Thinking After Europe: Jan Patocka and Politics 9781783486847, 9781783486854, 9781783486861, 9781783486, 1783486848

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Thinking After Europe

Thinking After Europe Jan Patočka and Politics

Edited by Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2016 Selection and editorial matter © Darian Meacham and Francesco Tava 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-684-7 PB 978-1-78348-685-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tava, Francesco, 1984– editor. Title: Thinking after Europe : Jan Patočka and politics / edited by Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016029115 (print) | LCCN 2016030126 (ebook) | ISBN 9781783486847 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783486854 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783486861 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Patočka, Jan, 1907–1977. | Political science—Philosophy. | Europe—Civilization—Philosophy. Classification: LCC B4805.P384 T45 2016 (print) | LCC B4805.P384 (ebook) | DDC 199/.4371—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029115 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Editors’ Introduction

ix

Acknowledgementsxxv PART I: INTELLECTUALS AND OPPOSITION

1

1 Translators’ Preface

3

2 Intellectuals and Opposition Jan Patočka

7

3 Intellectuals and Opposition: Alternative End Jan Patočka PART II: DISSIDENCE AND POLITICAL COMMITMENT 4 Jan Patočka and the Possibility of Spiritual Politics  Ivan Chvatík 5 Resisting Fear: On Dissent and the Solidarity of the Shaken in Contemporary European and Global Society Jiří Přibáň 6 The Soul as Site of Dissidence Simona Forti

23

27 29

39 57

PART III: POLITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY

75

7 Polemos in Jan Patočka’s Political Thought James Dodd

77

v

vi Contents

8 Supercivilization and Biologism Darian Meacham

95

9 Caring for the Asubjective Soul James Mensch

117

PART IV: PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

133

10 He Who Saw the Deep: The Epic of Gilgamesh in Patočka’s Philosophy of History Nicolas de Warren

135

11 The Dark Night of the Care for the Soul – Politics and Despair in Jan Patočka’s Sixth Heretical Essay Daniel Leufer

161

12 The Heresy of History: Patočka’s Reflections on Marx and Marxism Francesco Tava

183

13 The End of History and After: Rethinking Kojève and Patočka on the Idea of Post-History Riccardo Paparusso

201

PART V: RETHINKING THE COMMUNITY

215

14 On the Significance of the Ancient Greek Polis for Patočka and Castoriadis: Philosophy, Politics, History Suzi Adams

217

15 Patočka’s Radical and Agonistic Politics Tamara Caraus

237

16 Patočka’s Figures of Political Community Marion Bernard

259

17 This is a Mathematical Certainty: Patočka and the Neoliberal Ideology277 Ľubica Učník PART VI: EUROPE AND POST-EUROPE

299

18 Europe, Post-Europe, and Eurocentrism Karel Novotný

301

19 Europe and the Oblivion of the World: From Husserl to Patočka315 Ovidiu Stanciu

Contents

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20 Europe’s Twentieth Century: History of Wars and War as History 331 Ludger Hagedorn Bibliography347 Index369

Editors’ Introduction Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham

The decision to address Jan Patočka’s philosophy through its relationship with politics or the political is not an obvious one. Patočka, unlike many other thinkers of his generation, never developed a specific political philosophy; nor did he ever explicitly investigate issues such as political liberty and social justice, or topics related to civil rights, democratic functioning, and state theory. His public commitment to human rights is nonetheless very well documented due to his endorsement and willingness to serve as spokesperson for Charter 77 – an involvement that played a pivotal role in his death in 1977. Our contention in this book is that, even though we cannot speak of a Patočkian political philosophy, there is still a pervasive political element in his thought, which merits further investigation and elucidation. This is not least because we think that understanding the political dimension of Patočka’s thought is useful and, arguably, even necessary to understanding, interpreting, and tapping into the rich seam of his thought in general. The pervasive political dimension of Patočka’s thought emerges at different occasions throughout his work, without a specific regularity, except in cases dictated by historical contingencies – most significantly his commitment to Charter 77. For a long time this commitment has been seen as an isolated and hardly explainable episode in the life and work of a scholar who avoided the public arenas of politics. His ‘sudden’ involvement in politics seems equally out of place when seen in the context of some, though far from all, of his previous philosophical efforts, dedicated primarily to the field of phenomenology and the history of philosophy.1 One of the first goals of an enquiry which aims at clarifying the meaning of politics within Patočka’s thought consists in facing this question, trying to clarify the hidden paths that led Patočka in 1977 to directly engage in very concrete politics, despite ix

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the difficulties that this engagement would have involved and the cost that Patočka was no doubt aware it could incur. To do this, it is necessary to recall Patočka’s insights into modern and contemporary history, which he developed from the 1950s onwards,2 during the harshest years of real existing socialism in Czechoslovakia. These investigations flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, taking on at times a more positive outlook towards the future and at other points a much darker tone, with emphasis on war as the defining characteristic of the twentieth century and the corresponding calamity that had befallen European rationality. These oscillations were no doubt in correspondence with the great hopes for the political reform of socialism fostered by the Prague Spring and the subsequent disenchantment of ‘normalization’ within the communist regime.3 It was mostly during these years that Patočka focused his attention on Czech and European history, in the attempt to better understand the position of his country in the European context, as well as the position of Europe itself in a world where its dominance and centrality appeared to have been definitively compromised. The very idea of Europe, as well as the long-lasting crisis which this idea ran headlong into in the twentieth century, probably constitutes the main focus of Patočka’s reflections on politics. His essay from the early 1970s, ‘Europe and Post-Europe’, as well as the many fragments and unpublished texts on this same theme that appeared in the same period, can be considered as a summa of his analysis of the historical and political space in which he lived. Our contention in relation to this concept of post-Europe is that Patočka’s analyses and descriptions still provide an insightful and productive characterization of the contemporary European situation. Indeed, we hope that this volume makes a case for the idea of post-Europe, as Patočka understood it, becoming a meaningful discussion topic, in an age where the existence of Europe, as a united political body, is again at stake, as much as it was at the time during which Patočka addressed this issue.4 However, in order to shed light on this possible comparison, we need to correctly understand what ‘post-Europe’ means, and in which sense we can argue – as this book’s title suggests – that in order to think about Europe today it is also necessary to think after Europe. Something must be clarified at this point: thinking after Europe does not mean, neither for Patočka nor for ourselves, thinking without Europe. Patočka clarifies this point in a letter to a friend, where he argued that the key concept for understanding the ‘post’ which appears in the idea of ‘post-Europe’ is still ‘Europe’. We have provided an English translation of that letter as an appendix to this introduction.5 Patočka, like his teacher Husserl, was engaged in a project aimed at salvaging and resuscitating European ratio, saving it from its own internal mutations, which, as he clearly states in numerous places, had allowed Europe the power to conquer



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and subject the world to unthinkable violence, but also ultimately led to her – Europe’s – decline and indeed finish by the end of the two world wars. Europe, that two-thousand-year-old construction, which managed to lift up mankind to an altogether new degree of self-reflection and consciousness, and strength and power as well, [...] this historical reality, which for a long time supposed that it encompassed all of mankind, that it is mankind and that all else is worthy of neglect, is definitely at an end. […] [T]his enormous power, definitely wrecked itself in the span of thirty years, in two wars, after which nothing remained, nothing of her power that had ruled the world. […] Naturally she harnessed the entire world into this, just as she made the whole world hers before that, in a very crude material way. She forced it to completely engage itself in those horrendous enterprises. The result is, of course, that here are its inheritors, and these inheritors will never allow Europe to be what it once was.6

But we must not be too hasty here. Patočka’s diagnosis is markedly different from that of someone like Fanon, who at a similar time and with a similar intellectual background also wrote the continent’s death notice from its periphery: Let us not lose time in useless laments and sickening mimicry. Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world. For centuries it has stifled virtually the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual adventure.7

So where does Patočka stand? His definitive claim to the definitive end of Europe is preceded by a call to return to a study of Europe’s history to look for a way out of its contemporary morass: [T]he question is, when we go back to the roots of our contemporary disequilibrium, whether we do not need to go to the very origins of Europe and through these beginnings to the very relation between mankind and his place in the world; or rather, whether the disequilibrium we are positing today is not something that concerns solely European man in a particular historical period, but rather regards man sui generi today in his relation with the planet.8

And, You know what I perhaps want to say: Can care for the soul, which is the fundamental heritage of Europe, still speak to us today? […] [C]are for the soul is the central theme around which, I think, the life plan of Europe crystallized. Now our task is to determine what the soul means, what is meant by care for the soul and what is its significance.9

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What Patočka seems to have in mind when declaring an end to Europe, a need to think after Europe, is not an abandonment of the ‘spiritual adventure’ of the European tradition, but rather its recovery and somehow reinvigoration. So is Patočka then just another instance of Sartre’s caricature of the pathetic Frenchman who has, every day since 1930, wailed, ‘we’re finished!’ only to follow it with an ‘unless …’?10 Not likely. Patočka’s overall outlook remains ambiguously pessimistic, or one might say, tragic, in its orientation. If there is a sense of human telos in Patočka’s thought, it is towards a continuous effort of living in ‘problematicity’ – human existence is an adventure that will not end well, he tells his students in the late 1970s.11 And yet, in spite of this, the concept of the polis is introduced in his thought as both a necessity and goal. It is construed in these late lectures as a space where humans can confront the ‘fundamental distress’ that lies at the core of and yet constantly ungrounds and destabilizes their existence. The polis is a place where the ‘philosopher can live’.12 It is through the problem space opened up by the intersection of these seemingly conflicting tendencies that the ‘post’ in ‘post-Europe’ must be parsed. Indeed, the complex historical perspective that Patočka aims to establish by introducing this ‘post’ must be properly interrogated in order to avoid simplifications or misinterpretations. By elucidating the crisis that led Europe, as we knew it until the twentieth century, to a fatal decline, Patočka does not seek a simple escape or resolution, but rather suggests the need to develop a further and deeper insight into it. ‘Post-Europe’ in this sense should not be understood as a new political configuration,13 which could possibly constitute an alternative to Europe once its ultimate debacle will have finally taken place, but rather as a new historical perspective, which humankind has to apprehend in order to face the ongoing crisis. What does this new perspective consist of concretely? According to Patočka, developing a post-European perspective essentially means looking back at European history not as a march of relentless progress, wherein all the setbacks and the hindrances European humanity ran into are judged as mere contingencies, but as being fundamentally constituted and shaped by the most tragic and critical moments that marked it. Only on the basis of a deeper comprehension of their tragedies will Europeans become able to face not only the past, but also their present and future. This comprehension, which also corresponds with the most courageous forms of individual comportment, becomes possible only if humanity is able to actively embrace this ‘post’, namely, if human beings are willing to give up a position of passive inclusiveness in the events that determine European history, and start looking at Europe from a more complex angle. In other words, the post-European individual will be capable of dwelling in Europe and, at the same time, of taking a critical



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distance from it, which is the prerequisite for becoming aware of Europe’s problematic traits and for addressing them without fear. The event to which Patočka dedicated his most insightful analyses is war. The sixth Heretical Essay, perhaps his most widely read text, carefully marks out the twentieth century not just as a period of many wars, but as war. The twentieth century is fundamentally defined as war.14 Although Patočka’s interpretation of war, especially of the First World War, has been analysed by various interpreters,15 an attempt to investigate this particular subject more generally, in light of Patočka’s insight into political thought, is still lacking. We think that such an investigation, in order to be properly developed, needs to address all the aspects that the phenomenon of war acquires in Patočka’s works: from his theoretical understanding of the concept of polemos in Heraclitus’s fragments,16 to his historical and political analysis of European warfare, from its origin during the conflicts between the Greek poleis, up to its most recent conformations in the twentieth century, when the ideas of war and battle underwent decisive modifications. Several chapters of this book aim precisely at filling this gap.17 While reading the various writings that Patočka devoted to the problem of war, another element also emerges, which inevitably constitutes a further step in any serious analysis of his bond with politics. The idea that from the harshest experiences of war and conflict a new form of human commonality could actually arise is not visible only in the last of the Heretical Essays, but also emerges on various occasions in the essays on Europe and post-Europe. In all these cases, the possibility of shaping a new form of community that would be hinged on renewed ideas of solidarity and personal responsibility appears. Although Patočka addressed this possibility only through a series of hints and intuitions, without engaging in any thematic analysis of it, this aspect of his late output cannot be ignored. Even though this dimension of his work is not directly comparable with today’s attempts by many philosophers and political theorists to rethink and restructure the political space, in a period in which Europe is undergoing a new political and economic crisis, we think that Patočka’s attempt to address the concepts of solidarity, responsibility, and community could provide a meaningful example for whomever decides to tackle these complex themes. In this sense, we can understand how a growing interest in Patočka’s thought is spreading not only in the philosophical context, but also, more generally, in intellectual history and the social sciences. Trying to re-read Patočka’s philosophy in light of its significance for the current debate on Europe and its institutions entails recognizing the global character of his thought. Saying that Patočka is a global thinker does not mean, however, overlooking the fact that he worked and developed his philosophy within a particular context, i.e., central Europe. His reiterated

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decision to never leave Czechoslovakia, even in the hard times that followed the wreckage of the Prague Spring, is an object of debate among interpreters.18 What seems certain is that this decision was not motivated exclusively by practical reasons, like the hope for a concrete amelioration of the political situation, but also by his desire to maintain Prague as the fundamental viewpoint from which he could address the main issues that animated his thinking. This circumstance distances Patočka from other philosophers from the Soviet bloc, like Ernst Bloch, Leszek Kołakowski, and Imre Lakatos, who all decided, in different times and conditions, to leave their countries and to experience intellectual exile (with the unique case of Bloch, who happened to leave his country twice, in 1933 and in 1961, in opposition to two different regimes). To the contrary, Patočka never left Prague, although especially between 1967 and 1969 he could have taken advantage of some lectures he gave in western Germany, where he had many friends and admirers, to not return to his country. Patočka’s decision to maintain Prague as his home, as well as his philosophical viewpoint, can be read in light of the description that another Czech intellectual, Milan Kundera, made concerning central Europe. By dealing with the ‘tragedy’ of central Europe,19 Kundera aimed to shed light on the bizarre and ill-fated destiny of a space, which, after having been for long time the core of a powerful empire (until 1919) and the very centre (not only geographically but especially politically and culturally) of the European continent, suddenly became its most extreme and neglected periphery (after 1945). This troublesome position, both central and peripheral, on the edge between two forces that engaged in a new and potentially disastrous conflict, is precisely the one for which Patočka consciously opted. This circumstance, no matter how it is interpreted, must not be overlooked. It’s also a clear reason to approach Patočka’s thought with careful contextualization; on the one hand, Patočka is indeed a thinker whose cultural horizon is essentially linked to the European continental tradition, his thought clearly sinks its roots in the most prolific sources of twentiethcentury European philosophy: from phenomenology to existential philosophy. On the other hand, however, this continental character of his thought should not be mistaken for a sort of intellectual neutrality. Another source exists in Patočka’s thinking that has been seldom identified outside of his country, and which we think can be retraced by taking into account his keen interest in three eminent figures of the Czech culture: Comenius, Mácha, and Masaryk. In Comenius’s ‘Christian activism’20 and in his practical use of philosophy towards a substantial enhancement of society21 – in the seventeenth century, which in many aspects was not milder than the twentieth – Patočka glimpsed a line of thought which would later find further representatives in thinkers like Bolzano and Rádl.22 Moreover, the symbolism of the Czech poet Karel Hýnek Mácha offered Patočka an important source, from which



