III. A
Surprise on the Internet
In September
1998, after eighteen years in Oxford I returned to Prague. I was offered a Jan
Hus Foundation grant for a year with a promise of a flat and a permanent job
at the Institute of Philosophy; neither of these promises were honoured. I
therefore returned with my wife Doina and our little daughter Nera to England.
Shortly after our return my wife found on the internet a Czech report from 14th August 1998, entitled: ‘A Press Conference of the Czech Social Democratic Party’.
At the conference a freelance journalist Sedlák addressed Libor Rouček, the
Press Spokesman of the Party, as follows:
‘The Czech TV on all its channels presents Tomin. You too
lived in England and therefore know that Tomin had received psychiatric
treatment – he allegedly suffered from the fixed idea that he was Jan Hus … An
unhappy man, who should have no place on a TV screen. And this is public-owned
TV, payed for by the tax-payer.’
The Press
Spokesman replied:
‘… yes, I believe that Mr Tomin is an unhappy man, and as far
as I am acquainted with public-owned TV in other countries, not a single one
would produce such a programme. But this is a matter for the Czech TV and for
its Council.’
The TV
programme which these two men discussed concerned the interview held on the
occasion of my protest hunger-strike against the nomination of Jan Kavan as
Czech Foreign Minister, of which I have spoken in the preceding chapter. I
never saw the programme, but I have good reasons to believe that my discussion
with Kavan was cut out of it. It appears that the words of the two men at
the Press Conference, quoted above, were taken heed of by the Czech TV. Not
only was I not given any opportunity to properly explain on TV or in any public
media why I objected so strongly against Kavan’s nomination, but in the
archives of the Czech TV was in those days a programme about my stay at Oxford,
produced by Jiří Potužník, that was to be presented shortly after my return to
Prague; the viewers were never given a chance to see it. It was produced at
Oxford and had it been broadcast, the words about ‘unhappy Tomin’ would have
sounded very hollow. Most of the filming took place on a punt on the river
Cherwell; I was poling, Doina was sitting at the other end of the punt, Jiří
and the cameraman were in the middle. Surrounded by the beauty of Oxford
Colleges and University Parks, I initiated Jiří into the delights of having the
Bodleian Library at my disposal with all its treasures, of enjoying the beauty
of the English countryside on my long cycling-rides, and of my daily trips into
the treasures of Ancient Greek thought.
The
freelance journalist, quoted above, implied that I had received psychiatric
treatment in England and that this was well known at least in Czech emigrant
circles. How could this ‘information’ have taken hold of the minds of Czech
emigrants in Britain in spite of the fact that I have never received any
psychiatric treatment?
In Czech we
have a saying ‘Na každém šprochu je pravdy trochu’ which amounts to saying that
‘there is no rumour without some truth in it’. What truth is there in the
allegation that I had received psychiatric treatment? In 1979, under the
direction and supervision of the Czech secret police I was interned in a
psychiatric hospital for three days.
The incident
took place as follows. At the beginning of October 1979, I was told by
dissidents from the ‘underground’ that young people somewhere in north Bohemia
invited me to give a talk on philosophy to their group; the group allegedly met
in secrecy. The only person to whom I told about it was my wife, Zdena Tomin,
who was at that time a spokesperson for the Charter 77. I did not ask for the
names of the organizers and participants, I didn’t even know where exactly we
were going. On a Saturday afternoon a prominent member of the ‘underground’
came to take me to this unknown destination in his car. When we reached the
outskirts of Prague, we were ambushed by the secret police. I was asked to get
into their car. I refused, was dragged by them into their car, and taken into a
psychiatric clinic in Roudnice, the nearest town outside Prague. A
psychiatrist at the clinic wanted to subject me to a presumably routine
psychiatric investigation, but I refused to answer any of his questions. For in
my view, any answer to his questions would have amounted to participation in
the secret police’ attempt to misuse psychiatry. The psychiatrist’s attempt to
interrogate me took place in the presence of the secret policemen who carried
me into the surgery. I pointed at them and asked the psychiatrist whether it
had ever happened to him that he was asked to interview a person under such
conditions. Then I told him to try and phone my wife; he would find our
telephone number in the Telephone directory, but his attempt would end in
failure, for the police had disconnected our telephone. He did not even try.
