decreation. It results in unreality. But by uprooting oneself one seeks greater reality. (Weil, 1963, p.34) Elsewhere she writes, “[i]t is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day” (ibid.). Yet, Weil also clarified that total annihilation and thereby a perfect view of God were not possible within this life, because spiritual annihilation concluded is death, “the center and object of life. I used to think that, for those who live as they should, it is the instant when, for an infinitesimal fraction of time, pure truth, naked, certain and eternal, enters the soul” (Weil, 2009, p.22). Therefore, ultimately, “we have to die in order to liberate a tied up energy, in order to possess an energy which is free and capable of understanding the true relationship of things” (Weil, 1963, p.30). And yet, Weil did not propose that those in search for truth should simply die. On the contrary.

5.5 Weil’s conception of community Sacred inspiration, Weil believed, ought to aid in bringing about social transformation: the spiritualisation of ordinary life could ultimately reroot society spiritually and morally, transforming politics into an instrument of justice,

Simone Weil – Malheur  143 operating within human limitations but with the right, sacred aspiration. This community would not be built once and for all, but required continual struggle for justice. And this was not as unrealistic, as her criticism of state, nation and uprooted collectives made us believe. Weil argued that the expansion of power, responsible for the suppression of thought, was essentially limited (Moulakis, 1998, p.54). As power expands beyond its control, it breeds its own parasite of waste, anger and despair. This is its internal contradiction, which “every oppressive system carries within itself like a seed of death […]” (Weil, 2005a, p.168). Precisely those who have suffered waste, anger and despair, the afflicted, could be the first agents of change, Weil argued, having been able to see beyond the veil of power and into the order of reality. She also believed that only those who have felt extreme malheur were really capable of true compassion for God’s creation. This compassion, she argued, ought to be the basis for justice. If the afflicted were able to embody the love of nature and of one’s neighbour, imitating divine love, they could make visible God here below, radiating his love towards others (Moulakis, 1998, p.99), so that God is present at the point where the eyes of those who give and those who receive meet. The sufferer and the other love each other, starting from God, through God, but not for the love of God; they love each other for the love of the one for the other. (Weil, 2009) Those capable of compassion, she argued, can create in others “something stirring, touching, poetic and sacred”, inspiring others to follow their path (Weil, 2005b, p.175). Consequently, compassion is a movement with the potential for inspiration, because compassion is able, without hindrance, to cross frontiers, extend itself over all countries in misfortune, over all countries without exception; or all peoples who are subjected to the wretchedness of our human condition. Whereas pride in national glory is by its nature exclusive, non-transferable, compassion is by its nature universal. (Ibid., p.170) Thus, for those capable of compassion, all frontiers between classes, race, sex, countries, faiths, etc., are open (Bell, 1998, p.204). Concretely, in the context of post-World War II, Weil’s hope lied alone with the afflicted, capable of “refashioning the soul of the country” (2005b, p.145), derived “from the eternal source of all legality” (ibid., p.177). Community in practice In her final work, The Need for Roots, as well as in an earlier essay, The Needs of the Soul, Weil developed a concrete outline of a possible alternative to the

144  Simone Weil – Malheur twentieth century’s centralised, totalitarian collectives. First of all, Weil’s alternative collectives are not based on rights, originating in the contingent, natural world and thus subject to change, promoting self-interest and contention, but they are based on obligations which “remain independent of conditions. They belong to a realm situated above all conditions, because it is situated above this world” (Weil, 2005b, p.3). As opposed to rights which are obeyed through imitation, obligations are of experiential nature, issuing from the supernatural domain which binds all human beings identically to universal, objective and unchanging principles, though they will be performed differently. An obligation, has no foundation, but only a verification in the common consent accorded by the universal conscious. It finds expression in some of the oldest written texts which have come down to us. It is recognised by everybody, without exception in every single case where it is not attacked as a result of interest in passion. (Ibid., p.4) Weil envisions what may be described as a perennial, universal conscious which contains the knowledge of obligations, akin to common sense, and which she finds formulated in sacred texts across space and time. On this universal basis, Weil argues, there exists an eternal and unconditional duty towards every human being (2005a, p.107). As a form of resistance, she demanded that this universality be expressed across all structures of modern, Western, totalitarian life, because “[w]e are living in times that have no precedent, and in our present situation universality, which could formerly be implicit, has to be fully explicit. It has to permeate our language and the whole of our way of life” (Weil, 2009, p.51). Therefore, her ideal community’s first obligation is to remove any obstacles to universality, whatever is detrimental to the growth and mysterious germination of the impersonal element in the soul. This means, on the one hand, that for every person there should be enough room, enough freedom to plan the use of one’s time, the opportunity to reach ever higher levels of attention, some solitude, some silence. At the same time the person needs warmth, lest it be driven by distress to submerge itself in the collective. (Weil, 2005a, p.79) There is unity and equality in a society in which each member has undergone thinking, will be capable to further develop thought and possesses the liberty to attune her actions accordingly (Weil, 2004, p.87). This notion of order, Weil argues, is the first need of the soul. It can also be aided by exploring those texts and traditions which have revealed humanity in the past. Weil’s list of obligations continues with a variety of what she considers fundamental, vital human physical and moral needs, not to be confused

Simone Weil – Malheur  145 with contingent desires (Weil, 2005a, p.111). To the need for order, allowing each individual to practice their obligations unperturbed, and the need for liberty, she adds the need for rules, which should be general, few and stable, originating from a chosen and accepted source of authority and decided on by each member; the need for obedience, which refers both to active consent to rules and to God. Further needs include the ability to take initiative and responsibility, being meaningfully involved in and contributing to the community; flourishing local and regional life and educational activities; equality, which means granting each individual the same amount of respect and consideration regardless of race, sex, profession; hierarchism, which means devotion to superiors seen as symbols of the transcendent; honour for one’s professional life; punishment for crime only to help the criminal see justice; absolute freedom of expression; security; private property; and participation in collective possessions. Finally, she raised the need for truth, which she considered the most sacred (Weil, 2005a, p.116ff) – the skill of acquiring truth via attention must be taught at schools, she argued. While this list of needs appears unusually restrictive in parts, such as the need for hierarchism and punishment, Weil ensured that “[n]othing in all this would involve the slightest attack on public liberty. It would only mean satisfaction of the human soul’s most sacred need – protection against suggestion and falsehood” (ibid., p.140). This is because in her vision, only those who have given total, sincere and enlightened consent can form real community. Anyone who exercises power without having given that consent is committing a crime, she argued: [a]ny state whose whole official doctrine constitutes an incitement to this crime is itself wholly criminal. Any state whose official doctrine is not primarily directed against this crime in all its forms is lacking full legitimacy. Any legal system which contains no provisions against this crime is without the essence of legality […]. Any government whose members commit this crime, or authorise it in their subordinates, has betrayed its function. Any collectivity […] whose normal functioning implies or induces the practice of this crime is convicted of illegitimacy and should be reformed or abolished. (Ibid., p.226) All forms of power, in other words, have to be entrusted to those who have sworn consent to the obligation towards all human beings. Their needs cannot be subordinated to those of the state, or to the logic of money, rationality, race or colour (ibid., p.227). Whoever finds themselves in a political role, “if in his heart he hungers and thirsts after justice, must desire to possess this faculty of composition on a multiple plane, and consequently is bound, in the end, to receive it” (Weil, 2005b, p.212). In other words, a community is only just if justice is present on all planes of society, requiring that all members of society have compassionate hearts, reflecting God’s love and justice

146  Simone Weil – Malheur in their actions on their particular planes, operating within their human limits but expressing sacred humanity and thereby transforming the public spaces with the spirit of justice. Thus, everyone is responsible for the just organisation of community, structured around regional and local communities (Bell, 1998, p.129). Weil insisted on such “real, active and natural participation in the life of a community” (2005b, p.40) and emphasised: “This is a study which is permanently open to revision” (Weil, 2005a, p.227). The foundation of Weil’s alternative community is love and compassion, which is justice, acquired through attention and malheur – but of course it remains an experiment. Weil was aware how opaque her vision can appear, understanding the dangers of a concept as vague as “obligation” or “need of the soul,” and understood the complexity of her demand. Most societies would have reversed the relationship between the needs of the soul and the duty to attend to them, starving or manipulating needs instead (Weil, 2005a, p.112). Generally, dimensional equality between infinite obligation on the one hand and its finite subject on the other cannot be achieved. Ultimately, she argued, it cannot be known whether it is possible at all to practically create a community based on such obligations (ibid., p.113). Hence, [t]he method of political action outlined here goes beyond the possibilities of the human intelligence, at least as far as those possibilities are known. But it is precisely that which lends it its value. It is no use asking ourselves whether we are or are not capable of applying it. The answer would always be no. It is something which must be perfectly clearly conceived in the mind, pondered over long and often, planted permanently in that part of the mind where thoughts take root, and brought up whenever decisions have to be taken. There is then, perhaps, the chance that the decisions, though imperfect, will be good ones. (Weil, 2005b, p.212) Weil’s vision of community, after all then, appears both realistic and pragmatic. Rather than establishing her ideas as absolute principles, Weil took into consideration the limits of human faculties and thus emphasised the experimental nature of community building and the impossibility to provide a blueprint. She was aware that community ought to begin with the path into the soul or heart and ought to continue through detachment (Weil, 2005a, p.143). Within the soul, the individual finds “the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain” (Weil, 2009, p.114). This community, Weil argued, is the human’s only “native city,” its only true “country here below” (ibid., p.112). This “non-place” is, on the one hand, too difficult to love, because human faculties can never wholly grasp it, yet, on the other hand, it is too easy to love, because the faculties can imagine anything they like (ibid., p.114). Therefore, this native city and non-place should not be considered a point

Simone Weil – Malheur  147 reached once and for all through careful attention and detachment, but, rather remains a horizon that pulls the seeker towards itself, yet always recoils from touch. The learning experiment, then, remains the only realistic approach to community.12

5.6 Conclusion Weil’s life can be seen as an attempt to exist fully and consciously within tension: Via attention, Weil rigorously sought out tension, via malheur, she sought to cultivate and expand it. Her continuous fight against political, social and economic injustices and inequalities, against party politics, fascism, bureaucracy and patriarchy, can be seen as a critique of externalisation, against the “intellectual leprosy” that glosses over tension and seeks to replace it. Weil was so ruthless in her attempt to let gravity and grace, timelessness and time, ignorance and knowledge collide, that she even embraced malheur and turned it into a way to become present to God: its horror and pain, its unfairness and absolute power induce the sense of a total absence of God and hence remind one of God – of something that orders this world before humankind imposes its structures, something which is always more powerful and never comprehensible. Weil’s life, as precarious, seemingly contradictory and cruel it appeared, was an attunement to presence in which she saw beauty. Weil contrasts a society ordered by politics – an uprooted society – with a society rooted in tension, listening to and aiding the soul, instead of muting it. As in Landauer and Voegelin, the guideline for this society was the ancient community within the soul, where all the existents of this world are united in a single common source. It is possible to connect to this community via the practice of presence – malheur. And despite her severe criticism of the unprecedented foreclosure of experience and lack of thought in modern, Western society, she argued that the essence of human personality remains its desire for truth and justice, and its capability for attention and malheur, for a consciousness of the various obligations always proceeds from a desire for good which is unique, unchanging and identical with itself for every man, from the cradle to the grave. This desire, perpetually stirring in the depths of our being, makes it impossible for us ever to resign ourselves to situations in which obligations are incompatible with one another. Either we have recourse to lying in order to forget their existence, or we struggle blindly to extricate ourselves from them. (Weil, 2005a, p.113) Weil believed that God, who has created the world in a desire to be loved and known, despite infinitely extending beyond the world and appearing too distant or absent altogether, could be found within all of profane reality.

148  Simone Weil – Malheur Thus, every human being, by the mere fact of her existence, practicing attention and malheur, could share in the distance between God and creation, profane and sacred, approximating truth and justice through direct access to the wisdom present within God’s creations. Resistance, she argued, is the individual’s return of the love of God felt within her soul and put into action, radiating the presence of God into society. Interestingly, whereas in the discourse of crisis, politics and the political serve as tools for self-affirmation, allowing the subjected individual to achieve subjectivity through the political process, Weil’s philosophy and practice aimed at dissolving the self, so that, instead of having to attach itself to external markers of identification and meaning, it can return to the ancient community as it is experienced in the soul.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9

10

11 12

Cited in Moulakis (1998, p.86) and Lecons (p.193). Citing Ouvres Completes, 1, p.71. Citing Simone de Beauvoir. Mc Lellan, Utopian Pessimist, 28, citing Ouvres Completes, p.209. To such criticism, Simone Weil once replied: “I have always regarded dismissal as the natural culmination of my career” (Moulakis, 1998, p.38). In Waiting for God, a collection of essays posthumously assembled by Father Perrin and Gustave Thibon, a lay theologian whom Weil knew, she argued: “I should betray the truth […] if I left the point, where I have been since my birth, at the intersection of Christianity and everything that is not Christianity” (p.32). For more on this, see Bell (1998). To money and power, Weil adds as causes of uprootedness, the loss of meaningful work, of education, severing knowledge from the desire to “learn for the sake of learning, the desire for truth…,” the depopulation of the countryside, the loss of the past, the development of bureaucracy and a State (2005b, p.43ff). It has been noted that Weil considered Jews as “responsible for the uprooting of the whole terrestrial world” and continued, despite awareness of the Holocaust, strong criticism of Judaism, imagining post-war France as one in which Jewish minorities would be dispersed through Christian upbringing and intermixed marriages. For more on this, read Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum. Weil states, “if we silence all desires and opinions and if we love without formulating any words, we bind our whole soul to think “Thy will be done”, the thing which after that we feel sure we should do (even though in certain respects we may be mistaken) is the will of God. For if we ask him for bread he will not give us a stone.” This is inactive action, waiting for God’s guidance, in 1963 (p.91). In a letter from 1942, Weil states, “[w]e know then that joy is the sweetness of contact with the love of God, that affliction is the wound of this same contact when it is painful, and that only the contact matters, not the manner of it” (2009, p.44). This quote is provided by Weil’s friend Gustave Thibon in the introduction to Gravity and Grace (1963). A possible example of such a community could be the civilisation of Languedoc, the Cathars, which appear in Weil’s writings as a model civilisation. Weil considered Catharism both as the least dogmatic religion of the Middle Ages,

Simone Weil – Malheur  149 praising its horizontal distribution of knowledge and involvement, spreading through education, art and music, and its members’ perfection of malheur in thought and action as the path out of spiritual darkness, adopted and developed from the Greeks. The Cathars originated in Southern France in the twelfth century and were largely extinguished in the thirteenth century by the forces of kings and Popes, who considered them heretics and systematically destroyed their scriptures. Thus, little is known of their civilisation, except that it appears to have flourished with its distinct Occitan language, literature and political organisation, which constituted a mixture of monarchy and democracy in which members of their own religion lived peacefully side by side with Catholics. Catharism was a dualistic theology inspired by various sources, such as Platonism and Druid beliefs, based on the idea that the god of the old testament, responsible for creating all matter, was evil and tainted by sin, whereas the god of the new testament created the spiritual realm, being the source of all goodness. Cathars appear to have lived in abstention, practiced gender equality in which women could become spiritual leaders, rejected killing any living beings, war or capital punishment, marriage and reproduction. Their organisational structure was flat, based on decentralised, small city states with high cohesion, informed obedience and patriotism tied not to locality but common language. Moreover, Cathars criticised the Catholic Church for its political, spiritual and moral corruption. (McLellan, 1990, p.154ff; Weil, 1965, p.130).

6

Václav Havel – Neklid

At first sight, Václav Havel (1936–2011) does not quite seem to fit amongst these philosophers of presence. He was the only one to become a politician: the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic. And yet, as this chapter proceeds to show, Havel was a “different” politician with his own interpretation of how politics ought to be practiced. Like Landauer, Voegelin and Weil before, he is difficult to categorise – a bourgeois-turned outsider, a dissident-turned president, a playwright and poet who believed in the supernatural forces of Being yet who also supported the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and gave it an almost spiritual meaning. Yet, throughout his life, Havel was occupied with a theme we have encountered in the previously mentioned thinkers: “the disintegration of man’s oneness with himself and the loss of everything that gives human existence a meaningful order, continuity and its unique outline” (Havel, 1988, p.145).1 As this quote demonstrates, Havel conceptualised identity as oneness with oneself, a continuous act of assuming self-responsibility, formed in response to a primordial experience of an absolute horizon that transcends human order and comprehension, a horizon that is felt as present within consciousness.2 Havel criticised both the post-totalitarian East and democratic West for having created a political order that sought to negate and to substitute this absolute horizon, using ideology to manufacture a new panorama of everyday life. As such, he argued, modern humanity was living a lie. Genuine change, Havel believed, was only possible through living within the truth – through rediscovering the absolute horizon present within consciousness and attuning one’s action thereto. The prerequisite for this attunement, he argued, was neklid, translated as “restlessness” or “turbulence of the soul” – an unceasing pull by the absolute horizon. Neklid motivates an infinite multiplicity of types and degrees of living within the truth, opening the conventional category of the “dissident” to include individual revolts of conscience, thus emphasising the micro-power of citizens otherwise disengaged from formal political processes. Neklid, I argue in the following, constitutes a practice of presence.