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he would later mine some of the deepest and most problematic images in his late works, like the ‘night’ in the Heretical Essays.23 Finally, the figure of Masaryk represented for him the most complex and tragic attempt to realize a Czech national programme, whose failure he investigated after the end of the Prague Spring, in order to reconnect the cut threads of his country’s history.24 Although for reasons of space there is no possibility here to further develop this aspect of Patočka’s thought, we think that a challenge for future work will consist in deciphering all these hidden paths, detecting Patočka’s authentic position in his own cultural panorama. This is necessary for grasping not only his political reflections, but also his philosophy in general. Besides the heritage of Czech culture, which as we have seen is clearly echoed in Patočka’s thought, other basic dimensions must be also recognized. As an attentive reader of Greek philosophy, we see how Patočka derived from the works of Plato and Aristotle some of the most important themes of his philosophical research. The idea of the ‘care for the soul’ [epimeleia tés psychés], coined by Plato in the Phaedo, is one of the best examples of this source, as well as the concept of a ‘movement of existence’, which refers back to the Aristotelean idea of motion or change [kinesis] as the actualization of a potentiality.25 Caring for the soul is the way that the individual discovers a level of authenticity and resists any attempt by external forces to control and direct his or her own existence. The different movements of life that Patočka identifies as essentially human (acceptance, defence, and truth) constitute the various stages that humans go through, in order to reach this level of authenticity. This idea of human existence as essentially grounded on caring and moving is also at the basis of his phenomenology, which he defined as ‘asubjective’.26 What Patočka means by this term is a kind of phenomenology that rejects any priority of subjectivity over objectivity, and that is instead essentially focused on the openness of the moving body to its other, that is, to the world qua the process of coming to appearance. Since the primordial human condition consists of an injection into the world, it follows that the individual moves in the world even before they start looking at it. The grasping which characterizes every human’s early existence, and then the struggle for literally coming to grips with one’s environment, precedes any clear knowledge of what this world really is, and must be understood therefore as the authentic prehistory of subjective human existence – the human moves and feels in the world, negotiating practical and affective engagement with it and with others who inhabit it, before he or she knows it as a subject that stands in opposition or correlation to the world and its other inhabitants. Only with the emergence of a movement of truth, in which human beings learn how to distance themselves from these first phases of their life, does human history finally begin. History, in this context, means not just mere memory of the past, but also

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judgement of the present, and anticipation of the future.27 The idea of phenomenology that emerges from these considerations is the one of a discipline essentially oriented towards history, rather than limited to a simple methodology, and whose protagonist is not the anonymous and separated subject of the natural sciences, but rather an embodied subject, who moves in the world and contaminates herself with other individuals, constituting an intersubjective framing.28 This subject, precisely because of her essential involvement in the world, is characterised by movement towards a higher level of truth and authenticity, and resistance to any form of external control. The human subject by way of her essential movement toward a questioning of her own existence, resistance to external control, and fundamental relation to others in the task of constituting a world and a community, is, at its core, a political subject. Tackling Patočka’s phenomenology also entails taking into account the relationship between the Czech philosopher and his acknowledged masters: Husserl and Heidegger. Focusing on the political content of his thought actually enables us to better understand how Patočka surpassed the positions of both these philosophers, while retaining what he considered the most fecund grounds of their reflections: Husserl’s concepts of epoché and Lebenswelt, as well as Heidegger’s critiques of the ideas of technique and Gestell. Patočka’s relation to Husserl and Heidegger is too broad a topic to broach here, but we can try to provide some orienting observations. Suffice to say that his overall project can in some sense be described as an attempt to navigate between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s thought, while also going beyond both, by addressing what he saw as shortcomings in their respective projects. This entailed holding on to the transcendental impetus of Husserl’s phenomenology, but forgoing what Patočka viewed as a final Cartesian turn towards the transcendental ego in favour of the ‘asubjective’ phenomenology mentioned above. This entailed holding fast to the concept of the phenomenological epoché, which Patočka, like Husserl, placed at the centre of his phenomenological efforts, to the extent that in his last writings on myth he combines the idea of the epoché qua bracketing or putting aside the givenness of the natural world, with his analysis of Platonic and even Sumerian myth. Likewise, there is arguably a link between Patočka’s concepts of sacrifice and solidarity and his understanding of the epoché. Perhaps most important for our purposes here, there is arguably a link between his treatment of the concept of epoché and the idea of care for the soul as it relates to the rethinking of the polis. In Plato and Europe, Patočka describes his understanding of care for the soul as being a phenomenological question having to do fundamentally with the problem of appearance. In the author’s glosses to the Heretical Essays, Patočka reaffirms this relation between his thinking on politics and the polis and his approach to phenomenology: questions about social and political organization are fundamentally, he says, questions about phenomenology and the structure of appearing per se: ‘Thus the question of human social being is in the first



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place a phenomenological question’.29 Perhaps the first stop for anyone wishing to understand how Patočka conceives of ‘asubjective phenomenology’ in relation to the Husserlian concepts of epoché and reduction should be his essay ‘Epoché and Reduction’ [Epoché und Reduktion], written in 1975. This wonderful text has been recently published, translated in English, in a volume devoted to Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology.30 Patočka also sought to further develop Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld in an ethical and perhaps finally political direction. He frequently critiqued Husserl’s understanding of the lifeworld [Lebenswelt] for being overly cognitive or epistemological (the legitimacy of this critique can be disputed).31 In his essay, ‘The Schema of History’ (1975), he further questioned whether what he saw as the abstraction in Husserl’s understanding of the lifeworld was capable of addressing what he saw as the fundamental question of modernity: How did we come to be ruled by a concern for biological life? Despite various criticisms of Husserlian concepts of reduction, lifeworld, and crisis, Patočka remained of the conviction that Husserl’s work on the crisis of the European sciences and the lifeworld were invaluable resources in thinking ahead to the ‘catastrophe’ of Europe: In the wake of the war, we all had to ask about the origins of the catastrophe in which Europe lost its predominance. Husserl’s work, before the fact, called attention to the crisis of European reason – which, though losing none of its theoretical and practical effectiveness, had begun to lose its essential foundation, its existential significance, its inner justification and its profound truth – acquired an importance which its author could not have foreseen.32

The relation to Heidegger’s work is similar; concepts like ontological difference, technique, and Gestell (or framing) played enormously important roles in the development of Patočka’s thought. Indeed, it was in response to the subjectivism of Husserl’s phenomenology that Patočka sought to recast the concept of ontological difference (perhaps easiest understood as the distinctions between Being as a verb and beings as nouns or things) as a distinction between the ‘lifeworld’ as a world of pragmata and practical engagement and the ‘world’ or ‘world-structure’ as the process of appearance itself. We can see, in a schematic sense, how the question of human social being, which Patočka characterized as phenomenological, is a question of the relation between these two senses of the concept of world, one ontic (lifeworld) and one ontological (world-structure). Care for the soul and ultimately care for the polis is a question of interrogating this relation, wherein the sense-structures that form the reference points, hinges, and pivots of our concrete affective, social, political, and intellectual lives are formed. It is precisely in this context that Patočka considered Heidegger’s work on technology to be significant. Technization does not only distort the relation between the formalized

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domain of the sciences and the lived or experienced dimension of the lifeworld, leading to what Husserl called the crisis of the European sciences. The problem is more severe. The danger present in technization is a sclerosis of the relation between appearance (world-structure) and the natural world (the lifeworld), such that all coming-to-be or coming-to-appearance is ‘framed’ in terms of an orientation towards the maximum release of energy and the most efficient relation between energetic input and output. This sclerosis closes the possibility of care for the soul as the interrogation of the relation of ontological difference takes on an ontological dimension in the European crisis: it is a crisis in the relation between the very structure of appearing itself and what appears. The scale of this crisis gives the sense of urgency and absolute necessity to Patočka’s considerations of care for the soul and even concepts like epoché. Subsequently, we find the discussion of technology in its relation to appearance itself to be distributed across a wide swathe of Patočka’s later writings, including the aforementioned texts ‘The Schema of History’ and ‘Europe and Post-Europe’ as well as many of the notes and appendices that surround the writing of these essays.33 For the Englishspeaking reader, the 1973 essay ‘The Dangers of Technicization in Science according to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger according to M. Heidegger’ is an excellent way into this web of problems.34 Patočka’s approach to technology is not however monolithically Heideggerian or pessimistic. His ambiguity on this topic also points to an ambiguity concerning the influence of Marx and Marxism in his thinking. It is important to note that Patočka had an important influence on some of the attempts to reform and reinvigorate Marxist thinking in Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s. In the translation of ‘Intellectuals and Opposition’ that follows this introduction, Patočka speaks optimistically of a new technically aware and astute intelligencia, the students, who presented the best hope for the reform of European politics in both the East and the West. Any cause for optimism, at the time, lay in the spiritual awakening of young engineers protesting in the streets and eventually gaining control not only of the means of production but of the technological mediators of appearing itself. ********** The structure of this book follows many of the hints that we have gathered together so far. ‘Intellectuals and Opposition’, the 1968 essay with which we decided to start the volume, is an excellent example of Patočka’s commitment to political thinking, in a crucial moment for the history of his country and of Europe.35 The form of this commitment, as well as its final outcome in political dissidence and Charter 77, is investigated in the second part of the book. Ivan Chvatík, who in the late 1960s had the chance to follow and



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organize Patočka’s lectures and private seminars, becoming one of the most insightful witnesses of his teaching, addresses the possibility of a ‘spiritual politics’ on the basis of Patočka’s philosophy. Jiří Příbáň and Simona Forti focus their analyses on the same issue, understanding the kind of politics that Patočka envisioned as an attempt to build a form of ethical and political dissent, against the forces of normalization. In this sense, a confrontation with the thought and activism of Václav Havel, who always acknowledged his debt to Patočka, is particularly helpful in order to better understand this complex political scenario. In the third part of the volume, three phenomenological philosophers address Patočka’s peculiar perspective towards political thought. James Dodd focuses on the emergence of the idea of polemos in Patočka’s works, in order to clarify the meaning of the political, and the role of dissidence in the context of his thinking. Darian Meacham investigates what Patočka, in one of his last essays, calls the fundamental question of the contemporary era: ‘How, by way of mathematical physics, we have arrived at the supremacy of life, of biology?’ Meacham parses this question through Husserl’s analysis of the ‘Crisis of the European Sciences’, the idea of philosophy and politics as scientific, and enlists Canguilhem’s concept of ‘scientific ideology’ to explain the grip of ‘biologism’ on contemporary rational civilization. James Mensch’s chapter is an insightful analysis of the idea of the care for the soul, in which the Aristotelean source of this concept is fully clarified, as well as its importance in light of Patočka’s defence of human rights, as the first spokesperson of Charter 77. These contributions offer new material for contemporary phenomenology to address. They also point to the need for phenomenology to directly confront the most problematic issues in contemporary political debate. Part four is entirely focused on historical problems and on the philosophy of history. Nicolas de Warren addresses this issue through an investigation of the meaning of the Epic of Gilgamesh within Patočka’s thinking, showing how this can become a way to interpret his idea of Europe, in the aftermath of the twentieth century’s wars. Daniel Leufer’s chapter is also dedicated to the concept of war, on the basis of an analysis of the last of the Heretical Essays. Francesco Tava and Riccardo Paparusso both address the meaning of history in Patočka’s thought, starting from two different confrontations: the former with Marx and the Marxist philosophical tradition, and the latter with Kojève and his idea of ‘post-history’. The fifth part follows this line of investigation, by showing how, from an analysis of the crises and of the conflicts that marked twentieth century, new forms of political community can finally emerge. Suzi Adams concentrates her attention on the meaning of polis in Patočka’s and the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis’s work, providing an analysis which creates a useful

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bridge between philosophy and the social sciences. Tamara Caraus proposes an interpretation of Patočka’s insight into politics as a form of a radical and agonistic democracy. Marion Bernard focuses on the communitarian dimension which emerges in Patočka’s ideas of freedom and solidarity. Lastly, Ľubica Učník provides a sharp critique of contemporary neoliberalism, in which she identifies Patočka’s works as both a useful tool in order to recognize the main characteristics of this ideological conformation, as well as a possible path out of it, through political resistance. The sixth and final part has Europe as its focus. The positioning can be read as an invitation to further develop what we think could constitute an element of major interest for a philosophical and political analysis of the contemporary European situation, namely the idea of post-Europe. Karel Novotný provides a fundamental introduction to this problem, as well as a critical inquiry into the possible Eurocentrism within Patočka’s thinking. Ovidiu Stanciu refers back to Husserl’s philosophy as the primary source of Patočka’s discourse on Europe. Finally, Ludger Hagedorn analyses the shape of the European twentieth century: a continent that sank into a long-lasting war, which ended up determining its very nature and horizon. APPENDIX: JAN PATOČKA, ‘THE GENESIS AND CATASTROPHE OF EUROPE’ (FRAGMENT OF A LETTER TO IRENA KRONSKÁ)36 I believe the mythical side of our being comes from its being located at the point where the world appears; belonging to the world, it is thus simultaneously without, in an ‘apartness’ that is not easily definable; this is what all the great myths mean to convey in portraying man as guilty, not as the result of an act, but in virtue of his very being. Plato, who was the great rationalist, the great thinker of the superiority of light over darkness, wanted to make it possible for man to elude, or rather to overcome guilt. He interpreted ontological culpability, so deeply grasped by the tragic poets, as the result of an act of choice prior to empirical existence. He saw especially in the philosopher’s epimeleia tés psychés [care for the soul] a means of bringing together as one that existence which itself becomes a being while moving towards that which possesses being. In the process, he discovered that metaphysics is essentially practical, and therefore linked to a possibility of life in common, and that concern for the soul is ultimately concern for human life within a state. Not of course in any old state; indeed, in a state that does not yet (actually) exist, a state of justice, where, consequently, the political function is specialized. He thus marked the end of the polis, while creating the framework of a state no longer concrete, like the ancient city-state, but rather founded in metaphysics, in an invisible



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world. The development of this metaphysics born out of Plato’s Ideas is, on the one hand, the making of a state founded in (theological) metaphysics and, on the other hand, the history of Europe. What I am out to achieve in my study of Europe is to understand these relations between the metaphysical, the mythical, the theological, and the practical (both individual and collective, political). I have as yet hardly written anything on post-Europe, since the prefix ‘post-’ supposes the key term ‘Europe’; so I thrash about, caught up in a web of problems and enquiries that could largely take up several lifetimes. I don’t know if I have succeeded this time in giving you an idea of what my endeavour is about. I am trying to show that the transcendence of Christian theology and the idea of judgement passed on the world are the ‘repetition’ of a Platonic thought. I am studying the origins of the idea of natural law as the basis of civil law. I am studying the relationship between the two ever adjoining yet never merging European metaphysics, Plato’s and Democritus’s; and I am attempting to understand the decadence of metaphysics on the basis of hesitation between these two fundamental possibilities. I am trying to deal with the metaphysical origins of modern science and to explain why the discovery of ‘efficacious’ knowledge goes hand in hand with the loss of perspective on unity, universality and eternity; why we have logically lost our universal institutions, and why they have not been replaced; ultimately, catastrophe. Yours, Jean P. (translated from the French by Darian Meacham) NOTES 1. Patočka’s phenomenological research has in the past several decades became the subject and object of very insightful analyses, especially in the French- and German-speaking worlds. This is in no small part thanks to Françoise Dastur, Marc Richir, Renaud Barbaras, and their students. In Germany (especially upon the initiative of the scholars active at the IWM in Vienna), as well as in Italy (with the editions of his works on Socrates and Plato), major attention has been given to Patočka’s contributions in the history of philosophy and culture. 2. In the 1950s Patočka developed the concept of ‘supercivilisation’, establishing the basis for his future investigations in the philosophy of history. Several chapters of this book are devoted to this topic. See Jan Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’ [The Supercivilization and Its Inner Conflict], in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 1: Péče o duši I (Prague: Oikoymenh, 1996), 243–302. 3. Patočka’s works on the rise and the collapse of the Czech national programme, in which he directly addressed the thoughts of the most representative intellectuals