Then I made another suggestion; would he go with me to my flat? In front of our
flat, on the third floor of an apartment house in which we lived, he would find
two uniformed policemen; in relays, they were sitting there day and night as
our unwonted ‘guard’, frightening off any visitors. All this would tell him
that there is something out of order. In short, I did my best to encourage the
psychiatrist to refuse any further cooperation with the secret police. In the
end the psychiatrist ordered my hospitalization and the secret policemen
carried me back into the car.
Why did the
secret policemen have to carry me? It was because I refused to obey their
orders. What gave me the strength to do so was the ten-day hunger-strike with
which I defended my seminar in the autumn of 1977. The police tried to enforce
the discontinuation of my seminar by summoning me for interrogation on a
Wednesday, the day at which I held the seminar. I notified the Minister of
Internal Affairs that there were no legal grounds for the summons, and that I
would therefore disregard the summons; if the police were to resort to force,
they would have to carry me to the interrogation room, I would refuse to answer
any of their questions and begin a ten day hunger-strike in protest. The police
did resort to force, the hunger-strike was a great success, and from then, for
a year, the police refrained from interfering with my seminar.
From
Roudnice I was taken to the nearest psychiatric hospital, in Horní Beřkovice;
by then it was late at night. The two secret policemen who carried me into the
reception stood by while I informed the psychiatrist about the illegality of
their action. In the end, with no question in his questionnaire answered by me,
the psychiatrist ordered my internment. The two secret policemen had to carry
me again from the reception to one of the hospital buildings, up the stairs to
the bed that was pointed out to them. This in itself was a hopeful sign; the
psychiatrist gave in to the police pressure reluctantly, for he did not involve
any of the hospital staff in bringing me in.
Then the
nurse in charge ordered me to take off my clothes and put on the hospital
outfit. I refused to comply and was
given an injection. I remember dry throat; in the night I crawled to the toilet
like an animal, on all fours. The next day I received no further injection: it
was Sunday and there was no doctor to prescribe one. On Monday morning, I was
summoned to the Senior psychiatrist. It was a lady. She looked out of the
window and ordered the nurse to give me an injection. I said to her: ‘Doctor,
how can you prescribe an injection without talking to me or even just looking
at me?’ The psychiatrist told the nurse: ‘Leave it for now, we shall do it
after the round.’ After lunch the patients assembled in the dining hall. The
Senior psychiatrist with her assistants and a few nurses went from patient to
patient, looked at their papers, asked each a few questions. When the
procession came to me, I looked the Senior psychiatrist into her eyes and asked:
‘Doctor, can you give me any reason for having me here?’ She said: ‘We shall
discuss it after the round,’ – and as she said these words, she fainted.
Unconscious, she fell into the arms of the junior doctor who stood behind her and was carried out of the room.
An hour or
two later one of the elite patients – each psychiatric hospital in
Czechoslovakia had a group of elite patients who were entrusted with performing
all kinds of tasks – suggested that I should send a message to my wife
concerning my whereabouts. I said I did not want to do so. Then came the head
nurse and made the same suggestion. I repeated that I did not want to send my
wife any message. Then I was summoned to a junior doctor, who made the same
suggestion and received the same reply. The doctor asked me why I did not want
to inform my wife about my internment in the hospital. I replied that it was my
duty to do my utmost to stop this misuse of psychiatry and that every day I
spent in the hospital was the best I could do to stop it. I must confess that I
was convinced that not only my wife, but many signatories of the Charter77 on
her side, my students, those Czech philosophers whom I had invited to lecture
in my seminar, namely Jiří Nemec, Ladislav Hejdánek, and Radim Palouš, as well
as Oxford dons, would do their best to learn what happened to me, and when they
learnt, would do their best to make the police pay for their attempt to misuse
psychiatry in this way.
