By focusing on the authenticity of the individual life, the existential revolution and its critique of the eastern-European party-state breaks with the tradition of revolutionary sentiment propagated since 1789 in France. Seeking a radical reconstitution of the nation, the intellectuals of the French Revolution called for the reapportionment of power to more justly reflect the realities of the nation. Emmanual Joseph Sieyès, a leading intellectual of the time, questioned the legitimacy of longstanding political and social tradition, instead considering it a right for the Third Estate to greater political representation. But Havel sees such revisionism as failing to focus on the individual rather than the system, and rebukes the French Revolutionary tradition for perpetuating the cycle of ideology while failing to recognize the inherent inauthenticity of external political systems. Though existential philosophy recognizes that a fully moral society of authentic human relationships cannot exist fully, there is a hope that through a revolution of the individual can society begin progressing toward an independent life.
The way in which Havel defines ideology is central to understanding his argument toward an existential revolution. He writes that “ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human being the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them” (Havel 169). As a deceptive way to relate to the world, ideology allows for an individual to more readily part with moral fortitude. Behind a veneer of plausibility and truth, ideology is (like those deceptively large chocolate Easter bunnies) empty. Ideology grants the individual a sense of dignity through the illusion of an identity. But a sense of dignity is separate from the existence of dignity. The individual adopts ideology as a form of justification for inauthentic life, and since it grounds their existence in some form of dignity, the individual more readily accepts the subservience required of totality without the feeling of shame.
Havel personifies such inauthenticity in his illustration of the greengrocer. Though he puts out a sign which reads “Workers of the World, Unite!”, he does so only to indicate he is “beyond reproach” (Havel 168). Though the socialist revolutionary sentiment is apparent in the sign’s content, the action of placing the sign out and the message the sign truly sends are far cry from such. In many ways it is an ironic symbol of adherence to the status quo by the greengrocer; he might as well put out the sign reading “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient” for both signs contain the same message (Havel 169). While the first hides behind ideology (which is superficial), the content of the second is shameful. The greengrocer would refuse to place the second sign out of his window despite its authenticity because as a human he “has a sense of his own dignity” (Havel 169). The first sign then allows the greengrocer a mask of plausibility in his intentions, and allows him to deceive above all himself. Through the greengrocer one can see the power of ideology, and the ability for it to effectively maintain the façade of living within the truth. By never questioning the higher meaning of his political existence he can continue to live in the sense of dignity while being wholly stripped of his true moral existence.
Through understanding ideology and its power to allow for the yielding of the moral life, one can then consider what it means for the existentialist to revolt. No part of the system of the greengrocer can exist without ideology separating him from the truth. He is deceived in believing that he lives an authentic life because ideology gives him something to hide behind. To simply acknowledge inauthenticity thus represents an act of revolution. Havel argues “living within the truth, as humanity’s revolt against an enforced position, is… an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility” (Havel 172). Thus, by rejecting ideology as a means of justifying the inauthentic life, the revolutionary can more readily live within the truth. In the case of the greengrocer, if he “stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself” he is rejecting ideology and choosing to live within the truth (Havel 170). His enemy then cannot be external, in the form of another person or group of people, but is internal, in the form of his beliefs and how he relates to the world around him. As humans produce ideology to represent their own actions as dignified, the existential revolution calls for the individual choice to reject ideology and its inauthenticity to reconcile reality with human dignity.
The similarities between the existential revolution and the French Revolutionary tradition should be acknowledged as a basis of understanding their differences. Within the ancient French regime, Sieyès sees “the division of the citizens into orders” as an illegitimate structuring of power, and he labels such a political model “impossibly absurd” (Sieyès 174). He bitterly critiques the old regime’s manifestation of power as unjustly excluding the members of the Third Estate from their rights as citizens because “the so-called usefulness of a privileged order to the public service is a fallacy” (Sieyès 156). The old regime wielded the social stratifications established in old constitution as an ideological tool to mask their oppression. Sieyès supports the general critique by writing that “the towns of the kingdom have not given enough consideration to the progress of enlightenment” which is to say that the political organization of towns does not accurately reflect the new existence of the individual to whom they owe their existence (Sieyès 163). He emphasizes that “the activities which support society” (such as private activities of trade and agriculture) are performed by a variety of members within “the Third Estate”, contrasting realities of production with the beliefs of aristocratic utility entrenched through the old regime’s political model (Sieyès 155). Such a critique fits with Havel’s critique of ideology in the eastern-European party-state. Sieyès goes on to observe, “if you tell it [the People] to choose between truth and error, its mind clings to truth as naturally as healthy eyes turn towards the light” (Sieyès 177). Here again though separate in content, the meaning parallels the existential desire for authenticity through truth. Though the constitution of the old regime obscures the reality of the nation, Sieyès believes people, by rejecting the ancient political system, will be able to differentiate between the truth of the nation and the ideology seeking to obscure it.
