4 September (1982): Václav Havel to Olga Havlová

In 1979, the Czech playwright Václav Havel was sentenced to three years in prison for the crime of “subversion to the republic.” He was the leader of a dissident group known as The Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS). During those three years he regularly wrote to his wife Olga Havlová, a fellow dissident. In prison, Havel was only allowed to write letters about family matters; however, he gradually introduced more and more prohibited subjects. He realized that the more “abstract and incomprehensible” his letters were, they more likely they were to be sent—the censors did not allow anything to be mailed that they could understand. Thus, Havel dramatically changed his writing style. He was released from prison in 1982 for medical reasons, and in 1989 became Czechoslovakia’s first democratically elected president.

September 4, 1982

Dear Olga,

Among the thousands of remarkable events that create the miracle of Being and its history, the event which I have called here the constitution or the genesis of the human “I” has an entirely revolutionary significance. Unlike all other events, this one touches, in a special way, the very essence of Being, the very “Being of Being.” Man is not merely an entity among other entities, that is, something merely different from all the others, but an entity which, in a direct way, “is otherwise.” He is not merely distinguished from other entities by what he is (by the fact that he is essentially more structured, for example), but chiefly by how he is, the fact that his very being is essentially different from the being of anything else outside him. I have tried to describe this deeply ontological “otherness” (experimentally, more in a literary fashion and purely for the needs of the time when my letters are read) as a “state of separation”: on the other hand, we “know ourselves” and “know the world,” and on the other hand, we in fact know nothing about ourselves or the world, and knowing this of ourselves—and that we alone know this—we necessarily experience ourselves as something that has somehow “fallen” out of or been “separated” from the order of the universe and the general manner of Being. With anything else it seems the other way around: a particular entity “knows” neither itself nor the world; as an unproblematic (i.e., unseparated by its “self-knowledge”) expression of the totality of integral Being, however, it also “knows everything,” or rather it “possesses” itself completely “from within.” These two dimensions of all existing entities (i.e., lac of “self-knowledge” and complete “self-possession” “from inside”) are, at the same time, embodied as it were in the two fundamental levels of our experience of Being: the dimension of “not knowing” is the basis of what we experience as the world of entities, phenomena, things, that is, of everything I have called “the world”; and the dimension of hidden and total “self-knowledge of the universe” is the object of our inner experience, which I have called simply the experience of “Being.” That double layer of our ontological experience is essentially the experience of our double thrownness: our thrownness into the alienness of the world, which brings home or manifests us to our “separateness,” our vulnerability and our lostness, and our thrownness into the original integrity of Being and our “longing” for it. (By the way, it would seem that, logically, the world and the entities that make it up must have come first, and that only subsequently could man have been thrown into it. In fact, however, that is not so: man and the world come into being at the same time, as two “dimensions” of a single act of separation, because the world, i.e., the world of entities, is nothing other than Being, or rather the Being of the “non-I,” as it manifests itself to and through the constituting “I.” Thus the world is Being made external, made manifest to us, “made existent” by our otherness; it is a declaration or an expression of Being that is structured and defined by the kind of existential, mental and sensory openness and limitations we possess. That is why I wrote—and I can’t remember if I made it clear enough—that when the “I” is constituted, the world is constituted along with it. In any case, thrownness into the source of Being that first establishes that source as a genuine sour, i.e., as a more or less conscious experience of the secret bond between the “I” and the universe—or more precisely, between me and what is “beyond me,” as it were, and beyond each of my “exteriorities.”) Our thrownness into the world, then, makes present to us our separation; our thrownness into the source in Being, on the contrary, awakens in us that intrinsically human self-transcendence: the longing to step beyond all our concrete horizons and this to touch again the lost fullness of Being, somehow to “possess” it again (and thus to overcome our state of separation), issuing in the experience of “quasi-identification” as an alert contact—that is, fully aware of itself—with “absolute Being,” that mysterious principle in essence of everything that is. An important and special circumstance, one that throws light on many other things, is that both these experiences of ours are far from being merely noetic instruments; they have profound existential and moral substance and implications: while “Being”—as the absolute horizon of our relating—is for us—as a “voice” and a “cry”—identical with a moral order (as though Being were not only the “reasoning mind” of everything that exists, but its “heart” as well), the world, or rather existence in it, is a temptation for us to cling in a more complacent fashion (because of its indifference to the difficult “voice of Being”) to superficialities, immediate aims, details, to adapt ourselves to the flow of phenomena while giving up on their meaning (leading inevitably to the weakening of one’s own Being). Behind this notion is a sensation of the ambiguity, the instability, the contradictory and paradoxical nature of the human position. Our ontological “otherness” in fact chiefly expresses this: only man, for instance, can pose the question of meaning, yet he can never come up with an exhaustive answer to it (since it would mean not being what he is—“separated from Being”); he alone experiences, or rather through his experience constitutes, the world as that into which he has been thrown and in which he is condemned to exist, yet at the same time, he alone knows that by succumbing to that existence-in-the-world, he will irrevocably lose himself; he alone is capable of alertly experiencing Being as the true background of everything that exists, but at the same time he alone is fated to be outside that Being and condemned never to be fully inside it. Yet the paradox of this paradoxical nature of human being is that in it resides—at the same time—the source of all its beauty and misery, its tragedy and greatness, its dramatic florescence and its continual failures.

I think that religious archetypes accurately mirror the dimensions of this ambiguous essence of humanity—from the idea of paradise, that “recollection” of a lost participation in the integrity of Being, the idea of a fall into the world as an act of “separation” (is not the apple of knowledge in fact the “knowledge of self” that separates us?), the idea of the last judgement as our confrontation with the absolute horizon of our relating, right down to the idea of salvation as supreme transcendence, that “quasi-identification” with the fullness of Being, to which humanity is constantly aspiring. And the fact that all the short-circuited attempts of fanaticism to organize a “heaven on earth” inevitably lead to an earthly hell is more than clearly expressed in the reminder that the kingdom of God is not “of this earth.” Indeed: a relatively bearable human life on this earth can only be secured by a humanity whose orientation is “beyond” this world, a humanity that—in each of its “heres” and each of its “nows”—relates to infinity, to the absolute and to eternity. An unqualified orientation to the “here” and “now,” however bearable that may be, hopelessly transforms that “here” and “now” into desolation and waste and ultimately colors it with blood.

Yes: man is in fact nailed down—like Christ on the cross—to a grid of paradoxes: stretched between the horizontal of the 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 carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious, but 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.

The same thing in fact applies—this must be added for the sake of completeness—to these meditations of mine: they are a defeat because in them I have neither discovered nor expressed anything that hasn’t already been discovered long before and expressed a hundred times better—and yet they are, at the same time, a victory: if nothing else, I have at least managed, through them (overcoming more banally exterior and profoundly interior obstacles than I would ever wish upon anyone who writes anything), to pull myself together to the point where I now feel better than when I began them. It’s strange, but I may well be happier now than at any time in recent years.

In short, I feel fine and I love you—

Vašek

From Letters to Olga. Henry and Holt Company. New York: 1983.

FURTHER READING