The appearance of the totalitarian alternative to human existence, so typical for twentieth century, represents a consistent, consciously anti-traditional, and universal alternative to human life and its world. This consists in an elaborate ideological and behavioral embodiment of the essence of technology, i.e., in the comprehensive manipulability of both metal and practical human beings. In other words, totalitarian regimes present a systematic and cogent, but morally weak, reply to the modern split between rationality and morality which is reflected in the sharp division of the private and public spheres of human life. The totalitarian alternative offers an alluringly simple closure of this gap at the heart of modern humanity. In cases where such an answer has been accepted, as with the Communist and Nazi totalitarian regimes, the continuity of the Western tradition as such has been interrupted.

The central assault of the totalitarian thrust was aimed at the phenomenon of individual responsibility for one’s private and public life, including its moral and spiritual meaning. Precisely here, totalitarian regimes appeared extremely successful in creating a new type of human which was always ready to comply with any ideological commands for total lack of personal moral responsibility. Instead of a unitive moral orientation, the manifold tints and nuances of totalitarian sophistry succeeded in promoting a universal relativism of values. These crucial elements of the totalitarian mentality and activity now constitute a most sinister flaw impeding the solid recovery of post-communist countries from their long-lasting systematic disregard and elimination of the spiritual and moral foundations of the Occidental human tradition.

In the present situation of the post-totalitarian intelligentsia in Eastern Europe, this spiritual and moral predicament appears to be considerably strengthened by the contemporary influx from the West of post-modernism and neo-liberalism. In fact, these views seem to be the last possible stage of the modern move toward the fragmentation of unity and the tensions of human life anchored and developed in Western spirituality and morality. The common deno-minator of the present post-modern and neo-liberal dernier cri is evidently the same as the kernel of the new totalitarian human being: a universal, manipulated atomization of everything.

Thus, post-totalitarian human dignity consists in the capacity to question all reality including its open origins, as well as to adopt this ground of phenomenality as a starting point for joint human recog-nition, communication and action, on the one hand. On the other hand, this level of human insight made available through the tota-litarian attack on the foundations of the Western tradition, presents the only legitimate environment for the genuine contemplative dimension of human life, known traditionally as bios theoretikos or vita contemplativa.

Seeing the original appearing as the utmost ground and origin of time, and consequently of Being, points to the very condition of possibility for all reality. Such an exact distinction and hierarchy reflect a radical phenomenological way of coping with the original Greek philosophical experience of dike, fysis, polemos and logos as the prime source of everything that exists. This is a modern and responsible reconstruction of the founding and the stumbling block of Occidental spirituality. It spells tremendous risk, but seems to be the only promising alternative after the radical totalitarian break in Western civilization. In this way, human dignity appears to consists in a basic post-totalitarian faith grounded in a precise and verifiable hierarchy generating the human spiritual and moral move. Faith, as its distinctive element, is the appropriate resolve to dare the highly risky option for human life and this despite the totalitarian break in human history stemming from the radical anti-political, anti-moral and anti-spiritual character of the essence of technology.

The obvious central problem of this crucial phenomenon of humanity consists in its excellence over science, knowledge and truth. Because it makes these fundamentally possible, in principle it resists all discursive description. Nevertheless, its baselessness and preconditionlessness, which by the same token is the possibility of any precondition and foundation, substantiates Patocka’s position regarding appearing as such, which makes possible all appearances, and in this way all reality. Consequently, the very nature of the phenomenon of original human faith as fundamental appearance necessarily encompasses both plurality and universality as its prime and mutually compatible dynamics.

Similarly, the ethical and ontological foundations of human dignity appear also to be anchored in the centrality of appearing. This provides a central orientation on how to re-formulate the very concept of the entire realm of human virtues, which is to reformulate the very core of Western humanity. This remains under the sinister shadow both of its historic break by the totalitarian regimes and other forms of the development of technology in our century. This twofold radical shadow within Western civilization is the fatal fruit of its risky nature and origin. The only appropriate way to cope with this appears to be radical reflection and moral action based creatively on the founding Western insight of the central originating importance of an earthshaking pre-phenomenality of appearing as such for all that exists. Failure to abide in this spiritual and moral principle of the West was, and remains, the primary source of its deficient choices. Hence a redefinition of the moral complex of human and civic virtues in the light of appearing as such and its prime characteristics seems to be the way out of the looming impasse of the post-totalitarian predica-ment of democratic civilization.

