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CHAPTER 6 Working in Half-Truth: Some Premodern Reflections on Discourse Ethics in Politics Mary G. Dietz The international association of writers (PEN) held its 61st World Congress in Prague in 1991, five years to the month after the “revolution of the Magic Lantern” and the whirl of events that marked the beginning of the end of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, and a rebirth of politics (Ash 1995, 34).1 The general political theme of the PEN congress posed a problem to politics, insofar as it raised questions about the role of the intellectual, and about the relationship of the intellectual to the professional politician. As Timothy Garton Ash reports, the problem was not merely a matter of academic debate but had itself become politicized in the Czech Republic “around the . . . magnetic polarity between the two Vaclavs, now better known as President Havel and Prime Minister Klaus” (Ash 1995, 34). Ash, who was himself an invited speaker at the congress, sought to clarify the problem by positing the following distinction: The intellectual’s job is to seek the truth, and then to present it as fully and clearly and interestingly as possible. The politician’s job is to work in half-truth. The very word party implies partial, one-sided. (The Czech word for party, strana, meaning literally “side,” says it even more clearly). [1995, 35] Ash’s formulation put him at odds on one end of the polarity with Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, who was also present at the congress and spoke in favor of the proposition that there is no clear dividing line, or special status, that the intellectual enjoys over the professional politician 117 118 MARY G. DIETZ (Ash 1995, 35). In fact, Klaus found Ash’s notion that politicians work in half-truth “incredible,” and he accused the author of The Magic Lantern (1990) of delivering a “political” speech against politicians, from the side of a partisan (and perhaps morally self-righteous) “intellectual ” (1995, 35).2 On the other end of the polarity, Ash’s formulation was also at odds with President Vaclav Havel’s view of politics as “work of a kind that requires especially pure people, because it is especially easy to become morally tainted” (37). “The way of a truly moral politics,” Havel writes, “is neither simple nor easy” (38). With this in mind, Havel opened the PEN congress by acknowledging the distinctive position of the intellectuals and calling upon his “dear colleagues” to take responsibility and “have an impact on politics and its human perceptions in a spirit of solidarity” (34). Herein lies his hope that “a new spirituality” might come to politics (37).3 Klaus and Havel hold different views about the role and integrity of the intellectual in politics. Nevertheless, we might notice a shared, as spoken, conviction between them concerning the possibilities for purity in politics. Klaus registers the conviction on the side of the politician, and by adamantly resisting both Ash’s uneasy metaphor of “half-truth,” and Havel’s investiture of the intellectual over the politician as the morally superior seeker-of-truth. Havel registers the same conviction on the side of the intellectual, by arguing (against both Ash and Klaus) that in a corrupted age politics can be transfigured by the moral commitments of those intellects and writers who refuse to be dissuaded by “the lie” that “politics is a dirty business” (Ash 1995, 37).4 In this shared speech that commends itself to the purity of politics , the magnetic polarity between the two Vaclavs galvanizes into the form of a nearly Platonic political ideal. On this level, it matters not whether intellectuals are politicians or whether, by some dispensation of providence, politicians can become intellectuals. What matters is that both Vaclavs speak in the name of a politics that carries with it the imprimatur (if not the promise) of purity and truth. Against this Vaclavian politics of truth, Ash deploys the alternative formulation of “working in half-truth” in order to distinguish “the professional party politician’s job” from the intellectual’s, especially as it is “reflected, crucially, in a different use of language” (1995, 35). Here he amplifies what it means to work in the language of halftruth : If a politician gives a partial, one-sided, indeed self-censored account of a particular issue, he is simply doing his job. And if he manages to “sell” the part as the whole then he is doing his job effectively. . . . If [18.119.125.7...

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