Philosophy on the street

"The city peeled off the stern and gloomy face, the mask of rotting bolshevism, and replaced it with a thousand others. Some were the smiley makeup faces of clowns, and who'd give a damn if those wacky old circus-ring alcoholics smelling of sawdust and animal dung tried to hide a few pockmarks here and there, or a two-bit scar from a two-bit stab wound? Bright-colored buffoon kissers painted on for rowdy youngsters, for female sightseers from around the globe, for the first shy kisses and fleeting touches, for the first marijuana cigarette in the mysterious twilight of foreign lands wrapped in a web of legends, for wanna-be artists in a haze of romance, rust under their nails from the iron curtain, behind which - at long last! - no more tank parades, just Punch and Judy shows for sons and daughters from well-to-do families with fabulous passports who came to Eastern Europe to go wild. Expecting a menagerie and they found a jungle, expecting a jungle and they found a warehouse of scrapped stage scenery, searching for the spirit and the mirror-faced boogeyman got them...for dour intellectual females who cast off Morrison and Kerouac at the age of seven, then the existentialists and the phenomenologists between eleven and sixteen...and all that junk and then drugs and then, once cleansed, they loved Jesus so they could start up with some other male, the harpies, and then they were men-haters with well-rounded views on what was nonconformist and environmental and witchy and lesbian, and they wore our their resigned and scornful Czech landladies with opinions delivered in words, words, words..."

- Jachym Topol, from "A Visit To The Train Station"

"Phenomenology", "phenomenological", and "phenomenologist" are certainly not words you hear very often - unless you're hanging out in the philosophy department of a liberal four-year university. So I was quite pleasantly surprised to encounter phenomenology in this story by Jachym Topol. Topol is a Czech, born in Prague in 1962. This story was published in 1993, and is set in Prague. The story evokes a gritty picture of Prague in the 1990's, and amidst that grit and cigarette smoke is phenomenology.

Maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise to find philosophy there. Sartre was a phenomenologist. Heidegger was a phenomenologist. Existentialism and phenomenology share historical roots and philosophical premises, and existentialism was in the cultural vanguard in Europe in the 50's and 60's. But to read of precocious intellectual Czech girls spouting phenomenology in the 90's like emo American girls do Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens... It's just interesting. I wonder what exactly they talk about?