On 28 April 1975, the police conducted an
investigation into Karel Kosik's apartment and seized some of his manuscripts.
This text is the letter (published by Le Monde on 29-30 June 1975) sent by Karel Kosik to Jean Paul Sartre on this
incident ,on 26 May of the following year.
The Kosik-Sartre Exchange
Dear Jean-Paul Sartre,
The event of which I will tell you in this open letter
is of the most banal sort and without any interest for the sensationalist
press. But it is not to the devotees of the sensational that I address myself.
It is to you. And, through you, to my socialist, democratic and communist
friends who are also friends of Czechoslovakia. I am not addressing you an
appeal or a protest, but one single question which has a vital importance for
me:
Am I guilty?
This question haunts me since April 28, 1975, that is
to say, since the day the police searched my apartment for six hours and
confiscated more than one thousand pages of my philosophical manuscripts.
Given the fact that the search was made under the
pretext of a suspicion that I had hidden in my apartment writings which would
constitute evidence of a criminal activity, "subversion of the
Republic," I must assume that I am threatened with a prison term of from
one to five years, as provided by Article 98 of the penal code. I do not
underestimate the significance of this threat, but what troubles me more is the
eventual fate of the manuscripts confiscated from me.
For the last six years I have had to live in a very
peculiar situation: my existence has taken two forms—I am and I am nothing. I
am dead and, at the same time, I am alive. In the domain of the elementary
rights of the citizen and the man, I have been reduced to a mere nothing, and
at the same time, I have been graced with an exceptional existence as far as
the overabundance of care and attention from the police is concerned. I am a
mere nothing and that is why I cannot teach philosophy at the Charles
University, nor be employed anywhere or elsewhere in accordance with my
qualifications and in my specialty. I am dead, and that is why I cannot
participate in any of the scholarly meetings to which I am invited, nor accept
invitations to teach in European universities. As someone who is not and never
was, I must not lead my
readers into error and that is why all my publications
are banned, kept out of the libraries in Czechoslovakia. And my name has been
censured in the list of authors. I do not exist and that is why official
institutions are under no obligation to answer my complaints and protests. From
another point of view, I exist, even in excess. As is shown by the police searches and interrogations
which are becoming ordinary events. As a philosopher and an author, I am
stripped of basic rights and I live as an accused and a permanent suspect.
I am a suspect although I have committed no criminal
act. Why then am I suspected? Because I consider the exercise of thought to be
an inalienable human right and exercise this right. Because I consider inalienable the right of every man
to have his own opinion and to be able to express and communicate it. Because I
consider that every man should be able to keep a spine as a basic human right.
Why am I a suspect? Because in an environment of generalized
suspicion, the most specifically human values and the most commonly shared
ones, such as for example, friendship, honor, humor, the sense of politeness,
spontaneity and sincerity, become provocations; normal words and the simplest
things take on a subversive meaning.
The simple sentence: "I twisted my ankle and I
limp," seems to the ears of the police to be a password for a conspiracy.
And he who really limps is in the eyes of the police a mere faker who hides a
"dark" activity. In such an atmosphere, publicly proclaimed rights
are immediately limited or even completely denied: everyone has the right to
think, but he who reflects without permission and without being ordered to, or
who does not think as he ought to think, awakens suspicion. Everyone can have
his opinion, but he who refuses to accept opinions that are imposed and
unjustified, that are foreign to his own—which latter have some basis—and who
persists in demanding a rational and free discussion, becomes suspect. Everyone
has the right to have a spine, but if he does not "voluntarily" and
without dignity make a mea culpa which defiles him, he has no hope of
being able to publish or to find the sort of work for which he is qualified.
The manuscripts seized by the police were not even
destined for publication. In the event it is a matter only of unelaborated working
notes, preliminary studies relating to the preparation of two works which will
be titled: the first, On Practice, and the second, On Truth. These
manuscripts contain only opinions, opinions expressed by others in whom the
police are not interested, and mine, which the police already know from my
previous books and my articles. I would like to be able to believe the officer
of the State Police when he told me that after examination these manuscripts
would be
returned to me. But, well, how much time does the
police need to "study" a thousand pages of a philosophical
manuscript?
To that, other much more serious facts must be added.
The police have also confiscated the manuscripts of my friends, the writers
Ivan Klima and Ludvig Vaculik. And I must ask the question: April 28, 1975, was
I not the witness to events which foreshadow the gravest consequences for Czech
culture? On that day did they not make a trial run of the effectiveness of new
perfected methods in comparison with which the censorship in force up to then
was only a pitiful liberal game? Does not April, 1975, mark the attempt to
impose on society a new habit, a new "normality" — the regular
confiscation of manuscripts? Might this habit not very rapidly become—in the
country of Franz Kafka—so natural, so
necessary a consequence of indoctrination that the writers themselves will call
the police to take away completed works? I am not a partisan of these
innovations. Up to today I have not received a reply to my request for the
return of the manuscripts. Up to now I have kept silent about the
discriminatory measures of which I have been the victim, because my person
alone was attacked and this did not endanger the basis of my existence—the
possibility of thinking and writing. This time, in the case of the confiscation
of my philosophical manuscripts, I do not want to remain silent. Because I do
not want to be guilty! I would be complicit if I limited myself to watching
silently the way a sword of Damocles is held over the heads of all the writers
of Czechoslovakia—the threat that the police can take away at any time from any
writer a manuscript in progress or
completed.
There is still time to eliminate this threat. I have
not lost all hope in the rationality of the responsible leaders in
Czechoslovakia. I count on the lucidity and the conscience of the socialist,
democratic and communist friends of Czechoslovakia. Accept, dear friend, my
most cordial regards,
Karel Kosik
Dear Friend,
If I have taken so long to reply to you, this is
because your letter did not reach me. I read of it only a brief fragment in Le
Monde and I had some trouble finding it. That's been done now.
I will reply immediately to your question: no, you are
not guilty. Your letter would suffice to prove your innocence, not only to me,
but to all the friends of invaded and humiliated Czechoslovakia. If there is a
thing of which I am certain, it is, as you put it, that every man has the
original right and duty to think for himself; and if I, like everyone, have
often defended collective ideas, it was because they had penetrated me and
because I had compared them to my personal ideas, evaluated and judged them
true, in short, because they had become mine.
No government is qualified to judge the thoughts of a
citizen. It would do so, in any case, not in terms of thoughts but of
pseudo-thoughts. I call true thoughts those which are born from you, or ideas
which you have freely examined, found right and made your own. I call
pseudo-thoughts the theses supported by your government, and which have never
been produced or examined by the thought of a free man, but which are made up
of words collected in Soviet Russia and thrown over activities in order to hide
them and not to discover their meaning.
These false thoughts are nothing but forces which can
only impose themselves with the support of that other—real and material—force:
the police. It is to this that criminal leaders wish to reduce Czechoslovak
culture. This abomination, or rather this stupidity, cannot last long while
there are men like you, my dear friend, to denounce it. For, free thought can
be suppressed for a moment by police violence, but as such thought constitutes
the only means by which man can grasp his situation and the
procedures that can change it, it would be necessary
either to suppress man or to reject
definitively false thoughts.
I cannot commit anyone but myself; but I have
discussed your precious and unhappy country sufficiently often and at length to
be able to assure you that you have numerous friends who will say with me:
"If Karel Kosik is guilty, then all men (not only intellectuals, but
farmers and workers) who think about what they do are equally guilty." It
is on the basis of this simple idea that we will have to consider activities by
which, in helping you, we will help ourselves.
I assure you, my dear friend, of my fraternal
sentiments,
Jean-Paul
Sartre
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