Shaken solidarity

‘There are things for which it is worthwhile to suffer.’

A sentence that could be carved in stone or marble. A sentence that speaks to us immediately, regardless of whether we like it or not. A sentence that sets a tone: elevated and as if spoken from far away, but at the same time with the power to address an innermost dimension, intimate and straight. A sentence also – we have to be aware – that could easily be made fun of, but which would probably prove strong enough to retain its dignity even against parody and mockery.

‘There are things for which it is worthwhile to suffer.’

‘Existují věci, pro které stojí za to také trpět.’

Who is being addressed? It is a general statement, so potentially it could mean each and every one of us, but rhetorically, the impact is different. The sentence speaks – and maybe only speaks – to those who want to hear it, sense it, take it on. It speaks rather to the few than to the many, and ultimately, maybe the phrase speaks precisely to me, the person who is voicing it. Am I – whenever it becomes serious, we have to switch into first person singular – willing to take something upon myself, despite having the presentiment that it could likely harm me?

At first glance, the wording might be somewhat reminiscent of the Socratic principle that ‘it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it’ – one of the biggest and most often quoted dictums in the history of philosophical thinking. But while both statements address ‘suffering’, there is a decisive difference. The Socratic phrase, prominently formulated in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, speaks about the necessity of making a choice. It is very clearly expressed in passage 469c: ‘If it were necessary either to do wrong or to suffer it, I should choose to suffer rather than do it.’ The reason behind this preference is that Socrates (we should rather say the Platonic Socrates) is convinced that committing injustice makes people utterly unhappy. If we only knew how unhappy the committing of injustices makes us, we would, without any doubt, opt for the suffering and ultimately for its reward in happiness.

How very different the message of ‘our’ sentence! Forget about any moral reward! Don’t trust that the good deed will pay off! No moral harmony, nor moral happiness. Yet, and nevertheless, there might be something that pushes you to act, though it potentially only promises harm to you. But you do it, because you want things to be right or, better to say, you find things unbearable as they are – unbearably wrong, unbearably violating – and you decide to go against it.

Your decision, then, is not about having enough knowledge and insight to act in a morally proper way. This was Socrates’s question. Here, we can safely presuppose that many have the necessary knowledge about how unbearable certain conditions are; there is no lack of knowledge, but it is rather the question of whether one is willing to act accordingly. And it is somewhat clear that the decision to act in this way will always rather be one for the few. This is important – the circles of dissidence are built in solidarity, and they are very much in need of solidarity (hence the significant name of the Polish Solidarność movement and hence the title of this lecture, ‘Shaken Solidarity’), but the circles of dissidence also carry a distinctive mark that is potentially felt as overburdening and therefore is probably not easily accessible.

‘There are things for which it is worthwhile to suffer.’

This sentence – you have long guessed – comes from the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, and it is important to know the circumstances of its formulation. Patočka wrote it in a short piece called ‘Co můžeme očekávat od Charty 77?’(What Can We Expect from Charter 77?). It is dated 8 March 1977. That was a Tuesday. Five days later, on Sunday, 13 March 1977, Patočka was dead. He had decided that there were things for which it was worthwhile to suffer, and indeed he had to suffer for them. In the summer of 1977, he would have turned 70.

A few years earlier, he had coined the by-now-iconic formula of a ‘solidarity of the shaken’. It has been quoted, used, interpreted, and misinterpreted probably thousands of times by now, and the frequency is constantly increasing. The slogan originally appears in his book Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, written in 1974/75. When the book came out – I should change the wording; when the book became accessible and readable as an underground text in samizdat – it was circulated in a few dozen copies, and often the precondition to be allowed to read it was the promise to create one’s own typewritten transcript, usually six transcripts at a time with the use of carbon paper.

