Humanistic Ideals

by Tomáš Masaryk, W. Preston Warren (Translator)

A translation of Masaryk's critique of ideologies current in the late nineteenth century. He examines them in the light of human ethics and shows their shortcomings.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, History

132 pages, cloth

First published January 1, 1901

About the author

Austro-Hungarian and Czechoslovak statesman, sociologist and philosopher, who as the keenest advocate of Czechoslovak independence during World War I became the first President and founder of Czechoslovakia.

Masaryk was born to a working-class family in the predominantly Catholic city of Hodonín, Moravia. His father Jozef Masaryk, a carter, was a Slovak from the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary (later became the eastern province of Slovakia in Czechoslovakia), and his mother Teresie Masaryková (née Kropáčková) was a German from Moravia. They married on 15 August 1849, Teresie Kropáčková being two and half months pregnant.

The identity of Masaryk's biological father is still being disputed by the historians. There are rumours that Masaryk's father could have been Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph I, but the strongest possible evidence is pointing towards Nathan Redlich, german speaking Jew from Hodonín and Masaryk's mother's employer.

As a youth he worked as a blacksmith. He studied in Brno, Vienna (1872-1876 philosophy with Franz Brentano) and Leipzig (with Wilhelm Wundt). In 1882, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in the Czech part of the University of Prague. The following year he founded Athenaeum, a magazine devoted to Czech culture and science. He challenged the validity of the epic poems Rukopisy královedvorský a zelenohorský, supposedly dating from the early Middle Ages, and providing a false nationalistic basis of Czech chauvinism to which he was continuously opposed. Further enraging Czech sentiment, he fought against the old superstition of Jewish blood libel during the Hilsner Trial of 1899. The topic of his doctoral thesis was the phenomenon of suicide.

Masaryk served in the Reichsrat (Austrian Parliament) from 1891 to 1893 in the Young Czech Party and again from 1907 to 1914 in the Realist Party, but he did not campaign for the independence of Czechs and Slovaks from Austria-Hungary. When the First World War broke out, he had to flee the country, with a Serbian passport, to avoid arrest for treason, going to Geneva, to Italy, and then to England, where he started to agitate for Czechoslovak independence. In 1915 he was one of the first members of staff of the newly formed School of Slavonic and East European Studies, which was initially a department of King's College London, and is now a part of University College London, and where the Student Society and Junior Common Room are named after him. He became Professor of Slav Research at King's College in London lecturing on "The problem of small nations".

During the war, Masaryk's intelligence network of Czech revolutionaries provided important and critical intelligence to the Allies. Masaryk's European network worked with an American counter-espionage network of nearly 80 members headed by E.V. Voska who, as Habsburg subjects, were presumed to be German supporters but were involved in spying on German and Austrian diplomats. Among others, the intelligence from these networks were critical in uncovering the Hindu-German Conspiracy in San Francisco.

In 1916, Masaryk went to France to convince the French government of the necessity of disintegrating Austria-Hungary. After the February Revolution in 1917 he proceeded to Russia to help organize Slavic resistance to the Austrians, so-called Czechoslovak Legions. In 1918 he traveled to the United States, where he convinced President Woodrow Wilson of the rightness of his cause. Speaking on 26 October 1918, from the steps of Independence Hall in Philadelphia as head of the Mid-European Union, Masaryk called for the independence of the Czecho-slovaks and other oppressed peoples of Central Europe.

With the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the Allies recognized Masaryk as head of the Provisional Czechoslovak government.

Reviews

[Michal Sventek · Rating 5 out of 5]

TGM napísal prehľad prvkov humanizmu vo vybranej zbierke ideológií a filozofií danej doby, kde poukazuje na ich pozitíva aj negatíva a v závere predstavuje humanizmus samotný, tak ako mu rozumie on. Hovorí síce, že myšlienky to nie sú nové - no predsa sú výborne napísané a veľmi osviežujúce.

