Truth, Enlightenment, and Modernity: Lecture Takeaways

The lecture begins with an anecdote from July 2019, shortly after Volodymyr Zelenskyy became Ukraine's president and Donald Trump was the American president. A phone call between the two leaders became the subject of controversy when Trump allegedly pressured Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden's son's business dealings, implying that U.S. aid to Ukraine could be withheld if the evidence was not produced. This incident led to Trump's first impeachment hearing in November 2019.

Alexander Vindman's Testimony and the Concept of Truth

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, then in charge of European affairs for the National Security Council, testified at the impeachment hearing. Vindman, who had immigrated to the U.S. from Soviet Ukraine as a child, was uniquely positioned to understand the phone call, as he spoke English, Ukrainian, and Russian.

A satirical piece in The New Yorker imagined a conversation between Zelenskyy and his advisors after the call, highlighting the absurdity of the situation. However, Vindman's actual testimony began with a poignant message to his father, thanking him for bringing their family to a country where one could speak the truth without fear. This resonated with the speaker, evoking the concept of "truth" as understood by dissidents under communism, like Vaclav Havel, where truth was a source of emancipation and meaning.

The Enlightenment and the Pursuit of Truth

The lecture then delves into the Enlightenment, characterizing it as a "romantic story" about humanity's love affair with reason and its potential to grasp truth. This era emphasized human capacity for thought and understanding, leading to the Cartesian concept of the self as "I think." The Enlightenment replaced God and tradition with science and rationality, exalting human reason and its ability to improve the world.

This philosophical shift also laid the groundwork for liberalism, asserting that human beings, possessing reason, deserve self-governance. The idea of popular sovereignty is rooted in respect for individuals as thinking, reasoning beings. The Enlightenment also fostered a sense of forward motion, akin to solving a jigsaw puzzle, where each piece added brings humanity closer to a complete understanding of the world.

Groundlessness and the Rise of Subjectivity

Beneath this optimism, however, lurked the "threat of God's absence," or Bodenlosigkeit (groundlessness), a term used by Hannah Arendt. In a world without divine grounding, the question arose: how can humanity assure itself of the world's existence or the correspondence between perception and reality?

With Hegel and Marx, linear time intensified into "History with a capital H," moving towards a specific telos. Concurrently, subjectivity rose to prominence, with the psychoanalytical, phenomenological, and existentialist selves emphasizing "I think," "I will," and "I desire." Modernity grappled with the tension between subjectivity and telos as God receded. Structuralism later emerged as an alternative source of order, shifting focus from historical progression to a synchronic view.

The Enlightenment's legacy continues to be debated, with questions about the nature and limits of rationality. Philosophically, it provided telos and subjectivity; politically, liberalism and the rise of nation and class as categories for understanding society. These categories mediate between the singular and the universal, offering alternative structures for identity.

The Cosmopolitan Nature of Ideas and Intellectual Encounters

The lecture emphasizes the cosmopolitan nature of intellectual history, where ideas move freely and unpredictably across boundaries. Intellectual history progresses through encounters between thinkers, such as Engels and Marx, de Beauvoir and Sartre, or Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse. These meetings often spark new ideas and shape intellectual movements. The improbable encounter between Havel and Michnik on a mountaintop is cited as an example of such a transformative meeting.

The Avant-Garde and Radical Freedom

The avant-garde, emerging after World War I, responded to nationalism with aggressive internationalism, rejecting borders and limitations. This short-lived movement, while inspiring, also embraced a radical nihilism and the idea of "everything is possible," leading to a sense of Bodenlosigkeit. This radical emptiness, akin to Sartre's concept of radical freedom, sometimes led to radical utopianism and determinism. The avant-garde, like modernity itself, sought wholeness and grounding in a world without traditional foundations.

Totalitarianism and the Engineering of Humanity

The lecture then turns to Nazism and Stalinism, describing them as the "Frankensteins of modernity"—the Enlightenment project gone mad. These totalitarian regimes engaged in social engineering on a grand scale, believing that everything, including human beings, could be categorized, sculpted, and perfected. The appeal of such systems, as Georg Lukacs noted about Marxism-Hegelianism, lay in their promise of "wholeness," a way to overcome groundlessness by subsuming individual parts into an all-encompassing whole.

Existentialism, Guilt, and the Burden of Choice

Existentialism, particularly Sartre's version, confronted groundlessness by asserting that individuals must create their own identity through action and choice. This burden of choice, however, leads to anguish and guilt, which, like Foucault's concept of power, is pervasive and inescapable. Choices often lack innocence, with all available options potentially causing suffering. Arthur Koestler, a former communist, famously wrote about the "skeleton in the cupboard of his conscience," reflecting the moral compromises made under totalitarian regimes.

Heidegger's Philosophy and His Engagement with Nazism

The lecture then addresses Jan Patocka's surprising generosity towards Martin Heidegger's engagement with Nazism. Patocka, who studied with Heidegger in 1933 and endured Nazi occupation, understood the context of Heidegger's choices. When Heidegger's interview with Der Spiegel, discussing his Nazi past, was published posthumously in 1976, Patocka, upon reading it, suggested that a German in 1933 might have felt compelled to "try it out."