Václav Havel – Neklid  151 It is through Neklid that cracks are created in formal procedures and spaces opened that elude state control. Here, the realm of anti-political ­politics may emerge, of a genuine civil society, parallel to politics. This was Havel’s ideal – albeit, he believed, it would remain an impossible goal (Havel, 1997, p.17). Much like the thinkers discussed earlier, Havel believed that ­humanity was infinitely and inextricably caught in between its ­mundane existence demanding practical order and its access to the transcendent, ­absolute order, so that man is in fact nailed down – like Christ on the cross- to a grid of paradoxes: stretched between the horizontal world and the vertical of Being; dragged down by the hopelessness of existing-in-the-world on the one hand, and the unattainability of the absolute on the other, he balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of c­ arrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious, by virtue of his defeats; through perceiving absurdity, he once again finds meaning; through personal failure, he once more discovers responsibility; through the defeat of several prison sentences, he gains a victory – at the very least – over himself (as an object of worldly temptations); and through death- his last and greatest defeat- he finally triumphs over his fragmentation; by completing, for all time, his outline in the “memory of Being”, he returns at last – having rejected nothing of his “otherness” – to the womb of integral Being. (Havel, 1988, p.375) Havel’s writing, the openness of his absurdist plays provoking a quest for meaning and his political activity as dissident and even president, appealing to a global revolution of consciousness, are based on understanding human existence as thrown from the integrity of the absolute horizon that includes the multiplicity of existence in one integral Being into an alien world, tasked with the responsibility to live within the truth. This is the basis for his ­critique and personal course of politics to be discussed in the following (Havel, 1997, p.18).

6.1 Biography Born in 1936 to a “grand-bourgeoise” family in Prague, Havel enjoyed a protected early upbringing (Havel, 1990, p.3). His grandfather (Vácslav) is described as being a genuine capitalist, belonging to the bourgeoisie. He handed his property empire down to Havel’s father (Václav Maria), whose brother (Milos) was one of the founders of the Czech film industry (ibid., p.16).3 In 1942, after Hitler had annexed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland in 1938 and invaded the rest of the country in 1939 with the goal to eradicate Czech nationality, assimilating, deporting or exterminating Czechoslovaks, Havel’s family could flee to the countryside. There, Václav and his brother

152  Václav Havel – Neklid Ivan grew up unaware of political developments and supported by domestic staff (Havel, 1990, p.5). However, at school, Havel encountered social barriers, feeling ashamed of his privileges, “alone, inferior, lost, ridiculed” (ibid., p.5), and vaguely and somewhat subconsciously and not particularly tragically, yet irradicably and in everything that I do- that I am, in a fundamental and essential way, a little bit ‘outside the order of the world’, that in fact I’m always running along (like that well-fed piglet) a short distance behind my marching classmates, trying to catch up and take my place with the others as a fully fledged and equal member of that moving body, and that I am powerless to do otherwise. Along with this goes a deeply rooted feeling that however indisputable the places I do have in the “order of the world” may seem, they are still essentially uncertain and problematic. It’s as though I were never quite sure that my inclusion in the world won’t turn out to be illusory, fraudulent and temporary, as though I were still secretly expecting, sooner or later, to be exposed as an interloper and driven out in ridicule. (Ibid., p.179) This feeling increased after the Communist coup d’etat in 1948. Havel was branded a ‘bourgeois element,’ barred from formal education and consequently underwent phases of feeling “aggressively antibourgeois” (ibid., p.7). These experiences of “rather metaphysical exclusion” and “existential uncertainty” (Havel, 1988, p.287) provoked an “amplified tendency to see the absurd dimension of the world” (ibid., p.177), or its lack of meaning, prompting a continuous search for meaning and “a heightened sense of order” (ibid., p.289). Absurdity appeared to him to be an essential feature of human everyday experience, being not only a constant source of doubt but also of energy, compelling the bewildered Havel to develop and improve his self-definition and position (ibid., p.183), so that underlying his literary and political lifework, there is “somewhere behind those twists and turns […] a clear, lifelong continuity” (ibid.). In the early 1950s, whilst working as a laboratory technician and attending evening school, Havel founded the informal debating society “The 36-ers,” a group of outcasts discussing politics, economics and philosophy. He befriended “Group 42,” consisting of philosophers and artists, which became Havel’s “literary kindergarten,” exploring a “second culture,” hidden from state propaganda (Havel, 1990, p.24). Between 1952 and 1957, philosopher Josef Ludvík Fischer tutored Havel, inspiring him to read the works of German philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, a neo-Kantian concerned with distinguishing between the natural sciences and philosophy, and Jozef Šafárik, a hydrological engineer, who published Seven Letters to Melin, a book whose profound impact on him Havel emphasised, dealing with the themes of truth and salvation. Šafárik advocated radical individualism, so

Václav Havel – Neklid  153 that the individual, instead of merely following the rules of the apparatus, would rely on and be guided by its own conscience, willing to sacrifice even their lives as a guarantee for the truth that they were living (Williams, 2916, p.47f). Instead of transferring responsibility to the state or the church, the individual should practice responsibility herself. Such a martyr of truth would not try to teach or convince others to follow her truth, but rather, by her example, inspire others to do the same. Growing acutely aware of the absurdity of politics and ideology in Communist Czechoslovakia, Havel took up poetry and writing as outlets allowing for openness of exploration and expression. He stated of himself, “I am, I have never been, and I have no ambition to become a politician, a revolutionary, or a professional dissident. I am a writer. I write what I want and not what others want me to write,”4 justifying his new interest as an attempt to stay true to himself (Žantovský, 2015, p.39). As the cultural climate began to open, Havel publicly appealed for acknowledging the literary contributions of “Group 42,” gaining his first publicity as rebel. “Given the logic of things,” he argued, meaning given his attempt to stay true to himself, “I always manage to find myself whether I want to or not, in such a position” (ibid., p.33). Later, Havel embraced this non-position “outside the order of the world” (Havel, 1988, p.287), seeking not to limit his freedom of opinion. In fact, he argued, an intellectual should disturb, bear witness, be provocative and independent, rebel against manipulation and doubt systems and, for that reason, an intellectual cannot fit into any role that might be assigned to him, nor can he ever be made to fit into any of the histories written by the victors. An intellectual essentially doesn’t belong anywhere; he stands out as an irritant wherever he is; he does not fit into any pigeonhole completely. (Havel, 1990, p.167) Having been rejected to enrol for studying Arts, Humanities or Film, Havel underwent two years of military service during which time he read various plays, trying himself as playwright, director and actor (Žantovský, 2015, p.44ff). Upon return from the military in 1959, he became a stagehand at the established ABC theatre, where he caught the “theatre bug” (ibid., p.61). In stark contrast to tightly regulated and ideologically manufactured culture in Czechoslovakia, theatre experimentally probed into fundamental matters of human existence (Havel, 1990, p.52). “It was a manifestation of uncensored life,” he wrote, “life that spits on all ideology and all that lofty word of babble; a life that intrinsically resisted all forms of violence, all interpretations, all directives. Suddenly, against the world of appearances and interpretation, here stood truth” (ibid., p.49). Havel experienced theatre as a communal, social phenomenon, intersubjective and inter-existential, an “immediate and vivid enactment of the very mystery of human existence,”5 provoking the audience to participate in the generation of meaning and thus

154  Václav Havel – Neklid allowing genuine, direct encounters between the audience and its existential questions. Theatre constituted a living spiritual and intellectual focus, a place for social self awareness, a vanishing point where all the lines of force of the age meet, a seismograph of the times, a space, an area of freedom, an instrument of human liberation. (Havel, 1990, p.40) Havel wrote his first play, An Evening with the Family in 1960, The Garden Party6 in 1963, then The Memorandum in 1965,7 at the Theatre of the Balustrade, where he worked for eight years. His plays share a common focus on bureaucratic absurdities, the loss of meaning and dehumanisation of life, revealing the crises and possibilities of human identity in the modern age. They are absurdist, “drawn to everything mysterious, magic, irrational, inexplicable, grotesque, and absurd, everything that escapes order and problematises it” (Danaher, 2015, p.119). Absurdist plays are open in text and aesthetic, and consequently in meaning too, “they illustrate nothing” (Havel, 1990, p.54). The weirdness of the texts, playing with language as a source of miscommunication and alienation, especially in the realm of politics, separates meaning from its habitual interpretational context and exposes its falseness or lack of meaning. Thereby, the texts provoke the audience to generate meaning through introspection and self-reflection (Danaher, 2015, p.31). Inspired by banal, everyday experiences of humanity’s basic modalities, Havel’s plays seek to reveal “the fundamental questions of the modern human dimension” (Havel, 1990, p.54) contained within (Žantovský, 2015, p.119). Describing not merely a particular social or political system, but demonstrating humanity in a state of crisis, Havel considered the absurdist play as “the most significant theatrical phenomenon of the twentieth century” (Havel, 1990, p.53). After the plays, which were typically sold out and interrupted by laughter and standing ovations, the audience stayed to discuss the plays’ meaning. Thus, Havel became a popular and successful playwright and major benefactor of the renaissance of Czech modern culture (Žantovský, 2015, p.78). By the middle of the 1960s, “non ideological art” (Havel, 1990, p.51), a blooming film industry, literary circles and more emancipated scholarly disciplines dared to openly criticise the regime. In 1968, Alexander Dubcek replaced the leader of the Communist Party, initiating modest reforms implying relaxation of expression, assembly and association and thereby marking the beginning of the Prague Spring as the questioning, debating and criticising of the regime in myriads of spontaneous meetings and newly founded organisations. Havel, disillusioned with the disparity between slogans and action, and with the hostility and competition between camps, played only a minor role (Žantovský, 2015, p.103). He remained primarily a playwright, seeking to serve truth as a “witness of the time” (Havel, 1990,

Václav Havel – Neklid  155 p.99), a task which he considered incompatible with participating in party politics or political movements (Žantovský, 2015, p.106). Yet, Havel demonised neither communists nor activists, emphasising instead dialogue and understanding. While others, such as Milan Kundera, saw the Prague Spring as an opportunity to create a wholly new system, Havel “simply” advocated approaching “the rest of the civilised world” (Žantovský, 2015, p.120), opposed the “hysterical nonsense” of fellow activists and emphasised the need to engage in “something possible, something within our power,” as it was more important “to be modest but realistic, than to pacify one’s conscience by firing off loudmouthed proposals” (Havel, 1990, p.111). In August 1968, the Soviet, Bulgarian, Polish and Hungarian armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia to restore law and order. This time, Havel was impressed by the kindness, creativity and solidarity of political resistance and participated “in everything I could” (ibid., p.110), refusing emotional responses and talking instead “like a politician” (Žantovský, 2015, p.119). In a letter to Dubcek, he pleaded with him not to make a public confession in favour of the Soviet occupation but to react with pride and autonomy (ibid., p.103). Reflecting on the letter some years later, he noted, “I had written that even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance” (ibid., p.115). This demonstrated the impression the protest movement had left on Havel: while it did not succeed in achieving its demands, it nonetheless constituted an attempt to live within the truth. While many friends, including Milan Kundera, left the country, Havel, in an effort to be true to himself, stayed – under surveillance, without employment, having his work banned from theatres and libraries and finally having his passport revoked. As ‘normalisation’ led to country-wide depression, apathy, demoralisation, atomisation and the imprisonment of thousands of dissidents, Havel and his wife Olga retreated to their countryside domicile, sustained by money from productions abroad (ibid., p.131). Havel produced plays, held salons, signed petitions for the release of political prisoners and, eventually, in 1975, drafted a letter to then president Gustav Husak, formulating an idea central to the further development of his work. He warned Husak that the outward calm of society was based on existential fear and indifference and that Marxist ideology had become a mere ritual, covering consumerist escapism. What looked like perfect equilibrium, actually was not. Havel argued that the force of life would inevitably erupt, seeking a meaningful order, including genuine diversity (Williams, 2016, p.114f), because “[j]ust as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy” (Havel, 1989, p.23).8 This is his first formulation of neklid, an unceasing movement of all life towards variety and heterogeneity, provoking a questioning and stepping out of closed, fixed systems and, ultimately, Havel argued, provoking their destruction. Commenting on the trial

156  Václav Havel – Neklid surrounding The Plastic People of the Universe, a rock band that had formed as part of Czechoslovakia’s music renaissance and whose members had been arrested, Havel suggested that the communist system too produces its own poison, eventually causing self-destruction, for when an event is out of joint with itself – out of joint in the deeper sense that I have in mind here – then at the same time something unavoidably goes out of joint within us: a new perspective of the world will open a new perspective of our own human possibilities, of what we are and what we could be, and so – torn out of our ‘routine humanity’ we stand once again face to face with the most important question of all: How to come to terms with ourselves?9 In December 1976, Havel and other dissidents drafted Charter 77, the announcement of a committee to monitor and defend human, civil and political rights, which gained approximately 1,900 signatures.10 Its rhetoric was far from radical, merely reminding the government of the principles of human dignity and civic freedoms and asking the Soviet people to help the government in ensuring these principles were met. Havel, amongst philosopher Jan Patočka (1907–1977) who had strongly influenced Havel’s thought,11 and Václav Cerny functioned as spokesmen. Charter 77 constituted a first attempt in what Havel would later refer to as anti-politics: creating civil society in spaces that eluded state control, parallel to formal political structures (Havel, 1990, p.138). Considered as a treacherous threat to state and socialism, the government sabotaged and interrogated its members and created a vast propaganda campaign against Charter 77 (Žantovský, 2015, p.180ff).12 Havel, who remained under surveillance since then, suffering regular police harassment, bullying and blackmail, received a suspended 14 months long sentence, which in 1978 led to the formation of the dissident organisation The Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS), formed mostly by the signatories of Charter 77, offering to help dissidents and their families and raising awareness about the plight of dissidents. Havel was again arrested in 1979 and accepted his four-and-a-half-year long prison sentence with calmness, having concluded, “it is better not to live at all than to live without honour” (Havel, 1990, p.144).13 A year before, Havel had written the essay “Power of the Powerless,” an essay that gave him international attention as a dissident. However, Havel argued that he had never intended to become a dissident. It was merely by his attempt to capture truth in art, which, by showing up dissension, had an effect on how people viewed politics and participated in it (Pontuso, 2004, p.55). The essay “Power of the Powerless” was thus not meant as a manual, but as an introduction to the problem of living a lie, an outline of a theme, providing a stimulus (Matynia, 2014, p.23ff). Given growing international attention, Havel’s sentence was terminated when he fell severely ill in 1983. His

Václav Havel – Neklid  157 introspection, soul searching and growing self-confidence, alongside maturation of his ideas, are expressed in his letters to Olga, to which he referred as “testimony” of particular situations and thoughts, similar to “an existential document (like poetry)” (Havel, 2003, p.270). The central theme of these letters was the disintegration of “man’s oneness with himself and the loss of everything that gives human existence a meaningful order, continuity and its unique outline,” played out on different planes (ibid., p.145).14 In 1984, Havel wrote the speech “Politics and Conscience,” which he was invited to deliver at the university of Toulouse, yet from which he had to abstain, having no passport. In this essay, Havel broaches the issues of politics as practical morality. The corruption of society, environmental destruction and violence were the effect of a spiritual, rather than a political pathology, he argued, requiring a return to self-responsibility and truthfulness. In 1987, against the background of the Perestroika and Husak’s resignation, parallel spaces and growing networks of independently minded a­ rtists, students and other activists became a permanent feature of the ­public mood (Žantovský, 2015, p.273ff). Havel founded and led the Civic F ­ orum, a political movement that sought to unify Czechoslovakia’s ­dissident forces and overthrow the communist regime. From the 17th of November 1989, the country experienced a strong bout of unpredicted and growing ­civic-minded, non-violent protests, referred to as “the Velvet Revolution.” They were spearheaded by students and actors and ultimately lead to the resignation of the entire party membership on the 24th of November (ibid., p.288). The Civic Forum met with prime minister Ladislav Adamec to ­discuss how to organise the government and it nominated Havel as president, who was elected by the Federal Assembly from December 29, 1989 to June 5, 1990. In the country’s first free parliamentary elections since 1948, the Civic Forum, alongside its Slovak counterpart Public Against Violence, won the majority of seats. Havel later stated that he had acted out of responsibility and duty for his community (1997, p.60), because [i]t simply seemed to me that since I had been saying A for so long, I could not refuse to say B; it would have been irresponsible of me to criticise the Communist regime all my life and then, when it finally collapsed (with some help from me), refuse to take part in the creation of something better. (Havel, 1993, p.xvi) He felt “pulled forward by Being” (ibid.), as “History – if I may put it this way – forged ahead and through me, guiding my activities” (ibid., p.xvii). Havel stood, amongst other things, for accentuating “[c]ulture in the ­w idest possible sense of the word, including everything from what might be called the culture of everyday life – or “civility” – to what we know as high culture, including the arts and the sciences” (ibid., p.12); he stood for ­recognising all fundamental civil and human rights in their universal

158  Václav Havel – Neklid validity; for a federal, democratic state, a federal constitution, a Federal Assembly as parliament of the common Czech and Slovak state, a Federal Council; for checks and balances to protect the state from abuse of power by any of its organs; for a majority system; for smaller electoral districts; and for market economy and privatisation (Havel, 1993). However, although Havel was nominally the chief executive of the country, the constitution gave more powers to the prime minister, reducing Havel’s role to a predominantly moral, ceremonial one. In the task of outlining the new political system, Havel lost numerous battles. He struggled with Slovak nationalism demanding an independent republic,15 with former secret services permeating all ranks of society, with grievances created by the communist government, such as the former nationalisation of private property, and he experienced numerous dilemmas between the expectations directed at his official role on the one hand and his personal convictions on the other.16 He travelled much, attending celebrations, collecting honorary degrees and delivering his speeches across the globe, feeling particularly drawn to the United States of America (Havel, 2008, p.35f), advocating allegiances and regional cooperation (Žantovský, 2015, p.359ff). However, towards the end of his first term, the planned economy was collapsing and the market economy was still too weak. In the meantime, new parties had emerged across the political spectrum with conflicting demands, and the original chartists failed to agree on an agenda. Unwilling to endorse Czechoslovakia’s separation into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992, Havel resigned. He was re-elected in 1993 as first president of the Czech Republic along with Václav Klaus as prime minister, yet with a majority of only 55 percent. His popularity plummeted alongside the economy. Yet, under the new constitution, Havel had more autonomy (ibid., p.431). He pursued the expansion of the NATO, which he believed to be the country’s only genuine form of security and guarantor of values and principles comprising liberal democracy (ibid., p.443) and advocated European integration, which led to a continuous conflict between Havel and conservative, realist prime minister Klaus who opposed both projects. In addition, Havel’s health had seriously declined. He took uppers and downers, energy drinks, cigarettes and alcohol, suffering from multiple infections, bronchitis and pneumonia and was ultimately diagnosed with cancer (ibid., p.459f).17 His final, fourth term in office was shaped by frustration with the country’s political developments and with the media frenzy surrounding his private life, as well as by continuing depression and illness leading to poor performance on his part (ibid., p.478ff). Numerous polls revealed that a majority of the electorate was in favour of Havel resigning (ibid., p.483). In February 2003, he laid down his office. Havel’s post-presidential years were spent with travelling, working on literary pieces and on his autobiography, To the Castle and Back, testifying, inter alia, to Havel’s existential angst (2008, p.329f). He died in 2011. Much criticism has been raised against Havel for a lack of necessary historical, political and economic knowledge and for poor foresight.

