Havel was always predicting that mankind was headed toward a colossal disaster. Another peculiarity: Havel drew a few thoughts from Heidegger and his followers. Heidegger spoke about something called capital-B Being, and Havel, too, spoke about Being. Heidegger held out a despairing hope for a new god, and Havel, too, speculated about a new god. Here was something to ponder. Heidegger and the Heideggerians regularly veered off the highway into the anti-democratic right or the antidemocratic left. Heidegger was a Nazi. Sartre, the French Heideggerian, had a soft spot for Stalin. What was there in Havel’s Heideggerian inspiration that was going to keep Havel, too, from running into a ditch? Or, if you granted Havel his reliable good sense, what was going to keep his flakier admirers on the straight and narrow? Didn’t we need a stronger emphasis on rational thinking, instead of a weaker one, as he seemed to argue? This was a question. In any case, what could account for his success at capturing people’s attention around the world?

Havel heard me out. He attributed his worldwide fame to a series of events that allowed people to picture his career as a fairy tale, from prison to the Castle, in which truth had defeated lies; and he worried that fairy-tale traits made his thinking look too simple. Then again, he acknowledged that, as political leaders go, he did have an unusual quality. For instance, he wrote his own speeches. He had visited the United States in 1968, and the opportunity arose to visit the White House, and the person he had encountered there was a species unknown to himself, a “speechwriter.” He marveled at the existence of such people.

He did not want his own ideas to be chalked up to ideology—did not want to be called a Heideggerian, or a Kafkian, or a Milton Friedmanite, or any such thing. He granted that Heidegger had spoken about a new god, and Heidegger had also spoken about Nazism in a friendly way. But he pointed out that Heidegger’s comments about the new god and his comments about Nazism had appeared separately—in two different interviews—and should not be melded together. Havel suggested that, in holding Heidegger against him, I was dealing in journalistic clichés. Here was a jab. He also judged that capital-B Being was one of those words that does not translate into English. He had discussed the matter with his English-language translator, Paul Wilson. A vexing matter. Anyway, his big point had to do with the limits of rationalism. People had embraced science and Marxism and all kinds of modern ideas in the belief that rational analyses were guiding their steps. But something other than rational analyses always turned out to be at work. We would do better to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. We should recognize that something stands above us, beyond our understanding.

¶ 11:31 AM