The Academy of Humanities and Political Sciences
Mr. Chairman,
Thank you for your kind words. I am delighted and moved by the deep understanding you have
expressed for my efforts, and for the efforts of many of my fellow citizens.
Dear colleagues,
The honour you have bestowed upon me by electing me a member of the famous French
Academy of Humanities and Political Sciences is a great source of encouragement to me in the
present and a great commitment for the future. If I am to be one of you until the end of my days, I
must be worthy of it until the end of my days. I promise you I will try.
It is my pleasant duty in the spirit of the wonderful tradition of this Academy to recall with
deep respect my predecessor, the Italian economist Giuseppe Ugo Papi, whose life's work was
concerned, among other things, with creating and developing international structures for economic
cooperation and who was important far beyond the borders of his native country.
There are different ways of waiting. At one end of the great spectrum there is waiting for
Godot, who embodies universal salvation. For many of us who lived in the communist world, waiting
was something very close to this extreme position. Surrounded, bound, and in a sense internally
colonized by the totalitarian system, people lost the sense that there was a way out. They lost the will
to do anything; they lost the feeling that there was anything they could do. They simply lost hope. But
they did not and indeed could not lose the need for hope, because without hope a meaningful life is
impossible. So, they waited for Godot. Because they did not carry hope within them, they expected it
to arrive as some kind of salvation from without. But Godot at least as one who is expected will
not come, because he simply doesn't exist. He only represents hope. He is not hope itself, he is an
illusion. He is a product of our own helplessness, a patch over a hole in the spirit. But the patch itself
is full of holes. It is the hope of people without hope.
On the other end of the spectrum there was waiting of another kind: that is, patience. It was
waiting based on the knowledge that it made sense on principle to resist by speaking the truth simply
because it was the right thing to do, without speculating whether it would lead somewhere tomorrow,
or the day after, or ever. This kind of waiting grew out of the faith that repeating this defiant truth made
sense in itself, regardless of whether it was ever appreciated, or victorious, or repressed for the
hundredth time. At the very least, it meant that someone was not supporting the government of lies.
It also, of course, grew out of the faith but this is of secondary importance that a seed once sown
would one day take root and send forth a shoot. No one knew when. But it would happen someday,
perhaps for future generations.
This stance for simplicity's sake let us call it the dissident stance assumed and cultivated
patience. It taught us how to wait. It taught us waiting as patience, waiting as a state of hope, not as
an expression of hopelessness. Whereas waiting for Godot is a meaningless form of self-deception
and therefore a waste of time, this second type of waiting does have meaning; it is not a sweet lie but
bitter life with truth, and time spent in this kind of waiting is not wasted. To wait until good seeds sprout
is not the same as waiting for Godot. Waiting for Godot means waiting for lilies we have never planted
to grow.
I should make it clear that citizens of the communist world could not be divided into those who
merely waited for Godot and the dissidents. To a certain extent, all of us waited for Godot at times,
and at other times we were dissidents. It's just that some of us might have been more the former, and
others more the latter. Nevertheless, this experience can be simplified to the recognition that there is
waiting, and then there is waiting.
I am obviously not thinking about this because I feel a strong nostalgia for the past. I am trying
to determine what this experience means for the present and for the future.
Allow me to be personal for a moment. Although I am trained in the dissident type of patience
based on the awareness that waiting has a meaning, nevertheless in the past three years that is,
after our peaceful, anti-totalitarian revolution I was seized again and again by a desperate
impatience. I agonized over how slowly things were changing. My country still didn't have a new,
democratic constitution; the Czechs and Slovaks could not agree on whether they wished to live in one
country or in two; we were not moving swiftly enough toward the Western democratic world and its
structures; we were having trouble coming to terms with our own past; we were too slow to get rid of
the legacy of the old regime and the moral poverty it left behind.
I longed desperately for at least some of these problems to be resolved so that I could cross
them off the list and put them out of the way. I longed for some visible, tangible, indisputable outcome,
something finished, over and done with. I found it difficult to accept the fact that politics, like history
itself, is a never-ending process, a process that never allows us to say something is definitively over.
It was as though I had forgotten how to wait, to wait in the way that has meaning.
And it is only now, when I have had a little time to step back and think about all this, that I am
beginning to understand that in my impatience, I succumbed to precisely the thing I had been critical
of: the destructive impatience of contemporary technocratic civilization. This grows out of a vain
ratiocentrism and assumes erroneously that the world is nothing but a crossword puzzle to be solved,
that there is only one correct way the so-called objective way to solve it, and that it is entirely up
to me whether I succeed or not. Without even being aware of it, I too succumbed to the perverted
notion that I was the master of reality, that the only task was to improve reality according to some
existing recipe, that it was entirely up to me when I do it, and thus there was no reason not to do it
right away.
