The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka not only witnessed some of the most turbulent politics of twentieth-century Central Europe, but shaped his philosophy in response to that tumult. One of the last ...students of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, he inspired Václav Havel and other dissidents who confronted the Communist regime before 1989, as well as being actively involved in authoring and enacting Charter 77.He died in 1977 from medical complications resulting from interrogations of the secret police. iConfronting Totalitarian Minds/i examines his legacy along with several contemporary applications of his ideas about dissidence, solidarity, and the human being’s existential confrontation with unjust politics. Expanding the current possibilities of comparative political theory, the author puts Patočka’s ideas about dissidence, citizen mobilization, and civic responsibility into conversation with notable world historical figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Vaclav Havel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and other contemporary activists. In adding a fresh voice to contemporary conversations on transcending injustice, iConfronting Totalitarian Minds/i seeks to educate a wider audience about this philosopher’s continued relevance to political dissidents across the world.
This article contends that the language of dissident movements should be analyzed through the lenses of two modes of moral reasoning in order to evaluate the potential success of those movements. ...These two modes are characterized as the differences between Moralität and Sittlichkeit, Moralität as a type of moral reasoning based in universal principles, Sittlichkeit based in local manners and customs. Both types of reasoning can be observed in most dissident movements, and this article argues that dissident movements will not be successful without a certain balance of both types of moral reasoning infused in the processes of engaging citizens, mobilizing action, justifying strategy, and ensuring representation. This article explores several historical discourses, including anti-communist dissidents in Eastern Europe, Gandhi, and Aung San Suu Kyi. These cases demonstrate both the differences in these two modes of moral reasoning, and the various successful ways they can be used together as discourses of dissent. Conclusions are drawn for the sake of application to global dissident movements more generally.
Epilogue Brinton, Aspen E
Confronting Totalitarian Minds,
08/2021
Book Chapter
Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal wrote a story about a worker in a totalitarian state who was responsible for destroying printed materials no longer allowed to exist. In Too Loud a Solitude, the worker ...labors by himself in a dark basement, where truckloads of books and papers marked for destruction are offloaded. The worker is then responsible for putting them into a compression machine to create pallets that are later hauled away and put into an incinerator. Drinking beer from morning until night, instead of shoveling the printed materials quickly into the hydraulic press, he endeavors to do two things: to
In Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha, Mahatma Gandhi’s life is depicted in three movements. In Act One, Gandhi receives his inspiration from the ancient Hindu text of the Bhagavad Gita and the mythical ...battle of Krishna and Arjuna; then he founds Tolstoy Farm in South Africa to work the land as a spiritual exercise; then he re-grounds his life in a vow of sacrifice.¹ In Act Two, Gandhi translates his work on the farm into the work of political protest after he is violently attacked, concluding: “If I were not to do my work these worlds would fall to ruin and
Care of the Soul Aspen E. Brinton
Confronting Totalitarian Minds,
08/2021
Book Chapter
In the years leading up to his execution by the Nazis, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been working on a book he never finished. The fragments were posthumously published and edited by his close ...friend Eberhard Bethge as Ethics.¹ We learn from these writings what it was like for Bonhoeffer to think about ethical questions during a time when everyone was, he observed, “oppressed by a super-abounding reality of concrete ethical problems.”² This was a complicated task, as World War Two in Germany shone light onto humankind’s ability to be ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ in an exceptional way, and for Bonhoeffer it
Living in Truth Aspen E. Brinton
Confronting Totalitarian Minds,
08/2021
Book Chapter
On the occasion of Václav Havel’s death in 2011, the idea of ‘living in truth’ was celebrated as one of his main legacies as a playwright, a dissident, and a politician.¹ Journalists and commentators ...eulogized Havel’s thoughts on ‘living in truth’ largely from his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” dedicated to the memory of Jan Patočka and written in light of the harsh government reactions to Charter 77. While the eulogies did not necessarily agree that Havel fully managed to ‘live in truth’ throughout his time as a politician, the notion of ‘living in truth’ nonetheless framed his
