“The Intentions of Life”: Philosophical Points of Departure in The Power of the Powerless

Václav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless is certainly not a philosophical treatise in the true sense; rather, it is a reflection on what political changes a citizen can and cannot achieve in a “post-totalitarian” state (as Havel called the structure of power in socialist society at the time—see section II of his essay). Nonetheless the essay is dedicated to the memory of Jan Patočka, whom Havel twice cites directly (X and XVIII), so it is perhaps not illegitimate to ask whether some philosophical point of departure can be found in the text, and if so, what role it plays in Havel’s considerations.

Havel characterizes life in the socialist state of the 1970s as “life in falsehood” ¹ (VI). Its representative in the essay is the greengrocer who puts the sign “Workers of the world, unite!” in the window of his shop (i.e., the state shop in which he is employed). For the greengrocer, this slogan has no concrete content; who “workers” are and what their uniting might mean, let alone for what goal, are not among his considerations. Havel, as the essay’s author, likewise does not reflect on these questions; rather, he wants to document the situation of a person who submits to the demand of the “post-totalitarian” state that he disseminate such slogans of little content, whether from fear of not obeying or from indifference, and who thereby legitimates the demand and constitutes it for others. The greengrocer is thus a victim and architect of “life in falsehood”—an illusion of “post-totalitarian” power, which pretends to govern from the will of citizens but in fact deprives them of political and civic freedoms (VI).

In the mechanism of “life in falsehood” that Havel describes, we can find a certain moral variation on what Heidegger calls “Dasein’s inauthentic mode of being”—a modality of human existing wherein human existence seeks to evade its finitude by fully losing itself in the things it cares for (sich verliert an das Besorgte), and in which it understands itself along these lines (sich aus dem Besorgten her versteht). ² Of course even Heidegger’s “being there” (Dasein) doesn’t create this manner of being alone, but only as “being with” (Mitsein)—that is, being with others, who in their anonymity have already always prepared the milieu for an indefinite “they” (das “Man”) in which Dasein escapes the requirement to be what it really is in its “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit), satisfied instead with a general awareness of what “is expected,” what “is considered” important, etc.

Havel even explicitly speaks of “falling victim [Verfallen] to beings” ³ (III) or being “cast into the world of ‘beings,’” which “removes us from the experience of Being” (XX). In addition, he recognizes some kind of “ritual” of life in falsehood, which “dissolves” human beings as individuals and unbinds them from responsibility, and in doing so makes anonymous the power thus maintained (V). With this ritual and its “dictatorship” Havel does not mean some kind of special ceremony (even if occasionally he also writes of “Byzantine caesaropapism,” ⁴ in which “the highest secular authority is identical with the highest spiritual authority,” II), but a self-functioning “post-totalitarian” society in which goals are rather “low”—for example concern with one’s own survival or a quiet life, masked thanks to ideology as such lofty ideals of universal significance as “workers of the world unite” (III).

“Falling victim to beings,” nonetheless, is not limited in Havel’s analysis just to “post-totalitarian” socialist society. That, rather, is a kind of more vivid manifestation of the wretchedness or “deep crisis” in which “technological civilization” as such finds itself, of its “global automatism,” which “drags along” individuals stripped of control over “their own situation” according to the dictatorship of “industrial-consumer society” (XX).

That for which Havel appeals is therefore not the creation of a democratic arrangement of a West European type. Not only is such a project beyond the power of the enslaved citizen of a “post-totalitarian” state, but Havel (with reference to Heidegger) does not even believe that traditional parliamentary democracy (in its present form some kind of “post-democracy,” as Havel calls it, XXI) can stand up to this crisis. “Traditional parliamentary democracy with the usual spectrum of big political parties” ⁵ might at most be a “transitional solution.” Genuine help—Heidegger’s “God who alone can save us”—Havel hopes to find in “a renewed focus of politics on real people” (XX)—that is, in the formation of spontaneous social structures concretely “entering into a situation” and governing themselves by the situation’s “actual significance” ⁶ rather than by a generally applicable norm (XXI).

This “existential revolution” (XX), leading in the end to new types of social structures, is of course impossible without the moral turn of individuals from “life in falsehood” to “life in truth.” The greengrocer no longer obediently places empty slogans in his shop window; “he rejects the ritual” of “post-totalitarian” power. “The world of appearances” thus stands revealed in the mechanism of its functioning and takes revenge on the greengrocer by evicting him from the shelter that his loyalty had thus far provided (VII).