This perspective, shared by Patocka's friend Ivan Krastev, who grew up under communism, highlights the idea that few people emerged from Nazism and Stalinism with "clean hands." Heidegger's philosophy remains significant because it transcended the centuries-old subject-object paradigm, introducing the concept of embeddedness. Dasein, for Heidegger, was not merely a thinking consciousness but a being deeply involved in and shaped by the world, "thrown" (Geworfenheit) into history.

This "thrownness" implies that while individuals don't choose their birth circumstances, they are responsible for their actions within that embeddedness. Dasein is both thrown and radically ungrounded (Bodenlosigkeit) because authentic living involves confronting the "unhomeliness" (Unheimlichkeit) of existence and the inevitability of death. This visceral understanding of the human condition, including the notion of guilt, is a key aspect of Heidegger's legacy.

The 20th Century: A Bloodbath and the Stakes of History

The 20th century, marked by immense bloodshed, intensified these philosophical questions. The lecture cites staggering death tolls from Stalinism and World War II, emphasizing the mind-boggling scale of human suffering. These events underscore the importance of historicity, a concept Heidegger, like Hegel, provided to grasp the century's complexities.

Postmodernism and the Undermining of Truth

Postmodernism is presented as a belated response to this terror, a re-evaluation of revolutionary legacies. While structuralism offered the promise of stable structures, post-structuralism, particularly Derrida's work, argued against closed systems and determinate meaning. For Derrida, a stable structure implies a totalitarian "transcendental signified." He argued that language is unstable, and meaning flickers, leading to a "surplus of meaning" rather than a deficit. Critics, however, argue that a surplus of meaning is effectively no meaning.

Zygmunt Bauman's concept of "liquid modernity" describes postmodernity as an embrace of fluidity and ephemerality, a departure from modernity's attempt to replace old certainties with new ones. Derrida's deconstruction, while combating totalitarian risks, also raises the question of what to fight for if there is no determinant truth. Later in his life, Derrida revisited Marx and Hegel, exploring the "specters of Marx" and the enduring influence of Hegelian thought, even in anti-Hegelian perspectives.

Hannah Arendt's analysis of truth and lies under totalitarianism is introduced. She distinguished between pre-modern lies, which left discernible "tears in the fabric of reality," and totalitarian lies, which created a seamless, reconstructed reality. Totalitarian ideology, she argued, was more believable than empirical truth because it could conveniently edit out arbitrariness.

The lecture concludes by discussing "post-truth" and "neo-totalitarianism," exemplified by Putin's Russia, where the very notion of truth is undermined. This creates a new level of Bodenlosigkeit, where reality is constantly shifting, and "alternative facts" prevail. In this context, the speaker suggests revisiting Havel and Michnik, who, despite rejecting grand narratives, believed in the existence of truth.

The Philosophical Arc: Epistemology to Ethics

The philosophical arc moves from epistemology (truth as subject-object correspondence) through ontology to ethics (truth contrasted with lies, authenticity with inauthenticity), with history as the central mediating factor.

Patocka, Michalski, and the Antidote to Hegel

The lecture returns to the encounter between Jan Patocka and Krzysztof Michalski. Michalski, a student of Leszek Kolakowski, sought Patocka's guidance for his dissertation on Heidegger after his department was shut down in communist Poland. Despite their age difference, they shared the conviction that Heidegger could offer an antidote to Hegel in the communist bloc, demonstrating that meaning could exist without wholeness and truth without an inevitable telos.

Michalski found in Heidegger a sense of life as responsibility, a concept Patocka also embraced, viewing responsibility as an ontological trait of Dasein. Patocka believed that even if truth couldn't be grasped, the responsibility to seek it remained. His "Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History" articulated this, with Michalski helping to smuggle and publish them. This philosophical movement, including Kolakowski, Patocka, and Michalski, argued that robust subjectivity grounds truth, and truth and subjectivity are connected through responsibility.

After Patocka's death in 1977, Michalski worked to preserve his archive, eventually establishing the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, where Patocka's papers are still housed.

Forgiveness, Betrayal, and the Search for Truth

The lecture briefly touches on forgiveness, noting Arendt's view that Jesus discovered it and that it is an unpredictable, anti-political act that creates something new. The story of Edith Stein, Husserl's assistant, and Roman Ingarden, another student, illustrates betrayal and its consequences. Stein, heartbroken after Ingarden married another woman, asked him to burn her letters, which he did not. She later converted to Catholicism, became a Carmelite nun, and was gassed at Auschwitz as a Jew.

Years later, Ingarden recounted Stein's story to Karol Wojtyla (who would become Pope John Paul II), who was fascinated by her work. Wojtyla eventually canonized Edith Stein, praising her lifelong search for truth.

The lecture concludes with an anecdote about Pope John Paul II's attendance at a conference on the Enlightenment at the Institute for Human Sciences. After listening to discussions about reason and rationality, the Pope remarked that the Enlightenment and modernity were "just a brief moment in the autobiography of God."