Prvé dielo TGM, ktoré som doteraz čítal. Je to jedna z osobností, ktoré rešpektujem pre ich filozofiu a vplyv, no viem o nich len to, čo som postrehol z kultúry alebo dejepisu/správ. Teraz tú chybu naprávam a veľmi ma potešilo, čo som v tejto knižočke našiel. Pretože áno, stane sa, že si človek niekoho idealizuje (alebo úplne zavrhuje), potom si prečíta čosi z ich tvorby a zmení názor.

Najviac ma zaujala práve tá posledná kapitola, z ktorej som si odložil zopár citátov. Prikladám jeden, ktorým sa aj knižka končí. Určite odporúčam.

“Nehledejme nějakých tajeplných, nadmíru hlubokých a nových formulí a posledních slov pro všecky hádanky života. Hádanky jsou staré a odpovědi k nim jsou také staré. A mnohé ty odpovědi jsou dobré a správné. Ale tobě budou správnými, když je pochopíš sám a v okolnostech svých, jen sobě vlastných. Pak mnohé, co jsme dávno slyšeli, dostává pro nás nového smyslu. A tak pokračujeme, že to, co již známe, postřehujeme v novém osvětlení, že se nám na starém zjevují nové stránky. V tom se jeví hloubka myšlení a pochopení, že dovedeme postřehnout něco v tom, co dávno je známo, co denně slyšíme, k čemu jsme byli vedeni a o čem jsme byli přesvědčeni, že tomu již zcela dobře rozumíme.” - T.G. Masaryk, Ideály Humanitní, 1901.

[Alena Tesařová · Rating 5 out of 5]

T. G. Masaryk považoval humanitu za hlavní a jediný obsah českých dějin. V útlé knížce najdete přehled všech humanitních směrů, které zde Masaryk konfrontuje. Co odkazuje dnešním čtenářům? Že sebelépe znějící ideologii je třeba brát s rezervami, slepě ji nepřijímat a hlavně být kritický.

První československý prezident dále rozebírá problémy malého národa, národa českého, potažmo československého. Za 100 let jsme sice vyřešili otázky jazyka, území, hospodářství, sociálního systému, dá se říct, že i umění a náboženství, ale co se týče národního svědomí, morálky, právního státu, náboženství, myslím, že by radost neměl.

Co si všichni z knihy můžeme vzít? Jmenujuji aspoň pár myšlenek našeho největšího státníka moderních dějin.

- Štěstí je teď. Kdo štěstí hledá, už ho ztratil. Honbou po štěstí nikdo se šťastným nestal.
- Smyslem života nejsou materiální statky.
- Jen ať jsou spory, ale ať se bojuje s rozumem a poctivě.
- Mezi náboženstvím a mravností je rozdíl. Může být člověk nábožensky věřící, oddaný církvi, a nemusí být mravný. Mravnost je poměr člověka k člověku.
- Otcové a děti si vždy trochu nerozumějí.
- Naším úkolem je starat se o vychování a sebevychování.

[Harooon · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Filip Ligmajer · Rating 3 out of 5]

s. 42

Utilitarism tvrdí, že každý člověk jde po svém štěstí, po své slasti a jen po své slasti, pesimism to štěstí hledá také, ale dochází poznání, že štěstí nelze najít, poněvadž prý ho není.

Také já myslím, že ho není. Totiž: je po štěstí, jakmile ho někdo tak schválně hledá. Ten, kdo hledá štěstí, již ho ztratil. Člověk každý je rád šťasten - jistě, jakmile však začne štěstí tak usilovně vyhledávat, již ho nenalézá. Velmi pěkně jest to pověděno v pohádce o hloupém Honzovi. Ti dva chytří, vzdělaní páni bratři, kteří jdou za štěstím, nenalézají ho; ten hloupý Honza nehledal štěstí, ale kde bylo třeba, jak dovedl, pracoval, pomáhal a vida - byl šťasten a nakonec musil pomoci oběma bratrům nešťastným. V této pohádce o hloupém Honzovi náš lid největší ethickou moudrost nám pověděl, totiž: nehledat štěstí! To úmyslné, dokonce rafinované hledání štěstí činí nešťastným. Moderní člověk po veliké revoluci nejen hospodářsky a politicky, nýbrž i filosoficky a umělecky honí se po ztraceném štěstí, po ztraceném ráji - ale honbou po štěstí nikdo šťastným se nestal.

