The Self as Empty Space and Crowd: Karel Čapek and the Czechoslovak Condition

Abstract

When in 1922 Karel Čapek wrote Factory for the Absolute it was still possible to poke fun at the chiliastic atmosphere of post-World War I Europe. It was a time when redemptive faiths could be had by the dozen, when new messiahs were being unveiled in every political quarter, but when, from the relatively peaceful haven of Czechoslovakia’s First Republic, a violent struggle among them did not as yet appear imminent. Čapek’s novel, culminating in an apocalyptic war of all against all, was set in the year 1943; he was too optimistic by a decade. By the early 1930s, there was nothing to laugh about. With economic depression, the ever-increasing polarization of politics along class and national lines, and most ominously of all, the rise of Nazism in Germany, Čapek’s darkest imaginings of a world torn apart by rival visions of the absolute seemed to be on the brink of realization. In this worrying environment, Čapek urged his countrymen with more vehemence than ever to recognize the relativity of their own values and to accept the legitimacy of beliefs and perspectives other than their own. It was the only antidote, he warned, to the poisonous conflicts that threatened to tear apart Czechoslovakia as a state and enfeeble it in the face of external aggression.

The desultory state of the world today and of its political affairs can be defined as the epistemological crisis of European civilization.

—Karel Čapek, 1934¹