Václav Havel – Neklid  159 For example, Havel agreed to the “humanitarian bombings” (Le Monde, 1999b) of Kuwait, former Yugoslavia, Kosovo (Wall Street Journal, 1999a) and Iraq (Wall Street Journal, 2003a), and seemingly absolved the West from crimes committed during the Cold War (Havel, 1997, p.11f). He was also criticised for his “moralisms.” His appeals to “live in truth” were often perceived as confusing, out of touch with reality (Remnick, 2003), or, in Chomsky’s words, as “embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon “(1995, 149ff).”18 Yet again, others accused him of being in love with state power,19 suffering a descent “from the sublime to the ridiculous” (Žižek, 1999). Indeed, it seems paradoxical that Havel, having appealed for an individual existential revolution, a strong civil society and anti-political politics, himself would accept to enter and play by the rules of formal politics and, albeit in a predominantly ceremonial role, would, from a position of moral high ground, endorse wars fought under pretences that most had already identified as false – not least based on the kind of responsibility for world and humanity which Havel advocated. The unexpected outcome of the Velvet Revolution had certainly confronted Czechoslovakia, whose population had been deprived of participating in public administration since 1948, with a vacuum. Inevitably, those who were catapulted into state politics were not versed in proactive political and economic construction (Žantovský, 2015, p.371ff). Havel tended to realise and emphasise his mistakes and often admitted to being overwhelmed by his tasks (Havel, 1997, p.29, 50–53, 72–74). Žižek summarises his predicament succinctly: This, then, is Havel’s tragedy: his authentic ethical stance has become a moralising idiom cynically appropriated by the knaves of capitalism. His heroic insistence on doing the impossible (opposing the seemingly invincible Communist regime) has ended up serving those who ‘realistically’ argue that any real change in today’s world is impossible. This reversal is not a betrayal of his original ethical stance, but is inherent in it. The ultimate lesson of Havel’s tragedy is thus a cruel, but inexorable one: the direct ethical foundation of politics sooner or later turns into its own comic caricature, adopting the very cynicism it originally opposed. (Žižek, 1999) Havel himself repeatedly stated that, having fought for change, it would have been hypocritical not to act upon his words and to refuse responsibility when the Czech people had asked him to. His vision of the good society made it necessary that he acted upon his words. Also, he abstained from much of the party politics to listen to the public and to develop his more than 300 speeches delivered during office instead – they remained a source of continued philosophical endeavour. In many of these speeches, Havel emphasised the necessity of individual spiritual renewal. Instead of leading society into a new era, he sought to infuse public life with responsibility, morality and humility (Williams, 2016, p.170, 77). In line with this, also Havel’s vague “spirituality” has attracted much polemicists. While Havel did not

160  Václav Havel – Neklid consider himself a Christian and was not a practicing Catholic, he confessed that he felt since childhood, that there is a great mystery above me which is the focus of all meaning and the highest moral authority; that the event called the ‘world’ has a deeper order and meaning, and therefore is more than just a cluster of improbable accidents. (Havel, 1990, p.189) Havel did understand the universe as single meta-organism of which each individual is a part. Yet, it was unusual to bring this idea into the realm of politics.

6.2 Havel’s critique of politics Havel defined Czechoslovakian politics as post-totalitarian (Havel, 1991, p.135). Unlike a traditional dictatorship whose elite exercises top-down power openly, he stated that Czechoslovakia was governed by a single, unifying framework of ideology, serving as elaborate kit between the regime and the people, resembling a “secularized religion” (Havel, 1989, p.37ff). In the essay “Power of the Powerless,” Havel discusses this ideology using the famous example of a greengrocer displaying in his shop window a propaganda slogan delivered by the government – “Workers of the world unite.” Displaying the slogan demonstrates obedience and loyalty, protecting the greengrocer against reproach. In this essay, ideology has cast a veil over the reality of the greengrocer’s life, hiding the discrepancy between his private life on the one hand and totalitarian expectations on the other, creating a totalising illusion of harmony between “the human order and the order of the universe” (ibid., p.43). Displaying the slogan, the greengrocer perpetuates the government’s ideology, becoming himself “an active component of that power” (ibid., p.47), and contributing to the creation of ideology’s “panorama of everyday life” (ibid., p.42). Havel seeks to show: through ritualisation ideology “replaces reality with pseudo-reality,” creating “a world of appearances trying to pass for reality” (ibid., p.44). It is irrelevant whether the people believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system. (Ibid.) Consequently, Havel negates the dichotomy between a powerful communist party on the one hand and a powerless people on the other, arguing instead

Václav Havel – Neklid  161 that individuals themselves create and conserve this self-directed system on a daily basis (ibid., p.54), living a lie whose purpose is the foreclosure of their real identity and experience. The appeal of ideology and of the post-totalitarian system, he argued, lies in the false harmony it suggests – using self-deception and thereby legitimising and justifying unbearable existence. Havel explained, [i]n an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. (1989, p.11) Instead of confronting the natural openness and flux of existence, or indeed the brutality and injustice of the political regime, ideology provides stability, certainty, predictability, identity, dignity and morality (ibid., p.42). Thus, ideology becomes a metaphysical principle, an omnipresent and omnipotent fiction. Guaranteeing the inner coherence of individuals and the system, ideology serves as kit in society. Without it, society “would disintegrate into individual atoms chaotically colliding with one another in their unregulated particular interests and inclinations” (Havel, 1989, p.46). The system of totalitarian power would collapse into itself. Yet, as the lie can only really be lived if others are complicit in it, conforming to it and reflecting it (ibid., p.52), the unity of society can only be ensured by foreclosing and eliminating direct, unmediated, non-ideological encounters between citizens (Havel, 1997, p.63). Regardless of the position individuals hold, they are relevant to the ideological system only as elements that uphold its automatism (Havel, 1989, p.44). Consequently, Havel argued, identity as an act and process of attunement to personal experience is abandoned in favour of the ideological identity with the system (ibid., p.53). The system in turn provides its elements with the promise of unity – a unity found in complete, shared externalisation. Community as direct encounter between citizens is foreclosed. Reason, conscience and responsibility, individual morality, principles and common sense, Havel argued, are compromised in favour of ideology, becoming redundant. Therefore, he found ideology to be strongly homogenising, suppressing otherness, uniqueness, authenticity, creativity, anything unpredictable or uncountable as threats to the uniformity and legitimacy of its lie. If the individual does not adapt to ideology and its position within the system, she will be expelled or forced to adapt, “blending with the automatism and becoming its servant, almost indistinguishable from those who preceded him or her and those who will follow” (ibid., p.49). Consequently, the post-totalitarian system is essentially dehumanising, opposing life itself,

162  Václav Havel – Neklid because “while life, in its essence, moves toward ­plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution and self-­organization, in short, towards the fulfilment of its own freedom, the post-totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline” (ibid., p.44). Ultimately, ideology becomes unattended panorama. To prevent ­dissatisfaction inevitably arising from self-suppression, ideology intensifies, causing more dissatisfaction – a vicious cycle. In the end, it appears that ideology itself makes decisions that affect people, not the other way around (ibid., p.47). Power becomes anonymous, impersonal and inhuman. The o ­ rigin of ideology can no longer be identified. The “[s]ystem, ideology, and apparatus have deprived us – rulers as well as the ruled – of our conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual ­humanity” (Havel, 1991, p.258). States become machines, people statistics of voters, producers and consumers while “good and evil, categories of the natural world and therefore obsolete remnants of the past, lose all absolute meaning; the sole method of politics becomes quantifiable success” (Williams, 2016, p.125). It follows that in the post-totalitarian system, the political as the realm of deliberation and transformation in which selfhood is created through p ­ olitical action is in fact eliminated by omnipresent and omnipotent self­-suppression (Havel, 1989, p.67). People’s interest in political matters i­ nevitably decreases and independent political thought becomes a s­ eemingly unrealistic, utopian endeavour (ibid., p.67). The totalitarianism of the post-totalitarian system, then, lies in the essential exclusiveness of ideology at the expense of plural, unexpected, innovative thoughts and creative actions. The false East–West dichotomy or the crisis of modern civilisation According to Havel, the problem of “living a lie” was not unique to post-­ totalitarian Czechoslovakia. It had merely escalated in the East, sending a powerful warning to Western Europe and demonstrating the consequences of an exaggerated, expanded and overemphasised rationalism. Eastern post-totalitarianisms, he stated, are the avant-garde of a global crisis of this civilization, first European, then Euro-American, and ultimately global. They are one of the­ ­possible futurological studies of the Western world, not in the sense that one day they will attack and conquer it, but in a far deeper sense that they illustrate graphically the consequences of what Belohradský calls the “eschatology of the impersonal”. (Havel, 1991, p.260) Challenging the traditional Cold War dichotomy, Havel argued that both the East and the West were developing towards a global totalitarianism, that “the West and the East, though different in so many ways, are going through a single, common crisis” (ibid., p.267). Both societies, he clarified, originate from an

Václav Havel – Neklid  163 epoch which marks the liberation of human reason “from his personal human experience, personal conscience, and personal responsibility and so also from that to which, within the framework of the natural world, all responsibility is uniquely related, his absolute horizon” (ibid., p.257). As part of the pursuit of modernity’s desire for intellectual liberation, Havel argued, non-quantifiable, pre-objective experiences have been denied and personal conscience has been relegated “to the bathroom” as “subjective illusion” (ibid., p.255). This crisis, denies the binding importance of personal experience including the experience of mystery and of the absolute and displaces the personally experienced absolute as the measure of the world with a new, man-made absolute, devoid of mystery, free of the “whims” of subjectivity and, as such, impersonal and inhuman. It is the absolute of so-called objectivity: the objective, rational cognition of the scientific model of the world. (Ibid., p.252) Consequently, Havel described both societies as “egoistical anthropocene,” and diagnosed them with “vain ratiocentrism,” commodification, materialisation and the bureaucratisation of Being (ibid., p.105, p.222). The absence of responsibility was their essential characteristic, he argued, rooted in scientism and consumerism. The modern state was defined by this loss “of metaphysical certainties, of an experience of the transcendental, of any super personal moral authority, and of any kind of higher horizon” (Havel, 1990, p.10f) – and created to compensate for these. A logic that in order to uphold had to expand: Europe, particularly the European West, exported it to the rest of the world through colonialism and neo-colonialism. However, Havel also identified a general danger inherent in any type of politics: the temptation to suppress human temporality and ephemerality, repudiating the transcendental dimension of existence and, by ostensibly liberating oneself from human confines, enslaving oneself within the limits of one’s own dominion (Havel, 1988, p.339). This is because, [t]here is something treacherous, delusive, and ambiguous in the temptation of power. On the one hand, political power gives you the wonderful opportunity to confirm, day in and day out, that you really exist, that you have your own undeniable identity, that with every word and deed you are leaving a highly visible mark on the world around you. Yet, within that same political power and in everything that logically belongs to it lies a terrible danger: that, while pretending to confirm our existence and our identity, political power will in fact rob us of them. […]. He becomes a captive of his position, his perks, his office. What apparently confirms his identity and thus his existence in fact subtly takes that identity and existence away from him. He is no longer in control of himself, because he is controlled by something else: by his position and its exigencies, its consequences, its aspects and its privileges. There is something

164  Václav Havel – Neklid deadening about this temptation. Under the mantle of existential self-­ affirmation, existence is confiscated, ­alienated, deadened. (Havel, 1997, p.73) Again, Havel describes the phenomenon of externalisation. The temptation of political power is that it upends identity – identity no longer originates from the inside but is reflected by a system that affirms the self. Havel’s use of the word “politics” here implies “worldviews, let alone any complete, u ­ nified, integrated and self-contained philosophical, ideological or other system of beliefs which, with no further adjustments, I could then identify with and which would provide answers to all my questions” (Havel, 1988, p.190). However, Havel envisioned humankind – like the whole universe – to be part of a constant self-transformative movement “toward greater u ­ niqueness, variety and more complex and refined structures that ­constantly disrupt and surpass particular systemic levels to establish newer and higher levels of ‘order’” (ibid., p.189). Any attempt to oppose this human and biospheric essence, he stated, for example, by violent homogenisation, constitutes self-denial, which would, ultimately, first generate a sense of absurdity and then provoke a search for meaning. Foreclosing this movement, he believed, any system would wither and collapse in upon itself (ibid., p.192). The best examples here are Havel himself and the cultural, artistic dissident movement of Czechoslovakia, which used the mere coordinates of the communist regime to make the absurdity of the system visible to all.