Patočka wrote a lot (the collected works have grown and grown over the years), but he published little. He was mainly ‘writing for the drawer’, as he himself once put it. And the drawer is not good at implementing deadlines. But there was somebody who was very good at it: the young Polish doctoral student Krzysztof Michalski. With today’s lecture, we honour his name and his role as the founder of this institute. Michalski came to know Patočka in the 1970s, while writing his dissertation on Heidegger in Warsaw. Nobody in Poland felt well-equipped to act as a supervisor on that. But in Poland, they had heard about the special fame of a student of Husserl and Heidegger living in Prague, Jan Patočka. I shall keep the rest short: Michalski contacted him, and an intense exchange of letters (philosophical letters indeed) began. Michalski finished his dissertation, and he did something else: he pushed Patočka to write what would become his main work, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Maybe there would have been no Heretical Essays without Michalski, but even more was to come from this. After Patočka’s death, it was Michalski’s firm conviction that he would do whatever was in his power for the dissemination of Patočka’s work. And in 1982, when the IWM was founded, one of its first and clear missions was to do exactly that.

A Polish philosopher who honours the legacy and, yes, the sufferings of a Czech philosopher by founding an institute for advanced study in Vienna. Quite a story.

‘Są rzeczy, dla których warto cierpieć.’

In what follows, I will speak about the crucial moment when Charter 77 was in the making and its intimate connection to a short period in the life of one of its main authors. I will set out what I call ‘four probes’ to explore the context. One could also call them four circles of examination. All four are centered around the same nucleus, i.e., the statement that there are things worth suffering for. Step by step – or circle by circle – this will somewhat broaden the view on Charter 77, as well as on Jan Patočka and his intellectual legacy. Each circle will also relate to a growing time horizon in his life – one specific day for the first probe, one week for the second, then a period of three months, and ultimately the three years between 1974 and 1977.

First probe: One day in March 1977

On Tuesday, 8 March 1977, Jan Patočka finds himself in a hospital in the Prague district of Strahov. He is in a weak condition, suffering from severe bronchitis that has somewhat accompanied him since the early 1970s. But the recent weeks, after the publication of Charter 77, with him acting as one of the three speakers for the new movement, have been highly demanding in many regards. He has been arrested and severely interrogated several times, some of these interrogations lasting for up to 11 hours. But it is not only that: for many years, he lived the life of a private scholar, sitting at his desk and writing, though publishing was nearly impossible for him. He gained some repute (even fame) through the legendary underground seminars held at private apartments and semi-official locations in Prague. This kept him in regular contact with younger people, which was certainly somewhat essential for him as a teacher and as a human being. For most of his life, he was banned from universities and not allowed to teach, resulting in a very private life and many unfinished papers. Private teaching in the underground was a fulfillment and a joy – maybe demanding at some points, but nothing in comparison to what happened in the early weeks of 1977. Now, i.e., after his personal decision that there are things worthwhile suffering for, the old professor is all of a sudden in the spotlight – not only of the authorities, but of worldwide public attention.

When Patočka was hospitalized during the night of 3 March, he suffered from heavy chest pressure, palpitations, and shortness of breath. During the night of 7 March, the medical treatment had finally started to be effective, and by the next morning the patient felt better. 

What we have from this day, 8 March, is the aforementioned text ‘What We Can Expect from Charter 77’. It is a piece of some five pages in print, dated by Patočka himself, handwritten and smuggled out of the hospital by his family. It starts off by stating the enormous echo of the Charter 77 movement: ‘We won sympathy enough: we hardly could have asked for more. But the greater the sympathy, the greater the concern.’

What are the big concerns resulting from this enormous echo? People start asking nagging questions: Will this declaration not make the situation even worse? Is it wise to claim respect for human rights if some individuals then have to face even heavier persecution and a blatant violation of their human rights? Or, and this is the final question in which it all culminates: ‘Might not silence serve better than speaking out?’ Nagging questions indeed, also questions that must have haunted Patočka himself for quite some time, and I mean especially the time before his decision to join Charter 77. What it was – his newly found spirit of resoluteness and resistance; his illness; the possible awareness of his impending death – we can only speculate, but the answer that Patočka gives to these nagging concerns is remarkable: ‘Let us not mince words,’ he starts out, then continues: ‘Submissiveness has never led to relaxation, only to greater severity. The greater the fear and servility, the more the mighty have dared, the more they do dare and will dare. Nothing can make them relax their grip except a breaking of their confidence – a realization that their acts and injustice and discrimination do not pass unnoticed, that the waters do not close over the stones they throw. This is not meant as an empty hint at future vengeance, but as the call for an attitude that is dignified, truthful, and unafraid under all circumstances.’

