To Whom It Is Given
Givenness as the Antidote to Abstraction
“Fortunately the world around us is real,” wrote Václav Benda, dissident in the former Czechoslavakia, friend of Václav Havel, and signer of Charter 77. “The family really does exist, it is together or divided, has its joy and woes, its friends and interests. We should continue to surround their totalitarianism with our reality. For to assert itself, totalitarianism needs complete emptiness, nothingness.”
Benda was a man who focused his attention on what is given in the world, not on what is abstract.
By given I do not mean something given as a “gift” — though that is certainly part of it. I’m referring rather to what appears as given in experience; the real essence of things that emerges when reality is attended to seriously. This is an impossible skill to learn on Twitter (excuse me, X) where the primary thing given is transience — even when we want it to be something else, something substantial — but it’s an easy skill to learn in the family, as Benda himself observes. In a place like the family, things may not be how we would like them to be. But we learn to see them for what they are. And, hopefully, we develop the healthy disposition that what is given must be seriously contended with if we are going to live in the truth.