This requires restoring the interdependence of courage, practical wisdom, piety, justice, theoretical wisdom, temperance and friendship in terms of their immediate foundation in the pre-phenomena of appearing. The need for such a refounding of all virtues in the experience of appearing as such is pointed to by the phenomenon of totalitarianism as a radical anti-political and anti-moral embodiment of universal manipulability as the essence of technology.

One example is the virtue of justice. Presently this is discussed in terms of distributive and corrective systems of institutional arrangements. Behind such standard disputes lies a technological mentality postulating that the virtue of justice is a problem of inadequate systems and methods of institutional administrative orga-nization, i.e., a task for applied technology. According to this attitude justice can be achieved by applying an appropriate system and subsystem of administrative processes, i.e., justice appears to be at the disposal of organizational and administrative power. This obviously technological conception of justice points to another standard of justice which is much more than an institutional and organization mechanism. It points to the appearance of a mutual recognition of the rights and duties of free citizens as a proper legitimating environment of moral and legal guilt and its redemption. Moreover, the environment for a mutual moral recognition of human beings in freedom after its radical totalitarian liquidation has decisively contributed, at least in Czechoslovakia, to a restoration of human and civic virtues after everyday life and peace had been shaken to the roots of its meaning.

Thus, the sheer pre-phenomenality of appearing as such constituted the final resort, and by the same token the very first beginning of a meaningful life and world which, if recognized and followed consistently, will spell another beginning of history after its totalitarian rupture. Consequently, Plato’s question articulating the moral and spiritual movement of the Greek beginning of history, the question of how justice in the soul is possible, can now be answered. This follows the radical totalitarian negation of the history of answers to this most powerful question in European culture, and is situated in the midst of the culmination of the technological era of universal and versatile manipulability in the environment of modern democracies. The proper answer to this fundamental question of Western culture since 1989 is the conscious result of both the experience of, and a thorough reflection on, the founding pre-eminence of appearing as such. This includes recollection of the earlier course of Western history deeply determined by a lack of enduring clarity as to the true nature of the phenomenal process of original appearing.

In such a critical reinterpretation and recovery of appearing as such the virtue of justice appears first as a problem of moral res-ponsibility. The striking totalitarian success in liquidating this crucial element of the original European morality and system of law had been made possible by the artificial modern division partitioning human life into two independent spheres: public rationality and objectivity, on the one hand, and an allegedly merely subjective personal morality and religion, on the other. The totalitarian regimes constituted a radical attempt to close this characteristically essential abyss of modernity by a sophisticated and flexible combination of terror and ideologically manipulated behavior aimed at the total liquidation of individual moral responsibility, on the one hand, and of the distinction between state and society, on the other. To restore justice after such a challenge amounts to defining carefully moral responsibility in terms of overcoming the modern partition of public rational objectivity from private subjective morality and religion.

This implies a profound reformulation and extension of the concept of human rights to include both individual and public moral responsibility for the political and historical consequences of individual and civic decisions. In this moral way, the conception of human rights receives a substantial extension to basic duties. Thus, the technological concept of justice as universal order solving the question of human guilt, and appearing both in the form of equality under law and as enabling everyone to do what fits one’s individual dispositions can be reformulated. Instead human rights would be redefined in terms of natural law.

1. Cf. e.g., J. Patocka, Evropa a doba poevropska (Praha: Ceskoslovenskv spisovatel, 1970), pp. 216-234; and Kacirské eseje o filosofii d jin (Praha: Academia, 1990).

2. See Jan Patocka, Prirozený sv t jako filosofický problém (Praha: Ceskoslovenský spisovatel, 1970), pp. 216-234.

3. Cf. Jan Patocka, "Duchovni lov k a intelektuál," Souvislosti (1990/1), p. 15.

4. J. Patocka, Kacirské eseje o filosofii d jin, p. 141.

5. "Duchovni lov k a intelektuál", ibid.

6. VIII/7-8.

7. Cf. VIII/20.

8. Cf. VIII/3.

9. Cf. J. Patocka, Prirozený sv t jako filosofický problém, pp. 211.

10. Cf. VIII/3.

11. Cf. Plato, Parmenides, 137c4-1452a8.

12. Cf. Ludwig, p. 71.

13. Pol, 1253a.

14. Cf. Pato ka, VIII/6.

15. Cf. J. Pato ka, Evropa a doba poevropská, p. 88.

16. Ibid., p. 83.

17. Cf. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (Oxford, Claredon Press, 1972), p. 243.

18. Cf., ibid., p. 404.

19. Cf. Rawls, p. 12.

20. Cf., ibid., p. 60.