It is highly noteworthy that to him, the philosopher, the inner dimension is by far the biggest achievement of the whole Charter 77 movement. His reflections culminate in a passage that directly speaks about suffering and why suffering in the current situation is worthwhile. ‘Note that our people have once more become aware that there are things for which it is worthwhile to suffer, that the things for which we might have to suffer are those which make life worthwhile, and that without them all our arts, literature, and culture become mere trades leading only from the desk to the pay office and back. We know all that now, not in the least thanks to Charter 77 and all it has meant.’

Addendum: It is probably the next day, 9 March, that Patočka answers a questionnaire that has been sent to him by the West German weekly Die Zeit. It is his very last piece of writing. In it, there is the following question to the philosopher: ‘What personal experiences have you had with the state offices since you have been acting as a spokesperson of Charter 77?’ Patočka answers the following: ‘The state offices (maybe rightly so) have treated me as the least important spokesperson [there were three of them: Patočka, Jiří Hájek, and Václav Havel], as an old professor who was somewhat added to the whole setup as a kind of staffage. They did not consider the circumstance that the old professor had attempted to be in contact with the young generation, trying to hand on some thoughts that had been otherwise denied to them, and that he had made them aware of the moral side of all intellectual and political issues. It seems that the summons to the prosecutor as well as the summons to the Ministry of the Interior testify to a certain change in their viewpoint.’ Let this passage speak for itself.

The texts Patočka penned on 8–9 March were the intellectual and political testament of a philosopher and the last two writings of his life. For what came next, I cite from the hospital record: ‘In the night before 11 March, the condition worsens, leading to unconsciousness, right-sided hemiplegia, and aphasia. After a temporary improvement of the condition, he becomes unconscious again, followed by terminal pulmonary edema.’

Second probe: One week earlier

Charter 77 was published in the very early days of January 1977, along with the names of 242 signatories, people of quite different political viewpoints, professions, and religions. Although the original document was confiscated, copies circulated in samizdat and on 7 January were published in several Western newspapers, such as Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The Times, while radio broadcasters like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America were also transmitting the Charter 77 declaration that criticized the Czechoslovak government for failing to implement the commitment to the protection of human rights that it had signed in several international agreements, most prominently in the Declaration of Helsinki from 1975. The Charter 77 document describes the signatories as a ‘loose, informal, and open association of people… united by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world.’ It emphasizes that Charter 77 is not an organization, has no statutes or permanent organs, and ‘does not form the basis for any oppositional political activity.’ This emphasis on the strictly individual, private nature of any action under Charter 77 is highlighted by Patočka in several of his writings, the reason being that such individual initiative was not strictly prohibited by Czechoslovak law, while any association of three or more people could be qualified as a conspiracy.

Nevertheless, the Czechoslovak authorities reacted nervously and harshly. Though they considered the ‘old professor’ probably the least powerful of the three speakers, they immediately started following him. Altogether, he was interrogated seven times in January 1977: in his own apartment on 5 January, then almost as a daily routine from 10 to 14 January, and on 17 January in the offices of Státní Bezpečnost (StB, ‘State Security’), the secret police force controlled by the Communist Party. All the talks are quite meticulously documented by the secret police. We have the protocols of the interrogations, and in the meantime, they have been published in a well-documented edition. When I say ‘meticulously’, this does not necessarily mean ‘trustworthy’ but rather describes the highly bureaucratic tone and character of these documents.

Patočka’s health is not good, but he does quite well in these interrogations. Some of them are documented by the members of the secret police, like interviews, so they read ‘otázka’ (question) and then ‘odpověď’ (answer). He gives little information, behaves quietly and politely, stresses his moral convictions as the main reason for his actions, and very much presents it as a private decision. After 17 January, the interrogations stop, which does not mean that the observations stop; quite the opposite. We have about 80 printed pages with documentation by the observation teams following KANAL 5, which was Patočka’s codename. In some sense, this is all (bad) routine so far.

