“Unhappy is the country that needs a hero”. This is what the German Marxist dramatist Bertolt Brecht makes his protagonist Galileo Galilei claim in the play “Life of Galileo” from 1938. Galileo, both historically and in Brecht's version, is no hero. Upon being threatened with torture by the Vatican, he recants his teachings. Did he escape unhappiness, in this way? Certainly not; for unhappiness reigns as long as the demand for heroes exists. It does not help to turn down individual heroism. The situation won't improve. One should therefore read the sentence contrary to its intention: Because unhappiness is the human rule and not the exception, there will always be need for heroes. One might call “heroic” anyone who in a life-threatening situation overcomes fear and acts against what causes the threat. Heroism is a figure of transgression. The heroic individual exceeds the ordinary life crouching in the threat. He or she frees herself from the fear that attempts to bind her. It preserves the idea of man as a being who can free itself from fear and the manipulations of power, which are mediated by it. This way, each heroic individual has symbolic status. Precisely because the heroic individual represents the humane idea, he or she can be abused ideologically. This is especially true in the context of modernity, for which an emphatic concept of man is formative. The heroic individual of the ideological system overcomes what is threatening it. In so doing, she proves that the system itself is the epitome of the humane. Above all, modernity loves the heroic soldiers, workers, and – since biological disappearance is a danger to the system, too – mothers. Yet, the system itself produces a large number of fears. It could not exist otherwise; it is manipulative by nature. Here, another type of heroes is required, that is, people who go beyond the circle of manipulation and abused ideological heroism. In the language of politics, they are sometimes called “dissidents.” In October 1978, in the underground of Czechoslovak dissent, there was published an essay of Václav Havel entitled “The Power of the Powerless.” The essay became a landmark in the resistance movements of the entire Soviet bloc. It develops the character of dissent against the background of the prevailing real-socialist regime. According to it, two categorical distinctions are central: the regime is determined by power and “living within the lie;” in contrast, dissidence is distinguished by powerlessness and “living within the truth.” Following Havel, living within the truth remains faithful to what the human being really is. This is why living within the truth is able to disclose the lie of the system. It shows that the regime deceives the people about what they actually are. Initially, this disclosure has no political power. It is existential and moral by nature. Nevertheless, it is able to subvert the power of the regime. In covering the existential lie and sustaining it, the system delegitimizes itself. The claims of truth stand up and demand to eliminate it. In open confrontation with the regime, originally powerless living within the truth transforms into “singular, explosive, incalculable political power“(Havel). Havel is honest enough to hold answers concerning the future of political dissent as open as possible. Yet his political credo is clear: “I believe in structures that are not aimed at the technical aspect of the execution of power, but at the significance of that execution in structures held together more by a commonly shared feeling of the importance of certain communities (…). There can and must be structures that are open, dynamic, and small; (…) There must be structures that in principle place no limits on the genesis of different structures. Any accumulation of power whatsoever (one of the characteristics of automatism) should be profoundly alien to it. They would be structures not in the sense of organizations or institutions, but like a community. (…) Rather than a strategic agglomeration of formalized organizations, it is better to have organizations springing up ad hoc, infused with enthusiasm for a particular purpose and disappearing when that purpose has been achieved.” The future president of the Czech Republic, remained in his integrity, but yet had to bow to the pressures of what is possible, and is still far away from what he proposed. Undoubtedly, it is necessary to study Havel's biography also to understand what “real politics” means and how it works. In any case, the “real polis” that Havel's essay designs in the historic case of the “Velvet Revolution” remained a matter of dissidence. One should not judge dissent by its political results, that is, by the political systems following it. The success of dissent is in the actions that immediately spring from it. It allows people that which is rare, namely, to live on the highest level of life. There is this story of a Czech exile. The invasion of Soviet troops in August 1968, the end of the “Prague Spring,” made him a dissident. He woke up one morning, turned on the radio and heard about the Russian tanks in the streets of Prague. There was no question; he knew immediately what to do. He dressed himself, took to the streets and joined in the demonstrations against the occupation of the communist big brother. He was completely indifferent to what would follow for him as a consequence. In fact, he lost his job as an art teacher, was degraded to become the night watchman of a waterworks, and went to live on the margins of society, in constant fear of the visits of the State Security. Nevertheless, he would not compromise with the system. In the end, he would have to leave the country and work for a tamizdat publisher, reproducing censored literature abroad. One might argue that the experience of persecution has little to do with a higher level of life. However, what is a life under oppression? As Havel rightly writes in his essay, it is a “component of the system, an agent of its automatism, a petty instrument of the social auto-totality.” Whoever breaks out here by refusing or resisting has already won, because he or she has regained life from the usual reduction of life in the system. In some cases, this regained life is experienced as absolute freedom. The claims of oppressive society are completely broken, there are no connections to it any more, no desires or hopes it could meet. The focus is solely on developing the difference to the status quo, to establish a new form of life that has already begun with the simple word “No.” However, contrary to the suggestion of the prefix, the difference of dissent is not only about a disjunction. The new life has no relation to the future life of the existing society. It is not only different, but “another life”, that is, it has a unique quality that makes it incomparable to the existing life. One could also say: it is superior, because it has a superior future. It speaks for most dissidents that they would refuse to be called heroes. Usually, any form of pathos is foreign to them. Their relationship to the world is pragmatic and rather cheerful than melancholy or brooding. They have a free spirit, but this is no reason for them to be vain; sometimes they do not even know it. If heroism is to overcome, it can also dispense pathos and vanity. It needs no reward, not even that of great importance and meaning. Probably only heroism without reward is true heroism. It is a matter of the moment and of a far off future. ** Sandra Lehmann is a philosopher and writer in Vienna, Austria. Her book “Wirklichkeitsglaube und Überschreitung – Entwurf einer Metaphysik” was published in 2011, by Turia + Kant. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/wiihY Tags: Tribute, Vaclav Havel Section: Latest News, Op-ed