On Tuesday
morning I was summoned to the Senior psychiatrist office. I asked her again to
give me any reasons for my internment in the hospital. She admitted that there
was no medical reason and said that I would be released from the hospital
before noon; she kept her word.
Let me now
return to the press conference that took place nine years after the Velvet
Revolution and nineteen years after my three day internment in Horní Beřkovice:
‘Tomin had received psychiatric treatment – he allegedly suffered from the
fixed idea that he was Jan Hus,’ This was accepted not only by the Press
Spokesman of the Czech Social Democratic Party, but even the Deputy Prime
Minister Egon Lánský spoke in similar terms. How could such a distortion of
facts take place in the country in which an important role was played by men
who were well informed about the case, beginning with young Kavan, its Foreign
Secretary? As a contribution to finding the answer, I shall point to what took
place on Wednesday, a day after my release from the psychiatric hospital.
In the
autumn of 1979, my seminar was held in the flat of one of my students, Ivan Dejmal,
for in front of our flat two policemen were sitting day and night, as I have
already mentioned. On the programme for the forthcoming Wednesday was a lecture
by Ladislav Hejdánek, a Czech philosopher and theologian. I was exhausted after
the-three day adventure, wanted a rest, and decided to stay at home, thinking
that the seminar was in the best hands. It was seven o’clock, the seminar must have
started, and I was still at home. But then I began to regret missing the
lecture, for I had been looking forward to it. I got up and went to the
seminar. The room in which it was held was packed with people, the majority of
whom I had never seen. Everybody looked at me totally flabbergasted. Hejdánek
asked what had happened to me. So, I narrated my three-day psychiatric-hospital-adventure.
When I finished, Hejdánek said: ‘Do you really think that you have been
released because of what you did? That’s nonsense. They must have changed their
dispositions in Moscow.’ I did not ask Hejdánek what ‘they in Moscow’ had
to do with the Czech secret police attempt to intern me in the psychiatric
hospital in Horní Beřkovice. One thing was clear, I was unwanted in that room;
I stood up and left. I then learnt that the people there in the room were
from as far away as Brno in Moravia; ambitious plans had been prepared for the running
of the seminar in cooperation with Oxford dons, without me.
The week
that followed was perhaps the most difficult week in my whole life. My wife
learnt about my internment in the psychiatric hospital on Monday evening; even
if Hejdánek had learnt independently, as early as Saturday night, that I was
interned in the psychiatric hospital, the time that was left between then and
the Wednesday seminar was not sufficient for making any plans and preparations
for the running of the seminar without me, with people from Brno, in
cooperation with Oxford dons. The organizers must have been informed about my
internment well in advance, and nobody could think that the secret police
attempt at my internment might end in failure.
For the next
Wednesday, one more of Hejdánek’s lectures was planned. I didn’t think I could
face going there again, but when the Wednesday and the time of the seminar came,
I again became restless, and in the end went there. This time the situation in
Dejmal’s flat was very different. No Hejdánek, only a few students were
present, and they expected to be taken to the police any minute, a police car
was waiting on each corner of the housing block. My arrival was obviously
unexpected, the two police cars disappeared. This filled me with the hope that
our seminar could become a space in which there was no place for the secret
police. I do not mean that they would be physically excluded. I refused even to
think who from among my students might by informers. In my seminar there was no
place for anything that required secrecy. The principle on which I built it was
openness. To make reports on what I or any of my students said on Socrates,
Plato, or Aristotle was a ridiculous proposition for any secret police
informer.
