Tomáš Masaryk is considered one of Czechoslovakia’s founding fathers. He served a long career as professor at the University of Prague (today’s Charles University), and was a member of the “Young Czechs” faction in the Austrian parliament, before devoting himself to a study of his own people for 7 years. In this time he delivered a series of lectures known as “Humanistic Ideals”; this translation of them by Warren W. Preston appeared in 1971. They are short overviews of various philosophical currents, with Masaryk locating them in the context of his own project for a self-determining Czechoslovak nation. Surprisingly, it is Preston’s introduction that steals the show here; with great eloquence, he explains both the historical and the philosophical significance of Masaryk’s writings.
Masaryk was not considered a philosopher in his own time; not having a “system”—the hallmark of any hotshot 19th century thinker—disqualified him. He was more of a critic, analysing a broad continuum of works to distill, via negativa, his own liberal democratic political philosophy, to be implemented in real life. Masaryk, like his other colleagues in parliament, initially sought greater autonomy within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When World War I showed it to be dead on its feet, he returned from exile abroad to serve three Presidential terms before retiring in 1935.
Two events came to define Masaryk’s views. The first was the Hilsner Case. Leopold Hilsner, a Jew, was convicted of the blood libel, a Jewish ritual murder of a Czech Catholic girl. Masaryk became personally involved in the case, forming a defence team that appealed the result all the way up to Austria’s highest court. For his meddling, Masaryk was nearly run out of his position at the University of Prague. Hilsner spent 19 years in prison until his pardoning by Emperor Karl.
The second crucial event was the discovery of two manuscripts purporting to be ancient Czech epics. They showed a lost golden age in the early medieval period, with a richness of culture and chivalry that put their German neighbours, still roaming dark forests in Pagan ignorance, to shame. Putting his reputation on the line, Masaryk published an expose by a philologist which proved they were forgeries. His peers condemned him; some insisted on the documents’ legitimacy; others pointed to the need to believe in them for the sake of Czech liberation. “Truth conquers,” was Masaryk’s reply. A fragile Czechoslovak unity could never sustain itself on a lie.
Masaryk’s supporters broke away from the Young Czechs to form the Realists, who were united in their opposition to myth-making. The careful study of history, Masaryk believed, already revealed the essential character of the Czech nation, beginning with the Hussites in the 1400s. The Hussites were a religious movement that believed in the sufficiency of Divine Law as revealed in the Bible. They sought the extension of moral and religious culture into all spheres of life by means of education. To achieve this required honest attention to God’s creation in the form of scientific inquiry.
Masaryk did not see science as being at odds with moral or spiritual or social development. He believed their synthesis yielded the most accurate overall picture of reality possible. Consequently, he held that the study of ethics had a scientific nature. Ethics—meaning a practical system of morality—is the discovery of “sound human living within the social order.” (27) While eternal constants guide the focus of ethical inquiry, the human forms in which they are sought are inevitably determined by the historical and social context.
Ethics cannot be reduced to—nor derived from—a logical formula. The Utilitarian solution to ethics was to treat it as part of the burgeoning field of political economy. In doing so, the Utilitarians reduced moral questions to economic preferences, as just another kind of good to be sought in the marketplace of everyday decisions. The Marxists and Idealists, meanwhile, saw morality as superstructure, little more than the outgrowth of a particular period’s Zeitgeist, to be supplanted in turn by the demands of succeeding epochs. All social culture—including the human personality defined as the sum of its interpersonal relations—could be understood as such. But in so arguing, they denied the basic fact of human consciousness. Masaryk cheekily points out that if all social culture is a mere reflection of historical process, so too are our illusory conceptions of those historical processes, including Marxism and Idealism.
Masaryk’s starting point, then, is the experience of the individual human consciousness. In Warren’s words, “Any philosophic viewpoint, to commend itself, must establish consciousness as a critically final viewpoint, the significance of which is of such a grade as to permit self-vindicating certainty.” (47) Morality is a function of our social relations. It originates in feeling, not reason, although it is a feeling tempered by and enlightened through our capacity to reason: when our methods of observing the world are honest and sound, at certain moments the fog peels back from reality, and certain qualities emerge which we see to have a timeless nature: courage, love, devotion… each age follows them like a beacon, striving forward in its own manner, a piecewise perfecting Masaryk identifies as progress. Warren characterises this as a sort of value philosophy: “... all values are validities of things in their functional relations with men and their societies... values function in the total scope of culture.” (26)
If morality is founded on interpersonal relations then ethics develops from the “concrete inspiration” of love. Masaryk here means non-romantic love, Agape, the Christian love that is selfless and giving. He describes it as being directed at specific people and places, as opposed to abstract ideals such as the love of all humanity (humanitarianism) or the love of truth or wisdom (the literal meaning of the Greek word philosophy). Such high-minded sentiments make us feel warm and noble on the inside, but they are not “effective” in the sense of producing a real change in the world. Masaryk compares love to work. Effective love, like effective work, has a deliberate, incremental quality. It is broken up into tasks that are often individually unpleasant. Caring for senile family members or making the effort to go visit faraway friends doesn’t always feel worth it, but such efforts produce a tangible bond in the world that is worth more than all the magnanimity of our private convictions.
Masaryk’s description of love is anything but glamorous: love is work, he says! His rhetoric sharply counterposes that of his Nationalist peers, who sought to win a vigorous nation the way medieval knights won sainthoods. Masaryk was adamant the Czechoslovak nation would not be founded on lofty ideals or heroic actions: these are, by definition, limited to the exceptional person, whereas the democratic nation-state required the commitment of every person, from the highest to the lowest, with each contributing in his own capacity towards the common good. It’s a position not unlike that spelled out by George Eliot in the end of Middlemarch, when the narrator reflects on Dorothea’s unfulfilled dreams:
Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
However bright his calls for democracy, certain archaisms of thought take some of the lustre off Masaryk’s ideas. While denouncing as anti-human Nietszche’s view that all peoples and nations are everywhere waging a “struggle for existence”, he clings to a narrow Czechoslovakianism, selectively read back into the historical record from the time of the Hussite Brethren onward. Perhaps he imagined it should all lead to a happy brotherhood of peoples, but in essentialising the authentic expression of cultural identity, the nation-state drew red lines between previously fluid associations of dissimilar peoples who had otherwise been unified by tradition or geography. The logic of cultural purity having been accepted, there were only two possibilities: either the extermination of the (supposedly) foreign elements from the nation-state, or the mixing and diminishing of all its constituents. Both happened in the 20th century. Both disprove—or at least obsolete—Masaryk’s notion that we can obtain definitive philosophical answers from culturally-scoped premises.
Democracy, like any other political philosophy, seeks mastery over the past by engaging in myth-making. It depends upon a belief that we are born into a social contract, that we have certain responsibilities towards each other, that we take a personal stake in the instruments of politics and society, that our representatives are the best and fairest selections from among our ranks, that we won fateful conflicts against the totalitarian alternatives. Now we have entered a late stage of globalisation. Now consumerism, rather than culture, is the prime determinant of social reality. We don’t depend on our neighbours like we once had to. Modern society—saturating, lonely, atomising—molds us into a state of perfect indifference to one another. Where are Masaryk’s conditions for a convivial, moral democracy? They are nowhere to be seen. We transact more than we cooperate. Perhaps we are living in a time where such moral concepts have been utterly superseded—and it is Nietszche, much to Masaryk’s disdain, who gets the last laugh.