But then comes one crucial incident that drastically accelerates the further process. On 1 March, another Tuesday, exactly one week before he pens his final essay at the hospital in Strahov, Patočka unexpectedly receives visitors at his home. He has no phone and is in no way informed of their coming. It turns out that a group of five Dutch journalists has come to Prague to accompany the Dutch Foreign Minister Max van der Stoel on his official state visit to Socialist Czechoslovakia. One of the journalists is Anna Francis Salomonson. A piece by her appears in the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad the very next day, 2 March. Salomonson quotes him as saying: ‘The police want to know about the people who started the initiative for the Charter and who collected the signatures. My answer is always the same: I am fighting for a legal thing, and therefore I should not be here. At a police station.’ And it continues: ‘You ask me if now I am not afraid to return home? I am constantly afraid. But if it were fear that decides for me, I wouldn’t be sitting here. In Czechoslovakia, fear is our daily bread.’

Obviously, the interview made the authorities furious. A Czech translation of it is kept in the files of the StB, indicating an interest in pursuing the case. But there was something that caused even more trouble. While speaking to the journalists, they developed the idea that Patočka should meet the Dutch foreign minister in person. So the journalists took him and accompanied him to the Hotel InterContinental, where Max van der Stoel was to arrive soon afterward. The minister and the philosopher sat down for a very short conversation. Its content is not so very remarkable. We have a sound recording of it and great photos by a Dutch journalist. The whole conversation lasts not even five minutes, and van der Stoel’s final answer is friendly (maybe even more than friendly, because he is a fierce advocate of human rights), but it is also diplomatic and a bit empty (since he is a politician and aware of the consequences). At the very beginning, Patočka says a few astonishing sentences: ‘I am a spokesperson of Charter 77, but actually speaking, I could do only very little until now; it was more about writing, to explain the Charter and its meaning, to fend off certain misunderstandings that were especially generated by the big campaign that was started against the Charter. Most importantly, we are not some political dissidents. We are against this designation and we are against the thing itself.’

From the whole talk, one can sense how fully unprepared Patočka is for this meeting and how heavily he is overwhelmed by the situation. Though it is a really short chat between the two of them, Patočka later declares that it was one of the greatest moments of his life. At the end of the recorded talk, you can hear the breaking of his voice. He desperately searches for words, trying to hold his tears and control his emotions.

The police answer is immediate and fierce. The interrogations are taken up again, and you already know what happens from here on until his death on 13 March.

Third probe: Three months earlier

From the tense and heavily burdened days in the first half of March 1977, we will now take a look back at what happened three months earlier, i.e., sometime in December 1976. It is a crucial moment for the formation of Charter 77. As already mentioned, the declaration came out in very early January and, as indicated by the name itself, is meant to set an agenda for the New Year, for the new time to come. However, December 1976 is also the moment when things for Patočka personally became different – at least this is what I would think from reading the papers from that time. We know that at some time that month, Patočka was writing a piece with the title ‘K záležitostem Plastic People of the Universe a DG 307’ (On the Matter of The Plastic People of the Universe and DG 307) – the title becomes clearer when we know about the circumstances. The Plastic People of the Universe and DG 307 were two famous underground rock bands that were closely connected and were therefore often mentioned together. The members of these rock bands had been arrested in March 1976. Soon after, Václav Havel and Jiří Němec started a public campaign in their support, because they were convinced that the musicians’ arrest was a precedent for the suppression of intellectual and artistic freedom. This campaign culminated in an open letter to the German writer Heinrich Böll, which was dated 16 August 1976 and signed by Jaroslav Seifert (famous for workers’ poetry, later awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1984), Václav Černý (a literary scholar), Jan Patočka, Karel Kosík (another philosopher), Václav Havel, and the writers Ivan Klíma and Pavel Kohout. The letter was published in FAZ on 28 August 1976. The signatories are essentially a Who’s Who of Czechoslovak intellectuals of that time.

Patočka, it seems, had at that point already decided to take a stance. The campaign was at least partly successful – some of those arrested were released; others were sentenced to prison for periods between eight and 20 months. However, the spirit arising from the protest and the ongoing solidarity with those imprisoned was a decisive factor for the formulation of the Charter. It is in this spirit that Patočka, in December 1976, sits down and writes ‘On the Matter of The Plastic People of the Universe and DG 307’.