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and public figures of his country’s history, like Bolzano, Masaryk, and Rádl, were written precisely in this hectic period of hope and disillusion, between the years preceding the Prague Spring and the beginning of normalization. See, in particular, Jan Patočka, O smysl dneška [On the Meaning of Today], in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 12: Češi I, 231–338. 4. The necessity to rethink Europe’s political and economic structure, in order to overcome its ‘existential crisis’ was expressed by Thomas Piketty and fourteen other scholars in their ‘Manifesto for Europe’ (http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2014/may/02/manifesto-europe-radical-financial-democratic). 5. See Jan Patočka, L’Europe après l’Europe, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2007), 274. 6. Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 9. 7. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2007), xliv. 8. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 8–9. 9. Ibid., 14–15. 10. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, xl. 11. ‘Of course an important matter is that man always is essentially in a hopeless situation. Man is committed to an adventure, which, in a sense, cannot end well’. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 2. 12. Ibid., 88. 13. This point marks the biggest difference, for example, between Patočka’s idea of post-Europe and Habermas’s attempt to describe a possible reform of the European political structure, based on a new constellation of translational authorities. See Jürgen Habermas, The Post-National Constellation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), as well as the more recent The Crisis of the European Union: A Response (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). 14. See Jan Patočka, ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War’, in Heretical Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 119–37. 15. See, for example, Nicolas de Warren, ‘Homecoming. Jan Patočka’s Reflections on the First World War’, in Michael Staudigl (ed.), Phenomenologies of Violence (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 219–23. 16. See Patočka, Heretical Essays, 42–3, 136–7. 17. For an analysis of Patočka’s understanding of the ideas of mobilization and Fronterlebnis, in the context of the First World War, see Daniel Leufer’s contribution to this volume. See also Ludger Hagedorn’s analysis of Patočka’s idea of twentieth century as war. 18. See, for example, Francesco Tava, The Risk of Freedom: Ethics, Phenomenology and Politics in Jan Patočka, trans. Jane Ledlie (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 123ff. 19. See Milan Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, The New York Review of Books 31, 7 (26th April 1984): 33–8. 20. On this regard, see especially the series of lectures that Patočka held in 1965 at the Husserl-Archives in Leuven: Jan Patočka, Conférences de Louvain: sur la



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contribution de la Bohême à l’idéal de la science moderne [Leuven Conferences], ed. Valerie Löwit and Filip Karfík (Bruxelles: Ousia, 2001). 21. See Jan Patočka, ‘Comenius und die Offene Seele’ [Comenius and the Open Soul], in Kunst und Zeit. Kulturphilosophischen Schriften, ed. Klaus Nellen and Ilja Šrubař (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987), 175–90. 22. On Patočka’s understating of Czech intellectual history, see for example Erazim Kohák, Hearth and Horizon: Cultural Identity and Global Humanity in Czech Philosophy (Prague: Filosofia, 2008). 23. Patočka dedicated already in the 1940s several writings to Mácha’s poetry, in which he quotes among the others the poem ‘Night’, composed in 1834. See Jan Patočka, ‘Symbol země u K.H. Máchy’ [The Symbol of the Earth in K.H. Mácha] (1944), in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 4: Umění a čas I (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2004), 112. 24. See above, note 3. 25. About Patočka’s reception of Aristotle’s thought, see Dragoș Duicu, Phénoménologie du mouvement. Patočka et l’héritage de la physique aristotélicienne (Paris: Hermann, 2014); Claude Vishnu Spaak and Ovidiu Stanciu (eds.), Patočka lecteur d’Aristote: phénoménologie, ontologie, cosmologie (Argenteuil: Le Cercle herméneutique, 2015). 26. See in particular Jan Patočka, ‘Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer “asubjektiven” Phänomenologie’ [The Subjectivism of Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Possibility of an ‘Asubjective’ Phenomenology] (1970) and ‘Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Forderung einer asubjektiven Phänomenologie’ [The Subjectivism of Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Demand for an Asubjective Phenomenology] (1971), in Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz. Phänomenologische Schriften II, ed. Klaus Nellen and Jiří Němec (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), 267–85, 285–312. 27. In the essay on supercivilization, Patočka refers to Raymond Aron’s idea of ‘living historically’, as a way to preserve, repeat and judge the life of the ancestors. He also points out how the emergence of the third element, the one of ‘judgement’, marks the limit between primitivism and history. See Patočka, ‘Nadvicilizace’, in Peče o duši I, 243. 28. In this regard, the link between Patočka and other currents of post-Husserlian phenomenology (notably Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s in France, Enzo Paci’s in Italy) becomes visible. 29. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 149. 30. See Jan Patočka, ‘Epochē and Reduction: Some Observations’, in Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams (eds.), Asubjective Phenomenology: Jan Patočka’s Project in the Broader Context of his Work (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2015), 41–53. 31. On this point see, for example, the essay ‘Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy of the Crisis of the Sciences and His Conception of a Phenomenology of the “Life World”’, in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 223–38. 32. Ibid., 224 33. See Patočka, L’Europe après l’Europe.

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34. See Jan Patočka, ‘The Dangers of Technicization in Science according to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger according to M. Heidegger’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 327–39. 35. See more details about this essay in the translators’s preface. 36. Thank you to Erika Abrams for her invaluable help with the translation of this text. – The editors.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank first and foremost the many contributors to this volume. This volume stemmed from a conference, ‘Europe, The Very Idea’, held in May of 2014 in Bristol, United Kingdom, as part of the PostEurope Project. The conference was made possible through generous support from the Royal Institute of Philosophy (UK), The Czech Centre London, and The University of the West of England. The Patočka archives in Prague kindly offered the rights to publish the English translation of ‘Intellectuals and Opposition’, and a special thanks is owed to the director of those archives, Professor Ivan Chvatík, for his help with the translation. Daniel Leufer also generously gave his time and energy to produce the translation. We would also like to thank Sarah Campbell and Sinéad Murphy at Rowman & Littlefield International for their support and patience in bringing this project to fruition. Finally, Paul Gough was kind enough to offer his artwork for the cover of our book, for which we are grateful.

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Part I

INTELLECTUALS AND OPPOSITION

Chapter 1

Translators’ Preface

The essay presented here, in English translation, has its origins in a conference paper delivered by Jan Patočka on 3 June 1968, at the Evangelic Academy of Hofgeismar in West Germany. The historical context in which this event took place is of particular importance and thus deserves our attention. For Patočka and his entire nation, 1968 represented a moment of hope and rebirth: a season of political reforms had culminated in the election of Alexander Dubček as the new secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party on 5 January, and what followed was a period of political change and liberation which became known as the Prague Spring. Patočka, who had experienced first-hand the harshness of the first years of real socialism in his country, welcomed this new political climate with great expectations. In particular, this gave him a chance to restart his activity as a professor at Charles University, from which he had been banned in 1949, one year after the communist takeover. Moreover, the improved political situation also gave him the chance to recommence travelling on a regular basis to Western Europe, where in 1968 he held a series of public lectures, of which the text we present here is an example. Looking at the content of these lectures, two distinct lines of thought can be identified. On the one hand, Patočka took the opportunity to present his phenomenological research to an international audience, as he did on the occasion of the lecture ‘Phänomenologie und Metaphysik der Bewegung’.1 On the other hand, he also gave another lecture, titled ‘Czech Philosophy and Its Present Stage’,2 in which he addresses an altogether different topic, namely the cultural and philosophical situation of his country, with clear references to the ongoing political upheaval. Some months later, at a turbulent moment in which the reform movement in Prague was encountering its first serious obstacles, Patočka had another chance to address these topics in the 3

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Chapter 1

text that we present here. On this occasion, his attention is entirely focused on the figure of the intellectual and on the task that they are asked to fulfil in the present historical situation. In discussing the problem of the intellectual in society, Patočka does not aim to propose any straightforwardly elitist conception of politics in which a small, closed group of intellectually superior citizens would alone hold the reins of society. Indeed, the conception of the ‘intellectual’ which he advocates is not that of the modern specialist who, thanks to their intellectual skills, aims at becoming ‘the new leading character of human spirituality’, just as the figure of the religious clericus was in the Middle Ages. What Patočka has in mind are rather the young intellectuals – primarily students – who in the late 1960s, in Czechoslovakia as well as in Western Europe and North America, strove to reform the social and political system by entering into an active relationship with all its inner forces. Although it could be objected that even such a conception is nevertheless elitist because it still privileges a small group of society, it should also be noted that Patočka does not focus on the young intellectuals of Western capitalist societies (whom he actually criticizes), but rather those of Eastern socialist societies. Looking beyond the corrupt reality of those societies at the time, at least in principle, the universities in countries such as Czechoslovakia were accessible to all citizens. There were no ‘poor’ people who could not afford to send their children to universities (only ‘enemies of the state’ whose children were blacklisted, but the eradication of such corruption was precisely part of the hope placed in the reform movement). As such, this category of intellectual is something much more open than what we usually associate with the term. Indeed, the Czech term inteligence can mean both the ‘intelligentsia’ and the ‘intellect/ intelligence’ as a fundamental human faculty. In this broad sense, then, we could see the ‘intellectual’ to whom Patočka appeals as essentially a member of that group of human beings who utilize their faculty of intelligence, and, in 1968, the clearest manifestation of that phenomenon was to be found in the student movements. Patočka’s emphasis on the figure of the intellectual acquires a specific meaning if we take into account the role that intellectuals had played in Czechoslovakia during the years leading up to the Prague Spring. In that particular context, because of the total lack of a legitimized political elite, or of any other social group that could have been able to usefully represent the majority of the population, the voice of the intellectuals acquired a peculiar power and their action started to be seen as a reference point and as an example.3 It is not by chance that one of the fundamental events which set the tone for the Prague Spring was the Fourth Congress of Czech Writers that took place between 27 and 29 June 1967 in Prague, and to which Patočka referred one year later in his lecture.4



Translators’ Preface

5

The issue of the role of the intellectuals before, during, and after the Prague Spring cannot be further developed here. What we would like to do is simply to look more closely at this particular text of Patočka, whose editorial history can reveal better than any other description the author’s complex relationship with his country and his times. Two different versions of ‘Intellectuals and Opposition’ exist: the first one – partly readable here in the Appendix – which corresponds to the conference paper, and which was written in German, was in fact extensively reshaped by the author when he decided to translate it into Czech. In particular, the new version presents a different and more extended conclusion, in which Patočka directly tackles Marxist thought in a critical but also constructive way, revealing his growing interest in the inner reform of Marxism, which was developing in Czechoslovakia in those years. Patočka’s interest becomes particularly visible in the last paragraph of the final version of the essay, in which he directly refers to the Prague Spring, arguing that ‘the significance of Czechoslovak events in 1968 consists in the fact that for the first time the possibility takes shape of a new free society, based on the transformation of the working class – within socialism itself – into a class which has intellectuals at its core, as a core which is capable of introducing society to a new productive and historical era’.5 The tragic end of the Prague Spring, and the beginning of normalization, severely dampened Patočka’s enthusiasm, indelibly marking the further development of his political and philosophical reflection. This change is visible in his decision to cut the aforementioned excerpt from the second edition of the text, published in 1969, in a collection of essays entitled On the Meaning of Today, in which Patočka lucidly analyzed the failure of the Czech national programme from Masaryk to its definite collapse after the end of the Prague Spring.6 The passage between this essay, in which the hopes for a social and political renewal are still perceivable, and the following works from the 1970s is decisive. Nevertheless, even in the sixth of his Heretical Essays from the mid-1970s, where he is arguably at his darkest and most despairing, we still find Patočka holding out hope for the ‘technical intelligentsia’ as an agent of social renewal. At the close of the essay, when he discusses how the ‘solidarity of the shaken’ could become a historical factor, he states that it is necessary that this ‘component of the spirit, the “technical intelligentsia,” primarily researchers and those who apply research, inventors and engineers, would feel a waft of this solidarity and would act accordingly’.7 As such, the centrality of the intellectuals in Patočka’s political vision seems to have persevered even throughout the disappointments and despair of the 1970s. And it is precisely in the following essay that we find the role of the intellectual for Patočka most clearly spelled out. f.t. and d.l.

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Chapter 1

NOTES 1. Lecture originally given in German as ‘Phänomenologie und Metaphysik der Bewegung’ on 6/2/1968 at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg. 2. Lecture originally given in German as ‘Die tschechiche Philosophie und ihre gegenwärtige Phase’ on 6/2/1968, at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg. 3. The classic account is Vladimir V. Kusin’s The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring: The Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 1956–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 4. See infra, 9. 5. See infra, 20. 6. Published in Czech as O smysl dneška. Devět kapitol o problémech světových i českých. Afterword by Josef Zumr, Praha (Mladá fronta) 1969. 7. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essay in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 136.

Chapter 2

Intellectuals and Opposition* Jan Patocˇka Translated from Czech by Francesco Tava and Daniel Leufer

In an age that prides itself on how man’s rational will has subjected history itself to organization and anticipatory management, we are again, surprisingly, witnesses to unexpected and unheard-of things. Analyses do indeed still emerge which teach us how to comprehend what is happening, and prove that for those capable of deeper insight things are not incomprehensible. Yet, in matters of history, our deeper insight still lags behind reality. There were some events in the post-war age that I think surprised the world, at least for the scale of their impact, if not for the fact that they happened at all. Foremost was the disintegration of the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union, which occurred without any external pressure, but rather, through an imperceptible internal process, opaque in respect of its innumerable causes. This was despite the fact that the structure of this system seemed to be guaranteed by an enormous centralization probably unparalleled in history. An imponderable element also played a role, the shaking of the Stalin legend; an element whose intellectual nature gives it a particular relevance for our topic. When, some years later, what is known as the Cultural Revolution broke out – initiated by Mao and then led by his followers – most people saw something completely incomprehensible in it, some kind of Oriental barbarism, with no possible equivalent in the rational Western world. Nowadays, similar and yet more spontaneous movements have brought the most stable societies and states in Western Europe to the edge of destruction. Rightly or wrongly, these movements tend to have Mao’s name on their lips. There is no doubt that the

* The editors and translators are extremely grateful to Ivan Chvatík and Barbara Day for the generous time and efforts in revising this translation.

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recent resolutions by President Johnson, and particularly his decision to stop the air strikes over North Vietnam, were also influenced by intellectual elements, especially by the students protests in the United States, which exacerbated the mood of opposition towards American policy in Vietnam. Anyone with some knowledge of West Germany noticed how the entire political and spiritual atmosphere changed over the last two years, due for the most part to student action and student organizations. In our country, too, we have seen how one of the less glorious repercussions of the Stalinist era – Novotný’s regime – ended up the same way. This regime, which survived by resorting to all kinds of sly manipulations and still had plenty of power in its hands despite its long-time term lack of popularity, entered its final phase through clashes with writers and students. We could ask ourselves whether we have not put two disparate issues under one heading; indeed, what do the end of Stalinism or Mao’s Cultural Revolution have in common with intellectual opposition? Here, I would like to point out what Isaac Deutscher highlighted in his studies about the post-Stalinist era1: the replacement of Stalinism in the Soviet Union is connected with a new educational system and a change in the standard of living. Moreover, Mao’s Cultural Revolution was recently defended in the German left-wing press as being oriented against a bureaucratic establishment that is a traditional threat in the Chinese context, and against which an intellectual opposition is indispensable. It seems that Mao very quickly became aware of something that was overlooked elsewhere, namely the mass nature of the contemporary student body and hence the possibility to appeal to the students as a mass. Since then, however, the rest of the world has also been paying attention to the wild intellectual opposition spreading from one country to another, altering its activities, learning and adapting its tactics to the circumstances, and developing a long-term strategy. At the same time, it emerges that this opposition is related to phenomena which did now show up before and were hence not necessary to take into account. Until recently, intellectuals were an isolated or dispersed element that constituted a relatively negligible factor in public life due to their lack of numbers and dependence on decisive forces – for example, the power of the capitalist classes or the size of the relevant masses. In Western consumer society, conceived as a ‘lonely crowd’,2 the only possibility left open to intellectuals was to observe, orient themselves, and keep themselves informed, with absolutely no chance for action. We cannot, of course, assert today that intellectuals have achieved the social influence that would ensure that the whole of society realizes how, on the basis of consultation, something positive can be undertaken to confront the spread of harmful phenomena.3 Yet, intellectuals are no longer powerless, at least not if they form groups and factions. That the intellectual workers, mostly students, take to the streets, organizing street riots or



