"Man is created by natural and social forces, and can be "uncreated" by them." - "I can, therefore I am." - "When we are in its power, we do not experience evil as evil, but as a necessity, even as a duty." - "A right that no one recognizes does not mean much."
Simone Weil
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There are not many, but there are among us. We call them "fools" and either shake our heads at them or silently admire them. People for whom responsibility is their own example more than life. Such as Václav Havel or the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil.
"The greatest human error is thinking instead of finding out," Weil declared, which is why she interrupted her career as a teacher in 1934 and instead claimed factory drudgery at machines that provided no respite. In short, one has to find out what it is really like, that relentless repetitive robotic process in which man himself eventually becomes a mechanically functioning tool as well. One can theorize without actually experiencing it, but not "really understand" it.
In The Plague, Camus teaches us - and rarely without the exaggerated pathos that might very well be on offer - that, absurd as human suffering is, personal identification with it leads to a greatness that is ultimately as futile as the suffering itself, yet represents the only meaningful path left to the man "surrounded by non-sense."
Once one is...
Death is thus indeed the great re-evaluator of the habitual, for it is under its gaze that much changes and not a little is fundamentally transformed. This is nothing revelatory, nor is the observation that the vast majority of people are untouched by this fact: they simply live, accumulate possessions and functions, carefully massage their egos, pinch themselves and plot against each other as if there were no end of life course at all. Indeed, a certain Comenius captured this brilliantly in his essay The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart.
For that is simply the way to go with the flow uncomplicatedly, as it has always been and probably always will be. If something demands effort and separation from the safety of mass habits, it is paid for by being ostracized from the safety of the crowd and by the attention of the world, which it is wiser to avoid. More than one young rebel has preferred to return under the protective wings of convention, mechanically dictating how the "right life" is actually to be lived...
But then there are those who cannot be talked out of wanting to live life despite all the warningly raised index fingers. Without compromise and uniquely, in the extreme case, like the saints or Simone Weil. It is as if the words of that wise Czech clown (often quoted and even more often neglected in everyday life) about the fact that once one is, one should really be, and not not not be, as is the case in many cases, resonate in their heads...
After all, tales of radically lived lives can be different. They may not at all be just stories about Marat and Robespierre or Trotsky and Lenin, which are thus preserved and perpetuated in the collective memory of humanity. No, sometimes imaginary stories with the most unexpected twists, such as the one in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, which, surely rightly because of the radical choice of its protagonist, is also sometimes referred to as "the legend of the holy whore", provoke the eternal human desire to break out of the grey and the everyday just as powerfully.
For as the Gospels tell us, no one has greater love than he who lays down his life for others, and foolishness in the eyes of the world is often at most a reasonable stake in the conquest of the kingdom of God. In any case, the story of intellectuals such as Weil, or certainly Václav Havel, who have built their lives on personal responsibility for the views they espouse until their eventual death (even Havel, in his voluntary prison sentence, was not far short of it), is an eternal rebuke to all their salon contemporaries who, for various reasons, are simply incapable of such a commitment.
It is also because of a bad conscience and a sense of their own inadequacy that others cannot stop attacking and denigrating them. They are simply unable to honestly admit, as Heinrich Böll did (who met the decisive criterion of "personal responsibility" quite well), that they are simply not up to this league...
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