In short, I thought time belonged to me.
It was, of course, a big mistake.
The world, Being, and history have their own time. We can, of course, enter that time in a
creative way, but none of us has it entirely in his hands. The world and Being do not heed the
commands of the technologist or the technocrat; and they do not exist to do his bidding. They resist
his sense of time, just as they resist a broad interpretation of their sense of time. And just as they have
their own secrets and their own mystery, which is constantly catching modern enlightenment rationality
off guard, they also have their own, meandering course. If we give in to the desire to eradicate this
unfathomable meandering by erecting some monstrous dam, we risk a great deal, from the loss of
groundwater to bringing about catastrophic changes in the biosphere.
If I consider my own political impatience, I realize with new urgency that a politician of the
present and the future allow me to use the expression "post-modern politician" must learn, in the
deepest and best sense of the word, the importance of waiting. I don't mean waiting for Godot; his
waiting must be the expression of respect for the inner dynamics and tempo of Being, for the nature
of things, for their integrity and their independent dynamics, which resist coercive manipulation. He
must have the will to open events to the possibility of manifesting themselves as they really are, in
their essence. His actions cannot derive from impersonal analysis; they must come out of a personal
point of view, which cannot be based on a sense of superiority but must spring from humility.
The world cannot be brought under total control because it is not a machine. And it cannot be
rebuilt from the ground up merely on the basis of a technological idea. Utopians who believe this sow
even greater suffering. If reason is disengaged from the unique human spirit and becomes the main
guide to political action, it can only lead to the use of force, to violence. The world will resist an order
forced upon it by a brain that has forgotten that it is itself merely a modest aspect of the world's
infinitely rich morphology. And the more systematically and impatiently the world is crammed into
rational categories, the more explosions of irrationality there are to astonish us.
Yes, even I the sarcastic critic of all those who vainly explain the world had to remind
myself that the world cannot just be explained, it must be grasped and understood as well. It is not
enough to impose one's own words on it, but one must also listen to the polyphony of
often-contradictory messages the world sends out and try to penetrate their meaning. It is not enough
to describe, in scientific terms, the mechanics of things and events; their spirit must be personally
perceived and experienced. One cannot merely follow the timetable we have set for our influence on
the world; we must also honour and respect the infinitely more complex timetable the world has set
for itself. That timetable is the sum of the thousands of independent timetables of an infinite number
of natural, historical and human actions.
You cannot wait for Godot.
Godot will not come, because he does not exist.
In fact, you can't even fabricate Godot. A typical example of a fabricated Godot that is, a
Godot that actually shows up and is therefore a false Godot was communism. It was supposed to
save us, but it ended up only destroying and decimating us.
I realized with horror that there was, in fact, something communistic in my impatience to renew
democracy. Or, in more general terms, something of a rationally enlightened nature. I wanted to nudge
history forward in the way a child would when wishing to make a flower grow more quickly: by tugging
at it.
I think the art of waiting is something that has to be learned. We must patiently plant the seeds
and water the ground well, and give the plants exactly the amount of time they need to mature.
Just as we cannot fool a plant, we cannot fool history. But we must water history as well,
patiently and every day. We must water it not just with understanding, not just with humility, but with
love as well.
If politicians and citizens learn to wait in the best sense of the word, that is, as a way of
respecting the inner order of things we are never allowed to see into fully, if they understand that
everything in the world has its own time and that, in addition to what they desire from the world and
history, what the world and history themselves aspire to is also important, then humanity will not
necessarily turn out as badly as it sometimes seems it might.
If we are certain that the planting was good and that we are watering regularly, we have no
reason to be impatient. It is enough if we realize that our waiting has a meaning.
Waiting that has meaning because it grows out of hope and not hopelessness, from faith and
not from despair, from humility toward the time of the world and not out of fear of its sublime tranquillity
is not accompanied by boredom but by suspense. This kind of waiting is more than just waiting.
It is life. Life as the joyous involvement in the miracle of Being.
I come from a country that is full of impatient people. Perhaps they are impatient because they
have waited for Godot for so long they think Godot has finally come. This is an error as profound as
the one on which their waiting was based. Godot did not come. And that is just as well, because any
Godot that did come would be merely the imaginary Godot, the communist Godot. What came to
fruition had to come to fruition. Perhaps it would have come to fruition sooner had we watered it better.
But now we have a single task. We have to take this harvest, extract from it the seeds, sow them
again, and patiently water them.