What, however, is this “life in truth,” the possibility of which the greengrocer illustrates inasmuch as he “has shattered the world of appearances” and stepped out from “life in falsehood”? Havel indicates that it has not only a “political” dimension, which we have already mentioned, but also at the same time an “existential dimension (returning individual human beings to what they really are), ⁷ . . . a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), [and] . . . a moral dimension (setting an example for others)” ⁸ (VII). Two of these four dimensions—the existential and the noetic—are of particular interest if we are to analyze Havel’s vision of what a human being is and what character reality has. He writes:

Human beings can be alienated from themselves only because there is something in them to alienate. The terrain of this violation is their authentic existence. Life in truth is thus woven directly into the texture of life in falsehood. It is the repressed alternative, the authentic intention ⁹ to which life in falsehood is an inauthentic response. Only against this background does life in falsehood make any sense: it exists because of that background. In its excusatory, chimerical rootedness in the human order, it is a response to nothing other than the human orientation towards truth. ¹⁰ Under the orderly surface of the life of lies, therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real intentions, of its hidden openness to truth [VIII].

From this passage, we may conclude that Havel’s human beings, like Heidegger’s Dasein, are capable of “authentic existence,” which, however, can be (or always already is) “alienated” from itself and immersed in inauthenticity. Havel presents authentic existence as a possibility founded on the human “orientation towards truth” or “hidden openness to truth.” However, this possibility is “the repressed alternative” to the extent that human beings are “pulled” into life in falsehood “and ensnared by it, like Faust by Mephistopheles” (VI).

This diabolically inauthentic alternative is depicted in Havel’s essay as something characteristic of “post-totalitarian” society and its ritual of life in falsehood. We can nonetheless conclude from what has been said above that this alternative is a sad fact of all “technological civilization” with its dehumanizing “automatism,” although the wretchedness may be better masked in democratic society. To be sure, even there Havel uncovers “the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce” (XX). In post-totalitarian society, there exists essentially the same “hierarchy of values existing in the developed countries of the West. . . . In other words, what we have here is simply another form of the consumer and industrial society, with all its concomitant social, intellectual, and spiritual consequences” ¹¹ (II).

The search for a common denominator for the distress of “post-totalitarian” and democratic society is treacherous, because of the inestimable difference in their structure and the degree of freedom they offer citizens. Nonetheless the fact remains that Heidegger and, after him, Patočka, from whom Havel takes his rhetoric, spoke of twentieth-century Western civilization in a similarly somber spirit. Although both of Havel’s predecessors reckoned in their philosophies of history with brighter and darker times, human existence is “primarily and for the most part” captive to inauthenticity, and its authentic relation to Being—or its own meaning—is something uncertain and fragile that, in all times and in all circumstances, it must struggle to achieve.

In contrast to Heidegger in his old age, Havel emphasizes the importance of an individual’s moral conversion, or “turn,” and the possibilities of social structures, oriented toward “real human beings” and “actual significance,” which can grow out of such a conversion. Havel also describes this turn as “a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to the human order,” as “a new experience of Being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility, a newfound inner relationship to other people and to the human community” (XXI). It is apparently very difficult to characterize this transformation more specifically without using the metaphors of one or another religion, because the experience is essentially religious or quasi-religious (Havel himself refers to the experience of Indian monasticism or the Christian tradition, XVIII).

The focus of this conversion Havel also calls, in many places, “the intentions of life,” which in the “post-totalitarian” system are suppressed (VIII) but still embryonically realized in the dissident movements of “post-totalitarian” societies, in some kind of “parallel polis” (a term Havel borrows from Václav Benda). Havel describes this informal “polis,” with its independent activities of all kinds (especially pedagogical and cultural), as a space for “a life that is in harmony with its own intentions and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those intentions” (XVIII). ¹² According to Havel, these intentions are themselves of a diverse nature:

Sometimes they appear as the basic material or social interests of a group or an individual; at other times, they may appear as certain intellectual and spiritual interests; at still other times, they may be the most fundamental of existential demands, such as the simple longing of people to live their own lives in dignity [X] . . . that is, the elementary need of human beings to live, to a certain extent at least, in harmony with themselves . . ., to be able to express themselves freely, to find an outlet for their creativity, to enjoy legal security, and so on [XI].

It seems that these “intentions of life” and their pursuit (or at least non-suppression) stand in for Heidegger’s finitude (Endlichkeit) and its acceptance, not flight (Flucht) from it. The resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) of Heidegger’s Dasein, made possible by “anticipating death” (Vorlaufen zum Tode) or awareness of weight, such as has the choice of one’s own possibilities for finite being, is replaced here by authenticity in the sense of faithfulness to life and its “intentions.” “Life” is understood in these passages not only as biological, but also intellectual, spiritual, and social existence, which itself lays claim to some kind of faithfulness: “to live . . . at least to a certain extent in harmony with oneself.” Characteristic of human beings, this relationship of life to itself—that is, listening attentively to “the intentions of life” and building a free space for their fulfillment—constitutes in Havel’s reflections a necessary supplement to the notion of authenticity, which otherwise would not make coherent sense.