6.3  Havel’s experience of reality At the centre of Havel’s philosophy lies the notion of Being, a term denoting fundamental reality (Sire, 2001, p.55), also referred to as order of Being, mystery of Being, order of existence, the hidden sphere, absolute horizon and final horizon.20 Havel approaches Being phenomenologically, through his personal experiences of fundamental reality, stating, [t]he experience of Being [is] […] the experience that something is. At the very least, there is I, the one having the experience, there is the experience as such, and there is, and must be, intrinsically something that I experience; and if I alone existed – which seems highly unlikely, though theoretically, of course not out of question – and everything else were merely my dream, this would still be true: for even a dream is an experience, and experience of something, and thus it too is a form of Being. (Havel, 1988, p.358) Put simply, Being is not only the content of experience, but the experience of experiencing itself. Elsewhere, Havel explains, Being […] is not, therefore, simply a kind of nail on which everything hangs, but is itself the absoluteness of all “hanging”; it is the essence of

Václav Havel – Neklid  165 the existence of everything that exists; it is what joins everything that exists together, its order and its memory, its source, its will and its aim, what holds it “together”, as it were, and makes it participatory in its unity, its “uniqueness” and its meaningfulness. (Ibid., p.359)21 According to Havel, human experience is shaped by three horizons. The first constitutes the immediate physical surroundings into which one is “thrown” and within which one learns how to live – the somewhere and something of experience, such as Havel’s prison cell. The second horizon constitutes the existential horizon of “homes” [domov], implying networks of people, relationships, milieu’s and traditions, which change depending on one’s life situation. The third horizon, however, always remains constant, being the most imaginary, the most abstract, the most concealed and the most difficult of all to grasp, but at the same time, paradoxically, the most certain (it endures though everything concrete disintegrates), the most lasting. It is final and absolute (as the absolute horizon of all of life’s relativities); […] the horizon which – as the metaphysical vanishing-point of life, defining its meaning – many experience as God. (Havel, 1988, p.122) This absolute horizon of Being unveils itself to humankind via a mysterious experience within conscience, which thereby reveals the nature and position of humankind in the order of Being. Various anecdotes, typically featuring nature as stimulus, illustrate Havel’s experiences of Being. For example, in letter 53 to Olga, in November 1980, Havel described a moment of extreme bliss during his imprisonment, unexpectedly overwhelming him during a sunny break from work, when [s]uddenly, it seemed to me that all the beautiful summer days I had ever experienced and would yet experience were present in that moment […]. I seemed to be experiencing, in my mind, a moment of supreme bliss, of infinite joy (all the other important joys, such as the presence of those I love, seemed latent in that moment), and though I felt physically intoxicated by it, there was far more to it than that: it was a moment of supreme self-awareness, a supremely elevating state of the soul, a total and totally harmonic merging of existence with itself and with the entire world. (Ibid., p.21, 358f) Havel described an experience of presence as time condensed into a moment of experience. Presence implies a sense of unity – where the multiplicity of existence is condensed within Havel himself – allowing him to move beyond the confines of the first and second horizon of experience. Contrasting crassly with his everyday experience of isolation in prison, Havel also

166  Václav Havel – Neklid recorded feeling futility and anxiety, resulting from the “glimpse into the abyss of the infinite, of uncertainty, of mystery. There is simply nowhere else to go – except into emptiness, into the abyss itself” (ibid., p.222). This ecstatic experience had simultaneously revealed the infinite nonfulfillment and incomprehension of human existence. This is clarified by Havel’s terminology, referring to the ultimate meaning of life as “horizon”, or, more precisely, as the “absolute horizon of Being,” which continually pulls the viewer forward without ever allowing direct contact. The search for meaning, then, is troublesome because we know we must hold on in order not to fall, yet not only do we not know, nor will we ever find out, what we are holding on to or what is holding on to us, but we are never certain that we are holding on to anything: there is no way to confirm it, and in such matters, we have no choice but to believe in our own belief. (Ibid., p.243) Absolute meaning thus cannot be a portable piece of information but ­remains an unfulfilled desire, motivating the one who experiences it to ­continue the search. However, another characteristic of the horizon is its omnipresence, defining and demarcating vision. Hence, Havel emphasised that Being permeates the everydayness of experience, for example, whilst observing the advent of Spring from his prison window: what yesterday still seemed no more than an agglomeration of dead, isolated, accidental and purposeless entities now begins to appear as nature – nature, with its own great and mysterious order, its own direction, its countless births and deaths, its own life. We see that something exists that links, with the countless hidden but common laws and tendencies, the grass, the flower beds, the trees and everything they represent and remind us of; something that gives them worth, that underlies both the infinite (antientropic) diversity of their existence as discrete entities and the unfailing concord of their natural coexistence; ­something that breathes into them their beauty and that through them, displays and celebrates itself and inspires celebration. It is a small example, I think, of how Being manifests its own meaning, or rather, how the meaning of Being makes itself knowable through Being. (Havel, 1988, p.264) This anecdote illustrates how an everyday experience of Being, here as a feeling of unity with nature, provides knowledge about the “order of ­Being.” Being, nature and universe form one endlessly complex and incomprehensible meta-organism, the source of all existents and their inner unity b ­ eyond outer multiplicity (Havel, 1997, p.79). Havel, apart from referring to the

Václav Havel – Neklid  167 “biosphere”, also made repeated references to the Gaia hypothesis in his speeches, according to which all elements of the universe are ­interwoven and interdependent, forming said meta-organism. Consequently, he ­criticised the notion of an “environment” as outgrowth of anthropocentrism that considered anything non-human as inferior (ibid.). Havel’s anthropology The image of interwovenness and interdependence also permeates H ­ avel’s anthropology, considering the human being as “a crossroads of thousands of relations, links, influences, and other communications – physical, ­chemical, biological, and others of which we know nothing” (Havel, 1997, p.79). All relations work together to form life, [a]nd though each of us is a very special and complex network of space, time, matter, and energy, we are nothing more than their network; we are unthinkable without them, and without the order of the universe, whose dimensions they are. (Ibid.) Humankind is not an observer added to Being but always participates within it as “a peculiar node of Being, a living Atom within it, or, rather, a cell that, if sufficiently open to itself and its own mystery, can also ­experience the mystery, the will, the pain, and the hope of the world” (ibid., p.91). ­Consequently, humankind, a concentration of past-time composed of the same atoms as all of (previous) existents, exists and acts never in isolation, but bears ­responsibility for the entire meta-organism it participates in, because “we are related to more than the present moment and the present place, […] we are related to the world as a whole and to eternity” (ibid., p.80). Hence, Havel advocated responsibility not just at an individual level – to attune actions to experiences – but on a global level, implying ­humanity as such (ibid., p.76). Simultaneously, he considered the experience of transcendence, beyond the first and second horizon, spatial and temporal confines, and beyond particularities such as name, race or religion, as “one of the most basic human experiences, one that is genuinely universal and unites – or, more precisely, could unite – all of humanity” (ibid., p.175). Moreover, Havel emphasised that the human search for meaning in the mystery of Being is, in fact, mutual. Similar to Simone Weil’s theory that God created the world because He wanted to be known and loved, Havel argued that [i]t is not just we who long for contact with the meaning of Being, but the meaning of Being itself, if it can be put that way, reaches out to us. I feel like saying that a mystic cooperation occurs […]. (Havel, 1988, p.265)

168  Václav Havel – Neklid Like Weil who argued that God provided the human being with the faculty of reason so that it could decide on its own whether to return God’s love or not, Havel stated that “Being first had to call itself into question, through man, so that through his search for the “meaning of life”, through its own manifestations in the world that surrounds him and ultimately through the encounter of one with the other, Being could return to itself and be fulfilled” (ibid.). In other words, Being wishes to be re-united with itself through humankind and has, therefore, provided humankind not just with the faculty of reason, but also with the capacity to receive and to reflect mystery which continuously permeates the biosphere so that [t]he natural world, in virtue of its very being, bears within it the presupposition of the absolute which grounds, delimits, animates, and directs it, without which it would be unthinkable, absurd and superfluous, and which we can only quietly respect. (Havel, 1991, p.251) Human existence, consequently, is not merely separate and individual, enclosed within itself and limited to itself, but it is, repeatedly, the whole world. It is as if it were a light constantly reilluminating the world; a crystal in which the world is constantly being reflected; a point upon which all of Being’s lines of force constantly appear to converge centripetally, as it were. Human existence, I would say, is not just a particular fact or datum, but a kind of gospel as well, pointing to the absolute, and, in a way that has no precedent, manifesting the mystery of the world and the question of its meaning. (Havel, 1988, p.140) Conscience In order to be recognised and to remind humankind of its existence, Havel argued, Being “breathes through us” (ibid., p.147). Being re-connects through what Havel refers to as the voice of Being within conscience [hlas byti], which summons the individual which subsequently cannot deny it has been called (ibid., p.366). Havel’s use of the Czech term svedomi is often translated simply as conscience. However, according to scholar David Danaher, this English translation is insufficient to convey the real meaning of svedomi (Žantovský, 2015, p.188ff).22 Havel perceived the modern Western understanding of conscience as too mechanistic, reduced to a private “phantom of subjectivity,” (Havel, 1991, p.251) situated within the individual mind, an inner voice, “superego,” or local, psychologised segment of the brain and singular feature of the human being that is used to determine right from wrong based on individual control. His svedomi, on the contrary, liberates conscience

Václav Havel – Neklid  169 from the individual mind, thereby seeking to provide a way out of the modern crisis, reinforcing responsibility and identity as the outgrowth of conscience. Svedomi for Havel is a dialogue between oneself and the voice of Being within oneself (Žantovský, 2015, p.189). In that sense, it is an internalised manifestation of the voice of Being. For example, Havel ponders why, if alone on the tram, he would still buy a ticket and concludes that in the internal dialogue ensuing in his head, “someone I hold in higher regard than the transport commission” is conversing with him, someone “higher, in some regards, than myself,” who “knows everything (and is therefore omniscient), is everywhere (and therefore omnipresent) and remembers everything” (Havel, 1988, p.345f).23 Svedomi, then, is the “interpreter or mediator” (Havel, 1997, p.19) between the individual and Being. Moreover, svedomi manifests the interconnectedness of the human being and Being, revealing that “Being is one, it is everywhere and behind everything […] and the only way to it is the one that leads through this world of mine and through this ‘I’ of mine” (Havel, 1988, p.354). Svedomi is the access point to the transcendent Being. Hence, Danaher points out, instead of arguing that conscience is within humankind, Havel would argue that humankind is within conscience [svedomi] (Žantovský, 2015, p.189f). Elsewhere, Havel raises svedomi in the context of an awareness that “someone is watching us” (ibid., p.191). Thus, svedomi also functions as Being’s constant challenge for engagement and appeal to act responsibly, i.e., to listen to and to respond to it. Moreover, conscience as a basic, universal faculty “slumbers in every human being, something divine. And that is what we have to put our trust in (Havel, 1997, p. 224).” In other words, svedomi is an “orientation towards Being” that cannot be eliminated, only veiled. Finally, it is worth noting that svedomi is connected to a notion of understanding or witnessing over knowing. While the English “conscience” has shifted towards a more personalised form of being conscious, Havel’s svedomi emphasises witnessing shared knowledge. Referencing Erich Fromm, Danaher distinguishes between the modern understanding of conscience as something one has and uses as opposed to svedomi which is and which we are (Žantovský, 2015, p.196f). As Being has equipped humankind with conscience so it could be known, and reveals its total integrity to conscience, Havel argues that Being implies the existence of a “memory of Being,” within which everything is present and which knows and records everything “somewhere,” evaluating it. The individual exists in the memory of Being as the person I am today, and also as the person I am to others, i.e. both for those I am with at present, and for whose I’ve been cut off from […]. Moreover, I exist there, too, as the tension between all my “versions”, for that tension, too […] is me. Not only that, I am ultimately there both as a summation of all those versions and, at the same time, something that goes infinitely beyond them; in other words, as that which I “genuinely”

170  Václav Havel – Neklid am (which I cannot know, obviously, because I am not God). But that is, understandably, only “there”. (Havel, 1988, p.155) Responsibility, i.e., knowledge of what one has done, does and will do and why, arises from the tension between the I as the subject of action and its experience of something outside itself within conscience (ibid., p.266). The absolute horizon remains as a “challenge” (ibid, p.233) in human life, to be embraced and responded to, or avoided. One might seek to touch Being, accepting the world “permanently as a partly opened doorway to Being,” or one might alienate oneself from one’s “own, most proper, enigmatic essence” (ibid., p.339). Responsibility is closely linked to Havel’s conception of faith, which he defines as a commitment of openness towards the transcendent based on experience which is never reified into completion but remains an orientation towards Being that has to be decided upon anew in every situation (ibid., p.151, 360). Precisely, Havel describes faith as, simply a particular state of mind that is, a state of persistent and productive openness, of persistent questioning, a need to “experience the world”, again and again, in as direct and mediated a way as possible, and it does not, therefore, flow into me from some concretely defined outside object. For me, perseverance and continuity do not come from fixating on unchanging “convictions” but rather from a ceaseless process of searching, demystification and penetration beneath the surface of phenomena in ways that do not depend on allegiance to a given, ready-made methodology. My entire “experience of the world” has persuaded me of the mysterious multiformity and infinite “elusiveness” of the order of Being, which – by its very nature and by the very nature of the human mind – simply cannot be grasped and described by a consisted system of knowledge. (Ibid., p.190) To act responsibly, out of faith, means to become identical with oneself, acting upon one’s experience. Hence, identity dwells in responsibility – “we have an identity because we are responsible” (ibid., p.312) – as a movement of orientation towards Being. Or, put differently, responsibility is the foundation of human identity, “the root, the center of gravity, the constructional principle or axis of identity […]. It is the mortar binding it together, and when the mortar dries out, identity too begins irreversibly to crumble and fall apart” (ibid., p.145). This conception is strongly influenced by Patočka, who conceived of identity as “a responsibility which is ours, at all times and everywhere” (Stern, 1999, p.35). Elsewhere, Havel compared responsibility to a knife with which one carves one’s own features in the panorama of Being, writing into its history and the creation of the world in which each life participates (Havel, 1988, p.147). However, responsibility

Václav Havel – Neklid  171 is not to be mistaken as a creative act of finding oneself. On the contrary, Havel emphasises, responsibility is founded on the fact that humankind is not merely itself, but transcending itself. The orders of being As the first and second horizon differ across experiences, the third horizon remains a universal constant, albeit revealing itself differently at different times, being seen from different perspectives and experienced on various levels, thus leading to a multiplicity of interpretations, producing pluralistic knowledge (Havel, 1988, p.190f). Similar to perennial philosophy, Havel argued that despite the exoteric differences in their traditions, world religions and spiritualities shared a common esoteric wisdom, focusing on the principle of identity as living in truth, or responsibility (Havel, 1997, p.196). According to Havel, the religious traditions’ various reflections of meaning constitute the beginning of human history and order. In other words, from awareness of the “absolute horizon of Being” grows awareness of how to order beings in the concrete reality of society. Havel identified four basic orders. The first constitutes the absolute order whose essence and meaning are mysteriously and enigmatically veiled. Moreover, “it is as much an enigma as the Sphinx, it always speaks to us ­differently and always, I suppose, in ways that we ourselves are open to, in ways, to put it simply, that we can hear” (Havel, 1988, p.185). The second order, the “order of life,” “the order of the spirit” or “the order of human work,” is human order faithfully and responsibly reenacting the experienced first order. It is aided by mystical, religious, scientific and moral systems, created “[a]longside the general miracle of Being – both as part of that miracle and as its protagonist, as a special reiteration of it and a rebellious attempt to know, understand, control and transcend it” (ibid., p.186). All action therein is recorded into a metaspirit or superidentity, “something that maintains its continuity across epochs, cultures, civilisations and the entire history of humanity, something that is its backbone, its axis, its center of gravity, its direction, its mysterious “mission” within the order of Being” (ibid., p.272). Thus, each spiritual act is an integral part of the order of the spirit which is present in each act, altering the order of the spirit (ibid., p.273). This multiformity of the “order of life” is opposed by the third form of order, “the bastard son of Being,” or “order of death,” originating from the negation of the transcendent pole of Being – out of indifference or fear. It reduces existence to existence-in-the-world and forcefully strives to uphold exteriority, thus disregarding the multiformity of beings and plurality of access to meaning, enforcing homogenisation, such as post-totalitarianism (ibid., p.342). Havel evaluated his apparent love of order and structure as his heightened need to include myself in the ‘order of things’ […] [which] expresses itself in an intensifying effort to participate in ‘the order of

172  Václav Havel – Neklid life’ and at the same time, to challenge what threatens it most, that is, ‘the order of death’. (Ibid., p.187) The fourth form of order then is on the spectrum between the second and the third, the current order of things, including rules, customs or relationships into which one may enter responsibly or irresponsibly.

6.4 Neklid Havel noted that humankind is prone to the temptation to live a lie, “fluffing away” the absolute horizon of Being as it manifests itself within conscience, whilst, on the other hand, conscience always lies dormant within each individual as the access point to Being. The practice of neklid – prominent in his prison letters, and according to Danaher, the underlying principle of Havel’s genre crossing and literary work (Žantovský, 2015, p.179f) – serves to demonstrate how Havel envisions the transition from living a lie to living within the truth, from the “order of death” towards the “order of the spirit.”29 Neklid is the antagonist of klid, whose meaning in Czech ranges from calmness and peace to harmony. In his letter to Husak, Havel applied klid negatively, referring to apathy, a quiet life and artificial harmony secured by cooperation with the regime. Neklid, translated as restlessness, disquiet and turbulence, is juxtaposed as an essential quality of life, and in other texts equated with life itself, constituting a movement within conscience defying systematisation and provoking a stepping out and problematisation of the current order, thus being a tool for its erosion. Havel explains that [l]ife rebels against all uniformity and levelling; its aim is not sameness, but variety, the restlessness of transcendence, the adventure of novelty and rebellion against the status quo […]. On the other hand, the essence of authority […] consists basically in a distrust of all variety, uniqueness, and transcendence; in an aversion to everything unknown, impalpable, and currently obscure; in a proclivity for the uniform, the identical, and the inert; in deep affection for the status quo. (Havel, 1989, p.23f) Through provocation and appeal, neklid leads to transcendence beyond traditional ways of thinking and being in the world. Precisely, it is a constant, deepening turbulence of the mutual illumination, verification and augmentation of everything primordial, everything that has been achieved, everything intended and acted upon, spontaneously felt and worked out by the mind; a kind of unceasing dramatic confrontation between primordial vulnerability and achieved experience, between the