***
In ‘Out of
the East’ Polly Toynbee wrote: ‘Both Oxford and Cambridge had written to Julius
in Czechoslovakia when he was in mental hospital praising his work and offering
jobs any time he wanted.’ (The Guardian, 6th January, 1988) In
one of the subsequent issues The Guardian published my correction: ‘I
have never been offered any jobs by Oxford and Cambridge and to my knowledge no
letter was written to me by Oxford and Cambridge during the time when I was in
mental hospital. The whole affair lasted 60 hours, 24 of those falling on
Sunday. There simply was no time for Oxford and Cambridge to write any
letters.’ But was this not the original idea, which thus inadvertently
came out? The Czech secret police would intern me in a psychiatric hospital,
Oxford and Cambridge would get me out, and I would be given a lucrative job at
one of the universities?
Roger
Scruton visited my seminar less than a fortnight before the attempt of the
secret police to intern me in a psychiatric hospital; he gave us a lecture on
Wittgenstein. Barbara Day writes that the next day he met some of my students
on the quiet, wooded Shooters’ Island on the river Vltava and ‘wondered how
much opportunity they had to express their own ideas; the seminars were
dominated by Tomin, and the young students were overshadowed by his powerful
personality. In conversation with the students, Scruton began to realise what a
vital role the seminars played in passing on to the new generation traditions
of independent enquiry; he also thought how much more effective they could be
if the teaching were freed from the influence of personality.’(The Velvet
Philosophers, op. cit. p. 45)
***
In November
1979, about a month after the unsuccessful attempt at interning me in the Horní
Beřkovice psychiatric hospital, I was summoned to a psychiatrist in my Prague
district. I wrote to the psychiatrist, asking her to specify the reasons for
the summons. In reply, I received threatening summons, without any explanation:
if I refused to come, I would be taken to the psychiatrist by force. Thomas
Mautner from Australia had a lecture in my seminar just two days before I was
due to visit the psychiatrist, so I asked him to come along with me to the
psychiatric surgery; together we would ask for the reasons for the summons. He
agreed, and so did a Czech writer Eva Kantůrková. When we arrived, we went into
the waiting room and I knocked on the door of the psychiatrist: ‘I am here with
my friends, a distinguished Czech writer and an Australian philosopher; we want
to know why you summoned me for a psychiatric investigation.’ The doctor closed
the door in my face. Next, the door of the waiting room was locked. The psychiatrist
was obviously contacting the secret police, but the secret police do not like
acting in the daylight. We therefore gave the psychiatrist twenty minutes in
which it might sink deep into her mind – it was again a lady – that she would
get no help from the police. Then I knocked again on the psychiatrist door. She
beckoned me in, trying to prevent the entry of my friends. But I kept the door
wide open, and my friends came in. I asked the psychiatrist again and again for
her reasons in summoning me, translating into English every word I and the
psychiatrist said. At last she said: ‘The police say that you write letters to
the authorities.’ To this I said: ‘What you just said is very important, I must
write it down.’ As I was writing the words, I was translating them into English.
But I did not finish my writing for the psychiatrist shouted: ‘Out!’ We went
out, elated. With this the attempts of the police to use psychiatry against me
ended. Thomas Mautner’s and Eva Kantůrková’s bravery deserved to be noted, but
the incident was not even mentioned in the Western mass media.
In ‘The Pub
Philosopher’, published in The Independent Magazine on 18th November 1989
– i.e. a day after the Velvet Revolution began in Prague – Nick Cohen quoted an
Oxford professor who said about me: ‘you can disguise paranoia in the East.
