On 28 April 1975, the police conducted an investigation into Karel Kosik's apartment

and seized some of his manuscripts. This text is the letter (published by Le Monde on
29-30 June 1975) sent by Karel Kosik to Jean Paul Sartre on this incident ,on 26 May
of the following year.

The Kosik-Sartre Exchange

Dear Jean-Paul Sartre,

The event of which I will tell you in this open letter is of the most banal sort and
without any interest for the sensationalist press. But it is not to the devotees of the
sensational that I address myself. It is to you. And, through you, to my socialist,
democratic and communist friends who are also friends of Czechoslovakia. I am not
addressing you an appeal or a protest, but one single question which has a vital
importance for me:
Am I guilty?
This question haunts me since April 28, 1975, that is to say, since the day the police
searched my apartment for six hours and confiscated more than one thousand pages of
my philosophical manuscripts.
Given the fact that the search was made under the pretext of a suspicion that I had
hidden in my apartment writings which would constitute evidence of a criminal
activity, "subversion of the Republic," I must assume that I am threatened with a
prison term of from one to five years, as provided by Article 98 of the penal code. I do
not underestimate the significance of this threat, but what troubles me more is the
eventual fate of the manuscripts confiscated from me.
For the last six years I have had to live in a very peculiar situation: my existence has
taken two formsI am and I am nothing. I am dead and, at the same time, I am alive.
In the domain of the elementary rights of the citizen and the man, I have been reduced
to a mere nothing, and at the same time, I have been graced with an exceptional
existence as far as the overabundance of care and attention from the police is
concerned. I am a mere nothing and that is why I cannot teach philosophy at the
Charles University, nor be employed anywhere or elsewhere in accordance with my
qualifications and in my specialty. I am dead, and that is why I cannot participate in
any of the scholarly meetings to which I am invited, nor accept invitations to teach in
European universities. As someone who is not and never was, I must not lead my
readers into error and that is why all my publications are banned, kept out of the
libraries in Czechoslovakia. And my name has been censured in the list of authors. I
do not exist and that is why official institutions are under no obligation to answer my
complaints and protests. From another point of view, I exist, even in excess. As is
shown by the police searches and interrogations which are becoming ordinary events.
As a philosopher and an author, I am stripped of basic rights and I live as an accused
and a permanent suspect.
I am a suspect although I have committed no criminal act. Why then am I suspected?
Because I consider the exercise of thought to be an inalienable human right and
exercise this right. Because I consider inalienable the right of every man to have his
own opinion and to be able to express and communicate it. Because I consider that
every man should be able to keep a spine as a basic human right.
Why am I a suspect? Because in an environment of generalized suspicion, the most
specifically human values and the most commonly shared ones, such as for example,
friendship, honor, humor, the sense of politeness, spontaneity and sincerity, become
provocations; normal words and the simplest things take on a subversive meaning.
The simple sentence: "I twisted my ankle and I limp," seems to the ears of the police
to be a password for a conspiracy. And he who really limps is in the eyes of the police
a mere faker who hides a "dark" activity. In such an atmosphere, publicly proclaimed
rights are immediately limited or even completely denied: everyone has the right to
think, but he who reflects without permission and without being ordered to, or who
does not think as he ought to think, awakens suspicion. Everyone can have his
opinion, but he who refuses to accept opinions that are imposed and unjustified, that
are foreign to his ownwhich latter have some basisand who persists in
demanding a rational and free discussion, becomes suspect. Everyone has the right to
have a spine, but if he does not "voluntarily" and without dignity make a mea culpa
which defiles him, he has no hope of being able to publish or to find the sort of work
for which he is qualified.
The manuscripts seized by the police were not even destined for publication. In the
event it is a matter only of unelaborated working notes, preliminary studies relating to
the preparation of two works which will be titled: the first, On Practice, and the
second, On Truth. These manuscripts contain only opinions, opinions expressed by
others in whom the police are not interested, and mine, which the police already know
from my previous books and my articles. I would like to be able to believe the officer
of the State Police when he told me that after examination these manuscripts would be
returned to me. But, well, how much time does the police need to "study" a thousand
pages of a philosophical manuscript?
To that, other much more serious facts must be added. The police have also
confiscated the manuscripts of my friends, the writers Ivan Klima and Ludvig
Vaculik. And I must ask the question: April 28, 1975, was I not the witness to events
which foreshadow the gravest consequences for Czech culture? On that day did they
not make a trial run of the effectiveness of new perfected methods in comparison with
which the censorship in force up to then was only a pitiful liberal game? Does not
April, 1975, mark the attempt to impose on society a new habit, a new "normality"
the regular confiscation of manuscripts? Might this habit not very rapidly becomein
the country of Franz Kafkaso natural, so necessary a consequence of indoctrination
that the writers themselves will call the police to take away completed works? I am
not a partisan of these innovations. Up to today I have not received a reply to my
request for the return of the manuscripts. Up to now I have kept silent about the
discriminatory measures of which I have been the victim, because my person alone
was attacked and this did not endanger the basis of my existencethe possibility of
thinking and writing. This time, in the case of the confiscation of my philosophical
manuscripts, I do not want to remain silent. Because I do not want to be guilty! I
would be complicit if I limited myself to watching silently the way a sword of
Damocles is held over the heads of all the writers of Czechoslovakiathe threat that
the police can take away at any time from any writer a manuscript in progress or
completed.
There is still time to eliminate this threat. I have not lost all hope in the rationality of
the responsible leaders in Czechoslovakia. I count on the lucidity and the conscience
of the socialist, democratic and communist friends of Czechoslovakia. Accept, dear
friend, my most cordial regards,

Karel Kosik

Dear Friend,

If I have taken so long to reply to you, this is because your letter did not reach me. I
read of it only a brief fragment in Le Monde and I had some trouble finding it. That's
been done now.
I will reply immediately to your question: no, you are not guilty. Your letter would
suffice to prove your innocence, not only to me, but to all the friends of invaded and
humiliated Czechoslovakia. If there is a thing of which I am certain, it is, as you put
it, that every man has the original right and duty to think for himself; and if I, like
everyone, have often defended collective ideas, it was because they had penetrated me
and because I had compared them to my personal ideas, evaluated and judged them
true, in short, because they had become mine.
No government is qualified to judge the thoughts of a citizen. It would do so, in any
case, not in terms of thoughts but of pseudo-thoughts. I call true thoughts those which
are born from you, or ideas which you have freely examined, found right and made
your own. I call pseudo-thoughts the theses supported by your government, and which
have never been produced or examined by the thought of a free man, but which are
made up of words collected in Soviet Russia and thrown over activities in order to
hide them and not to discover their meaning.
These false thoughts are nothing but forces which can only impose themselves with
the support of that otherreal and materialforce: the police. It is to this that
criminal leaders wish to reduce Czechoslovak culture. This abomination, or rather this
stupidity, cannot last long while there are men like you, my dear friend, to denounce
it. For, free thought can be suppressed for a moment by police violence, but as such
thought constitutes the only means by which man can grasp his situation and the
procedures that can change it, it would be necessary either to suppress man or to reject
definitively false thoughts.
I cannot commit anyone but myself; but I have discussed your precious and unhappy
country sufficiently often and at length to be able to assure you that you have
numerous friends who will say with me: "If Karel Kosik is guilty, then all men (not
only intellectuals, but farmers and workers) who think about what they do are equally
guilty." It is on the basis of this simple idea that we will have to consider activities by
which, in helping you, we will help ourselves.
I assure you, my dear friend, of my fraternal sentiments,

Jean-Paul Sartre