Intellectuals and Opposition

9

occupation strikes as only labourers did before; that writers’ congresses have become events of major importance in which political changes are invisibly attained – of these phenomena, in the past, there were rumours, but no real instances.4 A new element is emerging in society, a force that will have to be reckoned with from now on, a force that will be regretted by any politician who fails to use it. The students – those for example attending Western universities, which are expanding and have tens of thousands of members – have formed a group which is continuously together, which can easily organize itself, and which is highly mobile; tens of thousands in the streets (or potentially in the streets) constitute something for which the ordinary apparatus of power is not easily prepared, especially if that apparatus resorts to the unpopular use of force, directing it against that element considered everywhere the finest and most hopeful. Despite the different traits this phenomenon may acquire in particular states and nations, it clearly has an international nature, since similar events are taking place in all, or nearly all, Western countries. In Eastern countries with a different social structure, there are major differences. Nonetheless, a mass movement, mainly composed of students, exists here too. In Western countries, this movement adds new elements to its programme of action as it passes from one country to another. In Germany, a plan of action originated among left-wing students and extended beyond the student body to the trade unions and broader strata of labourers; while in France this task will almost be fulfilled before the traditional structures snap out of their stupefaction. In Poland, the opposition emerging among the writers is severely repressed; in our country, by contrast, it is pushing ahead, even showing the politicians how to speak to those who hold power. I have already suggested that these phenomena seem to be related to the fact that the mass nature of modern society has encompassed the intellectual sphere. In the post-war period, the mass groupings of students increased enormously everywhere, especially in the West where society invested heavily in the establishment of universities, channelling its surpluses into them. The possibility of spiritual control over this intellectual element did however not correspond to the rate of its growth. Nowhere do the universities have the teaching and administrative staff who could measure up to the present situation, not just with regard to their discipline but to the social situation; people able, in their regular activities, to show that universities work in contact with the historical moment, and not in a way completely burdened with dead traditions, topics, and petty meanings; that active life and urgent problems do not escape their consideration. Internally, the universities thus become explosive and externally a combat division and battlefield. Young intellectuals, in their effort to discover the truth about their own situation and the society in which they live, reach the point of a radical refusal of the reality of which they are a

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part. To identify what is worth refusing is for them quite easy, requiring only a few years to accomplish. Young people do still have that time, unlike the rest of the population already settled into intricate and motionless Western society, which is composed of an extremely controlling conglomeration. This is not, however, enough to find some positive solution. It is thus not surprising that the young intellectuals of Western countries thrive on the negation that is the only space of their freedom. Today’s society, meanwhile, is such a stable mechanism, not even allowing partial modification, that this negation, insofar as it does not bring any fundamental revolutionary change, inevitably leads to a withdrawal into unreality, or untamed revolt, senseless with regard to its aims, and thriving on destruction. Today, Western intellectuals no longer think they are powerless cogs inside a mighty machine which keeps running with no regard for the wishes of the cogs; they are no longer powerless, but their power is purely destructive. This may also entail some advantages, among which would be the abolition of those intellectual taboos that previously covered the spiritual atmosphere; such as, for example, in the Germany of the Weimar Republic, where no one could have attempted to stir up in an unpopular way the question of the war guilt or reconsider the meaning of Bismarck’s concept of the state for the future of Germany. Today, we witness how all this neglect is catching up with us. But even the abolition of the taboo is evidence only of a crisis if we do not see where we are heading without the taboo. In spite of all that, I think that all these phenomena of today’s world are just the prelude to a pattern that will emerge, and that they therefore have, or at least can have, a positive meaning. It seems that the society of the future (whose new base will be entirely technical, and whose wealth will not consist in goods, but rather the constantly increasing and formalized ability to produce goods) will need a substantial number of advanced intellectuals, chiefly in the most decisive and crucial positions. Of course, they would have to be specialists; but specialists – by their very training as specialists – practice their general skills of orientation, thinking, and criticism. Would it not be possible to assume that an awareness of such an eminent social stratum – of its ability to organize itself into a formation capable of solidarity, action, protest, and rejection – could be of paramount importance for the future, for the rationalization and the rationality of society? Here, in this stratum, for the first time in history, this rationality in its pure form could become a means of both the reproduction of life and the aim of society. The interests of this stratum would be identical here with the interests of human reason. The interests of this stratum of technological intellectuals and their assumptions should therefore stay at the centre of every such complex of ideas that would find hope of being made real by this stratum. Based on these perspectives, the intelligentsia would be urgently engaged in the task of developing such a



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complex of ideas in the future. The task of rationally analyzing the structure of today’s society with the aim of understanding to which social class the intellectuals essentially belong and how they can put their active and revitalizing force at the disposal of society in a structural way, is also a part of this. That this enquiry must be linked with the current analysis of the class society and its dialectics is in my view as undeniable as the need for an unbiased analysis of today’s original and, from the perspective of the nineteenth century, unpredictable situation. Perhaps it would now be appropriate to remind intellectuals of some prolegomena to their essential awareness as intellectuals. At the moment when intellectuals become a mass movement, it is important not to lose but rather increase their awareness of being intellectuals. Numbers of students formed a mass insofar as they realized how to turn their voices into a collective exclamation at the right moment; how to become groups of protesters or even fighters; how to behave emotionally and ardently, and spontaneously create leaders capable of leading them. So far, they have not formed a mass in the sense of being fundamentally passive, accommodating, and deprived of initiative and taste for intellectual argumentation. However, this is the risk that threatens them and that is necessary to overcome: they must not lose the taste for discussion and intellectual argument that has marked them till now. They must not lose the taste for asking questions. They must improve their critical skills and ability instead of increasing their emotionalism – or better, they have to control their emotions. They must not stoop to what intellectuals used to be in the cultures of the past, at best, instruments in the hands of the ruling class, or even a single party, as happened in the first great cultures and at the height of the Middle Ages. And they must also not let themselves be neutralized to the level of ‘uprooted’ intellectuals of the modern age, and especially the bourgeois era. They must continually hone their awareness of what abuse, false conscience, and social falsity are, and, basing themselves on this awareness, must strengthen their independent position within today’s society, which they must teach to respect them as a powerful and organized element. Students as an ever-present but nevertheless variable and mobile mass should become the vanguard of society. For all these purposes, a reflection on the concept of the intellectual itself could be a first modest introduction, and for that, we would like to summarize some fundamental considerations. It is no coincidence that one specific social group was given a name; that is, the Latin analogue of the Greek nous, signifying the direct and original presence of the primordial origins of Being in our mind, and hence inter alia the presence of that ultimate meaning and purpose which shapes the world in its wholeness (the concept presupposes the existence of such purpose). Intelligentia [intelligence]5 means the capacity of the soul, particularly of the human one; Gadamer has shown in an essay how this expression, which

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originally identified the ability to overcome a certain speculative reason, ended up indicating ‘an aptitude for understanding and judging’,6 which equally characterizes both human beings and certain higher animals. It is moreover a concept which indicates formal efficiency, and, finally, something purely instrumental. Not only does the term ‘intelligence’, as a title of efficiency, not describe anything exclusively human, but it also subordinates the human being (through an instinctive life structure) to a category of purpose that is established from the outside. In this way the human is actually determined from an animal perspective, in a theriomorphic [having an animal form] way. The meaning of this word underwent a theriomorphic reduction particularly from the time it was widely used by modern psychotechnique,7 while on the other hand it still did not have this aspect when it began to be used as a sociological category to designate a certain kind of profession or employment.8 Indeed, if we understand the phrase ‘he belongs to the intelligentsia’ as an expression of willingness to be manipulated by authority, and, in general, of social dependence, we must also recognize that this meaning emerged only recently, whereas, in its early uses, the expression undoubtedly also indicated the ability to determine one’s goals freely and the ability to conceive spiritual ends in life, as I. A. Blácha states in Sociology of the Intelligentsia.9 This (latter) use spread during the first half of the nineteenth century, to the extent that it would be worth writing a semantic history of it. It indicates an intellectual [človek ducha]10 who shapes his or her life through mental activity either by performing an intellectual profession – a ‘liberal’ profession: such as law, justice, preaching, or teaching, especially at the highest levels – or in such a way that his or her whole life is determined by a spiritual end. The term also indicates in a rather simple way whomever does a job on the basis of a school certificate. Nonetheless, the original meaning did not vanish from general awareness, and thus the term still indicates a concept of value. This is related to an issue Gadamer has also highlighted: intellect, or independent thought, is not something comparable to a talent that we can easily decide to exploit; it is rather something which can be achieved only through a fight against the restraining forces of life, both private and public. Also belonging to the nature of the ‘intellectual’, therefore, is a certain sense and feeling of the problematic aspect of our relationship to truth, a certain awareness of the existence of those idola to which Bacon referred. This relationship is not an explicit object of reflection, but rather something that sensitive persons practice in the course of their lives, in the sense that they do not surrender to certain tendencies and temptations, but rather place themselves at a distance from them, and in this way foster the emergence of an ‘authenticity’ in themselves; of a new ‘I’ which moves away from private interests and private situations, ‘transcending’ them both. This curbing of immediate goals (dictated by instinct and tradition) enables and at the same time urges



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a person to establish ends that are individually and explicitly created and chosen; ends that are not simply given but freely determined, and hence spiritual. If intellect, in the sense of a free reflection, is always related to a moral position, to the choice between right and wrong, upon which the losing or gaining of the true, spiritual ‘I’ depends, the fundamental precondition of this intelligence is therefore that sphere we enter through ‘moral insight’. This remains true, despite the remarkable decline of the notion of ‘intelligence’ from how the ancient philosophers conceived it to the ‘theriomorphic’ sense that modern psychotechnique and the sociology of the ‘lonely crowd’ attributed to it. Concerning the sphere we reach through our moral insight, we can say that ‘it is not of this world’, because it cannot be observed or investigated as something given and present, but it opens itself in such a way that we hear a certain demand and respond to it. Thus, we see a whole structure marking the intellectual and his way of thinking: the ability to reflect and to think independently, which is not stereotypical but rather presupposes the resolution of new situations, consists of the power to restructure our experience. It is a power capable of delivering the proper means for the given aims. The aims, however, must be at least recognized and accepted, and not – as with animals – simply given according to the biological structure of their species. This, however, entails the capability for self-determination. Through self-determination, the capability to determine our own goals, we overcome the whole sphere of the given. In this way, a firm ‘I’ emerges, which we can with Hegel describe as a universal and category, or philosophical element in ourselves. This philosophical element has another prerequisite, however: an insight into what is never ‘given’, into what ‘is not of our world’, into the moral sphere. In this spiritual structure lies the possibility for the intellectual professions to break away from the social servitude to which they were initially subjected. The social prestige of these professions was due at first to the magic forces with whose evocation they were connected, and later to the invention of writing and its connection to the life of the state. While in the first case the intellectual professions were transformed into a caste, in the second they were subjugated to the ruling class. In this second circumstance, however, lay the seeds of the possibility for a free, or even oppositional, writer to distinguish himself from the mere scribe who was still bound and subjected to that class. The American sociologist and essayist Hoffer strove in this way to detect the origin of intellectual opposition in the decadent phases of the great civilizations of the Far East, and gives examples from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine.11 He saw the first example of a systematic opposition in the Hebrew prophets. With regard to the modern age, we should probably go back to the tradition of the medieval heretic; the need for spiritual freedom emerges in him, and he is the forerunner of the great social propositions of modernity.

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The intellectuals then do not bear their title unjustly, and even in its degradation – which Gadamer underlined in such a clever way – a great part of modern spiritual history manifests itself. In this regard, it is worth mentioning the still remarkable work that Emanuel Rádl wrote in 1927, Krize inteligence [Crisis of the Intelligentsia].12 In this work, Rádl argues that the direct predecessor of the modern intellectual is the medieval clericus: the cleric. During the Renaissance, the cleric was replaced as paragon and centre, as the leading type of human spirituality, by the philosopher, since the existence of the transcendent being fell into doubt. Within a century, the philosopher was replaced by the scientific expert, the specialist. Currently, however, the scientific specialist is threatened in the same way by the man of everyday practical goals. Rádl’s scheme might recall Comte’s rule of the three stages, but while the positivist philosopher sees progress in this alternation, Rádl regards it as decadence founded on the gradual elimination of those very conditions of existence of the intellectual which make the ‘transcending’ possible, the overcoming of the immediate, given world, and of merely received aims. Our analysis has shown that practical intellect is conditioned by ‘philosophic’ ability, by the ability to conceive what is universal, by that ‘sphere that is not of this world’, with these two levels corresponding (in Rádl’s scheme of development) to the philosopher and the cleric. It follows then that the intellectual has to meditate on those types of life that lack transcendence, such as natural and instinctive man, man as labourer and producer, the successful man in the most solid sense of this word, like the American businessman or the successful politician whose only concern is power. All that is left is for the intellectual to vindicate them, thereby renouncing his struggle to acquire any distinguished position in the world, and accepting his instrumental function precisely in the way that his own organ – the intellect – went from being an end in itself to being an instrumental ability. A critical remark might be also added. It is certainly true that the medieval clericus recognized the intellect [duchovno] in its transcendence, its irreducibility or even its opposition to any kind of worldliness, and in that it is the foundation of all truth, even declarative. De facto, however, he was at the service of the social system, which was far from corresponding to that fundamental truth. On the contrary, in this system, the intellectual [duchovno] was condemned to serve the distribution of power and legal relations. In the Middle Ages there was a principle that made truth as a whole, freethinking, transcendence, and opposition to what is factually given possible. And yet, in reality, apart from a few exceptions (I mentioned the heretics), there was no actual opposition. In the modern age the intellectual’s power of opposition is applied practically in a previously unprecedented way, as I will try to show, ever more extensively. But in so doing it is threatened by the danger that the principle of all opposition will be lost from view.13 The reason is



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that in the modern age instrumentality and efficacy become possible and therefore thematic, while the conditions of their possibility disappear into obscurity. This figure of intellectual events [duchovní dění] is clearly visible, for instance, in the context of Hegel’s and Marx’s conceptions of historical movement. In Hegel, the dialectic of history has a sense, a goal, and it hangs upon this goal and its understanding – on the self-realization of reason, which is at the same time understood as the base of all that is. It is the instrumental realization of this goal that is lacking in Hegel, and this is why his concept of history is schematically abstract and does not take into account what in a non-figurative sense might be called ‘der Ernst, der Schmerz, die Geduld und die Arbeit’ [the seriousness, the pain, the patience, and the work].14 In Marxism, transcendence is likewise present as a critique of the present state of capitalist production in the proletarian self-awareness; no historical upheaval – for whose realization an alliance between the intelligentsia and the worker, the proletarian, is indispensable – is possible without this awareness. Yet, it is a merely horizontal transcendence, which leads only from one phase of social production to another, as far as the return of alienated labour to its initiators is concerned; the materialist concept, the ‘reproduction of life’, acts as though the meaningful moment would be established by instinct and by immediate life and its forces. This concept utterly overlooks the fact that horizontal transcendence can have meaning only insofar as it enables a person to live other than in an immediate dimension, by also providing them with a greater possibility of truthfulness and personhood, and not solely for greater wealth in their immediate (sensuous) life. In this way, the opposition of the intelligentsia – that is, those who comprehend the historical process – to an alienated and alienating society is finally justified. It obscures, however, the fact that there is a twofold opposition, as there is a twofold transcendence: one horizontal, which confronts a specific social condition that must be replaced by another; and one vertical, with regard to immediacy, in general, which gives room and space to the first kind of transcendence. In Marx as in Hegel, it is reason, the inner logic of things, that governs life, change, and progress. Nevertheless, for Marx, his emphasis on effectiveness means that in the logic of things he mainly sees the things, unlike Hegel, who sees the logic. It seems to us that the task of the intelligentsia, their ‘issue’, is to maintain both of these ways of transcendence in their distinction and their reciprocal relationship. It is no longer simply a question of acknowledging the existence of the ‘spiritual sphere’ and worshipping it in a quietist way, as in the classical and medieval ages, but rather of striving to establish the true government of the spirit based on the revelation of the inadequacy of the factual world. Kant spoke of the sphere of the spirit, or better, of the spirits, defining it as the sphere of morality. For him, the sphere of morality is the sphere of the validity of reason, that is, of what is universal and necessary. Subsequently,