There are so many real conspiracies. There aren’t the same excuses when you
come to the West.’ Nick Cohen added: ‘How dare pampered Oxford dons condemn a
man who has been sent in and out of jail since he was 18 for standing up for
humanist values? It sounds scandalous until you hear Tomin happily accuse
classical philosophers of conspiring to destroy him because he could expose
their ignorance, or of collaborating with the Czech authorities.’ The article is
full of gross inaccuracies and distortions. Consider the quoted sentence. I was
imprisoned only twice, both times before I reached my 19th birthday:
I was sentenced to three months in prison for my refusal to undergo the
conscription to military service, which was at that time obligatory for all
young men, and to four years for leaving the country illegally. (Of these four
years I spent in prison only a year, for three years of my sentence were
pardoned by an amnesty – president Zápotocký died and Novotný, the new
president issued an amnesty. My case was unusual, for I actually did leave the
country illegally; I tried to get on a boat in a Polish port Szczetin and was
apprehended by the Polish police. Had I unsuccessfully attempted to cross the
border to West Germany or Austria, the amnesty would not have applied to my
case.)
I never
accused classical philosophers ‘of conspiring to destroy me’, nor did I ever
say that they ‘collaborated with the Czech authorities.’ I told Cohen what I
experienced in very concrete terms, but he put into my mouth his own generalizations,
which were false. He did it so that every reader would agree with the
anonymously quoted professor: ‘“I don’t wish to sound East European,” said one,
“but perhaps he does need psychiatric help.”’
Let me point
out a few things I told Cohen. During the first two years in Oxford I lived with
my family in a house hired by Dr Kathleen Wilkes, who was the first Oxford
visitor in my seminar; we lived on the ground floor, she on the upper floor. We
were often visited by Roger Scruton and Alan Montefiore who discussed with Kathy
Oxford activities in Czechoslovakia. They divided them into open activities, namely
the visits in Ladislav Hejdánek’s seminar, viewed as a smokescreen that
shielded their truly important activities in Petr Rezek’s seminar, held in
secrecy. I told them that it was naïve to believe that the secret police knew
nothing of Rezek’s seminar. Alan Montefiore asked me how I can say that Rezek’s
seminar is not secret, when people in Prague are confident that their meetings
are secret. In those days I was receiving an emigrant journal Svědectví,
published in France. I showed Alan the issue in which a Frenchman wrote about
his visit in Rezek’s seminar. I said: ‘Alan, it is still possible that the
Czechoslovak secret police knows nothing about the seminar, but only if the KGB
gave a strict order that the department in Czechoslovak Ministry of Internal
Affairs, which monitors Svědectví, must leave this particular issue untouched.’
I told Cohen that the Czechoslovak secret police was undoubtedly interested in the
secrecy of Rezek’s seminar; that’s what secret police is all about, operating
in secrecy. It made me sad that Oxford dons adopted this myth of secrecy. On
another time Alan asked me: ‘Do you think that we have betrayed you?’ I
replied: ‘You cannot betray me; you have betrayed yourselves.’
One affair
bothered me in particular. One of my students, Jan Bednář, wrote to me that he
would like to get The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Kathy Wilkes
promised that the next visitor would bring it to him. A few weeks later I got
another letter from Bednář in which he complained that I must have forgotten
about him. I showed Kathy his letter. She promised to put it right. And she
did. In those days Kathy was giving to me the copies of ‘strictly
confident’ reports that each visitor had to write for the JHEF (Jan Hus
Educational Foundation). I think it was the fifth report, written by Roger
Scruton, in which he wrote that he delivered the Oxford Dictionary to Bednář, commenting:
‘We made it clear to him that we were not amused at his importunity’. And so, I
told Kathy that I didn’t want to see any more reports, in fact I didn’t want to
have anything more to do with the whole thing. For whatever I had said was
disregarded, the mantra of Roger and Alan, and others involved, was: ‘We must
do what our friends in Prague wants us to do’. In vain did I tell them that this
meant: ‘We must do what the Czechoslovak secret police wants us to do’.
Nick Cohen’s
article requires a short explanation. In 1988 I was approached by The Daily
Telegraph. Through its offices, Noel Reilly offered me a private grant of
£3000 for three lectures a year in The Beehive, his pub in Swindon. The
contract was for three years, i.e. for nine lectures in total. I had been
unemployed for two years when I received the offer, and I could not refuse it.