s. 55

Mezi náboženstvím a mravností je rozdíl věcný. Mravnost není náboženstvím a náboženství není mravností. Může být člověk nábožensky velice věřící, oddaný své církvi, svým dogmatům i předpisům, a nebude mravný, ba bude třeba nemravný. Nemluvím jen o svatoušství. Ale náboženství je tolik různých forem, že prostě myslit, jako by ten, do má náboženství, proto už měl mravnost, je omyl. Mravnost je poměr člověka k člověku. Potřebujeme mravnosti ve svém styku s bližním. Náboženství vzniká z poměru člověka k celému světu, zvláště k bohu. Náboženství má širší okruh než mravnost; v náboženství je mravnost obsažena.

s. 58

Láska, humanita musí být pozitivní. Často nenávist, například k národu druhému, pokládá se již za lásku k národu svému. Vyšší je nemít té nenávisti, ale positivně milovat. Nebudu se přít o to, lze-li něco cizího tak milovat jako své. Například cizí národ milovat tak jako svůj. Bylo by nepřirozené to žádat; ale zvykejme si národ, rodinu, stranu svou, kohokoli milovat positivně, to jest bez pozadí nenávisti, a docela nový mravní svět se nám rozevře.

s. 68

A všechny tyto prvky dohromady tvoří národnost; totiž jazyk, území, hospodářské a sociální poměry, literatura básnická, věda, filosofie, mravnost a náboženství.

s. 69

Přečteme-li si však a srovnáme-li Kollára, Máchu, Nerudu, Bezruče, vidíme, že nejen si národ jinak představovali, ale také lásku k němu jinak cítili. Cit nezůstává stále týž, mění se stejně jako se mění pojem. V romantice se jinak cítilo, než když začal realism a naturalism. V naší literatuře je romantika u Kollára; Havlíček prošel ruskou školou realistickou. Proto pojímá národ jinak než Kollár, jinak s ním cítí. U Bezruče vidíme již cit sociální, zájem o dělníka. Kde by byl měl Kollár zájem o dělníky?

s. 73

Humanitní myšlenka není kosmopolitism. Humanitní myšlenka má obsah dvojí: 1. Všichni národové tvoří lidstvo. 2. Člověk má dosáhnout ve svém životě čistého člověctví, mravního ideálu člověka. Ten ideál máme na mysli, říkáme-li: To je jednání lidské, to je jednání nelidské. Podle této myšlenky my národnost pojímáme humanitně. Nám musí být národnost otázkou svědomí. Jak praví Havlíček: ,,Napřed bud každý našinec sám přičinlivý, vzdělaný, čestný člověk, a pak teprv vlastenec." Napřed být čestným člověkem, to je národnost - to je vlastenectví. Tak je pojímali Havlíček, Palacký, Kollár.

s. 92

Vídeň myslila, že všichni národové jsou upoutáni, ale duše se upoutat nedá. Toho censor nedovede. Musili by umělce, spisovatele udělat censory. Každá censura je o mnoho myšlenek za spisovateli své doby. To je význam literatury, že dovede pracovat a rozsévat nové myšlenky i v nejhorších dobách.

[Sebastian Štros · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a straightforward short introduction into main philosophical currents of Masaryk’s day ie. 17th-19th century philosophy. However, I felt like Masaryk is slihhtly misinterpreting Nietzsche and despises Schoppenhauer without giving any counterarguments. Like duh Schoppenhauer was grumpy pessimisst but that does not mean one is absolved of engaging with his work. Another contention is that there is only 10 Pages of Masaryk’s own philosophy. Though that part was fun, it was more anecdotal and full of stories rather than argumentative. And not to sound too critical the rest is actually very informative and pleasantly written eg. Texts on Kant, Hegel, Socialism/Marxism. Really not bad, only my expectations about Masaryk’s own thoughts were not met.

[Salome · Rating 5 out of 5]

Překvapivě čtivé, stručné a výstižné. Zejména prostřední část mi poskytla několik témat na přemýšlení.