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philosophy struggled to transfer this sphere of the universal from the timeless Empyrean to the historical cosmos. Hegel taught that reason realizes itself in history. That it does so through the dialectics of economic and social progress, and the relations between the productive forces and the productive organization of human society, was what Marx taught. While reason is for Hegel a theological and metaphysical principle, for Marx it is an anthropological one. And yet, unfortunately, he does not develop the particular nature of this anthropology, the principle of a twofold transcendence. Marx knows only horizontal transcendence; his anthropology intends to find a connection with the objectivity of the natural sciences and its developmental principle, and like its model, Feuerbach’s anthropology, it aims at the specificity of what is human, its meaningfulness – but nonetheless, for the same reason, must also fundamentally miss its aim. The original principle of anthropology, interpretation on the level of meaningfulness, performance, and motivation, and not on the sole basis of impersonal causality, produced existential philosophy and phenomenology. From here, a path towards Marx’s historical and anthropological conception of reason is possible, but for that, existing existential philosophy must be subjected to scrutiny. Most existential philosophies separate vertical transcendence, the teleological impulse to transcend what is given (existence is that which is concerned with its own Being), from horizontal transcendence, the impulse directed towards the world and towards things. The condition for relating to the historical dimension is the overcoming of this concept of existence. Sartre and especially Merleau-Ponty already saw the fundamental impulse to go out of ourselves which characterizes existence as positive. This impulse is not, however, merely positive, but rather an orientation towards ourselves. While not every orientation from the self to the world is an orientation of the subject towards itself, we can argue that there is no orientation towards the self that is not also oriented towards the world. The long-term goal we are aiming at, by attempting to establish a philosophical anthropology related to MerleauPonty’s position, consists of connecting the anthropological principle, that is, the principle of existence as a final self-determination, and the historical process. It must be understood that existence does not simply decline into the world, that it does not fall away from itself, it does not lose its authenticity only to recover it thereafter by overtaking death and relating to non-Being. It is rather that the way to the world has a ‘dialectical’ character; that this coming out from ourselves also implies the possibility of a return, and how this might happen. It seems to us now that in the present this task has a particular character, insofar as the realization of reason has reached a stage in which, for the first time in history, the opposition between the rational nature of human life and the materiality of its reproduction becomes not only resolvable but



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resolvable through reason. Marx identified the rationality of social progress in that the extreme alienation of the labouring person, and of labour in the capitalist system, contributes to its own dissolution, because of the proletariat’s self-awareness and its revolutionary turn. Through large-scale production, the proletariat guarantees the rational possibility for everybody to sustain their lives, just as the socialist organization of property relations guarantees the actual realization of this. Production remains, however, something material, an investment of life into physical labour. However, in modern conditions of automatization, cybernetics, and the gradual displacement of the physical workforce, production becomes a mainly rational process, giving up its organic and material traits. It no longer rests on the shoulders of the proletarian but those of the technician, who is an intellectual as long as he remains, despite all his specialization, tightly bound to the whole community of the intelligentsia. Nowadays, the intelligentsia is a technological intelligentsia, not in the sense that it cares only about the means, with a view to predetermined goals without acknowledging the idea of self-determination of life, but rather because in the present age, technology represents the decisive form of reason, which is itself such a productive force. Nonetheless, technology cannot be authentic – it cannot produce, develop, and give its best yield – as long as it is used for destruction instead of creation; as long as it is put at the service of a single group, and not of the general public; as long as the control of the way in which it is used is not guaranteed against the risk of its misappropriation. The interest of technology is the interest of the technological intelligentsia. At the same time, the interest of production is a group interest, personal and general; that means that the productive class is at the same time actually general. This also means that the interest of production is not only an interest in goods and their quantity, since it is not determined only by this material element, but is rather, in its generality, a moral interest. Technology, in the phase in which the intelligentsia prevails – an intelligentsia determining and permeating production in its entirety, and influencing the whole of society through its rising predominance – is essentially international and unifying; it is ‘left-wing’, in the sense of resisting the establishment of interest groups, whether economic or political elites. It is democratic, because it invokes a control, the public, that is, a way for everybody to participate. The material, that on which we depend in the physical world and which we master through our bodily strength and corporeality, is at present being sublimated into a form of reason which is rationally controllable. Those who possess reason start to compete for control of the world and, as possessors of reason, cannot do this just for themselves, but rather for everybody. The possessors of reason are neither Comte’s spiritual organ and government of mankind, nor technocratic elites. They are not a new consortium of managers, but rather a mass intelligentsia, at whose core are the technicians, producing possibilities

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touching both the sky and the earth, and creating a contact and a relationship between the two. Their vanguards are those workshops in which this intelligentsia, today’s decisive mass, is created: the universities and the swarm of pupils and students of technical high schools heading towards universities and flowing into them. At the stage of the overcoming of capitalism, envisaged by Marx in the conditions of production of the nineteenth century – that is, in its ‘paleo-technical’ phase, characterized by the collective possession of the means of production and of the monopoly of the political power by a centrally organized party – a particularly difficult problem consisted of preventing the emergence of a parasitic apparatus based on bureaucratic power which would govern the revolution as an enterprise with its own advantages but still in the name of the proletariat. With such an apparatus, discussion would fade to nothing since it would assume that, as the holder of theoretical knowledge, it would objectively know the interests of the proletariat better than the proletariat itself, understood as a historical subject. This modern kind of alienation would not constitute a notable danger in the new technical phase, because its requirement – that is, the distance between the material character of the production and its social essence – would be erased and consequently there would be no need for any special social layer regulating the interests of the producers with the danger of an unwitting or even deliberate parasitism. Perhaps only the fulfilment of Marx’s dialectical materialism, that is, the dialectics of production through which man himself is produced, in a dialectics of that reason which comes to possess itself, will bring a solution in this field too. This solution would consist, with regard to economy, of a slow reabsorption of the bureaucracy within a limited domain of expertise and, with regard to politics, of attaining control over the broad community. It would be a general and hence democratic and automatic solution; it would not require any exceptional and uncontrolled social bodies. This seems likewise to be a solution for two other contradictory situations. First of all, and particularly, for what Rádl defined as the crisis of the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia will no longer have the material world in front of itself, understood in that rough form that entails deploying the forces of the organism as though they were physical levers. As the influence of this material subjugation vanishes, the intelligentsia will no longer be fascinated by efficiency and externality and will become capable of reflecting on the inner conditions of its activity. We saw how these inner conditions correspond to the ‘philosophical’ and ‘moral sphere’, the non-reality through which transcendence penetrates the world. The crisis of the intelligentsia consisted of neglecting vertical transcendence and in engaging too much in the domain of the means, until any autonomy, any freedom in setting one’s own goals, was completely overshadowed. The technological intelligentsia, as the core



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of today’s intellectual masses, could again seem something instrumental. But this (technological) intelligentsia is tied to the whole intellectual mass, of which it constitutes the core, through numerous bonds: the bond of scientific morality, since technology and science are one, and science without morality is a science in decline; the bond of being public; and the bond of a critical rationality. The technological intelligentsia will, through the struggle it will have to engage in order to obtain power, become aware of the inevitability of decisions, of remaining firm in them, and of being anchored in that which is not given but which sets demands – decisions that are the condition of their own possibility. They will realize through this struggle that their element is a moral one, that their nature does not consist in adapting, but rather in implementing, not themselves, but rather reason, which is not a mere judgement on what is given, but a demand and an imperative. The tension that exists between left-wing intellectuals of the West and the intelligentsia of some Eastern Bloc countries can eventually be overcome once the masses of the intelligentsia acquire a decisive social function. The intellectuals of the West have become accustomed to seeing the liberal principles of human rights and freedoms as nothing more (or less) than the ideological camouflage of bourgeois regimes, and therefore accord them no importance. The intellectuals of the East, on the contrary, see them as a condition of their own effectiveness as a force of reason penetrating a whole and non-alienated society. Perhaps they overrate them, since none of these principles has an absolute character, and are successful only in a historical situation determined by a new structural form of the forces of production. What is important is that we are talking here of different principles, not the abstract principles of supposedly natural freedoms, but principles that, after having been negated, are reborn – born again as conditions under which the government of reason in a totally emancipated society finally becomes possible. This conflict of the two-sided fundamental orientation of today’s active intelligentsia is clearly related to what they are in contradiction with. In the West, it is the late bourgeois society and its pseudo-liberal ideology, whose falsehood is constantly attested by the real deeds of this society, such as racial discrimination and ruthless imperialist international politics. The current intelligentsia, as the vanguard of the transformed working class, considers the struggle against its adversaries as more urgent than forming the awareness and organization of its own interests. One might even argue that by developing this combative tendency, the intelligentsia will end up not only confronting the existing establishment but also neglecting their own awareness and clashing with its own interests. But since these interests are of a general nature, there appears a danger that the intelligentsia does not serve objectively its own primary goal, that is, the overcoming of the class conflict and the rise of a unitary socialist society. There is also the danger that, due to the failure of

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the intelligentsia’s activity, all the social forces opposed to it will mobilize and organize themselves, leading the division of the intelligentsia itself and the self-subjugation of humanity. Western society is passing into the hands of a new working class, technologically better equipped, but politically badly prepared. This transition demands a restructuring of the whole Left, which politically is still based on nineteenth-century structures of production. The significance of the Czechoslovak events in 1968 is that, for the first time, the possibility of a new free society is taking shape, based on the transformation of the working class – within socialism itself – into a class which has intellectuals at its core, a core which is capable of introducing society to a new productive and historical era. This society, despite the incomprehension and the pressures to which it has been subjected by the old-style socialism, has not let itself be persuaded by the suggestion that it represents merely a liberal reaction but has insisted, despite everything, on the validity of its own principles for socialism.15 NOTES 1. See Isaac Deutscher, Russia in Transition (New York: Coward-McCann, 1957); Ironies of History: Essays on Contemporary Communism (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). – Czech Editors’ note (hereafter: CEs). 2. See David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1950). – English Editors’ note (hereafter: EEs). 3. Here Patočka is likely referring a democratic process of public consultation. – EEs. 4. The reference here is to the Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers that took place in Prague between 27th and 29th June 1967. At this event, which obtained a big response and became one of the fundamental steps towards the Prague Spring, intellectuals like Kundera, Havel, Kosík, Kohout, and Vaculík took the floor. An account of the congress can be found in Galia Golan, The Czechoslovak Reform Movement: Communism in Crisis, 1962–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 239ff. Excerpts from the writers’ speeches at the congress are in Jaromír Navrátil, The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (New York: Central European University Press, 1998), 8ff. – EEs. 5. The word is in Latin in the text. – EEs. 6. See Hans Georg Gadamer, ‘Philosophische Bemerkungen zum Problem der Intelligenz’, in Der Nervenartzt 35 (1964): 281–86; also in Gesammelte Werke, 4 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1987), 276–87. For the definition, see Philippe Monet, Inventaire des deux langues, françoise et latine (1636). – CEs. 7. ‘Psychotechnique’ commonly means a discipline developed during the first decades of the twentieth century that consists of the application of psychology in the technical field, as well as in other practical activities, and especially in labour



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(it was also known as ‘industrial psychology’). See, in particular, Hugo Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik (Leipzig: Barth, 1914). – EEs. 8. The Czech word ‘inteligence’ indicates here both the concept of ‘intellect’ (i.e. the capacity for learning, reasoning, and understanding) and ‘intelligentsia’ (i.e. the social group of the intellectuals). – EEs. 9. I. A. Blácha, Sociologie Inteligence, Praha 1937. – CEs. 10. Hereafter Patočka refers to the idea of the intellectual by using the terms duch, duchovno, duchovní, which literally refer to the context of ‘spirituality’. Previously, he used the term inteligence, inteligent. This distinction can be also found in other writings, for example, ‘The Spiritual Person and the Intellectual’ [Duchovní člověk a intelektuál]. With this distinction, he wants to emphasize how the former type of intellectual – duch, duchovno, duchovní – makes free use of his or her intellect, while the latter is subjected to and manipulated by power. – EEs. 11. See Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 43ff. – CEs. 12. Emanuel Rádl, Krize Inteligence (Prague: Akademická YMCA, 1928). – EEs. 13. From here on, the Czech version of the essay and the conference text diverge. The translation of the original conclusion of Patočka’s talk in Hofgeismar is here included as an appendix. – EEs. 14. In German in the text. ‘Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the serious­ness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative’, Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. Arthur V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 11. – EEs. 15. This excerpt, which concludes Patočka’s essay, is only present in its first edition – see, Patočka, ‘Inteligence a opozice’, Universita Karlova 15 (1969) – and later removed by the author. – EEs.

Chapter 3

Intellectuals and Opposition Alternative End Jan Patocˇka

This text corresponds to the conclusion of the conference ‘Intelligenz und die Opposizion’ that Patočka held on 3 June 1968, at the Evangelic Academy in Hofgeismar, and from which the essay ‘Inteligence a opozice’ later stemmed.

In this way, for example, transcendence is indeed present in Marxism in the form of proletarian consciousness, as a critique of the present situation, of the capitalist culture of civil society and of production; there can be no dialectical overturning, no turn of history, without the coming to consciousness of the proletariat, without an alliance of the intellectual and the worker. But transcendence is understood here purely as historically horizontal, as leading from one state of social production to the other, with regard to the restoration [Zurückerstattung] of alienated labour or at most the unleashing of the ‘creative powers’ of man. Thus the act of transcendence itself becomes something purely formal, and the matter of meaning-bestowal is provided by instinctive, immediate life and its powers. And yet it seems to be clear that horizontal transcendence has a meaning-bestowing effect because, through it, a life in a dimension other than that of immediacy is made possible; not a merely ‘sensuously’ further unfolded and richer existence [Dasein], but something entirely different, a life in truth and in greater inner proximity to the kernel of the human being which was previously absent and impossible. It is indeed this dimension which first gives sense to oppositional and even revolutionary praxis; on the other hand, it must also be said that this dimension is only present in praxis and becomes hollow without it. So it seems to me that, for example, one could consider whether the present turning away from the recently so tremendously celebrated thinking of Being does not repudiate the fact that, here, man has been limited to a role of one who waits and listens, despite obviously urgent tasks – tasks concerning life and 23

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death – in a situation that is certainly labyrinthine, but which is nonetheless ours and is to be actively mastered by us. In this way I would indeed like to concede that it may well be true that the opposition may belong to the essence of the intellectual in an alienated societal situation. But I venture to claim that there are two kinds of opposition corresponding to the two dimensions of transcendence: one horizontal, which is set against the given societal condition that is to be replaced by another; and one ‘vertical’, the opposition to the immediate in general, that which first provides room and meaning for the former kind. Let us also attempt to consider the following possibility. If both manners of transcendence are related to one another, if the horizontal transcendence is blind without the vertical, and if the vertical without the horizontal is empty, then the business of the intellectual consists in bringing them both into vital interrelation and maintaining them in this relatedness. Not only to observe and venerate the spiritual, as Antiquity outlined it and as the High Middle Ages saw it as realised for the whole of Christianity in the unity of the natural and the supernatural, but rather to push for its actualisation only on the basis of the disclosure of the insufficiency of the given reality, that would be the true task. In this manner the ‘crisis of the intelligentsia’ would not be overcome by denying praxis its spirituality but by acknowledging that it would again be understood as essentially always spiritual, namely as moral praxis. Whatever would oppose and impede such an understanding must signify a danger. But such a danger is not merely present in the current Marxist conception of transcending. By consolidating themselves into a combat group, the young intellectuals of today have indeed succeeded in opening a vision of how one could eradicate the sclerosis of the society that lacks transcendence and perhaps also of how one could eradicate the danger of the enslavement of the masses under the mastery of a power-elite. They have again demonstrated that the spiritual people of today have not lost the readiness for sacrifice and the willingness to undergo suffering in view of the act of transcending; rather, they have shown that this readiness is present to a considerable extent. In this sense, they have overcome the ‘crisis of the intelligentsia’. But at the same time there exists the danger of an overemphasis of the horizontal, of closing ranks to fight – and that means forming a power group (or a group which strives for power). The cause of the intellectuals is therefore understood in a one-sided manner; it runs the risk of sinking into the purely political, into acting and agitating without a final, determining perspective. The groups of intellectuals engaged in struggles in the East and in the West are a little different from each other, even though the general goals of their struggle are similar: they oppose an establishment, the manipulation through elites and a general lack of perspective. The Western intellectuals live in formal democracies which derive a part of their fundamental