It was a great challenge; I enjoyed every lecture and every discussion that
followed. I invited my Oxford colleagues to each lecture; none of them came. Of
the planned nine lectures I gave only three. The last took place in the early
spring 1989 and was entitled ‘The demise of Marxism’. In the discussion I was
asked: ‘What is the future of Czechoslovakia?’ I replied: ‘Thatcherism.
Privatisation. Once you realize the beauty of selling what is not yours, it is
irresistible.’ After this I was still receiving the payment for a few months –
I was still payed when Cohen’s article was published, in November 1979 – but I
was not invited to give any more lectures.
***
During the
1980s I had an opportunity to lecture at the Sub-faculty of Philosophy whenever
I applied for permission to do so, but since 1990 I was deprived of this
privilege. For several years I tried to regain the permission by informing
Oxford philosophers about the progress of my work, sending them texts of the
lectures I wanted to give. When my applications were refused year by year, I
resorted to a seven-day hunger-strike. I held it on the seventh anniversary of
Nick Cohen’s ‘The Pub Philosopher’. Had my protest been unsuccessful, I was
determined to hold the next year an eight-day hunger-strike, then a nine-day,
and so on. But the seven-day hunger-strike worked. The Philosophy Lectures Secretary
granted the permission under special conditions, three of which follow:
‘i. You should be allowed the use of the room in 10 Merton
Street to give lectures in;
ii. As last year [she should have written “as seven years
ago”], these may be advertised in 10 Merton Street and on the “Lecture
Prospectus” sent out just before the start of the term.
iv. You accept that no secretarial, word processing or
xeroxing facilities can be made available to you by the Philosophy Sub-Faculty,
or any other University department, over and above those involved in
advertising your lectures as mentioned in ii. above.’
Reading
these conditions, I was thinking of Roger Scruton’s article ‘A Catacomb
Culture’: ‘we would smuggle [to Czechoslovakia] printing equipment,
photocopiers, binding machines, and the countless other requirements of the “catacomb
culture”. We also encouraged our French, German, American and Canadian
colleagues to establish sister trusts … ‘ (TLS, February 16-22, 1990)
To regain
the energy I needed to give my next course of lectures, I re-read a letter that
one of my former students addressed to the Editor of The Oxford Magazine.
He wrote it in response to the article ‘The Dons who went out in the cold’
published in Hilary Term 1991, which celebrated Oxford involvement in Eastern
Europe:
‘The Oxford Magazine is supposed to publish all the
good things about Oxford, but if it cannot admit of self-criticism where it is
due, then one wonders what is the purpose of bringing East Europeans to Oxford
at all.
I refer to the treatment of Dr Julius Tomin of Prague. It was
on Dr Tomin’s invitation to attend seminars on Plato that the academics you
describe (mainly from Balliol, one from Cambridge) went to Prague in the first
place. On there expulsion, they let Dr Tomin understand that if ever he came to
Oxford he would be welcome. He left Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s and since
that time has been living in Oxford without ever having been offered academic
job of any kind. Indeed, he has been reduced to living in penury, surviving
either on Social Security or on ad hoc charity handouts, as at present. He was
even reduced at one stage to giving lectures in a pub to earn money. Not only
this, but his colleagues in the Philosophy Faculty have completely
cold-shouldered him, or worse. Dr Jonathan Barnes of Balliol opined in a
newspaper interview (in The Independent Magazine) that Dr Tomin would
never have been admitted to Oxford as an undergraduate, let alone as a don,
adding for good measure, and in the true Eastern European fashion, that he
thought Dr Tomin should be put into a mental asylum. The cause of this
unbelievably callous behaviour is a deep-going difference of opinion between Dr
Tomin and his fellow philosophers about Ancient Philosophy and the way it is
taught in British and American universities today. This is no small topic, and
yet instead of agreeing to meet Dr Tomin in frank and open discussion in
public, the Philosophy Faculty has closed ranks and dismissed him out of hand.