Ironically, the only direct reference to the musicians is made in the title. But the message is very clear, and for Patočka’s standards, surprisingly imaginative, one might even say fantastic, since the story he tells is almost a fairy tale. It is the reversal of a short story by Dostoevsky called The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, about a sinful person who arrives on a planet of totally innocent people and manages to morally corrupt all of them. ‘Our cosmonauts’, which is what Patočka calls the young people arrested by the Czechoslovak police, are the opposite: it is as if they could travel to some corrupted planet (it is not difficult to recognize that it is Planet Earth in the 20th century), and because they are so good-willed and fresh at heart, might be able to make a change for the better on the whole planet. A fantastic story – Patočka explicitly calls it a miracle – but also an articulation of desperate hopes and an unrestricted solidarity for those young people who should be allowed to express themselves. Incidentally, Patočka really didn’t like their music – for him, music had found its culmination in Beethoven – but it seems that solidarity for those oppressed had, in the meantime, found in him a resonance that transgressed such differences.

At the end of this article in solidarity with the musicians, Patočka asks: ‘Yet what is youth if not a guest arriving from the unknown – to begin life anew?… Where beginning anew means, primarily, rejecting… fighting against attempts to make everything easy, against convenience, against averaging out, against dishonesty to oneself and to others…’

Fighting against convenience and dishonesty, to begin anew, to dare to begin anew. I guess that we can see how the path is set for what he will say three months later about the necessity to suffer for what is worth suffering for…

Fourth probe: Three years earlier

The formula of the ‘solidarity of the shaken’ is Patočka’s buzzword. It was probably never meant to be one, but over the last 30 years has obtained an almost iconic meaning. It derives from Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, Patočka’s by far best-known book. The main reference for the invocation of a ‘solidarity of the shaken’ is to the fighters at the front in the First World War, i.e., those for whom the seemingly endless and meaningless fighting has shaped a world without any horizon and perspective. In that moment of complete exhaustion, Patočka holds, they realize that it must feel just the same for those on the other side of the trenches. What unites them is precisely their total shaken-ness, and an immediate, very fundamentally humane sense of solidarity arises from that. Obviously, this historical reference is not the only one, and the whole idea of a “solidarity of the shaken” is also very much influenced by the dissident circles and the dissident experiences of Patočka’s own time (underground seminars, intellectuals working as night watchmen and going through existential uncertainties). Many more things could be said about this iconic formula and its historical references. To conclude for today, I will cite the most famous formulation of the “solidarity of the shaken” that the author gives in his Heretical Essays: ‘The solidarity of the shaken is capable of saying no to all mobilizing measures… The solidarity of the shaken is being built up in persecutions and uncertainties: that is its frontline, a quiet one, unadvertised and sensationless… Unafraid of being unpopular, this solidarity calls silently, without a word.’

Once again, many further references could be made to the implications and the historical and philosophical importance of these lines. However, in accordance with the main approach of what I wanted to say today, I will explicitly draw your attention to the last four words of these lines: ‘silently, without a word’ is the call of solidarity. I find it most important to stress this as a main characteristic of solidarity: it is not so much (or should not be so much) an expectation, a demand. It is not even a philosophical description or a recipe, but rather an internal working and an internal fight – not to ask for solidarity, but to fight with oneself to be able to show and act in solidarity.

Postludium

The burial of Jan Patočka took place in the cemetery of Svatá Markéta in Břevnov, Prague 6, on 16 March 1977. The state authorities tried their best to make it unworthy, using a helicopter and motocross bikes to create a hellish noise and make it impossible for those in attendance to understand a word. People were either kept from entering the cemetery or arrested. The police began their arrests in the city centre, far away from Břevnov. Many people managed to get there nevertheless. The cemetery was full, and the events were never forgotten by those who witnessed them. The secret police were taking photos of all visitors from in between the gravestones. A young man called Ondřej Němec – he was 17 then and already part of dissident circles – took photos as well. Sometimes, you see in both series of photos – the ones taken by the secret police and the ones by Ondřej Němec – the very same people, but it is remarkable how very different they appear. What is it that makes the ones in the photos by Němec look like they come from another planet or from a more humane world? I guess the answer is clear: it is a shared solidarity – and be it a shaken solidarity. It is the passion or compassion of the person behind the camera and a shared conviction:

‘There are things for which it is worthwhile to suffer.’

This text was presented on 6 July 2026 as the Krzysztof Michalski Memorial Lecture at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.