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principles from a time when, to agree with Mill, a public sphere was present: when one had recourse to the individual consciousness as the seat of judgement and final court of appeal; when one supposed a harmony of interests among all those involved; when one believed that a free discussion could lead to a rational decision and that one could continually pursue and control the implementation of this decision. Only under these conditions do the fundamental democratic principles and laws have their full meaning. In opposition to this, since the end of the eighteenth century it has been discovered and proclaimed that there is something like a volonté générale [general will] and thus in no way is it only the individual consciousness which has social relevance; that there is a class conflict; that the modern society and body politic need teams of specialists; that the common man is no animal rationale; that consciousness is – through class interest – socially determined; and that control in the modern mass society is becoming ever more difficult. On the basis of this contrast between reality and long-sedimented theory, a realistic, neutral, critically minded Western intellectual will tend to interpret democratic principles as theses about the given social reality and will thus tend to designate them as false or at least as inadequate. In the retention of these principles in constitutions and political rules of play, he will see the inner ideological mendacity of a system which pretends to be something other than what it actually is in order to avoid a confrontation with the dehumanized reality. Thus it is time and time again that Western intellectuals tend to essentially underestimate the fundamental democratic principles and laws. Socialists, who fight against the tutelage of the entire public sphere imposed by professional politicians and apparatchiks, are convinced that the actualisation of socialism will bring about a ‘real democracy’, a condition of society with the greatest possible equality of opportunity. They, however, count more on factors which are not given consideration in liberaldemocratic theory. In comparison to the ever-surviving classical-liberal conception from the Western armoury of thought, they believe that their conception offers a better insight into society, apart from also believing that Eastern society is essentially more suitable terrain for a life lived in truth. In democracy, free reflection, and discussion, they must therefore see the main weapons in the struggle against the establishment of social strata of power and domination: thus, today, they [socialists or Eastern intellectuals] perhaps tend to overestimate democratic laws and institutions. For one is never secured and one cannot secure oneself against all dangers; the alienating factors in society are like the thousand regenerating heads of a hydra. Yet, in that respect, the position of the Eastern intellectual is more favourable and affords them what is perhaps a greater openness to the true essence of the intelligentsia because they tend to consider the fundamental democratic laws not merely as means to an end, but rather as an authentic end in

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themselves. It seems to me as though we would be somehow closer to the authentic matter of the intellect, provided that it may be sketched as I have done so above; for, should there succeed in Eastern Europe a unification of ethical and social liberation, the ‘crisis of the intelligentsia’ would probably thereby also be overcome.

Part II

DISSIDENCE AND POLITICAL COMMITMENT

Chapter 4

Jan Patočka and the Possibility of Spiritual Politics Ivan Chvatík

The philosophic career of Jan Patočka ended when he sacrificed his life in the struggle for freedom. It happened neither on the front line of a battlefield nor on the barricades nor even in a street battle with agents of the communist police, although the latter played their role in it; rather, his death was the immediate consequence of his public appearance in his capacity as spokesman for the independent civic initiative, Charter 77. The events that would eventually lead to his death began with a meeting with the Dutch foreign minister, organized by independent journalists from the minister’s cohort. The meeting took the form of a press conference; the power organs of the totalitarian Czechoslovak state became aware of it only after it occurred. Can something like this be characterized otherwise than as a political act? It is necessary to understand the whole Charter 77 movement as political, although it explicitly refused this description. It is obvious that even the reason for this refusal was political. To declare itself, in the totalitarian state, as a political movement, would mean immediate liquidation, justified by the then valid law. The power structures of the state understood this political trick well. But as the international political situation forced them to keep a semblance of justice, they were mostly anxious to turn to other-than-brutal liquidation measures. It was enough that in connection with the announcement of Charter 77, Václav Havel, also one of its spokesmen, had already spent more than one month in prison. But why, in the very first sentence of this text, have I mentioned sacrifice? It is not only because such phrases are usually used in reference to deceased heroes. Here, I mean it in a literal sense. Because when Dutch journalists came to offer Patočka the possibility to meet the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Max Van der Stoel, Patočka was confined to bed by the acute symptoms of his chronic bronchitis, and it must have been clear to him that by 29

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accepting their offer he would overexert himself. But it was no common impudence on his part. Patočka’s act was in perfect agreement with what he had already learned, lectured, and written about over several years: namely, that political life is ‘ever seeking the opportunity for action, for possibilities that present themselves; it means a life in active tension, one of extreme risk and unceasing upward striving [i.e. upswing] in which every pause is necessarily already a weakness for which the initiative of others lies in wait’.1 And not only that: the ‘spiritual person’, whom Patočka had spoken about at a private seminar less than three years before his death, who is able to sacrifice himself, who is able to see its sense and meaning […] cannot be afraid. A spiritual person is of course not a politician in a common sense but he is political in another way because he throws the problematicity of reality into the face of society and of what he encounters around himself. […] To pretend that politics is something non-decent for a spiritual person – that is the worst sophistry you can imagine.2

When Patočka decided to meet the Dutch minister, he was surely neither afraid that he would die nor aware that he would bring the anger of the powerful upon himself. It was impossible to miss such a splendid situation. Charter 77 had gained a real international dimension. A few days later, the embassy of West Germany was to hold a big party to celebrate the acquisition and opening of the Lobkowitz Palace as its new permanent seat in Prague. The secret police, now aware of the meeting with the Dutch minister, got nervous that Patočka might repeat his international political appearance. He, however, did not receive an invitation; but to prevent the possibility of him getting one at the last moment, the police came for him early in the morning and drove him around the whole day from place to place, and again and again asked him for what precisely that strange Charter asked. Patočka explained to them that to call for human rights is no criminal act, but they did not listen, they only made him speak endlessly. At noon they had a decent lunch in a restaurant outside Prague, but they brought him home only late in the evening. After midnight, the exhausted philosopher collapsed and had to be taken to hospital. He did not return home. So Patočka acted as a politician – as a spiritual person for whom political activity was not indecent. And if he was aware of what sacrifice he was making, so too was he able to see its sense and meaning. To stay in bed at home as every ‘normal’ man would do would have been an unacceptable weakness for him. It would mean to prefer mere personal security and sustenance of life vis-à-vis the possibility of an upswing. This was the same case prior to January 1977, when he was deciding to accept the role of spokesman. Taking into consideration the condition of his health, many had attempted to dissuade him



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from accepting the offer. But to refuse for this reason would have meant, for him, not to be in accord with himself; not to pass the practical test of whether he was the spiritual person he seemed to be in his lectures when speaking about Socrates’s and Plato’s concept of the soul: The spiritual life of Socrates consists, to be sure, in that he endeavours, in dialogue with others, to find out whether they, and he himself would be able, in the many different questions their life poses, to keep unity each with himself, whether they would be able to be consequent, whether they really are what they believe themselves to be.3

I have already used the word upswing twice. I would like to stress again that this is the key concept in Patočka’s philosophy of history. It appears in some texts even before the war, then it once again comes to the fore in his ‘negative Platonism’, and it finally plays a central role in his teaching about the three movements of existence. Although, at first glance, this teaching seems to be the same in each case, it was constantly developing during the 1960s and 1970s, especially concerning the concept of the third movement of life, the properly ontological movement of breaking-through or problematization. Indeed, if we were to take the different expositions of this thought only as repeated descriptions of the same, it would be easy to find many discrepancies. But I shall ignore this for the time being. I shall instead start from the fact that as late as in the Heretical Essays (1975) Patočka explicitly brings political acting into the realm of the third movement of existence. For Patočka, it was only a political upswing that opened up history: ‘History represents a distancing from and a reaction against the period of prehistory; it is a rising [i.e. upswing] above the level of the prehistorical, an attempt at a renewal and resurgence of life’.4 On this occasion, Patočka explicitly comes to terms with Husserl’s and Heidegger’s concepts of history. He says they ‘seem deeply different from ours because both speak explicitly of philosophy alone as starting point and, in a sense, the core of history’.5 He does not want to discredit the role of philosophy. Its part in getting humanity away from or even out of mythical tradition was of course highly significant for him. Nevertheless, politics has priority here. Patočka quotes Hannah Arendt to explain how ‘on the necessary foundation of the family oikos, yet in contradiction between its self-enclosed generative privacy and the will to public openness’, a possibility opens up to live for something other than mere sustenance and generation of life;6 ‘this life is essentially and in its very being distinct from life in acceptation; here, life is not received as complete as it is, but rather transforms itself from the start – it is a reaching forth [i.e. upswing]’.7 The political upswing of life over the level of mere sustenance, which opens up history, is the discovery of freedom: ‘Historical man exists out of

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freedom and for freedom’, says Patočka in his own unfinished attempt to translate his Heretical Essays into German.8 This thought is repeated in the first two Heretical Essays several times. For example, still in connection with Arendt: on the foundation of economic security supplied by oikos and polis, ‘something fundamentally different arises on this foundation [...] a life that freely defines itself so that it could define itself also in the future and in others, independently of that foundation’.9 Or, about a page later: the political life has its goal in ‘a free life as such, one’s own or that of others’.10 And at last, a quite pregnant formulation: Life unsheltered, a life of outreach [i.e., upswing] and initiative without pause and ease, is not simply a life of different goals, contents, or structures rather than a life of acceptance – it is differently, since it itself opens up the possibility for which it reaches; while seeing this liberation, both the dependence of the one and the free superiority of the other, sees what life is and can be. Without aspiring to the superhuman, it becomes freely human.11

So history not only begins with an upswing, but it can only sustain itself as history in a constant repetition of upswings. The freedom achieved by the upswing is, to be sure, constantly in danger. It is endangered not only by external enemies but first of all by the inner one. Patočka says: ‘As protection against its own inner trend towards rest, routine, and relaxation it has the stimulus of the public openness which not only offers opportunities but also ever lies in wait to seize them’.12 The foundation upon which this freedom has been achieved, the family and the care for the household, continues to rear its head in the hearts of the achievers. For those who have achieved freedom, the old tendency to care just for accumulating wealth for private good and to misuse freedom for their own particular benefit is still present. It manifests itself in a drive to seize power and, with it, access to wealth for oneself alone, instead of working to secure this achieved freedom for everybody. Hence it is necessary, in a new situation of decline, to repeat the upswing again and again, eventually even against those by whom freedom has been won. Abstractly speaking, it means that ‘history [...] is a finite freedom in a struggle and as a struggle for freedom itself’.13 However, this is not easy. The greatest enemy of upswing is certainly the man in upswing itself. If he has rejected the possibility of accepting a readymade meaning from mythical or other traditions, and if he has to project meaning by himself alone, he stands, as Patočka says, face-to-face with the universe as a whole and sees that he does not understand it.14 The horizon of what he understands is encircled by nearly impenetrable darkness. Is it then not simpler not to attempt an upswing but rather to be content with what has



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already been achieved – that is, a sophisticated system of non-free but relatively luxurious sustenance of life? Freedom, however, once discovered, cannot be forgotten. The problematicity of the upswing demands explication. This task gives rise to philosophy: ‘The renewal of life’s meaning in the rise of political life bears within it the seed of philosophical life as well. [...] Political life at a stroke confronts humans with the possibility of the totality of life and of life as a totality. Philosophical life grafts itself to this trunk and brings forth what is enclosed within it’.15 Hence, the uncertainty and precariousness of the political and social upswing to freedom is that which connects politics with philosophy. When analyzed with philosophical insight, this precariousness appears to be even more terrible than it does when manifesting itself to politicians. But when philosophers present it to them, and at the same time try to warn them against the above-mentioned possibilities of decline, politicians do not understand them and, instead, sentence the Socrateses of this world, for such a subversive activity, to death. Hence, in a way, philosophy, as fulfilling a social demand, attempts to penetrate through the darkness of the universe to provide something stable which the upswing could use, at least a bit, as a support. And so the big metaphysical systems arise; elementary scientific knowledge is cultivated; nonetheless, the original Greek polis does not survive but destroys itself in fratricidal wars. However, the spirit of the polis, as Patočka says, survives in the form of philosophy: The Western spirit and the world history are bound together in their origins: it is the spirit of free meaning bestowal, it is the shaking of life as simply accepted with all its certainties and at the same time the origin of new possibilities of life in that shaken situation, that is, of philosophy. Since, however, philosophy and the spirit of the polis are closely linked so that the spirit of the polis survives ultimately always in the form of philosophy, this particular event, the emergence of the polis, has a universal significance.16

But in which form does the spirit of polis survive in philosophy? Perhaps it would be possible to say that it has two forms. On the one hand, philosophy reveals the above-mentioned precariousness of the foundation on which the free man is moving and points inevitably at the darkness that embraces this foundation. It can bring many a thing into the light of day, but it is precisely while doing this that it shows the darkness as unfathomable. On the other hand, philosophers attempt – motivated by this just-mentioned partial success – to catch sight of, to perceive, and to speculate upon a sort of firm framework in this darkness. So arose the great metaphysical systems of

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Plato, Democritus, and Aristotle. Patočka underlines the basic differences of these systems from one another, which discredited them from the very beginning because each of them aspired to be the only true one. For exactly this reason, Patočka restlessly looks for what they all have in common. He finds out that it is the ‘care for the soul’, the care of that in us which has the power of transcendence, which can surpass all that exists, aiming at the darkness out of which everything emerges. Nevertheless, in the Roman Empire, which concentrated more on broadening its borders than on philosophizing, it was nigh on impossible to care for the souls of all citizens in a sophisticated, philosophical way; not to mention the countless masses of people of subdued nations who had not experienced any philosophical training whatsoever. And this philosophical care for the soul was certainly not realized even in the small Greek states of pre-Roman times. Hence, it is no wonder that the agent of unification that succeeded in saving, in kind, the decaying empire was religion: namely, something that stands halfway between myth and philosophy. Christianity, first through the voice of St Paul, refuses philosophy as if it were something similar to the various mythical cults of the different nations the Roman Empire subdued. But St Paul, especially, picks up from philosophy and preserves, as Patočka stresses, the important element common to all philosophical schools – that is, care for the soul. I see preservation of the care for the soul primarily in the fact that the Christian religion, unlike myth, is a matter of faith. If the content of a cult is not self-evident for all the members of a mythical society, and if many such cults concur in an empire, it is no longer possible to unite them forcefully from the top down. The only possibility – which subsequently also proved successful – was to offer people something that they could grasp and accept, each for himself inwardly; something that they could believe in and that could give meaning to their mostly painful lives. Therefore, it was not possible simply to adopt the Old (Jewish) Testament; rather, it was necessary to interpret it and complete it with the articles of faith, the dogmata, in such a way that the New Teaching would become credible for that infinitely heterogeneous mass of people, so that people could really believe it. From the very beginnings of Christianity, what to believe – the dogmata – was always a matter of dispute. These disputes could not have taken the theological and at the same time political form they had from the very beginning if the parties to them had not been intellectuals; if they were not the kind of spiritual persons in Patočka’s sense, if they were not heirs to the Greek philosophical tradition, and if they were not, at the same time, politicians. To set forth a dogma, it was necessary to argue; regarding its acceptance, it was necessary to vote. Of course, from time to time, in situations when the care for power and wealth prevailed over the care for the soul, it was also necessary to take up swords.