Václav Havel – Neklid  173 primordial limitlessness of self-transcendence and the reflected limitations of separation, between the primordial radicalism of the unbridled intentions of the “pre-I” and the deliberation and stability of their selfaware projections into the world of our earthly “existential praxis”. (Havel, 1988, p.362) The movements of klid and neklid have formed the orders of the world in a struggle between two tendencies of Being, entropic and anti-entropic, which, on the human level, have manifested themselves in “the order of death” on the one hand and the will to self on the other, “i.e. the will of a person to be what he is or wants to be, to be himself, and in the best way possible to defend and enlarge the self-that is, in his ‘will to identity’” (ibid., p.301). This will, neklid, leads to gradually overcoming the relative first and second horizons, seeking the absolute horizon of Being, leading to unique, individual identity. Neklid strives from rigidly ordered and complex narrow structures towards maximum probability. Hence, Danaher also identified Havel’s genre crossing as an enactment of neklid, which could also be said of his absurdist plays, staging klid reflecting the post-totalitarian order and thereby confronting the audience with its meaninglessness demanding meaning – creating a space open to a variety of interpretations (Žantovský, 2015). In essence, neklid constitutes an experience of separation or alienation – belonging neither in this world nor being able to transcend it fully – as the initial condition of humanity and as a fundamental experience of existence, realised as a double-bound (absurd) “throwness” or alienness in the world (Havel, 1988, p.319). Havel explained, [w]e don’t experience throwness into the source in Being until we have been separated from its integrity and thrust into the alienness of the world, and on the contrary, we experience throwness into the alienness of the world only through our “otherness” as separated Being. In other words, if we did not originate in Being, we would not know the experience of being thrown into the world, and if we did not exist in the world, we would not know the experience of originating in Being. The disintegration of Being into an “I” that is constituting itself, and a “non-I” (i.e. the world) surrounding it, creates both an experience of the world, its alienness and throwness into it, and an experience of a sundering from Being and “throwness” into a “longing” for it. (Ibid., p.325) Being thrown into the world, humanity loses its certitude of Being “of our former rootedness in its integrity, totality and universality, of our involvement in its general “identity”. In other words, we are no longer identical with Being. We do not experience it simply, from “inside”, but only as our own alienation from it” (ibid., p.320). The world is realised as an alien place because it constantly confronts humankind with its own otherness in the

174  Václav Havel – Neklid form of essential unfathomability. Humankind thus realises itself as separated from Being, which reveals itself only as a question and secret and, therefore, provokes a continually reaching out toward it. Rooted in Being by virtue of its origins, humankind experiences homesickness for the integrity of Being and a longing to “repossess” Being. In other words: Thus is man alienated from Being, but precisely because of this he is seared by longing for its integrity (which he understands as meaningfulness), by a desire to merge with it and thus to transcend himself totally. As such, however, he is also alienated from the world in which he finds himself, a world that captivates and imprisons him. He is an alien in the world because he is still somehow bound up in Being, and he is alienated from Being because he has been thrown into the world. His drama unfolds in the rupture between his orientation “upward” and “backward” and a constant falling “downward” and into “now”. He is surrounded by the horizon of the world, from which there is no escape, and at the same time, consumed by a longing to break through this horizon and step beyond it. (Ibid.) This condition, which Havel describes as an inner echo, creates a tension between approaching the luring horizon on the one hand and, on the other, the desire “to sink into it, to forget ourselves in it, to lie our way out of ourselves and our ‘otherness’ and thus to simplify our existence-in-the-world” (ibid.). One may give in to this tension and seek to sever one of the poles, or one may accept it as a challenge to submit in a responsible way and set out “on a multisignificational journey between Being and the world…to undertake it, aware that his goal lies beyond his field of vision” (ibid.). Which ever way the human being decides upon, Havel argued, there is no escape from its condition of connection with Being. It is both “somewhat” rooted in Being and “somewhat” outside it, and our mind is in fact a kind of bridge that attempts to span that “gap” by substituting, reconstructing, recreating what we are not, or what we don’t have, what is on the far shore of that “gap”. So though we are only “half” in Being, yet in a sense we are so doubly, wherein through this second “half-being”, we attempt to replace the loss of the first: perceiving, knowing, appearance, understanding, grasping, becoming awareall of these are degrees or modes of how our “half-Being” strives toward its missing second half, strives to recreate it. (Ibid., p.326) In sum, Havel conceptualises Being as an absolute, omnipresent and omnipotent horizon defining one’s experience of existence. The movement of neklid within conscience raises awareness of the human condition of

Václav Havel – Neklid  175 separation – both from Being and from the world. This can motivate either a search for meaning or a flight into the order of death. Yet, neklid never ceases to reveal the truth about reality as an open, unfathomable movement, thus constituting a universal “lever” for initiating resistance.

6.5 Anti-political politics and Havel’s ideal community Focusing on Havel’s essays “Power of the Powerless” and “Politics and Conscience,” the following section explores how “living a lie” and its correspondent “order of death” may be challenged and overcome, reclaiming responsibility and identity. Havel was concerned with no less than the question of whether humanity, both in the East and the West, could reconstitute the natural world as genuine terrain of politics, restore human experience as basis and measure for politics and place morality above politics and responsibility above desire. The individual, human “I” should be rehabilitated as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified human “I” responsible for ourselves because we are bound to something higher, and capable of sacrificing something, in extreme cases even everything, of his banal, prosperous private life-that “rule of everydayness”, as Jan Patočka used to say – for the sake of that which gives life meaning. (Havel, 1991, p.263) Thus, Havel, whilst formally campaigning for an independent, free and democratic, economically prosperous and socially just republic serving the individual, and served by the individual in turn, primarily appealed to individual conscience and promoted an individual existential revolution (Havel, 1997, p.18). Living in truth Havel understood reality as an open, uncontrollable, continuous movement beyond itself, revealed within conscience, which grows aware of the multiplicity of knowledge, thus challenging the rigidity and homogeneity of the “order of death.” As discussed above, Havel argued that humanity and the entire biosphere moves towards greater uniqueness, thus constantly disrupting particular systems in an attempt to establish improved order (Havel, 1988, p.189). Neklid exposes human, particular order as limited and incompatible with the experience of reality, provoking the quest to live within truth. Thus, [u]nder the orderly surface of the life of lies, therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth. The singular, explosive, incalculable political power of living within the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the truth has an ally,

176  Václav Havel – Neklid invisible to be sure, but omnipresent: this hidden sphere. It is from this sphere that the life lived openly in the truth grows; it is to this sphere that it speaks, and in it that it finds understanding. This is where the potential for communication exists. (Havel, 1989, p.57) For example, the greengrocer displaying government propaganda might one day feel that the tension between experiencing this hidden sphere of life on the one hand and his public lie on the other is no longer bearable. Consequently, he decides to no longer display the sign. It is an attempt to live within the truth. His small, individual act of refusing self-denial and selfsuppression “makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself” (ibid., p.58). His act functions like the – above much mentioned – contrast agent, illuminating the lie and confronting others, who pass his shop window, with their own self-denial. The physical force of living within the truth is thus only secondary. By revealing that the foundation of the system is a lie, the greengrocer has threatened it in its entirety. Hence, Havel argued that even a single and seemingly powerless person who nonetheless acts in truth and defends it, ready to pay the price, has greater power than thousands of voters. Living within the truth has not only an “existential dimension (returning humanity to its inherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has an unambiguous political dimension” (Havel, 1989, p.56), debasing the post-totalitarian system. It follows that anyone in pursuit of living within the truth qualifies as a dissident, regardless of whether one defines oneself as such or has purposefully decided to become a dissident (ibid., p.69). Rather, one is “thrown into it by [one’s] personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structure and placed in a position of conflict with them” (ibid., p.83). The demands of dissidents can be multiple, sometimes representing basic social interests of individuals or groups, intellectual or spiritual interests, placing existential demands, such as living in dignity (ibid., p.65). Their means can vary, from letters, rock concerts, student demonstrations, refusing to vote in fake elections or a hunger strike (ibid., p.59f). Yet, many expressions of living within the truth also remain small scale and anonymous. Nonetheless, this alternative realm of action, where the demands of the post-totalitarian system clash with the real aims of life is what Havel refers to as the anti-political or pre-political (ibid., p.61). Anti-politics According to Hungarian novelist György Konrád, post-1968 resistance, especially in Eastern Europe, encouraged social rather than political movements, was strongly rooted in civil society and strove,

Václav Havel – Neklid  177 to put politics in its place and make sure it stays there, never overstepping its proper office of defending and refining the rules of the game of civil society. Anti-politics is the ethos of civil society, and civil society is the antithesis of military society (1984, p.92). Various dissidents, which heavily influenced Havel, formulated versions of anti-politics. For example, Czech activist and mathematician Václav Benda formulated the concept of a “parallel polis” in a short seminal tract entitled “Parallel Polis” in 1978, discussing an opting out of the state without entering social and political self-exile, but via a parallel economy, parallel educational institutions and so on (Bren, 2010). Similarly, Czech poet Ivan Martin Jirous coined the term “second culture” in 1975 in a short manifesto called “Report on the Third Czech Music Festival,” referring to the Czech underground of artists and intellectuals taking the “spiritual stance” of stepping out of corrupt culture and creating authentic culture independent of official channels of communication and social recognition (Falk, 2003, p.84ff). Havel generally agreed with both notions, understanding anti-politics, also at times referred to as pre-politics, as separate from government and as another sphere, which did not oppose government, but watched over its power whilst embodying the independent life of society and creating networks of associations that themselves, non-tactically, create forms of order. However, as opposed to Benda, who considered the parallel polis a political space, Havel understood anti-politics as a primarily moral, apolitical stance of individual living within the truth. Anti-politics originates in individual existential revolution and emerges when living within the truth is no longer “merely” reactive, but proactive and constructive across a spectrum of expressions, activities, ways of thinking, communicating, et cetera. In other words, when through inner emancipation, living within the truth is no longer mere negation but becomes creative as the independent, spiritual and social life of society emerges (Havel, 1989, p.85). Charter 77, the majority of whose members had neither political experience nor political ambitions, is an example of anti-politics. Despite disagreements, for example, about whether their anti-politics should emphasise political de-regularisation and morality (Patočka’s and Havel’s stance) or be, in Benda’s sense, a political space, it nonetheless created parallel structures, challenging the government without direct confrontation and creating new social structures. The chartists formed an informal and open association of people with very different backgrounds, connected simply by the desire to insist on the respect for civil and human rights, serving the general interest of the people of the country. They refused formal organisation, statutes, permanent organs or members, as well as providing its own program for political or social reform. Instead, their preferred method was constructive dialogue with the state powers. Characteristically, anti-politics is an open-ended project lacking blueprints. It is not predetermined by external sources but emerges from

178  Václav Havel – Neklid individual human conscience and further actions, leading to unforeseeable transformations in social consciousness. “The essence of life is infinitely and mysteriously multiform,” Havel clarified, “and therefore it cannot be contained or planned for, in its fullness and variability, by any central intelligence” (Havel, 1993, p.62). Therefore, taking up the theme of parallel polis, Havel argued that “[t]hese informed, non-bureaucratic, dynamic, and open communities that comprise the ‘parallel polis,’” may represent “a kind of rudimentary prefiguration, a symbolic model, of those more meaningful “post-democratic” political structures that might become the foundation of a better society” (Žantovský, 2015, p.203). Anti-politics is, thus, based on experimentation. Anti-political politics By now, it is clear that Havel is not opposed to politics per se, which, he argued, is only as immoral as politicians make it. Similarly, not all forms of order – all systems – are necessarily negative. Only if they are an end in themselves whose purpose is to strengthen their own structure do they constitute “orders of death.” If a system is a tool as part of a transition to something else, then it can be a manifestation of this “order of life” and the “order of Being itself.” The kind of politics Havel advocated is an antipolitical politics, that is politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the utilitarian, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favour politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured cure for our fellow humans. (Havel, 1991, p.269) In the post-totalitarian context, which had deprived people of participation in public administration for decades, thus causing a mass loss of interest in political thought, Havel promoted a politics based on individual existential experience, a “[p]olitics ‘from below’. Politics of man, not of the apparatus. Politics growing from the heart, not from a thesis” (ibid., p.7, p.271). Whilst still insisting on the need for formal political structures, Havel envisioned them radically reformed. Hence, the task of anti-political politics is [t]o shed the burden of traditional political categories and habits and open oneself up fully to the world of human existence and then to draw political conclusions only after having analysed it […].A genuine, profound and lasting change for the better […] can no longer result from the victory […] of any particular traditional political conception, which can ultimately be only external, that is, a structural or systemic conception.

Václav Havel – Neklid  179 More than ever before such a change will have to derive from human existence, from the fundamental reconstitution of the position of people in the world, their relationships to themselves and to each other, and to the universe. If a better economic and political model is to be created, then perhaps more than ever before it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society. This is not something that can be designed and introduced like a new car. It if is to be more than just a new variation on the old degeneration, it must above all be an expression of life in the process of transforming itself. (Havel, 1989, p.70) Anti-political politics in practice In his Summer Meditations, Havel outlined his practical vision for democratic Czechoslovakia. He emphasised his duty to defend the law and constitution (Havel, 1993, p.33), the necessity for a good legal, political and administrative culture and relationship between the state and its citizens, for a prospering market economy, fairness in pension policies and tax policies, for large-scale programs to improve the civility of everyday life, for an effective energy strategy, improved schooling and an ecological revival. He commented on NATO, Warsaw Pact, Helsinki Process and European Economic Community, proposed a new electoral system and various institutions to deal with the discrepancies between Czechs and Slovaks and proposed more powers granted to the president (ibid., p.21ff, 102ff). The type of state he envisioned is highly decentralised, with strong local governments, expressing the wishes of society as an organ that society itself has created as instrument for their own self-realisation (ibid., p.121). Politicians should be “mirrors of society” (ibid., p.4), carrying heightened responsibility for the moral state of society, developing and strengthening it. The state should only guarantee freedom and security, yet the people themselves should be responsible for the state, which Havel described as their own project and home, something which they can love, because they themselves created it (ibid., p.127). Havel was aware that this is an ideal state, based on individual revolution of conscience and continuous responsibility, and that it is ultimately unrealisable and can only be approached “as one would a horizon, and do so in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained” (Havel, 1997, p.17). As with anti-politics, [t]here is no simple set of instructions on how to proceed. A moral and intellectual state cannot be established through constitution or through law, or through directives, but only through complex, long-term, and never ending work involving education and self-education. What is needed is lively and responsible consideration of every political step, every decision; a constant stress on moral deliberation and moral judgement; continued self-examination and self-analysis; an endless rethinking of our

180  Václav Havel – Neklid priorities. It is not, in short, something we can simply declare or introduce. It’s a way of going about things, demands the courage to breathe moral and spiritual motivation into everything, to seek the human dimension in all things. Science, technology, expertise, and so-called professionalism are not enough. Something more is necessary. For the sake of simplicity, it might be called spirit. Or feeling, or conscience. (Havel, 1993, p.20) Elsewhere, he repeated, The politics I refer to here cannot be enshrined in or guaranteed by any law, decree, or declaration. We cannot hope that any single, specific political act might bring it about. Only the aim of an ideology can be achieved; the aim of the kind of politics I mean is never completely attainable, because this politics is nothing more than a permanent challenge, a never-ending effort that can only – in the best possible case – leave behind it a certain trace of goodness. This trace can then naturally be found […] from the spirit of laws, to everyday political decisions, right down to the general political climate in areas where it has had an impact. […] What is at issue here is not a set of dogmas, postulates, and ideological theses but a political style, a political atmosphere, the inner spirit of politics. Political activity should have human contours. (Havel, 1997, p.114) Havel’s ideal civil society – anti-politics – consists of various associations, networks of local, regional and state-wide clubs and organisations, with a variety of aims and purposes, creating rich cultural life, providing each region with its own individual face and inimitable spiritual climate, parallel to the state. Corresponding to the “essence of human life” – experience, the will to self – it constitutes the foundation of democracy understood as a system based on trust and responsibility (ibid., p.145). This civil society, he clarified, means [n]othing less and nothing more than respect for everything that is nonstandard, unique, personal, unusual, even provocative. It simply means respect for life and its mystery, confidence in the human spirit, and an opportunity for all nonstandard beings who derive pleasure from occasionally doing something that gives pleasure to others. (Ibid., p.148) According to Havel, such an order based on individual experience would create an atmosphere of tolerant solidarity where unity in diversity can be found in the shared experience of transcendence beyond particular, exclusive first and second horizons towards the single absolute horizon. He thus advocated it as response to the increasing demands of multiculturalism, fostering peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation (ibid., p.172, 91f).

Václav Havel – Neklid  181 In sum, Havel’s vision of community is based on the subordination of politics to human conscience within which the voice of Being reveals the absolute horizon of Being as the common source of existence and as a guideline for action. Hence, Havel argued, the origin of all genuine politics is morality, understood as active responsibility, responding to the experience of Being (Havel, 1993, p.1). This “politics with a spiritual dimension” is derived from a personal sense of responsibility for the world – even though it is clear that no individual can save the world as a whole. A politician, Havel argued, alluding to his earlier definition of the dissident, should base his action on [s]oul, individual spirituality, firsthand personal insight into things, the courage to be oneself and go the way one’s conscience points, humility in the face of the mysterious order of Being, confidence in its natural direction, and, above all, trust in one’s own subjectivity as the principal link with the subjectivity of the world […]. (Havel, 1997, p.93) Just as Havel had opened up the definition of a dissident, he expanded the traditional understanding of a politician to include anyone responsible. Observing new social movements, he argued that profound changes were already occurring, marking the twentieth century as the eclipse of a transitional era in human history from the Modern Age, with its faith in rationality and science towards another age in the process of taking shape and yet having to define itself (Žantovský, 2015, p.140ff). “Something is on the way out,” he argued, “something else is being painfully born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble” (Havel, 1997, p.165).