We all know that Oxford can be a bit pompous and stuffy from time to time but
the treatment meted out to Dr Tomin is simply intolerable, especially since the
issues at stake, and the way they have been handled, raise fundamental
questions about the teaching of philosophy at the university.
It is no doubt too much to expect that, of the millions
raised by the campaign, some emolument might be made available to Dr Tomin for
his teaching and research, but it would be the worst kind of economy with the
truth if you failed to bring this shabby affair to the attention of your
readers.
I must declare an interest. Dr Tomin gave me countless
informal tutorials when I was an undergraduate and we have spent long hours
together working on philosophy texts when I was a graduate. He is by far the
best philosophy teacher I have ever had.’
***
The
invitation I sent to Oxford University on 20th May 1978:
Dear Colleagues,
I would like to inform you of our work and to ask for your
cooperation.
We live in Czechoslovakia, I and my friends and students. A
year ago, we decided not to respect any more the current illegal practice of
state functionaries who arrogate a right to decide who may study and what, who
may teach and what he may teach. We decided to study philosophy together. The
contents of our work were determined by my long study of ancient Greek
literature; we have studied mostly Greek philosophy. As expected, state
authorities took interest in our work soon. They manifested their interest in
their own way: long questionings in secret police headquarters, duress to stop
our work. Our need to work together proved stronger. In our struggle for the
right to study we were not alone, we were backed by the Charter 77, a movement
which fights for basic human rights in our country, and the world opinion
expressed by the free press helped us considerably. Our course of philosophy
has run a year. To the honour of state authorities, we must say, that up to now
we did not encounter any further direct interference, only individual acts of
persecution: some of us were sacked, some get no possibility to study on
high-schools or university. From time to time we hear threats: ‘We will destroy
you together with your Plato.’ From the moment we tried to enrich our program
by inviting friends from abroad my post stopped coming. That is the reason I
decided to write an open letter to your four universities; I have been deprived
of any usual means of entering into scientific contacts on a private basis.
We cannot put up with a state of affairs where the state
power decides to whom we may write and whose letters we may read, who may visit
us and who may talk to us, who may share with us their knowledge. We study
English and German, our thinking is influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe, Bacon
and Locke … Can we acquiesce in being for ever deprived of any living contact
with the present cultural and scientific life in Great Britain, U.S.A and
Germany? We cannot travel even to GDR (German Democratic Republic), our
passports were confiscated. We cannot buy free press, the press which our
friends send us is mostly confiscated. But our government needs hard
currencies, they cannot live without western commodities, so our country is
open to visitors from the West. You have the possibility to come and visit us.
What are the topics in which we are interested? We want to
understand the world in which we live and so we cannot neglect the view of
natural sciences. Natural sciences, have they become a mere technical tool for
explaining the nature or have they retained an ability to mediate an
understanding of the world? We would be happy if natural scientists came to us
and opened to us a sphere of human struggle to understand the world in which we
live. We want to understand the society – we would be glad to have with us an
economist, a sociologist … We want to understand human being, welcome would be
a psychologist, philosopher, theologian … We want to understand the historical
dynamics of human society, welcome would be an anthropologist, historian,
futurologist, ecologist … Is there any scientific field or topic which we can a
priori eliminate? There is only one precondition –an interest to visit us and
to share with us ones’ own understanding.
In view of the fact that I do not get the post and my
telephone may be confiscated any day, we cannot rely on normal means of
communication. Allow me, please, to make a suggestion which seems to me most
practicable. We study philosophy together every Wednesday from September to
June, always at 6.p.m. in my flat: Praha 7, Keramická 3. Whenever you come, you
are welcome. It would be most convenient, if we had visitors on a fixed day,
e.g. every first Wednesday in a month, from October till June.
Dear friends, you will make us happy if you answer our
request for cooperation and we are looking forward to have you with us.
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