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It was a specific trait of the victorious Christian religion in the declining Roman Empire that from the very beginning, it was organized similar to the Roman Empire itself and formed, in a way, a parallel state within a state. It is perhaps because of this that Pilate reproaches Jesus for pretending to be a king. But whereas the political consciousness of Roman citizens concerning the idea of a Roman Empire was inevitably fading, the belief of Christians in the possibility of realizing the Kingdom of God on earth was so strong that Constantine legalized Christianity, primarily as a welcome aid to maintaining and broadening the empire. By retreating to Constantinople and leaving the rule of Rome de facto to Christian popes, he in fact created in the European world a situation of diarchy – that is, the concurrence of spiritual and worldly power. However, neither one nor the other was able, or even wanted, to completely win. The matter of dispute was always how to divide power over the world. Hence, from the very beginning, the Christian conception of care for the soul has had a not-insignificant political aspect. In the fifth Heretical Essay, ‘Is Technological Civilisation Decadent and Why’, Patočka speaks about how, in the realm of Christianity, a new form of human soul appears, namely an individual, a person; and Jacques Derrida devotes to this process the first part of his essay ‘Donner la mort’.17 I have explained elsewhere18 that Derrida, at the end of his otherwise interesting analyses, errs when stating that Patočka, a ‘Christian thinker’, wants to save contemporary mankind by freeing Christianity from Platonism. Here, I would like to sketch out briefly why Patočka keeps being a ‘Christian thinker’ in spite of the fact that he wants to ‘think Christianity through until the end’ and so to overcome its failing exactly by exhausting and developing its Platonic component – that is, its above-mentioned, Socratic care for the soul. For, if Patočka agrees with Wolfgang Weischedel that ‘each particular meaning, if it is to be genuine meaning, presupposes a total and absolute meaning, but a relative and partial meaning can never bestow meaning on the whole because particular meaning can be [...] a product of meaninglessness while only total meaningfulness can keep all individual beings from drowning in meaninglessness’,19 then he still remains caught by a corner of his coat in the old ontotheological metaphysic which he elsewhere so ardently tries to escape. It is necessary to grasp, with Friedrich Nietzsche, that the Christianmetaphysical endeavour to secure the total meaning of the world and life by recurring to the absolute being of God – which is transcendent vis-à-vis all other beings and from which all beings draw their being and meaning – was and is the source of the nihilism that the Christian world achieved. Nevertheless, it is impossible to escape this dead-end street by substituting, as Patočka does, a totalizing transcendent Highest Being with a similarly totalizing and transcending (but non-being) Being that would be the bearer of

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absolute meaning; inaccessible for mankind and therefore problematical, but as a promise always present and searched for. Meaning, to be sure, is genuine meaning – as Pavel Kouba shows20 with Nietzsche – only when its meaningfulness is not warranted by anything else more meaningful, and hence could turn out to be meaningless. It is thanks to this precariousness and finiteness of itself that there can be meaning for a finite human being. And precisely because the precariousness of meaning – a possibility of its turning out to be meaningless – is not an abstract notion but a very frequent reality, it is necessary again and again to look for it, and to find and project it. Now, it is necessary to take up again Patočka’s concept of upswing. Certainly, the question arises of how to recognize and judge, how to look for meaning, and whether the meaning we have found and projected is good or bad. Here, I believe, Patočka comes up with his idea of the solidarity of the shaken. This is a solidarity of those who are distressed by their belief in the day, that is, simply for their belief that there is an absolute meaning; and moreover who knows that what matters in history is to face the fall into meaninglessness by engaging in a Socratic dialogue of the soul with itself and with others. This is not a dialogue that obscures the dark side of the universe, the meaninglessness that has been revealed to us, but way of a mathematical science of nature. Such a Socratic dialogue should not, of course, be a dialogue that only problematizes and negates everything – as it seems to be in Platonic dialogues – but rather one in which meaning would be found in the form of decisions concerning how to act in a concrete situation, so that the acting will be an upswing. Hence, the solidarity of these shaken should follow as an immediate consequence of their being shaken. If they are shaken, namely, in their belief in the possibility of absolute meaning, then their upswing must always be in a way precarious for them. For, in fact, not even the meaning they have convincingly found in the Socratic dialogue of their souls, and for which they risk their lives, should be allowed to obscure the possible meaningfulness of what their political enemy is fighting for with equal ardour. The care of the individual soul, which would bring the soul again and again into an upswing, is therefore closely connected with the care for the soul in the polis – that is, with political life. Patočka’s spiritual man – when brought in the course of his life to the situation where he has to act as a politician – would not care first and foremost for his own material benefit but would rather strive to be superior to others by his attempts at upswing. Also, the sustenance of life, power, and wealth belong in a way to the upswing, namely as conditions that make an upswing possible. The dead and unable cannot pull themselves into upswing. But this is exactly why the Heideggerian ‘being toward death’ is a necessary ontological condition



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for any human upswing. The striving for upswing can be a struggle of life and death. And the death of millions can be at stake. This is why it is necessary that the politician, under the impression of being in upswing, does not succumb to his vanity but rather, in his striving for it, keeps solidarity with others; even, in a way, with his opponents. If the main lines of my attempt at interpretation of Patočka’s philosophical thought are meaningful, then I believe this is very positive. Although refusing any absolute instance of meaning whatever, my attempt does not fall into total meaninglessness, as Weischedel would like to have it. Because although it is always possible that one concrete upswing turns out to be meaningless, it is only so when another upswing aimed at another attempt at meaning, is going to prevail. Hence, if history is the history of the upswing as a fight against the fall into the non-historical, if it is a striving starting from freedom and attempting to preserve freedom, then it is clear that, as Patočka says, ‘the problem of history may not be resolved, it must be preserved as a problem’.21 It is necessary to forge ahead in solving it. NOTES 1. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1966), 38. Emphasis in the original. 2. Jan Patočka, ‘Duchovní člověk a intelektuál’, in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 3: Péče o duši III (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2002), 366. See also the English translation by Eric Manton, ‘The Spiritual Person and the Intellectual’, in Living in Problematicity (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2007), 51–69. 3. Patočka, Péče o duši III, 358. My translation. 4. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 36. 5. See ibid., 44–6. 6. Ibid., 37. 7. Ibid., 38. 8. ‘[D]er geschichtliche Mensch ist ein aus Freiheit und umwillen der Freiheit existierender’, in Patočka, Péče o duši III, 528. My translation. 9. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 38. 10. Ibid., 39. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 38. 13. Patočka, Péče o duši III, 547. my translation. 14. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 25, 39. 15. Ibid., 40. 16. Ibid., 41. 17. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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18. Ivan Chvatík, Jan Patočka – Christian or Platonist? Paper at the conference ‘The Reasons of Europe’, December 2013, La Sapienza University of Rome. 19. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 73. 20. Pavel Kouba, Die Welt nach Nietzsche. Eine philosophische Interpretation (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001). 21. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 118.

Chapter 5

Resisting Fear On Dissent and the Solidarity of the Shaken in Contemporary European and Global Society Jiří Přibáň INTRODUCTION In European and global society, even the solidarity of the shaken is shaken these days. A new politics of fear is spreading fast in old and new democracies and increasing the appeal of authoritarianism. This chapter, therefore, addresses the self-referencing shaken solidarity of the shaken by returning to Havel’s concepts of the ‘power of the powerless’ and ‘existential revolution’ and Patočka’s concept of the solidarity of the shaken. It examines them specifically in the context of Hannah Arendt’s and Michel Foucault’s philosophies. Nevertheless, the chapter’s main argument draws on the current crisis of European society, where politics has now turned into a mere system of decision-making for bare living. Resisting this form of political existentialism – which reduces politics to the problems of bare life, surviving in constant fear, and the hatred that grows out of it – dissent as a microphysics of power reminds us that every politics is existential only to the extent to which human beings look for and find the meaning of their existence in it. However, human existence is not exhausted by politics. No politics, therefore, must become the system of decision-making about the meaning of life and human existence. 1. THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along 39

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by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies.1

These words from Havel’s The Power of the Powerless are often cited by critics of ‘the system’ – whether global civilizational, or local political – to support their apocalyptic vision of the overall societal collapse and ever bigger crisis which is described by Havel as ‘the general failure of modern humanity’.2 These critics are joined by all sorts of seekers of new foundations carried away by a naïve idea that the contemporary social crisis manifested in many different forms – from the collapse of financial markets, growing economic inequalities, and the decline of democratic politics to the mass migration and environmental disasters – may have a moral solution. The Power of the Powerless, nevertheless, is impossible to read as either an analytical critique of society, or an emancipatory programme and instruction manual for how to get involved in civil society. It does not make sense to attempt to classify the essay by using political, ideological, and philosophical categories. After all, who is still interested today in discussing whether Havel was a right-winger supported by and supporting the West, or a leftie dreaming of alternatives to the parliamentary democracy and market?! How important is it to establish whether emphasizing the environmental problems of humankind is an example of conservatism or radicalism? And is not the difference between political realism and idealism, still much used as intellectual crutches by politicians and their advisers today, just another symptom of political and intellectual quandary? 2. ‘THE PARADOXES OF LIFE, RIGHT?’!3 The Power of the Powerless requires a different reading. It is a text strongly echoing Havel’s talents for dramatization and thinking in paradoxes, which enabled him to formulate both the immodest call for ‘an existential revolution’4 and the invocation of Masaryk’s famous notion of everyday ‘smallscale work’ [drobná práce].5 However, there is both an argumentative and a fictional beauty in paradoxes. Havel, a profoundly committed democrat, thus can express his worries about human liberty by using the vocabulary of Martin Heidegger who, to put it very mildly, was indifferent about democratic society and its liberties. The essay’s topic obviously is paradoxical itself because power describes a situation of those who are pushed to the outskirts of society, if not beyond it, as the powerless. The interplay of contradictions occasionally leads some readers and interpreters to hardly original thoughts on ‘the powerlessness of the powerful’ and



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somehow automatically added variations on the theme of ‘the power of the powerful’ and ‘the powerlessness of the powerless’. However, understanding the literal and figurative meaning of the power of the powerless assumes understanding the power of paradoxes used by Havel to create a dramatic structure of his essay and to describe the meaning of dissent as an existential revolution in any society, including the open and democratic society. Understanding this general power of paradoxes and contradictions in modern thinking and civilization also opens up the possibility of understanding the currently bleak situation in Central Europe which, only a quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, started shifting from the democratization of society to what the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán described as the coming ‘era of the work-based nation state’ and an illiberal work-based society.6 Similarly, the Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski announced ‘the reconstruction of the state’ and nurtured the fantasy of ‘the fourth republic’7 replacing the immoral and corrupt liberal regime constituted after the fall of communism in 1989. Instead of an existential revolution, one witnesses in Central Europe and elsewhere a paradoxical counter-revolution turning politics into an existential matter of decision-making related to bare living in which the lust for power is as strong as the hatred of modern man with his notions of civil rights and democratic government.8 Images of nations as a community of blood and soil or cultural heritage as a hammer against ‘intruders’ are just some forms expressing the same hatred. Instead of liberty, fear reigns in Europe today. Instead of a civilized political debate, one witnesses, once again in the modern history of our continent, ever louder and popular thoughts on ‘the end of civilization’. However, the basic paradox of this mobilization of the politics of fear and its risks already had been formulated by Hannah Arendt in her classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism in the following words: Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likely to come from without. Nature has been mastered and no barbarians threaten to destroy what they cannot understand, as the Mongolians threatened Europe for centuries. Even the emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon within, not outside, our civilization. The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst.9

To understand our current social crisis in European and global society, which, by no means, is merely a political or an economic crisis, we must profoundly rethink this paradox of barbarianism stemming from within our civilization. It is exactly this paradox that is linked to the call for an existential revolution. However, this revolution must never become an ideology of political existentialism which promises to resolve the absurdity of individual life by the absoluteness of collective will.

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3. AN EXISTENTIAL REVOLUTION VERSUS POLITICAL EXISTENTIALISM According to Havel, an existential revolution has to precede all reconstructions and reconstitutions of society including those driven by ethics, politics and technology.10 It consists in resisting societal automatism entrenched in and dependent on all-pervasive apparatuses and technologies of power. It looks for alternatives contrasting what Havel described as the intentions of life and the intentions of the system.11 In this escalated revolt of life against the system, Havel’s vision strikingly resembles Jürgen Habermas’s heroic, yet vain attempt at founding the legitimacy of contemporary society with its functionally differentiated subsystems of politics, economy, law, and science in the legendary lifeworld [Lebenswelt] which had been considered a reservoir of humanity and its hopes by both scientifically strict phenomenology and poetically speculative philosophy. It is a revolt against the world in which the system is just another name for totality – self-creating and repressing the forces of life. Nevertheless, should the concept of an existential revolution (and the accompanying concept of the power of the powerless) preserve some meaning in the current social and political condition of European and global society, it is impossible to juggle with it in front of society’s curtain. Instead, this revolution has to proceed as a permanent contestation of words and concepts directly used on its stage. It cannot be conceived as a struggle between life and the system in which life could win as the foundational and legitimizing force of all systems. Life is not outside economic, political, legal, or technological structures. It is manifested in them! Every contestation of legitimacy, therefore, is a contestation of self-description of these structures and not some pre-political ultimate power of human reason to fundamentally shake ‘manipulative’ structures of the system. The self-constitution of different social systems, described as autopoiesis in contemporary social theory, does not preserve social totality but affirms and further enhances differentiation of modern society. The political power of the powerless thus does not consist in their ability to theatrically pull off the world’s ideological mask and, from their higher moral position of living in truth,12 reveal power’s true face. It is not behind the stage of what the German Jesuit Franz Neumayr called theatrum politicum almost three centuries ago.13 Everyone including dissidents is part of this theatre and we cannot preliminarily decide about our participation in it on the basis of some ‘life philosophy’ and individual or collective will. The social crisis is impossible to describe in terms of the simple contradiction between poetic life and the autopoietic system. Havel’s call for an existential revolution, therefore, is necessary to clarify and, in some respect,



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radicalize, because it cannot be conceptualized as just a record of the intentions of a life lived in truth against the falsity of complex civilizational ‘autototality’14 manipulating human beings by the lust of consumerism and the sedative power of bureaucratic efficiency. The difference between ‘living in truth’ and ‘social lies’ cannot describe the complexity of power and its strategies in contemporary society. Nevertheless, Havel’s essay continues to strongly resonate with the contemporary social and political condition for its capacity to relativize all apparently absolute concepts and categories, whether in politics with its ideologies, law with its coding of society into legalities and illegalities, economy with its rational laws of completely irrational consumption, or technique uselessly measuring its efficiency. It is exactly this power of relativization that eventually constitutes even the resistance against the politics of absolute fear and hatred. Existential revolution and dissent, therefore, are not morally fundamental but autopoietic – that is self-constitutive – resistances against all politics founded on the feelings of existential threat and perceived as the struggle for survival. 4. PEACE AS THE DEEPENING OF THE STATE OF WAR AND THE SOLIDARITY OF THE SHAKEN In ‘The Queen of the Night’, a song from the 1980s, the Czech folksinger Vladimír Merta sang about ‘armies of the day’ and ‘armies of the night’ and a man permanently thrown between these two worlds and wanting to run away from ‘their Eden, yet not knowing where to go’. The singer and poet thus illuminatingly grasped what Jan Patočka described in his Heretical Essays as the drama of freedom struggling against modern civilization’s pressure, mobilizing human beings in their fight for bare life and chaining them by fear.15 Patočka’s Heretical Essays show that the capacity to master the power of paradoxes belongs to the intellectual arsenal of both philosophers and dissidents. Patočka also undergoes a risky argumentative journey full of references to the works and ideas of Ernest Jünger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and their absolute experience of a warfront at which human existence announces itself as sacrifice and due to which even the rules of peacetime are structured by ‘the will to war’. Face-to-face with this war masked as peace and denial of life in mundane routines of economically and politically guaranteed survival, this powerlessness, nevertheless, paradoxically opens up a possibility of resistance which, according to Patočka, represents the very drama of freedom.16 Modern civilization constantly deepens its state of war. War is no more ‘a continuation of politics by other means’ as understood by Clausewitz.17