6.6 Conclusion Entropy, a movement towards equilibrium, is one of the basic laws of the universe. Havel took this law of physics to compare post-totalitarian rule to it: its leaders too enforced sameness, uniformity and levelling. Yet, this did not align with the force of life, he argued. Here, Havel’s work can be interpreted as rather hopeful, for he believed that this force of life was a movement towards uniqueness, heterogeneity, novelty and difference. Thus, inevitably, life would dismantle entropy. Neklid refers to this force of life, and, as I have argued, it constitutes a practice of presence, describing an unceasing movement of reality experienced within conscience. Havel believed that beyond the here and now, there was another reality, an absolute horizon, to which Havel also referred as Being, which would make itself heard, summoning the individual to listen. Precisely, he believed that conscience was the primordial, essential human faculty where Being continually revealed itself and thus revealed the existence of a mysterious order, both within and transcending all human order – thereby dismantling the

182  Václav Havel – Neklid totality of post-totalitarian order. Through provocation and appeal, neklid allows the individual experiencing conscience to step out of and to oppose the particular order. The notion of “living in truth” then can be seen as an attempt to listen to Being and to attune one’s actions to it, thus stepping out of the post-totalitarian order. Both the post-totalitarian East and the capitalist West sought to suppress fundamental reality, Havel argued. Politics, he argued, was in essence externalisation, a wedge driven between experience and knowledge, producing an amalgamation of individuals who were not living in truth but who had replaced their moral self-direction with blind adherence to propaganda and ideology. Thus instead of living in the openness of uncertainty they had moved into an “immediately available home” (Havel, 1989, p.11). Modern Western politics, Havel argued, had replaced conscience with systems, ideology and apparatuses. According to Havel, authentic politics had to be anti-political, so that the state does create and protect freedoms and safety, while the citizens’ realm of the antipolitical or pre-political creates parallel structures of community in multiple, creative ways and is fundamentally open to individual experiences and various knowledge. Politics, then should be “morality in practice, based on conscience and truth” (Havel, 1997, p.81). Havel explains his ideal politics as such: Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility, expressed through action, to and for the whole, a responsibility that is what it is – a “higher” responsibility – only because it has a metaphysical grounding: that is, it grows out of a conscious or subconscious certainty that our death ends nothing, because everything is forever recorded and evaluated somewhere else, somewhere “above us”, in what I have called “the memory of Being” – an integral aspect of the secret order of the cosmos, of nature, and of life, which believers call God and to whose judgement everything is subject. (Havel, 1993, p.6) Regardless of the degree of self-delusion, neklid would allow the individual to put politics in its place. Only if the individual has undergone such an existential revolution, and decided to act upon it responsibly, meaning to bring its action into unity with its experience, thus creating its own identity, is genuine community and genuine political change possible. This, however, will remain a continuing, open-ended experimentation motivated by faith.

Notes 1 Please note that my engagement with Václav Havel in this thesis is limited to English translations of his work. 2 The Czech term which Havel uses, svedomi, has been translated interchangeably as conscience and consciousness. The Czech meaning of this term will be discussed in Section 3 (Havel’s philosophy of Being).

Václav Havel – Neklid  183 3 Williams (2016, p.24) notes that Havel’s grandfather, though not being formally religious, was interested in theosophy and even hosted seances, articles about which he would publish under a pseudonym. He believed, for example, that ­humans could incarnate towards higher planes, all within a harmonious spirit. Preserved in the family, his ideas might be heard echoing in those of his grandson. 4 Cited in Sire (2001, p.23). 5 Cited in Danaher (2015, p.83). 6 The play is about Mr. and Mrs. Pludek’s hopes for their son to become a rising star in the bureaucracy. Hugo becomes a chief liquidator of the Liquidation ­Office. His task is to liquidate the Inauguration Office, yet the Liquidation Office also needs to be liquidated, so that the liquidation of the Inauguration Office cannot proceed. Hugo then becomes head of the new Central Committee for Inauguration and Liquidation. He quickly learns bureaucratic roles and ­vacant languages, spoken by those working in the bureaucracy. At the end of play, H ­ ugo’s identity is lost, not even his parents recognise him anymore. 7 The Memorandum deals with the issues that arise for office managing director Josef Gross after he receives a memorandum whose language he cannot read. It is written in Ptydepe, a new, more efficient and reliable language without emotions. Gross spends the play trying to get the memo translated, requiring several authorisations which he has difficulty receiving. Throughout the play, a staff watcher observes Gross. Ultimately, yet another language is introduced, before it is agreed that everyone will speak in their mother tongue again. 8 Havel’s description of normalisation bears resemblance to Egon Bondy’s texts of the early 1970s. Bondy was one of the leading figures of the Czech underground and wrote songs for the Plastic People of the Universe. 9 Cited in Žantovský, Havel: A Life, p.167. 10 Chartists included amongst others Czech philosopher Jan Patočka who had studied under Heidegger and Husserl and who greatly influenced Havel, as well as dissident and mathematician Václav Benda, novelist Pavel Kohout and ­philosopher Ladislav Hejdánek. 11 Havel read Patočka’s works already as a teenager and later attended his l­ ectures. However, Williams notes that the influence of Pavel Safarik was greater on Havel than Patočka’s. Other philosophers who are typically considered to have influenced Havel’s thought were Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Levinas and Husserl. Williams (2016, p.119f). 12 During interrogation, Havel signed a document promising not to inspire or organise collective initiatives, upon which Havel was released and met with great disappointment by the Czech people. He reflected upon and regretted this ­i ncident throughout his life, concluding, firstly, that he had lied his way out of taking full responsibility for himself and, secondly, that identity was not constant and stable but had to be continuously, actively created. Havel (1988, p.350ff). He dealt with the guilt he felt from this episode in at least two of his plays, Largo Desolato (1984) and Temptation (1985). 13 Havel’s letters to Olga, which, he was aware, were circulated amongst friends and which would later be published, were written by Havel with the awareness that anything comprehensible would not pass the censors. This accounts for the often complicated formulations. Havel (1990, p.150). 14 Havel argued his meditations in the letters were only an attempt to capture the flow of his feelings, and not a philosophical system, and that he was often ­contradicting himself and refurbishing arguments (ibid., p.147). 15 Havel initially tried to bridge the differences between Czechoslovak, Slovak and Czech political representatives, but unable to push his ideas through parliament and amidst growing tensions, Czechoslovakia was peacefully dissolved in 1991

184  Václav Havel – Neklid

16 17 18

19

20 21

22

23

and separated into two independent countries, Czech Republic and Slovakia, in 1992. Such as having to meet Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, known for his support of SS troops that had committed atrocities in the Balkans (Žantovský, 2015, p.380). His wife Dagmar died in 1996. Havel married again in 1997, for which he was severely criticised by many Czechs (ibid., p.427). In, Keane (1999, p.438). Keane’s biography, which is strong in the author’s subjective musings, has been criticised for plagiarism, getting numerous facts wrong and omitting vital information. It is therefore not used elsewhere in this chapter. Havel was influenced by and, in a way, responded to Heidegger’s philosophy. For example, he accepted Heidegger’s criticism of modern philosophy’s attempts to fully answer life’s mysteries by mastering the beings, conquering nature and fully controlling humans destiny, disguising the complexity, spontaneity and heterogeneity of human existence. However, Havel rejected Heidegger’s proposition that Being is no-thing. On the contrary, Havel believed that there is an absolute ground to human experience that is the basis for moral, responsible behaviour. The validity of this position, he argued, could be established through phenomenological meditation. Pontus, Civic Responsibility in the modern Age, 20ff. Discussed also in Sire, Václav Havel, The Intellectual Conscience of International Politics, 56. By exploring the Czech etymological roots, Danaher shows that svedomi is strongly linked to notions of witnessing (svedek), testimony (svedectvi), consciousness (vedomi), awareness (povedomi) and knowing (vedet), whereas the English term conscience is etymologically to less semantically transparent. Elsewhere, Havel argues that conscience induces an “awareness that there is someone who watches us” of which we are “intrinsically conscious.” This, Sire argues, appears to be an almost theistic conception of God, omnipresent, omniscient and good, addressing oneself directly and personally. Sire, The Intellectual Conscience of International Politics. The exploration of Neklid is limited by access to English translations only. Only David S. Danaher has explored neklid in greater depth in English.

Conclusion

“We live in times both haunted and paradoxical.”1 This notion shapes the “discourse of crisis.” As voters desert the arena, apathy persists and anti- establishment rhetoric booms, political theorists scramble to critique. What is this crisis that has befallen politics? The answer they find is: externalisation. Identity has been outsourced, it is argued, instead of being continuously formed in ideological clashes. Demands for equality and dreams for the impossible have paved the way for consensus. “Them versus us” has become fixed representations, categories and attributes. And once identity is outsourced, it requires an entire system to uphold it: politics now is a project of self-assertion. In this technocratic wasteland, pent-up energy unloads in racist, ethnic and religious violence. This phenomenon is new, the discourse of crisis suggests, because none of the old, traditional concepts seem to suffice. The tools are outdated, the language inane. Thus began the search for prefixes: post-politics and post-democracy, archi- and paraand meta-politics, the unpolitical, the impolitical, the apolitical, post-truthpolitics. Implied are two assumptions: that we have deviated from a proper or genuine politics and that new concepts and original ways of thinking and practicing are needed to re-examine its essence, limits and beyond. And yet – there are limits to the discourse of crisis, too. Instead of finding a way out, it merely increases the surface: when “politics” no longer sufficed to account for the flux of society, the concept of “the political” was coined – saving politics from depoliticisation. The two forces formed a dialectic and self-contained field exhausting the whole universe. In it, reality became a system. When the dialectic no longer sufficed to account for the feeling of alienation, post-, pre-, meta-, para-, and post-truth-politics were coined – saving the political from its displacement. This raises questions: is there not a way to think about this double movement of depoliticisation and the simultaneous overabundance of politics that is not itself immediately subsumed by the political? Is there an explanation for the outbursts of excessive violence, or at least another perspective, which does not trace its eruption to this very movement? Can these thoughts be expressed in a language that does not relapse into the pre-existing discourse, dominated by the hegemony of politics? Can a change of the status quo occur through other than

186  Conclusion political action? Or is it true that “the metamorphosis will always belong to the plane of politics; and it is only the definitions of this political plane that vary”? (Dubreuil, 2012, p.5). Does it make sense then that politics should “sort out completely the misdeeds of politics?” Surely, “one should ask whether – if the wrongs of politics are politically unsolvable – it is still useful to wish to preserve the conceits of a worn-out category” (ibid., p.6). And if we are but a product of and subject to politics, power, language, social surroundings and hegemonies, able to realise ourselves only through these, then how are these questions possible in the first place? What is this intuition that makes some feel alien and homeless in this world? In other words: if we so obviously do not resonate with this order, is there then something outside of politics, something prior to its mediation of how we see and experience and talk about the world, an outside from which the observer can reflect on the current situation from another viewpoint, with another vocabulary? These questions, it turns out, are ancient. A range of concepts – marginalised in the political discourse – bear witness to this, developed on the basis of extensive anthropological evidence. Firstly, imitation: according to sociologist Gabriel Tarde, imitation is the central aspect of social behaviour, creating regularity and repetition, allowing individuals to exert influence across time and space. However, repetition is not merely mechanical. It passes through us internally, through our consciousness or spirit, where it receives a personal imprint. It is the intimate impact of one spirit on another, through which learning occurs and new, original insights are formed. Yet, imitation is also considered contagious. If it spins out of control and no longer passes through the spirit or consciousness, assimilation occurs instead. This qualitative transformation, this similarisation, can be observed with the transition to modernity: as the public grew and compartmentalised, cohesion became mostly mental, imitation and contagion occurred at greater distance. A paradoxical relationship ensued, between increasing interaction, interdependence and spatial concentration on the one hand, and a greater distance between human beings on the other – a distance exacerbated by the rise of a global society. The discourse of crisis precisely seeks to diagnose this distance. Yet, its political dialectic serves to perpetuate it. It may be argued, the discourse itself is an example of imitation spun out of control. As to why this entanglement in imitation occurs, the concept of the trickster is helpful, recorded and processed in fairytales, myths and legends, picked up by anthropology as the descriptions of a certain, peculiar power that reoccurs through time and space: the trickster is not only a creature that disturbs order, installing another, second order – an imitation of an imitation – expanding its power through division and fracturing. The trickster is also a master of externalisation. It moulds the world according to its vision, instead of moulding itself to the world – closing open existence off. This power, it could be argued, also manifests itself, to an extent, in the social sciences: in the increasing specialisation and divergence and in the marginalisation and trivialisation not only of concepts of anthropology but ultimately of the notion of an experiencing, interpreting consciousness

Conclusion  187 prior to politics, prior to imitation, altogether. This foreclosure then prevents asking the very question that Gabriel Tarde, but also philosophical anthropologist René Girard, discussed in Chapter 2, as well as the tales of the trickster point us to: what is our own, most primary and unmediated experience of reality? Necessarily, this question cannot be answered by imposing an understanding merely externally through abstract, mental work – only through personal participation within reality. And this participation, precisely, is foreclosed in the discourse of crisis, too. Chiefly, then, to comprehend the effects of the discourse of crisis, this book employs the notion of liminality. It sheds light on the fact that the inventiveness within the political discourse, the segmentation and compartmentalisation of the social sciences, and, further, also the fast pace of trends and of new tools for individualisation do not really imply a transition from an old stage to a new, rather, they, paradoxically, ossify this interstitial dimension – between promise and its realisation – this condition “betwixt and between,” creating a permanent version of it: a permanent liminality where the logic of the trickster, the logic of an imitation, is placed at the centre of life. In this continuous game of illusion, existence becomes inseparable from its mask. Instead of individualisation merely a choice between mimetic conveniences exist – a logic that can also be transferred to the discourse of crisis. As their promises remain unanswered, the process starts all over again – with another prefix-frenzy on another plane. This all carries existence further and further towards a void and further away from meaningfulness. To employ the concept of liminality, then, allows us to stop. And to think. What are we really looking for? As the crisis of politics has received interest and criticism from every possible angle, criticism which has reinforced the self-contained field of politics, further eluding the possibility of an outside, the aim of this book is to react to a lacuna in the literature of contemporary mainstream and critical political thought, opening it up, instead, to these anthropological concepts, making externalisation visible, as well as to another perspective, breaking externalisation open. This other perspective, this gesture of thought, has been excluded, neglected and runs parallel to the standard canon of contemporary political thought – and it is not determined by the totality of the dialectic. Rather, it allows the individual to step out of politics, making visible its limits and thus putting politics in its place: the philosophy of presence. Presence is…This approach is futile. “Presence” is not the kind of marketed self-affirmation which the weekend mindfulness retreats advertise, that can be purchased and imitated. Presence is not this or that. The inchoateness here is intended. This book suggests that presence is a personal experience, not a concept, but the most primary experience of life. It is all-pervasive, inclusive, democratic and perennial. It cannot be willed – it continually reveals itself. This is why its content or “quality” cannot be defined and specified – to describe presence is to curb it, to predict it is to constrain and trivialise the experience. There are records of presence, but they only echo and reflect

188  Conclusion it, they are symbols. The most fitting way to describe presence is indeed as tension, a tension between time and timelessness, knowledge and ignorance, truth and deformation, sacred and profane, of not being fully here, nor fully there, always in-between, pulled towards the poles. It precedes politics and language, it escapes reason – but it envelops these, being always present. This tension tears through the trickster logic, unmasks the limits of imitation and finally exposes that permanent liminality does not have to be total: because there is another order, not of human making. The philosophy of presence then is not a neutral pursuit of rationality, nor the product of intentionalist knowledge or a fixed set of ideas. On the contrary, it describes the exegetical inquiry into personally lived experience, the search for an adequate “existence in truth,” replying to that initial intuition, implying attunement of action in the here and now. Practices of presence seek to cultivate and habituate this experience. This book constitutes merely a first exploration of the many ways in which the relationship between experience, philosophy and politics has manifested itself. A relationship that may be examined further in future research. However, this initial exploration is difficult. Firstly, the knowledge that has been re-excavated here is perennial and can only ever be discussed by abstaining from totalising claims and by remaining open to the work of these philosophers. Secondly, the philosophers of presence are not dealing with an object that could simply be described and conceptualised. Rather, presence tells its own story through them. On the one hand, the experience occurs to a person firmly rooted, physically, within the world of things. On the other hand, the faculty in which presence is experienced – to which Landauer refers as spirit, Voegelin as psyche or consciousness, Weil as soul or heart and Havel as conscience – is located in-between the world of things and mystery, in tension towards the universe (Landauer), the ground of being (Voegelin), God (Weil) or Being (Havel). This faculty is the locus of the luminous presence of tension and it is therefore where the language of the philosopher is engendered. As Voegelin has argued: There is no “external” or “immanent” world unless it is recognised as such by its relation to something that is “internal” or “transcendent”. Such terms […] do not denote objects of their properties but are the language indices arising from the Metaxy in the event of its becoming luminous for the comprehensive reality, its structure and dynamics. The terms are exegetic, not descriptive. They indicate the movements of the soul when, in the Metaxy of consciousness, it explores the experience of divine reality and tries to find the language that will articulate its exegetic movements. (Voegelin, 2000e, p.25) The language of the philosophers of presence is not descriptive. Those who have chosen to discuss the “movements of the soul,” have done so in a