Were we to attempt to unite both motifs, we would have to assume that “the intentions of life,” however generally understandable, are suppressed (or at least threatened) not just in the “post-totalitarian” system, but also in Western technological civilization and evidently in human history as such. The degree of this repression is understandably variable, but what interests us is the very fact of the intentions’ endangerment and the ever-present need to fight for free space for their development.

In the human world, we find “the intentions of life” always endangered because they necessarily demand faithfulness to oneself, which can to varying degrees be fulfilled or also completely squandered:

The essential intentions of life are present naturally in every human being. In everyone there is some longing for his or her human dignity, for moral integrity, for the free experience of Being and for transcendence over the “world of beings.” Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with life in falsehood. Everyone somehow succumbs to a profane objectification, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life [VI]. ¹³

Human life, therefore, has not only its legitimate, “existential intentions” but also the possibility to alienate itself from itself, to degenerate into “pseudo-life.” “The intentions of life” are thus not self-evidently fulfilled, but represent a certain achievement that is not always successful and that is apparently never completely successful. It would therefore be impossible to try to draw a clear line of demarcation between fulfillment and unfulfillment; because of their nature, the intentions always remain to a certain extent unrealizable. “Life in truth” and “life in falsehood” seem in this sense to be more substantially mixed together than Havel’s essay makes out (VI–VII).

At the same time, it would of course be unreasonable to refuse to differentiate at all between the two possibilities of life. The degree to which anyone “succumbs to a profane objectification, and to utilitarianism,” can still vary appreciably, even if it cannot be fixed clearly or definitively. It would be a grievous misunderstanding of the “intentions of life” to yield thoughtlessly to decadence and not try in some way to oppose it, just because it is never possible to determine its exact extent.

It would be similarly misleading not to look at all at the ways in which “the intentions of life” are fulfilled or suppressed in the social dimension. Repression in the “post-totalitarian” system was noticeably more thorough than “the dictatorship of industrial and consumer society,” as Havel’s essay makes quite clear. At stake here is evidently not just a difference of degree, but of quality, of the whole arrangement of the society and space in which the intentions of life can or, indeed, cannot be realized.

The question of the source of this personal and social decadence remains unanswered in Havel’s essay, and indeed it is not even posed (perhaps it would be the law of increasing entropy, about which Havel writes in his 1975 letter to Gustáv Husák). Havel identifies the “post-totalitarian” state clearly enough as the suppressor of “life’s intentions” and together with Heidegger (and Patočka) blames technology—“that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modern metaphysics”—that it “is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction” (XX). Nonetheless, Havel does not reflect on the mechanism behind the rise of all these plagues. Is some kind of law at work in this self-destructiveness of life? Or is the matter just a freak anomaly of our unhappy age? Or is it some kind of permanent tendency of life, which is not subject to any intelligible law?

Although Havel’s essay leads us to suspect the third of these possibilities, such questioning is not his concern. This is certainly forgivable with regard to the goal of the text; nevertheless, by its complete absence the problem unpleasantly disturbs Havel’s considerations about moral conversion to “life in truth” and particularly about a political reorientation toward “real human beings” and social structures that grow organically as a consequence. Specifically, the noble results of this double reorientation will evidently be attacked by that deceitful tendency of life to self-falsification and self-destruction. Though we may not be able to predict in detail how this might occur, it would be advisable to count on the tendency and subject “the intentions of life” to careful consideration, in order to create mechanisms for their defense. Of course, this also necessarily means confronting something—and here we once again come dangerously close to the willful exercise of power, which destroys rather than defends “the intentions of life.” Perhaps, however, even this need to defend “the intentions of life” is itself an “intention of life,” albeit one easily abused (as, indeed, are all life’s intentions). “The intentions of life” therefore require a mechanism of protection from their own misuse.

We will evidently need to counterbalance the “intentions of life”—a concept that Havel clearly employs as something thoroughly positive—with the unfortunate tendency of life to deceive itself, to constrain and destroy itself—a tendency that Havel the playwright knew well and which is some kind of unpleasant yet unavoidable by-product of building a free space for the development of authentic intentions. Without this awareness of the persistent ambivalence of “life,” “life in truth” can easily present itself as an illusion, which is even politically dangerous. Precisely the building of mechanisms that protect “the intentions of life” from life’s tendency to decadence is the true goal of politics. The degree of recognition and fulfillment of this goal distinguishes one kind of social arrangement from another—and this quite substantially. For example, it distinguishes “post-totalitarian” from democratic society much more meaningfully than the degree of repression alone does.

Václav Havel certainly did not write his essay as the manifesto of a future president, and his later government belonged without doubt among the better periods in the history of our independent national state. In reading Havel’s reflections from 1978 today we can nevertheless not resist the impression that, had he been more sharply aware of the ambivalent nature of “life,” which itself jeopardizes its own best intentions, his contribution to developments after 1989 might have been deeper and more lasting.