We warmly invite you to the third debate in the Promyslet Havla LIVE series, organised by Prague Castle in cooperation with Český rozhlas Vltava. This debate will be devoted to the relationship between political life and spirituality, in a broader sense to spiritual experience
The motivation behind our live debate:
For Václav Havel, the reference to the "absolute horizon", the "focal point of all meaning" and a "moral authority" transcending the human being was decisive for reflecting on political action, civic responsibility and personal decision-making. Although in Dopisy Olze, Dálkový výslech and other texts he rejects any form of doctrine, he is convinced that "the only real hope for people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time, in the cosmos, and an awareness of our own capacity for transcendence that grows out of it". He draws attention to the negative consequences of the fact that "between the rational and the spiritual, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique, an ever deeper chasm is opening up". In his speeches in the 1990s he invoked spiritual experience as an element uniting all cultures, a potential source of peace, or at least of a willingness to seek common agreement. How can this attitude of Václav Havel's be assessed with a distance of thirty years? What role does and should spirituality, or spiritual experience, play in political action and in a democratic society? Is it a support against hollowing out, or an ideological threat?
speakers: Alice Koubová, Milena Bartlová, Petr Kratochvíl
Milena Bartlová is professor emerita of art history at UMPRUM. She previously worked at Masaryk University, among other institutions, lectured at Humboldt University and received a Mellon Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin. After more than three decades of studying the Middle Ages, she has recently turned to research on the contemporary history of the humanities. She has published, alone and with others, some twenty books and numerous scholarly studies, and she consistently engages in the press and in audiovisual media in popularisation, cultural-political journalism and art criticism.
Petr Kratochvíl is a professor of international relations whose work focuses in particular on the relationship between religion and politics and, more recently, on the transformation of the global order. He works at the Institute of International Relations and at Metropolitan University. In the past he has worked at Sciences Po in Paris and at La Sapienza in Rome, and he has lectured at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, at the LSE in London and at the Nobel Symposium. He is the author of more than a hundred scholarly publications and is also an active participant in Czech public debates.
The Promyslet Havla live debate series is prepared in cooperation with Český rozhlas Vltava.
FG Forrest, a.s., www.fg.cz, 2015