Despite rejecting ideology in form, Sieyès commits the error of jumping from the individuals who make up the Third Estate to the abstraction of ‘the People’ as a unified will of the Third Estate, and in doing so loses the very basis of his initial critique of the old French regime. He writes “the nobility does not belong to the common order” to separate out the privileged orders as an enemy external to the nation and proclaims, “the aristocrats try to repress the People”, thereby dichotomizing the struggle between the two conceptual factions (Sieyès 157). By abstracting the individuals whom the Third Estate is made of into the concept of an individual will expressing the general will of the Nation, Sieyès loses sight of the authenticity of human existence and again falls back on the deceptive forms of ideology. To Havel one cannot equate the individuals comprising the Third Estate with a singular perspective and sense of self. Such an abstraction fails to directly value individual diversity in a way similar to how post-totalitarian society demanded an ideological existence of the greengrocer. Any political system derived from abstracted society will be external and will fail to bring about an independent human existence.
A crucial point of failure in the French Revolutionary tradition is the faith placed in external political systems. When Sieyès asserts “political rights are the sole guarantee of our civil rights and personal freedom” he assumes absolute legitimacy in the claim (Sieyès 177). But it simply isn’t true, and Havel rebukes the ideological cycle of the French Revolutionary tradition. He states plainly “a genuine, profound, and lasting change for the better can no longer result from the victory… of any particular traditional political conception, which can ultimately be only external” (Havel 173). The revolutionary victory of any traditional political order—be it fascism, socialism, or democracy—cannot guarantee genuine and lasting change for society because that order is only external to the individual. But through a change in “human existence” (possibly within the political order) can a lasting positive change take place (Havel 173). In the case of the French Revolution then, the proposed reconstitution of representation would by no means guarantee civil rights and personal freedom because it would not represent a change in the fundamental human existence and considered abstracted solutions.
Finally, one arrives at the question of what an existential revolution should do in contrast to the French Revolutionary tradition. Existentialism by its very nature cannot be a new political party, and so cannot and should not seek to create a new political model without forgetting its inherent basis of individual reconstitution. By rejecting “living within a lie” the existentialist must necessarily take the positive step of living within the truth rooted in the universe (Havel 173). Though the existentialist rejects ideology, the focus upon individual reconstitution does not preclude political thought from occurring. Havel differentiates between the aims of existential thought by writing “any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the ‘human order,’ which no political order can replace” (Havel 174). By rejecting ideology in principle, an existential revolution would instead focus on establishing a new human order, which by definition must be an internal change. Without being particularly specific, Havel offers general thoughts on the indications of human progress such as a “newfound inner relationship to other people” (Havel 174). By breaking the cycle of ideology, the existential revolution will begin the creation of a new human order, born organically from authentic individuals living in stronger community.
By the very nature of the individuality of the existentialist revolution, societal change will not come as a flash point and resolution. To consider what form a new authentic political system will result from an existential revolution would be an ironic mishap: Havel makes clear such is not the goal. The moral reconstitution of society through internal forces alters the fabric of society point by point, person by person. Because the scale of the existential revolution is singular, and the enemy within, its outcomes will not be sweeping. If the system governing society should shift, it may be an indication of the success of the revolution, but it will not be the root victory. The French Revolutionary tradition sought to refine over time systems of power. The enemy being external, and the victory being external, calls for ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité!’ were poorly realized due to blinding faith in the power of political structures. At a point in time where traditional revolution had failed, Havel’s call for a revolution of the human order shifted the revolutionary paradigm political modelling toward ethical thought, and offered the hope of a more moral society.
Works Cited:
Sieyès, Joseph Emmanuel. 1789. “What Is the Third Estate?” In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, edited by Keith Michael Baker. Vol. 7 of University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization, edited by John Boyer and Julius Kirshner, 154-79. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1987.
Havel, Václav. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe. Edited by John Keane and Steven Lukes. NY, NY: Routledge, 2015.