Winter Journey [2]
A letter of mid-April 1981 offers the perfect opportunity to continue exploring Havel’s overarching vision of human identity and his understanding of our relation to Being. He envisions four related “orders,” four levels in a cosmos that begins with “the omnipresent order of Being,” passes through a strong affirmation of human creativity and its diabolical denial, and continues to what he charmingly calls “the mishmash” of daily life. This four-tiered order is anything but static: it is a seeker’s vision, a map of understandings and challenges. To perceive Havel as a seeker and questioner is what we can hope to gain at this stage of our winter journey.
Behind all phenomena . . . in the world, we may observe, intimate or experience existentially in various ways something like a general “order of Being.” The essence and meaning of this order are veiled in mystery; it is as much an enigma as the Sphinx, it always speaks to us differently and always, I suppose, in ways that we ourselves are open to—in ways, to put it simply, that we can hear.
Alongside the general miracle of Being—both as a part of that miracle and as its protagonist, as a . . . a rebellious attempt to know, understand, control and transcend it—stands the miracle of the human spirit, of human existence. Into the infinite silence of the omnipresent order of Being, . . . there sounds the impassioned voice of the order of human freedom, of life, of spirit. The subtly structured world of meaningful and hopeful human life, opening new vistas of freedom and carrying man to a deeper experience of Being, the countless remarkable intellectual (mystical, religious, scientific) and moral systems, . . . in short the way in which man becomes man in the finest sense of the word—all of this constitutes the “order of life,” “the order of the spirit,” “the order of human work.” . . .
I would say that this “order of life” is a kind of “legitimate son” of “the order of Being,” because it grows out of an indestructible faith in the latter’s meaning and a fearless confrontation with its mystery.
Over and against this passionate order, which is the work of people created “in God’s image,” there constantly recurs its evil caricature and misshapen protagonist, “the bastard son of Being,” the offspring of indifference to the meaning of Being and vindictive fear of its mystery: the chilling work of man as “the image of the devil”: the order of homogenization by violence, perfectly organized impotence and centrally directed desolation and boredom, in which man is conceived as . . . without free will, without the power to reason for himself, without a unique life of his own, and where that monstrous ideal, order, is a euphemism for the graveyard. . . .
Thus against “the order of life,” sustained by a longing for meaning and an experience of the mystery of Being, there stand this “order of death,” a monument to non-sense, an executioner of mystery, a materialization of nothingness.
The fourth and final order is . . . nothing more and nothing less than the real order of things, of human things above all, the reality around us, its rules, customs, circumstances, relationships—just as they are, which means full of variety, contradictions, complexities, with everything that is good and bad, pretty and ugly, meaningful and absurd. It is simply “the mishmash of everything” that we call life. (16 April 1981)
This is a playwright writing our lives: his first profession prompts him to perceive the nature of each level and its relation to other levels as a drama. The drama begins in a realm expressed by Havel in words that recall a line in Pascal’s Pensées—“the infinite silence of the omnipresent order of Being”; then characterizes humanity (at our best) as a fearless explorer, longing for meaning; and then the adversary, the “materialization of nothingness”, the recurrent threat; and finally the ordinary things of life, the colorful reality around us. The schema is beautifully conceived and expressed, and there is something to live up to: to love and steadily serve human possibility, one’s own possibility and that of one’s community large or small, not to succumb to non-sense and passivity.
In the letter written two weeks later, Havel characterized the attitude of search, of questioning, that had become native to him. It called for both intellectual freedom and tireless attention: as he writes, “a state of persistent and productive openness.”
I have never created, or accepted, any comprehensive “worldview,” let alone any complete, unified, integrated and self-contained philosophical, ideological or other system of beliefs which, with no further adjustments, I could then identify with and which would provide answers to all my questions. . . . Something very deep inside me has always resisted such an approach; I simply don’t seem to have the internal capacity for it. . . .
I have already written you about what faith means to me: it is simply a particular state of mind, that is, a state of persistent and productive openness, of persistent questioning, a need to “experience the world,” again and again, in as direct and unmediated a way as possible, and it does not, therefore, flow into me from some concretely defined outside object. For me, perseverance and continuity do not come from fixating on unchanging “convictions” but rather from a ceaseless process of searching, demystification and penetration beneath the surface of phenomena. . . . My entire “experience of the world” has persuaded me of the mysterious multiformity and infinite “elusiveness” of the order of Being, which—by its very nature and by the very nature of the human mind—simply cannot be grasped and described by a consistent system of knowledge. . . The order of Being has many facets; it can be regarded from many different points of view and experienced on many different levels; it is not within the powers of the “order of the spirit” to grasp it entirely—that is, to reveal its secrets. . . . All one can do—and in any case, this is what creates the essence and the beauty of the whole adventure of the spirit—is to touch . . . a particular level of reality, and apply and develop a particular way of looking at it and experiencing it. (1 May 1981)
Like Havel, let’s go further into this question of freely searching. These are pages little known to communities of religious and spiritual seekers, yet to my mind they are classic reports capable of inspiring all such men and women to persevere and to use the mind in enriching, partially uncharted ways. For Havel the release from dogma was a release toward persistent exploration, toward “living with the question.”
For me, the notion of some complete and finite knowledge that explains everything and raises no further questions is clearly related to the notion of an end—an end to the spirit, to life, to time and to Being. Anything meaningful that has ever been said in this matter (including every religious gospel) is, on the contrary, remarkable for its dramatic openness, its incompleteness. It is not a confirmation so much as a challenge or an appeal; something that is, in the highest sense, “taking place,” living, something that overwhelms us or speaks to us, obliges or excites us, something that is in concord with our innermost experience and which may even change our entire life from the ground up but which never, of course, attempts to answer, unambiguously, the unanswerable question of meaning (answer in the sense of “settling the matter” or “sweeping it off the table”). It always tends rather to suggest a certain way of living with the question.
Is that too little? I don’t think so at all. Living with the question means nothing more than constantly “responding” to it, or rather, being in some form of living “contact” with that “meaning,” or constantly hearing a faint echo of it. It does not mean an end to the problem, but an ever closer coexistence with it. Though we cannot “respond” to it in the traditional sense of that word, nevertheless, by longing for it and seeking after it, we in fact indirectly confront it over and over again. In this regard, we are a little like a blind man touching the woman he loves, whom he has never seen and never will. The question of the meaning of life, then, is not a full stop at the end of life, but the beginning of a deeper experience of life. It is like a light whose source we cannot see, but in whose illumination we nevertheless live—whether we delight in its incomprehensible abundance or suffer from its incomprehensible dearth.
It is being in constant touch with this mystery that ultimately makes us genuinely human. Man is . . . both the question and the questioner, and cannot help being so. . . . This process of “coming to terms with meaning” is the most complex, the most obscure and at the same time the most important metaphysical-existential experience that one can go through in life.
I don’t know any other way of dealing with the question of “the meaning of life” except by undergoing the experience personally and attempting to report on it. In one way or another, I’ve been trying to do this in my letters from the start and I intend to continue, in the hope that whatever I manage to squeeze out of myself in these difficult circumstances will be taken neither literally nor too seriously, but understood as a stream of improvised attempts to articulate my unarticulated “inner life.” (6 September 1981)
I confess to being quite exhausted at this point. We are on terrain where Havel, the prison laundry man, the friend to inmates who turned to him for counsel, the man permitted for years to write one letter per week, is giving voice to a classic text in the modern literature of spirituality. This completes the second lap in our winter journey. Perhaps there is a mountain hut nearby where some good fellow is serving warm grog. I have coins in my pocket, and you do, too. Let’s go in.
The source for this Substack, as indicated, is Havel’s Letters to Olga.