Conclusion  189 language appropriate to their experience, a language that refuses externalisation and being outsourced. As the philosophers of presence are shaped by a specific time and place, their language is certainly particular and never ultimate. Yet, it has also arisen from attentively “listening” to reality revealing itself, from “seeing it,” allowing it to tell its own story. Voegelin used the term “index” to refer to such language symbols that emerge from the exegesis of existence: they are not exactly names or concepts, rather they refer to poles of existence (Webb, 1981, p.283). He also specified the difference between symbols on the one hand, expressing consciousness in tension, re-presenting its experience, associated with luminosity, and concepts on the other, referring to objects in time and space, associated with intentionality. The symbols used here, then, are not ends, but a means. This book is not about possessing facts, but it is about exploring the possibility of an identity between knower and known and the unity of experience and knowledge, a unity which these thinkers, and by extension this book, seek to restore. And so writing these chapters has at times been an odd experience. Because spirit, psyche and consciousness, universe, ground of being, God or Being are not symbols that typically appear in the discourse of crisis, or indeed in contemporary and mainstream political theory – precisely because an exact meaning cannot be assigned to them. So in writing about these, there was a moment of surrender: accepting that not solely the degree to which a symbol is articulated matters (the semantic understanding) but rather whether it resonates and stifles a quest for truth in the reader. As Eric Voegelin has argued, explaining the difficulty of communicating consciousness, [t]heory as an explication of certain experiences is intelligible only to those in whom the explication will stir up parallel experiences as the empirical basis for testing the truth of theory. Unless a theoretical exposition activates the corresponding experiences at least to a degree, it will create the impression of empty talk or will perhaps be rejected as an irrelevant expression of subjective opinions […] theory has no argument against a man who feels, or pretends to feel, unable of re-enacting the experience. (1987, p.64f) In other words, theory can only be meaningful if it evokes the engendering reality in the reader, because the experience which has engendered a symbol is present in her. The truth of a theory belongs to the experience. The infinite incongruence, however, between experience, ideas and symbols thus needs to be accepted, as well as the possibility that there might be an infinite variety of explications. In thus surrendering, the method of this book may be characterised as a participation in the practices of presence, i.e., becoming itself such an act of presence. The format of this book becomes part of its argument. Gustav Landauer, Eric Voegelin, Simone Weil and Václav Havel have resonated with me, because they have, indeed, evoked and reconstituted in me

190  Conclusion corresponding experiences. At first sight, these four thinkers are an unusual match. Respectively they have lived in late-nineteenth-century Germany, Nazism-infested Austria, interwar France and post-totalitarian Czechoslovakia. They have also followed very different paths in life: as anarchists and teachers, scholars, dissidents, playwrights and even presidents. They have used different languages and chosen different means to attune their lives to their experiences. Yet, each connects in an astounding way to the contemporary discourse of crisis, discussed in the following section, thus showing that the concern for externalisation and self-assertion existed long before. Of course, other thinkers might have met similar criteria. It is important that this selection is not exclusive. On the contrary, there is an initial sense of arbitrariness to the selection. However, it is qualified by the fact that presence cannot be proven and defined but only resonate. Amidst the demands for “radical critiques” and new original ventures, prominent in the discourse of crisis, these four thinkers have dared weakness. Each begins their quest for meaning with the confession of a tension and confusion: Gustav Landauer cannot fathom the “the permanent collision of romantic desire with philistine limitation” and finds society, even individuals themselves, piteously divided. Eric Voegelin observed that too often in the social sciences methodology had replaced ontology, that prescientific, subjective knowledge through personal experience was evaded. Simone Weil intuitively felt the existence of a transcendent reality, from which eternal principles, such as truth, beauty, goodness and virtue would issue, yet which she herself, a human being, felt excluded from. Havel, too, described himself as being out of place, at the margins of society, observing absurdity all around him. Instead of seeing their condition in tension as an ill to be overcome, these thinkers have faced themselves. Each has endured a never-ending struggle for adequacy – respectively refusing categorisation. Their lifework was a zetema, a reflection on the auto-revelation of reality, trying to comprehend their strange existence and to live in truth, in accordance with it. They were out of place: in their thought, their actions, in their language, refusing to outsource words. And so they have clashed: not only were they witnesses of presence. In their attempts to stay true to themselves, they also became its martyrs. Together these thinkers have flagged externalisation and by their practices of presence sought to overcome the toxicity of imitation, venturing inwards instead and stepping out of the types of permanent liminalities they have each encountered. These philosophers of presence have also been pulled into politics, because the degree of attunement will determine the type of relations that form society. So their philosophies of politics emerge as a derivative of their philosophies of presence.

The practices of presence This book has focused on the practices of presence, Absonderung, Anamnesis, Malheur and Neklid, the moments of the revelation of presence and

Conclusion  191 the stages from arbitrariness to habituation, thereby showing how uniquely presence can be described and lived, yet also how common the experience is. Gustav Landauer’s practice of presence is Absonderung, literally translated as separation. By this gesture, the individual surrenders completely to the flow of the “eternal stream” (Landauer, 2010c, p.99) within, letting herself be “grasped and seized by it” (ibid., p.98). Landauer describes this stream as an “ever-present source in ourselves” (ibid., p.106), wherein all existents of the past and their effects in the future meet, where notions of “here and there” become superfluous, revealing beneath the multiplicity of individual existents a unity and common source. Pure, immediate experience of this “eternal stream” of presence reveals that individuals are “only manifestations and points of passage, the electrical sparks of something greater, something all-encompassing” and “always [a] manifestation of the universe” (ibid., p.96). Consequently, the individual realises not only that she herself is the expression of the soul stream but that the effects of all actions ultimately return there, so that “everything we make while we are alive connects us with the universe.” While in everyday life, the world is ordered by categorical partition, distinguishing between individuals as singular entities, time and place, Absonderung allows the individual to step out of this order of separation. Beyond the rigid order of the state, the forceful reiteration of relationships, then, an “organism” is revealed, one that “changes permanently, that always manifests itself in new individual shapes” (ibid., p.103). Politics is unmasked as an expedient or pseudo-reality, fooling human perception (Lunn, 1973, p.158). The deeper the individual immerses herself in herself and hence in the “eternal stream,” the more she is able to reflect on politics from a distance, putting politics in its place. Thus, instead of creating a society ordered externally via politics, there arises for Landauer the possibility to create a community ordered of individuals who have themselves subjectively experienced presence and, seeking to share and cultivate this experience, found each other, “us few who feel like heirs to the millennia, who feel simple and eternal, who are Gods” (2010c, p.107), to form small communities. Necessarily, such communities will remain experiments: presence obligates the individual to attune her actions. According to Landauer, further moments of revelation will be generated, involving the whole richness of the senses, so that the individual will continually form new experiences and insights. Importantly, Absonderung is not self-realisation but rather a practice of humbleness – or, as Simone Weil puts it, of attention: it requires no further tools than pure passivity, selflessness and surrender, allowing the “eternal stream” to pass through oneself, so that oneself becomes the stream. Its motto, “We do not just perceive the world – we are the world” (ibid., p.98), implies: presence is truly democratic. Eric Voegelin’s practice of presence is Anamnesis, Greek for remembrance, and formulated 66 years after Landauer’s lecture “Through Separation to Community.” Voegelin’s philosophy, too, arises from a tension between original insight via experience and its representation in symbols in the world of

192  Conclusion politics, science and society. This tension initiated a struggle for the recovery of truth. In order to move beyond this “considerable heap of dogma,”2 ideological, theological and metaphysical, Voegelin argued, a philosopher had to engage in self-exegetical explorations of his own consciousness, recovering his own, original experiences. In his “anamnetic experiments,” outlined in Volume 6 of the Collected Volumes, Voegelin recalls experiences of his infancy and childhood, prior to the trauma of National Socialism. Specifically, he remembers experiences that have “excited consciousness towards the awe of existence” (2002a, p.84) and hence led to an existential unrest which impelled the individual towards further philosophical exploration (ibid., p.85). In the case of Voegelin, these are 20 memories of pre-reflective experience of transcendence in space, time, matter, history, wishful dreams and wishful times. Each memory points to an experience of presence that had merely been forgotten, buried under the heap of dogma, yet which was lingering present in the mind. Anamnesis reveals the opposite of factual knowledge, rather moments “that cause one to apprehend some part of reality as opaque, as something that calls for interpretation” (Keulmann, 1990, p.56). Similarly to how Landauer describes the insights gained from experiencing the “eternal stream,” Voegelin concludes that anamnesis reveals presence in the metaxy, the in-between of knowledge and ignorance, life and death, time and timelessness, conscious and unconscious. It does not provide the individual with factual knowledge. On the contrary, it reveals the limits of consciousness and is only ever partly transparent, never offering certain results (Voegelin, 2002, p.85). Affirming the incapacity of humankind to grasp the whole, presence reveals the structure of the real as other than human order. It shows that [e]xistence in tension which is consciousness moves in two dimensions at the same time; it is eternal and mundanely timebound. So you can express this existence only by the term […] the flow of presence, meaning thereby the intersection of time and the timeless. That is called the presence. (Voegelin, 2004, p.63f) Both Landauer and Voegelin emphasise the self-revelatory nature of this other order, or, in Voegelin’s terms, “It-reality.” Landauer refers to it as stream, Voegelin as flow. Anamnesis then is an experiential descending into consciousness, experiencing this flow, with the aim to clear out “all ideological junk to make the conditio humana visible once again” (1999a, p.72). It is a contrast agent, “recapturing reality in opposition to its contemporary deformation” (2006, p.121). As such, anamnesis, from which results the philosophy of consciousness, is the necessary precondition for any political philosophy. And just like Landauer, Voegelin was hopeful that, despite the exacerbation of externalisation, different communities could form, precisely because presence was an inclusive and democratic practice, revealing

Conclusion  193 itself infinitely differently, yielding infinitely different results and symbols (2002a, p.313). Simone Weil’s practice of presence appears far darker and more gruesome than Absonderung and Anamnesis – at first sight: malheur means “the uprooting of life, a more or less protracted equivalent to death, rendered irresistibly present in the soul by impairment or the immediate apprehension of physical agony” (Weil, 2009, p.32). Malheur describes a completely indifferent and arbitrary, blind mechanism, absurd in its occurrence and irreducible – “the grand enigma of human life” (ibid.). Because it defies comprehension and all human force and logic, it exiles its victim from everything she had hitherto known and possessed, uprooting her wholly and leaving her to “struggle on the ground like a half crushed worm” (ibid., p.33). The one who has experienced malheur receives the mark of slavery, Weil writes, because she is no longer her own master but has realised her subjection to another force, transcending the totality of space and time, which, in the moment of malheur, is condensed into one single point, piercing the soul. Because the afflicted bears witness to that force and wanders as a living reminder of it, she, too, then, possesses the dangerous power to dismantle the human order as merely arbitrary, whimsical and ultimately powerless. This explains, Weil argues, why the afflicted will be met with rejection and seclusion by society – like a scapegoat in the Girardian sense. Marked by the horrors of the experience, Weil describes the afflicted as deprived of their personality and reduced to things. Whereas Landauer’s and Voegelin’s practices of presence have revealed the unity of all things, Weil’s practice emphasises the distance between oneself and God. In malheur, God is completely, infinitely absent. However: while He cannot be perfectly present to the individual, because her mind – caught in between – will rationally distort the experience, He can be experienced purely in His absence. His love can be felt in the absence of love (ibid., p.39). What is not there, cannot be limited, thus what remains is pure, actively passive experience of absence. As the individual is deprived of all her self, only God passes through her – “We can only consent to forfeit our own sentiments to allow the passage of love through our souls. This is what it is to deny oneself” (ibid., p.43). To suffer malheur unconsoled, refusing to fill the void which suffering creates with imagination (Weil, 1963), “which perpetually tends to stop up the cracks though which grace flows,”3 is to become present to God (2009, p.70). The State, on the contrary, is what fills the individual, assigns attributes and meanings to it, modelling those subjected to it, to its own image. Havel’s practice of presence is neklid, translated into English as “restlessness” or “disquiet.” The term (and its variations) occurs throughout Havel’s work, yet this practice is best explained in his letter to Gustav Husák from 1975. Therein, Havel contrasted neklid, a natural movement present within the soul, with the normalising and totalising tendencies of the Czechoslovakian post-totalitarian regime, having caused apathy, paralysis and conformity, a “deadening of the heart, a devastation of life.” While neklid

194  Conclusion describes an existential unrest, the tickling of an “irrepressible urge to oppose entropy,” klid is the Czech word for “quiet life,” “rest,” “calm” or “piece and quiet” (Havel, 1989, p.23ff). The perfect communist order has come “at the price of a paralysis of the spirit, a deadening of the heart, and devastation of life” (ibid.). Hence, “what prevails is order without life,” a spiritual and moral crisis. However, Havel argued that neklid never ceases to disturb  and interrupt klid: because life is restless, it “rebels against all uniformity and leveling; its aim is not sameness, but variety, the disquiet of transcendence, the adventure of novelty and rebellion against the status quo” (Havel, 1989). The inner echo of neklid is constantly present, Havel argued, and it too reminds the individual that the fixed and rigid order of the Czechoslovak regime is decrepit. Hence, life cannot be halted completely, it always continues to broach unrest, experiencing “a kind of unceasing dramatic confrontation” between mundane earthly existence and the “primordial limitlessness of self-transcendence” (1988, p.362). It is through neklid that the individual can develop an authentic sense of self – and this is what motivates dissent. Because neklid continuously reveals itself, it is to be understood as a process rather than an outcome. The aim of life is to persist in this novelty and rebellion. For Havel, a political transformation consequently has to be preceded by a spiritual transformation. While Havel was the only politician out of all four thinkers, he refused politics “as the technology of power and manipulation,” and instead sought out practical morality, politics as a way of achieving meaningful lives. Despite differences in language, style and action, each of the four thinkers invokes experiences of presence. Landauer describes it as “something that passes through us” (2010c, p.88), Voegelin as “neither time nor the timeless, but the flow in which time and the timeless meet” (2004, p.213), Weil as God’s love of himself through the human being, his creation (1963, p.28), Havel as “Being [that] breathes through us” (1988, p.147). Each time, presence appears as a tension between the mundane and the sacred, the political and life, immanent and transcendent, in between which the individual exists and which continuously, dynamically reveals itself. Thereby, presence unmasks the logic of externalisation, makes permanent liminality visible. To “shrug it off,” this experience, to flee toward “the magic of the extreme” (Voegelin) or into “the leprosy of the mind” (Weil), perpetuating the imitation of one’s own imagination, would be to participate in permanent liminality. Instead, these thinkers feel compelled to consciously remember presence, to embrace and to cultivate it. Hence, Landauer, Voegelin, Weil and Havel showcase the infinite variety of practices of presence, while also pointing to the ubiquitousness and inclusiveness of presence – thus to the infinite potential to overcome permanent liminality. Their absolute singularity as thinkers, their refusal to attach their position to a particular school, tradition or methodology, and the lack of system and order to their work is hence an expression of openness and testimony to the fact that presence cannot be captivated, but remains mysterious and universally accessible. At the same time, each

Conclusion  195 of these thinkers shows that presence can allow the one who experiences it to “step out”, assuming a perspective that allows to reflect on politics differently, to put it into its place.