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From now on, Michel Foucault’s paraphrasing definition of peace as a continuation of war by other means18 applies as the most suitable description of the current state of war and peace. According to Patočka, history is exactly this conflict between ‘bare life’ chained by fear and ‘life at the summit’, which clearly sees the temporality and finiteness of human existence and is therefore capable of understanding what is at stake in the routines of daily life and transcending them by the resisting spiritual turn – the solidarity of the shaken.19 When Patočka recalls Socrates’s daimonion speaking in warnings and prohibitions and defines the solidarity of the shaken as the capacity to say NO to the states of war in modern civilization,20 this call for the spiritual turn and power needs to be perceived as a declaration of war on the world which turns even every peace and human life into war with its absurd victims, whether in the name of human progress, ideals of humanity, or cultural values, and ethnic or even racial purity. 5. WAR AGAINST ESTABLISHED DESCRIPTIONS OF THE POLITICAL WORLD: ON HAVEL’S INSPIRATION BY PATOČKA’S PHILOSOPHY Havel adopts Patočka’s critique of modern technical civilization exclusively focused on performance and ignoring the dimension of human responsibility. With this critique, he also adopts Patočka’s notion of daimonion as the capacity to say NO to the states of war in modern civilization. Furthermore, Havel extends this battlefield into the struggle against all established categories and distinctions in which modern politics describes itself. For instance, he effectively dismantles the systemically functioning, yet ever more questioned differentiation of political parties and their ideologies as left-wing, centrist, and right-wing. His use of Heidegger’s politically conservative call for the return to the sense of Being unmistakably echoes radical voices of the Left insisting on the fundamental reconstitution of society. Furthermore, the return to the authentic structures of community promoting ‘living in truth’ assumes a typically modern reconstruction of democratic society. Similarly, Havel dismantles the favourite distinction of political realism and idealism according to which politics is divided into the real world of power with its operations and the ideal world of aspirations and norms guiding politicians in their job of promoting the general good and justice in national and international contexts. He, therefore, pushes his reader to constantly ask if the political order is primarily to either follow specific values, or maintain itself through power and decision-making. In Havel’s notion of ‘auto-totality’, allegedly present in both communist and democratic societies,



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both technologies of power and ideological values actually constitute the totality of obedience, paralyzing life in its free expression. Power, especially nuclear power, certainly has an existential dimension because it can destroy human beings as both individuals and as a biological species. However, even the Cold War had not been exclusively considered as an irrational struggle for survival, but rather as a conflict of political values in which, for instance, ‘the fight for peace’, officially promoted by communist propaganda, represented a spectacular example of the Orwellian newspeak. The leaders of the Cold War political world followed the rationality of the Nash equilibrium according to which players cannot gain anything by changing their own strategies – in this case, by starting the nuclear war. However, even this strategic political game was not purely dominated by political realism and both superpowers and their allies understood themselves to be defending values and ideals worthy of greater or lesser sacrifices. The Power of the Powerless, therefore, also needs to be read as a declaration of war on all wars, cold or hot, because every difference between political realism and idealism only obscures the fact that even values and ideals lead to specific power manipulations. It is subsequently necessary to return to Patočka’s famous statement and ask again and again: What are those ‘things for which it is worthwhile to suffer’?21 – the statement constituting the intellectual and ethical structure of Havel’s essay, too. The answer is in the recognition that a free human being must critically stand even against all political values usurping objective validity so that the very value of freedom eventually does not become a mere ideological phrase and social category of the state-sanctioned metaphysics of power. 6. THE PARADOX OF HUMAN RIGHTS Radicalism and conservatism, revolution and reform, informal community and formal society, or the difference between authentic and alienated living do not represent fatal choices for the power of the powerless but constantly invite the critical revaluation of all these categories and values associated with them. The same is to be said about the vocabulary of human rights, which is often represented as a central front of the imaginary war against the civilization of war mobilizations using the human fear of bare life as its central political measure. According to Hannah Arendt, who so profoundly influenced Patočka’s philosophy and the whole intellectual environment of Czech dissent, totalitarian movements are defined by ‘cynical claims that no such thing as inalienable human rights existed and that the affirmations of the democracies

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to the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardice in the face of the cruel majesty of a new world’.22 Arendt then sceptically comments that ‘the very phrase “human rights” became for all concerned – victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike – the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy’;23 yet, the history of political dissent in totalitarian countries and the development of international law in the past seventy years showed that even totalitarianism had its internal changes and the idealism of human rights had proved to be the most realistic and efficient strategy of the resistance of the powerless. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, like in some of her other books, Arendt skilfully moves between reassertions of common knowledge and moral provocations and then unexpectedly strikes the reader with the most original idea or comment. She describes ‘the perplexities of the rights of man’24 and mainly reiterates Edmund Burke’s notorious critique of these rights as destructive due to their absolute and abstract nature. Like Burke, Arendt believes that rights and liberties must be entrenched in political authority. At the same time, however, she insightfully describes totalitarianism as the political organization of hate and fear depriving individuals and whole groups of their rights, which were, until then, considered inviolable. Why? Because the nation conquered the state! National interest and collective will became more important than the rule of law guaranteeing equal rights and freedoms for all citizens. Totalitarianism is the rule of the nation’s collective will over the rule of law. In this respect, Arendt highlights one important paradox of modern civilization, namely the paradox of human rights, which are inviolable and belong to the human being for simply being part of humankind, yet cannot be manifested and enforced without his or her belonging to a specific political community. Without political organization, people cannot guarantee their mutually equal rights, and equality becomes merely a matter of existence within the same undifferentiated and biologically determined human species. Without equality as the first political principle and criterion of justice, politics, nevertheless, becomes totalitarian in the sense that it determines who shall be included in and excluded from political community. According to Arendt, The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion – formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities – but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.25

She thus emphasizes both that human rights cannot exist without political community and that the nation state ‘cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down’.26



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Instead of politics, totalitarianism means a regress to the primal anarchical horde of one race in the name of which it is possible to sovereignly rule over the lives of all people by the most sophisticated and brutal policing arbitrarily turning anyone into a refugee without any rights, including the right to life. This is why one also needs to worry about and warn against the current European counter-revolution of the nation state founded on collective labour instead of civil rights. 7. RACISM IN THE SYSTEM WHICH ‘GIVES LIFE’ In his criticisms of Jean-Paul Sartre and his generation in the mid-1960s, Michel Foucault rejected the existentialist passion for life, history, politics, and all things absurd and relegated Sartre’s philosophy to the level of a contemporary mythology.27 Instead, he promoted another passion, namely the passion for concepts and the ‘system’ that sustains humans in time and space, runs through them, underlays them, and can organize itself as knowledge or language.28 Man as subject is actually part of the structures of society and knowledge, which can both constitute and dissolve it. Foucault’s much discussed idea of ‘the end of man’ actually is one of many variations on Nietzsche’s idea of ‘the death of god’ and Foucault explicitly states that ‘in our day […] the absence or the death of God […] is affirmed as the end of man’.29 However, more importantly, it also signifies the system’s capacity to organize, evolve, and transform itself. The idea of humanity including the rights of man is an outcome of this capacity and historical evolution of the system. Furthermore, the idea of the end of man also announces the end of the existential and philosophical myth of history as the relationship between the freedom of man and social reality which informs Patočka’s concept of the solidarity of the shaken as a community of ‘spiritual people’. According to Foucault, the system does not need human subjects for its existence or for the persistence of its operative conceptual distinctions. Today, we can identify these distinctions in different social systems, such as government/opposition in the political system, profit/loss in the economic system, and legality/illegality in the system of positive law. Sartre responded by criticizing Foucault’s emphasis on internal structures and conceptual distinctions in the systems of human sciences. According to him, this approach means ‘the rejection of history’ which is not an archaeology reconstructing the traces of vanished knowledge but a ‘geology’ describing the series of successive layers making up our ‘ground’ without the possibility of historical reflection understanding the practical process of how ‘mankind passes from one thought to another’.30 However, the extent

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of the error committed by Marxist and existentialist philosophers who, for ideological reasons or intellectual misunderstanding, considered Foucault a reactionary replacing man by the system and politics or by technologies of power became obvious when Foucault started analysing modern society as a system of normalizing and totalizing practices in which the classic concept of political sovereignty as right to take life or let live […] came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die. The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die.31

This new ‘right to make live’ is typical of modern society in which even peace of civility is a continuation of war, now conducted without front lines in the whole social body, and the power of social norms gradually marginalizes constitutionally legislated rules of polity. According to Foucault, even the Marxist class struggle is a kind of racism32 and modern society evolves as a gradual replacement of state sovereignty by the biological-medical perspectives.33 The nation is turned into a racial category and the sovereign people transform into the population disciplined by social norms. Modern democracies, therefore, have their population policies controlling everything from hygiene rules in restaurants to medical care, housing, and the system of social security. Population is not governed by the law but by the norm producing conditions under which it is specified what is to live and what will be allowed to die. As Foucault comments: It is this notion, this concept of the nation, that will give rise to the famous revolutionary problem of the nation; it will, of course, give rise to the basic concepts of nineteenth-century nationalism. It will also give rise to the notion of race. And, finally, it will give rise to the notion of class.34

Nation becomes one of many forms of the race’s declaration of war on the rule of law and sources of the totalization of society. The civil war is not replaced by civil society and peaceful cooperation but by the biological struggle for ‘the right to life’ masked in civil terms of democratic politics. It is possible only when the sovereign nation takes over the state and subjects it to the new forces of bio-politics, which are anti-state and based on the notion of society as a specific biological form for which individuals have to be capable and willing to sacrifice not only their way of life but their life itself. This turn is behind modern totalitarianism in all its forms. Foucault does not believe in the ethnos/demos distinction separating the concept of the political and democratic nation from its ethnic and cultural counterpart,



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but instead associates racism with the general process of democratization of modern society. When the state becomes democratic and sovereignty starts to be exercized by the people instead of the monarch, sovereign power begins to be burdened by disciplinary subjugation, which has nothing to do with the laws and bureaucracy, and makes political sovereignty subject of social norms and population bio-politics. In this power constellation, labelling, for instance, euthanasia as a ‘human right’ invites serious questions about the very concept of the rights of man and its transformation in the last two centuries. What appears to be a matter of personal choice is actually another form of politics regulating life and death of the whole population and obscuring the imposing power of medicine and biological concepts by the language of ethics. The specificity of racism, Foucault notes, is ‘not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power’.35 Biological racism of the evolutionist type, therefore, is present in democracies as well as in authoritarian societies – the Nazi and communist totalitarian societies – and affects prisoners, dissidents, the mentally ill, etc. Racism is thus impossible to study only in its known extreme ideological and political forms – for instance, in the racism exhibited by Nazi Germany or North Korea. It equally has to be analyzed in the eugenics and social welfare policies of, for example, the United States with their ideology of liberal individualism or Scandinavian social democracies. 8. STRENGTHENING, OR WEAKENING THE RIGHTS? Is there any help or solution to this paradox of inclusive democratization proceeding as exclusive racialization? One possibility, I believe, is to turn upside down the classic argument of legal and political positivists, such as Edmund Burke, Hannah Arendt, and many others, and assume that state power is just one of many power forms in contemporary global society. There are many other, often more powerful and efficient, constellations and strategies associated with the historical process of globalization, which have diminished and limited the state and its power and, with it, the democratic legitimacy, civil rights, and freedoms guaranteed by the state. The power of economic globalization, flexibility of social networks, effects of contemporary science, and the performance of technologies all marginalize the political institutions of the democratic state. The right to privacy is endangered by global corporations, such as Google and Facebook, which have successfully transformed personal views, interests, and wishes into products with added value. The national government of China, one with nuclear powers, expropriates the land of powerless farmers and turns them into refugees in

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their own country, giving priority to the foreign investors from Europe and the United States promising to build more factories and assembly plants. Pharmaceutical companies pillage cultural heritage and knowledge of traditional medicine in Africa and Amazonia and cynically subject it to their own copyright. In this globalized world, it is impossible to be consoled by a naïve belief that everything will end up well and humankind will experience a moral renewal, rediscover its inviolable and universally valid rights, and start building political constitutions as founding institutions of cosmopolitan democratic society. In this world, however, it is equally wrong to cynically reject the very concept of the rights of man and citizen as an abstract ideology once described by Jeremy Bentham as ‘nonsense upon stilts’.36 9. AN ‘ORDINARY TRIAL’, INJUSTICE, AND THE SOLIDARITY OF THE SHAKEN: ON DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PATOČKA AND FOUCAULT In this situation, how should one understand Havel’s notion of an existential revolution as the revolution of human rights necessary to be defended as ‘truths’?37 To better understand the rights as ‘truths’, we should remind ourselves of a gathering of French intellectuals and Soviet dissidents organized by Foucault in June 1977 and coinciding with Leonid Brezhnev’s visit to Paris. This gesture of solidarity and resistance has a more general context because, in December 1976 – not long before the gathering – Foucault had been invited to participate in the TV programme Apostrophes on ‘man’s future’ and discuss his new book The Will to Knowledge. However, he surprised the interviewer by refusing to do so and preferring to talk about a book which did not have any author. It was a book ‘made up of fragments of reality, things said, deeds, documents, sadness, misfortunes’ and injustices endured by Dr Stern, a Soviet citizen, during ‘an ordinary trial’ in the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s.38 The book was based on secret tape recordings smuggled out of the Soviet Union and later published under the title The U. S. S. R. Versus Dr. Mikhail Stern: An Ordinary Trial in the Soviet Union.39 It covered the criminal trial of Dr Stern who refused the KGB’s instructions to forbid his two sons emigrating to Israel and subsequently was falsely accused of taking bribes and sentenced to eight years of forced labour. What was extraordinary in this ‘ordinary trial’, apart from the courage of the children of the accused recording and smuggling the tapes to the West, was the fact that witnesses for the prosecution, who were supposed to confirm the false accusations, actually instead confirmed Dr Stern’s innocence during the court hearings. Gross injustice committed by the communist regime was obvious, yet Foucault was



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even more fascinated by those witnesses – ordinary people who wrestled fear and, despite the regime’s threat of repression, decided to ‘come to tell us what the truth is’40 and thus managed to say NO to the state’s repressive power. Foucault summarized this lesson in the following words: ‘Never forget that, faced with the power the state has over bodies, there is also the resistance of individuals who know how to say no.’41 Truth is not abstract and objective; it is always part of some context – from state violence and apparatuses of justice to the scientific laboratories and philosophical seminars. It is determined by situations, consequences, and circumstances under which people come to believe what is truth and, as such, has to be expressed and made public. Responding to ‘ordinary trials’ in communist or fascist regimes as well as to the treatment of prisoners or patients in psychiatric clinics, Foucault comes to the noteworthy, yet, due to his activism, not completely surprising conclusion that there exists an international citizenry that has its rights, that has its duties, and that is committed to rise up against every abuse of power, no matter who the author, no matter who the victims. After all, we are all ruled, and as such, we are in solidarity.42

In other words, human solidarity is not constituted only after people become citizens of their polity. It emerges simply because people are being subjugated and disciplined by societal power. Citizenry is not an outcome of the political institutionalization of power but a much more radical outcome of resistance against power in all its forms – moral values, psychiatric practices, and any of the other forces generated by societal norms. This is also why Foucault criticized primitive Marxist views including the economic substructure/political superstructure distinction according to which the class struggle between the exploiting and exploited classes is a social manifestation of universal human progress and the objective truth of history. Similarly, his famous TV debate with Noam Chomsky showed how critical he was of moralist missionaries of the Left and their naïve views of law and justice as attributes of the human nature which need to be protected by all governments and manifest, through political struggles, universal humanity. Instead of these metaphysical projects, Foucault philosophically and practically focused on what he described as a microphysics of power. Instead of being part of the historical drama of freedom at the front line, man appears in the grid of many opposite forces. Foucault’s notion of the solidarity of the shaken therefore cannot promise liberation from everyday routine living. Like life, death belongs to the system and not to the individuals or groups such as the nation, dissidents, etc.

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However, this does not mean that we should give up on the possibility of the solidarity of the shaken and the right to resistance. This right is not an expression of the forces of life but a revolt against all living conditions justified as unconditional interests of society in its totality. It is the solidarity of those who, like David Byrne in his song ‘The Civil Wars’, realize that ‘The war is in you/ the war is in me/ The war is in everybody now/ The wolf is loose/ he’s living in you.’43 The shock comes from the knowledge that it is impossible to hide from power because it passes through and subjugates all of us. We do not live like Rousseau’s noble savages who could mutually agree on constituting their political community. We live under the constant threat that any power constellation can turn us into barbarians excluded from the civilization into which we had been born. However, the solidarity of Foucault’s people shaken by this situation and ‘the end of man’ is not weaker or less human than the solidarity of Patočka’s ