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LIVING IN TRUTH IS A BAD PHILOSOPHY
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- TOM HAYDEN
LIVING IN TRUTH IS A BAD PHILOSOPHY1. HAVEL’S FOCUS ON THE “TRUTH” AND CERTAINTY PREVENTS REAL RESPONSIBILITY Peter Augustine Lawler, Professor of Political Science, Berry College, PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICAL SCIENCE, Winter, 1997, p. 35. After discussing rights. Havel speaks of "transcendence ... deeply and joyously experienced," a mysterious "harmony" with all that exists. Only such an experience makes "peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation" possible. Maybe that is so. But is that experience really one of the whole truth, or even the fundamental truth, known to human beings? Can such joyous harmony be the foundation of the distinctions between God and person, good and evil, and virtue and vice, which the dissident Havel said constituted the "natural" or prescientific world? The persistent impression is that peaceful coexistence with each other, the earth, and the cosmos demands that we surrender the assertiveness that comes with the exercise of rights or even the exercise of virtue. If we experience ourselves as too well anchored, then there is no longer any need for or possibility of responsibility. 2. HIS REJECTION OF RELIGION IS HASTY: LIVING IN TRUTH IS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT IT Peter Augustine Lawler, Professor of Political Science, Berry College, PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICAL SCIENCE, Winter, 1997, p. 35. Postmodernism properly understood, Havel used to know, is based primarily in opposition to systemization and denial of differences. It fundamentally affirms the disorder or plurality that characterizes the liberty of personal identity. showing that human greatness is intertwined with human misery, the awareness of human alienation from Being and the inevitability of death. Its aim is to restore meaning or weight to the distinctions, beginning with the one between man and God, that constitute the "natural world," the one undermined by the impersonal abstractions of science. So postmodernism, acknowledging that human beings really have spiritual or religious longings, is open to the possibility of religion's truth. Only biblical religion, in my view, attempts to explain the greatness and misery of individual alienation or homelessness, and nothing Havel has said provides an adequate replacement.
Scott Tucker, Artist, Activist, Writer, THE HUMANIST, November-December 1994, p. 40-41. In my column "Capitalism with a Human Face?" (Humanist, May/June 1994), I ventured to hope that Vaclav Havel, the playwright and human-rights activist who became Czechoslovakia's first head of state after communism, would exert "at least a. moderating influence upon his fellow politicians and capitalists' " Under communism, Havel espoused democratic socialism. Today he is a multimillionaire content with "the free market ... the only natural economy," which, in turn, reflects the free and multiform "miracle of being." On July 4 of this year, Mayor Edward Rendell awarded the Philadelphia Liberty Medal to Havel during a ceremony at Independence Hall. The metaphysician and the politician in Havel joined together to deliver this message: The relationship to the world that modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential.... It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning.... Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the Earth and, at the same time, the cosmos. In one of his essays, Havel quotes Heidegger with approval: "Only a God can save us now." For a time, Heidegger found God in Hitler. I don't discount either writer across the board, and I share Havel's concern with bridging ultimate and relative values, but he would do more good if he would preach his current creed directly to the Thatcherite faction directing the Czech economy. There is little justice or mercy in their program, and they continue the degradation of earth, air, and water which was common policy under the communist regime. In the abstract, Havel's message is often decent. But if we dig a little to discover just how the current Czech regime is "rooted in the earth," we find that Havel increasingly plays the role of moral fig leaf for nakedly rapacious "free market" forces, both national and inter, national. No wonder he has received an uncritical chorus of acclaim from our own rulers and pundits. Politics is not only the art of compromise, and Havel will soon destroy even his integrity as a common citizen and writer if he continues preaching cosmic banalities.
It says a great deal about American academic thinking that we are still arguing about the 1960s, and whether some of the political movements of the time were benevolent or detrimental. One of those movements, Students for a Democratic Society, had a charismatic and thoughtful leader named Tom Hayden who has continued (as an activist and as a California state legislator) to work for change in the American political arena. And unlike me, Hayden -- committed to the Socratic and Platonic tradition of logic and rhetoric -- does not shy away from nor roll his eyes at debates on the impact of the 1960s. Far from it: Hayden welcomes the dialogue, which he sees as necessary for a rich and stable intellectual culture. While it’s certainly impossible to sum up either the SDS or Hayden in just a few pages -- the issues they tackled ranged from the war in Vietnam to racial injustice to anti-nuclear politics to American economic inequity -- it is possible to sum up the academic debate surrounding them. Basically, there are two camps that feel strongly as regards Hayden and SDS. There are those who consider them to be heroic protestors, challengers of the status quo and defenders of the downtrodden -- and those who consider them to be troublemaking, anti-American louts who have frayed the fabric of the blue jeans of American life. Who is right? Well, in order to answer that question, we’ll have to take a look at Hayden, his life, his ideas, and what he and those inspired by him did during the 1960s. It wouldn’t hurt to have a gander at what they have continued to do in the ensuing decades. So, with that said, let’s examine one of the most fascinating periods of recent American history. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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