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Abstract
Václav Havel is a playwright who turned into a statesman of extraordinary wisdom and morals by the exigency of his time. He has been the most prominent voice of post-Communist Eastern Europe. His close fellow-traveller was Jan Patocka who was a student of Husserl and Heidegger and closely read the phenomenological ethicist Emmanuel Levinas who earmarked dialogical ethics as "first philosophy." The present essay explores Havel's philosophy of responsibility as "first politics." His signature piece "living in truth" marks the heart of his morality in politics, that is, the confluence of morality and politics. For Havel, politics as "the art of the impossible" defies politics as "the art of the possible" or Realpolitik. Responsibility as "first politics" is a moral alternative to violence.
Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy.
-Emmanuel Levinas (1969: p. 304)
[W]ords are stronger than bullets.
-Albert Camus (1991: p. 140)
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human being with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice.
-Hannah Arendt (1998: p. 2)
There is something refreshing and novel about Václav Havel's philosophic politics that appeals to and attracts the critical attention and acclaim of contemporary intellectuals from all political persuasions: Richard Rorty, Steven Lukes, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Roger Scruton, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Robert N. Bellah, and Robert Jay Lifton. From the side of conservatives, Havel represents the death of communism as a totalitarian political system and the "end" of ideology and history as the transparent triumph of American liberalism. From the side of political radicalism, he symbolizes the ultimate victory of the powerless.
For many intellectuals, it is the working of Havel's philosophic politics, of the politics of the antipolitical that is attractive and intriguing. It is summed up in the idea of "living in truth" as moral sensibility. In his Reinventing Politics which surveys Eastern European politics from Stalin to Havel, Vladimir Tismaneanu (1992: p. 133) writes poignantly: "Nobody better expressed the commitment to a politics of truth than the Czech playwright and human rights activist Václav Havel." There is indeed something avant-garde and forward-looking in Havel's thought. In...