The contribution to the discourse of crisis 1 Externalisation is systemic. It has led to the age of politics The discourse of crisis points to the totality of politics, Inna Viriasova and Laurent Dubreuil to the totality of the political. This book, however, goes a step further. As the discussion of the concept of liminality has sought to show and as Landauer, Voegelin, Weil and Havel have argued, the totality of politics is not rare or deviant, but inherent. This is because externalisation is the essence of politics and externalisation is contagious. Landauer might have put it most succinctly: the state is the surrogate of the spirit, emerging where there is spiritlessness (2012a, p.35).4 This claim is echoed in each of the other thinker’s work, describing the purpose of politics as assuming a substitutional function, whereby the complex and continuous task of self-realisation, responsibility and identity are outsourced into the political realm. Voegelin has emphasised that politics is evocative of a reality, that by setting up a government a world is created, a little cosmion of order in accordance with imagination (1997a, p.225). To Weil, political parties create “intellectual leprosy,” spreading from the high ranks into the strata of society, where they contaminate thinking. To Havel, rules and regulations substitute responsibility, the activity of the mind is deferred. Through the process of outsourcing, politics, political institutions and discourse fundamentally separate the individual from herself, creating a universe tailored to this distance, repeating it through its rules, norms, categories and language, and thereby upholding and protecting it. As externalisation becomes all-pervasive, it begins to replace reality, causing the intellectual leprosy that no longer trusts its own experiences and negates them. This is reflected in Havel’s work when he argues that the political and ideological apparatus have deprived both the rulers and the ruled of their conscience, common sense and thus of actual humanity. This panorama is inhumane, as Havel continued to argue, not only because it prevents open, direct and spontaneous relationships, but also because it denies humankind participation in a dimension vital to its experience of humanness and hence curbs the possibility to live fully. While presence, according to these thinkers, continues to manifest itself, seeping into the fabric of ideology, so ideology continues to expand and increase itself. The discourse of crisis identifies this totalising tendency as an aberration of genuine politics. These four thinkers respond: politics is only being logically executed. Indeed, they rather diagnose an “age of politics,” characterised by the frequent assumption that “something” prior to or beyond politics is impossible, that therefore the examination of reality begins with a political pathology, not with

196  Conclusion any spiritual undercurrents. In the age of politics, the spirit is substituted almost entirely: in structure, language, method and theory. 2 The pathology is not political, but spiritual. The response does not lead via politics, but inwards The discourse of crisis argues that order shall be formed externally. The philosophers of presence state that the path leads inwards first. Instead of proposing to search for new concepts and original ways of thinking and practicing politics, they find that knowledge is already present deep inside – it merely needs to be remembered and cultivated. According to Weil, “[i]f we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire […]. We only have to draw aside the veil of unreality and we shall see that they are given to use in this way” (1963, p.20). Similarly, Landauer argued that “everything that appears to us as separated, is in the reality of infinite space and infinite time only a single, large connected whole” (Willems, 2001, p.25).5 Thus, that which “we find in the deepest depths of our selves is community, humanity, divinity” (Landauer, 2010c, p.105). Individuals who are one with their innermost self “do not perceive anything as external; they are this memory, they do not possess it” (ibid., p.106). This echoes with Voegelin, who argued that [c]ontrary to the possibility that the order of being might be unknowable for man or that man with his capacity for mental order might confront a being without order, reality demonstrates a remarkable agreement between order of the mind and order of being […]. The experience of being activates man to the reality of order in himself and in the cosmos. (2002a, p.79) And the argument can be found in Havel too, who stated that [h]uman existence, I would say, is not just a particular fact or datum, but a kind of gospel as well, pointing to the absolute, and, in a way that has no precedent, manifesting the mystery of the world and the question of its meaning. (1988, p.140). Instead of ordering the world externally via politics, the task is to attune oneself to the order of the world. “Order” then takes on an entirely new meaning. Society, the agglomeration of individuals who are never quite at one with themselves and present in relation are contrasted with the homonoia, a community of likeminded members of a single whole. In society, otherness is a threat, able to unmask the allegedly absolute order and total ideology, revealing beneath the supposed domination of reality its eclipse. In community, however, otherness is cherished, for it reveals that the single

Conclusion  197 whole beneath all multiplicity manifests itself in an infinite, incomprehensible variety. As Voegelin argues: By virtue of the noetic structure of his existence man discovers himself as being not a world unto himself, but an existent among others; he experiences a field of existents of which he is a part. Moreover, he discovers himself as not being the maker of this field of existents. (1990, p.47)

3 Contingency is not a void, it is a source In the discourse of crisis, no meaning issues from contingency and multiplicity – they feel like a void. If they are incorporated into ph ilosophy, they are appropriated, for example, as the concept of the political. For the philosophers of presence, however, the “void” is rather a source: experiencing the perplexing ground of being, revealing itself and then hiding from view, is precisely an impetus to them. Their practices of presence seek to explore this source, and whilst they only reach confusion, perplexity and awe, they interpret this disturbance and source of tension as gift. Like a contrast agent, this source makes visible the forms of deformations, ideologies, violence and small-mindedness. And thereby it makes possible attunement and the experiment of community. 4 A trace of presence echoes in the discourse of crisis. But it is subsumed by the categories of politics The discourse of crisis springs from an intuitive awareness of presence: as politics turns into a project of externalisation, as self-assertion becomes its goal, openness and difference are foreclosed. As externalisation expands, the invisible, the inaudible and the unpredictable are excluded and made to disappear. The discourse of crisis responds with outrage, defending freedom and openness. This means: politics is precisely not yet total. Dreams and hopes continue to transcend its order. Similarly, the dialectic of politics and the political expresses awareness of a tension: between, on the one hand, a system that is fixed and rigid, an order that seeks to control and expand, and, on the other hand, an often mysterious moment of interruption, confusion and becoming. There might be parallels between the depiction of a never-ending interplay of politics and the political, whereby society can never become one with itself, and the understanding that presence also continually reveals itself, so that attunement remains a lifelong task, which can never be completed. Yet, dreams and hopes and tension are immediately subsumed in the categories of politics. This is because presence demands surrender. Experiencing an order that is utterly incomprehensible discloses the limits of

198  Conclusion human knowledge. Experiencing the infinity of the beyond discloses the finiteness of human existence. Presence suspends all certainty, identity and power. It places on the one who experiences it the burden of responsibility: to face oneself and to live differently from now on so as not to live a lie, refusing the monopolies of absolute truth and definite ways. To thus live in truth is an uncomfortable, dangerous task. It is a zetema, the quest for authentic subjectivity that leads via continuous, never-ending self- examination. Whoever pursues it is likely to clash, in some way or another, with those who do not. However, to subsume this experience to the categories of politics is to absolve that responsibility, to retain an element of certainty. It transfers responsibility onto the plane of politics – another form of externalisation. 5 There is hope Each of these four thinkers believed: as presence continues to crack and seep into the fabric of ideology, its defence would continually expand and increase, yet ultimately ideology would enmesh itself in its own logic. This is because reality could merely be hidden or forgotten but not destroyed, so that the gap between experience and order would continue to grow, alienate and produce tension. The precarious existence in between limits and the ultimate ground would make itself be felt. Indeed, they argue, anyone can cultivate presence. No tools are needed other than attention, genuine passivity and humbleness to experience reality and the willingness to unite experience and knowledge, despite perplexity and flux.

Resonating In retrospect, it is fair to say that this research, too, began with a tension: with an inability to fathom the paradox between practical political order on the one hand, its obligatory structures of laws, norms and rules, and our own experiences and dreams for this world on the other. It, too, began with a suspicion: about the reduction of human selfhood and behaviour to political parameters, about the squeezing of each crisis through a gauge of such parameters, pegging a differentiated field of reality and applying a method to it, a language that does not seem to fit experience, so that reality is compartmentalised, but in one of these compartments, our methods and theories could explain almost everything. This work began with an intuition that whatever reveals itself in the moment of “the political,” when discontent manifests itself, when demands are placed, when a society is constituted, is only one exemplar, one singular manifestation of a something that cannot merely, entirely be captured in the concept of “the political.” When I discovered the works of these four thinkers, it spoke to me. Their approaches to exploring the world were the opposite of the political science I had studied. They began with the primary experience of existence, tension, and developed a lifework to somehow approximate its intelligibility.

Conclusion  199 What textbooks might consider unscientific to me seemed genuinely empirical. To these four thinkers, a philosophy of politics originated in the spirit (Landauer), consciousness (Voegelin), heart, soul (Weil) and conscience (Havel), including it into the search for knowledge as a luminous center of existence, radiating into society. Presenting this approach, however, one not only runs into difficulties of explanation – after all, there are no definitions, no beginnings and conclusions, no solutions, one also runs into the question whether this is not a dangerous project, making totalising claims about human nature, truth, purpose and order. But really, this tension is something quite simple and commonplace, it is the finiteness and creatureliness in our existence, of being creatures for a day as the poets call man, of being born and bound to die, of dissatisfaction with a state experienced as imperfect, of apprehension of a perfection that is not of this world but is a privilege of the gods, of possible fulfilment in a state beyond this world, the Platonic epekeina, and so forth. (Voegelin, 1990, p.146) These experiences do not reveal Truth. They reveal the truth about existence as caught up in an incomprehensible and insurmountable tension, which simply puts any totalising claims in perspective and thus politics, as an inherently totalising surrogate of tension, into its place. Attunement and community will remain an experiment, and debates about these experiments will happen between those who have resonated and found each other – because presence cannot be willed or learned or enforced. Here lies the difference. The effect of presence is perplexity, the corrosion of monopolies of power and structures of hierarchy. This is not a program. Rather, you yourself are your own instrument. Having written this book, I participated in the presence of these philosophers, being reminded of the experiences of tension that had initially drawn me towards studying politics and towards this specific project. In the last years, they made me ask questions not just about the state of current politics, but also about my existence in it and about my involvement. Landauer, Voegelin, Weil and Havel have built a bridge back to my original experiences of tension and antagonisms. Reading their work and writing about it, I too have practiced Anamnesis, cultivated my memories of turbulences and deep, dark experience and cherished absurdities. But not just within the limits of this work, also outside of it, I have occasionally surrendered to presence. As a consequence, my dissatisfaction with academia has hardened and I have chosen a profession that now allows me to witness: as a journalist in the field I believe I can now see both the effects of ideology as well as instances of presence clearly. This perspective, I believe, is not of less scientific value, it is simply another understanding of a “social-science”: as a practice based on experiential life, which seeks to deepen it and make life in tension intelligible.

200  Conclusion

Notes 1 Wilson and Swyngedouw (2015, p.2). 2 Voegelin, Letter to Robert Heilmann, June 19, 1966, in Hoover Institution Archives, Voegelin Papers, box 17 folder 9. 3 This is a quote provided by Weil’s friend Gustave Thibon in his 1947 i ntroduction to Gravity and Grace. 4 My translation. 5 My translation. German original: “Alles, was uns gesondert und getrennt erscheint sei in der Wirklichkeit des unendlichen Raumes und der unendlichen Zeit nur ein grosses, zusammenhängendes Ganzes.”

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Index

Abgeschiedenheit 51, 66–67, 77 Absonderung 40, 46, 65–68, 71–72, 191 absurdity 151–154, 164, 190 absurdist plays 151, 154, 173 AfD 8–9, 21 Alain (Emile Chartier) 117–118, 129 aletheia 36 Altglas, V. 28 amazement 35, 37 Anamnesis 41, 80, 101–104, 106, 192 anarchism: Landauer 50, 53, 63, 66; Voegelin 104, 110; Weil 120 anarchism-socialism 50, 62–63, 70–71 anarchist 46, 48, 53, 55, 60, 69 an-archic 38, 63, 65–66, 68–69 annihilation: Landauer 56, 65–66; Weil 140–142 anti-politics 7, 11; Havel 43; Voegelin 109 Antipolitik 53–55, 60–62, 64, 68, 70 apolitics 23–26 arche 55–59, 61–63, 65–66, 68, 71 archein 53–55, 71 Arendt, Hannah 35, 112 attention 27–28, 34–35, 198; Weil 117–118, 123–125, 137–142, 144, 146 attunement: Havel 161, 197, 199; Voegelin 32, 34–35, 98, 102–103; Weil 126 Badiou, A. 10, 24 Being 151, 157, 163–175 bewilderment: Landauer 66; Voegelin 80, 103, 107; Weil 137 Brother Lawrence 31, 34–35 bureaucracy 121, 130–133 Cacciari, M. 7, 23 christianity 30, 104, 123

commonality of the spirit 97, 101 community: Girard 12–13; Landauer 53–54, 57, 65, 67–71; Viriasova and Dubreuil 26–27, 30–32; Voegelin 89, 90, 101, 106–109 compassion 141–143, 145–146 conditio humana 91, 93, 97, 101, 192 conscience: Havel 163, 168–172, 182 consciousness: Havel 151, 188–189, 192; voegelin 92, 99–108 cosmion 41, 89, 95 cosmos 88, 89–95, 99, 107, 110 Danaher, D. 154, 168–169, 172–173 Derrida, J. 29 Descartes, R. 117–119 discourse of crisis 7–11, 13–15, 18, 185–190, 195–197 Divine Presence 30–34, 90–91, 102–103 doxa 207 Dubreuil, L. 23–24 eclipse of reality 92–93, 96 ecumene 91, 95 Ecumenic Age 91–93, 95, 98 Esposito, R. 7, 23 Eucharist 29–32 Existenzerhellung 34 externalisation 6–8, 11–13, 15–18, 37, 40, 42–44; Havel 164, 187, 194–195, 197–198; Voegelin 81, 89, 91; Weil 115, 127 fin de siècle 46–48, 59, 80–83 flow of presence 31, 33, 102–104, 110, 192 Girard, R. 11–17, 19, 187 Giroux, H. 11

214 Index God 30–35; Havel 165, 168, 182, 189, 191, 193–194; Landauer 51; Voegelin 86, 88, 90, 93, 107; Weil 42, 123–124, 132, 134–143, 145 grace 136–138, 141, 193 gravity 136, 141 greengrocer 160, 176 ground of being 41, 90, 96–100, 108, 197 heart: Havel 178, 188, 199; Landauer 67; Voegelin 105; Weil 137–139 Henry, M. 24–26 History of Political Ideas 86–89 Hitler and the Germans 87 homonoia 32, 92, 108, 110 horizon of Being 150–151, 163–167, 170–174, 180–181 ideology: 42–44; Havel 153, 160–162, 180, 182, 195, 198; Voegelin 80, 82, 84, 88, 110 Imago Dei 96, 107–108 imitation 16–20, 58, 186–188, 190 impolitical 7, 23 infra-politics 1, 7 It-Reality 99–102, 192 klid 172–173 Konrad, G. 176–177 Kraus, K. 83, 87, 111 Letters to Olga 157, 165 likemindedness 80, 92, 108, 110 liminal crisis 18 liminality 16–20 living a lie 150, 156, 161–162, 172, 175 living within the truth 175–177 malheur 42, 122–125, 140–143, 147, 193 Man Without Qualities 81–82, 87, 111 Marchart, O. 7 Mauthner, F. 51–53 Meister Eckhart 51–53, 66–67 meta-politics 7, 185 metaxy 99, 110, 188, 192 mindfulness 27–28, 32, 35, 187 mimicry 11, 32, 35, 60, 72, 128 mimetic nature 16 mimetic rivalry 12, 19 mimetic theory 11, 15 Morrissey, M. 88, 100, 107–108 Musil, R. 38, 81–84, 87, 111

mystical anarchism 45, 46 mystical anthropology: Landauer 61–63; Voegelin 100; Weil 137–138 mystical philosopher 88 mystical philosophy 88 National Socialism 39, 79, 85–87 necessity 121, 127, 133, 135–136, 140–141, 159 The Need for Roots 125, 143 Neklid 43, 172–173, 181–182, 190, 193–194 nosos 41, 90, 93 ontology 18, 82, 190 open society 108–110 Oppression and Liberty 122 Order and History 87 order of Being: Havel 164–166, 170–171, 178, 181, 196; Voegelin 88, 90, 98, 107, 109 parapolitics 7 particular community 96–98 periagoge 33 permanent liminality 3, 15–19, 43, 187, 188, 194 philodoxy 105 philosophy of consciousness 3–4, 27, 33–37, 43, 187–188 philosophy of presence 3 Plato 93, 106, 119 pneumopathology 93, 109 Political Age 93, 96, 98 political difference 15 Politics and Conscience 157, 175 post-politics 3, 7, 9–10, 13, 23, 185 post-totalitarianism 39, 44, 117 post-truth-politics 3, 7–10, 23, 33, 40, 185 power 41; Havel 160–163, 178, 186, 198; Voegelin 93–94, 97; Weil 129, 141–148 Power of the Powerless 156, 160, 175 The Power of Words 127, 131 practices of presence 3, 190–195, 197 presence 29–33; discussion of 36–38, 102–104; Havel 165, 187–190; philosophy of 33–34; practice of 45–46 primary reality 62–63, 94, 101 psyche 33, 98, 188–189 quaternarian structure 91, 93, 96

Index  215 refusal to apperceive 93 responsibility 50; Havel 170–171, 175, 181, 182, 195; Voegelin 93, 96, 98 Rossbach, S. 88 sacrificial crisis 12 Sandoz, E. 83, 85, 87–88 scandal 12 scapegoat 12, 13, 16, 193 scapegoating 12, 13, 16, 19 second reality 41, 82, 87, 94–98, 102, 109 Seelenhafte 61, 62 Seelenleben 62 selflessness 118, 140, 191 self-realisation 7, 12, 28, 35, 179, 195 Socialist Democratic Party 49, 52–53 soul 26, 35, 40–41; Havel 188, 193, 199; Landauer 64, 65; Voegelin 89–90, 92, 98, 106, 108; Weil 120, 124–126, 137, 146 soul stream 191 Socialist Bund 52, 70 spirit: 30; Havel 171, 172, 180, 186, 188, 194; Landauer 40, 49, 56, 57, 59, 62–64; Voegelin 89, 94–97, 101, 104, 107 spiritlessness 40, 56–57, 195 spirituality 27, 159, 181 St John of the Cross 31 state: Havel 153, 177, 179–180, 182, 192–193, 195; Landauer 40, 50, 53–60; Voegelin 95, 97; Weil 129–132, 145

Stavrakakis, Y. 9, 10 suffering: Voegelin 103; Weil 124, 128, 137, 140, 141, 193 Summer Meditations 38, 179 svedomi 168–169 Szakolczai, A. 16–18 theatre 153–154 Thing-Reality 99, 102 totalitarianism 43; Havel 162; Voegelin 110; Weil 115, 134 transcendence 43; Havel 167, 172–173, 180, 192, 194; Voegelin 94, 97, 99, 100, 102 truncation 66–67 ultra-politics 1, 7 uprootedness 125–130, 134 via negativa 35, 88 victim 12–13 Viriasova, I. 23–27 void 16, 18, 32, 139, 142, 197 Webb, E. 34, 90, 189 Weltanschauung 61 Wolin, S. 8 world-I 66–67, 94, 97–98 zetema 33–34, 190, 198 Žižek 7, 10, 28, 159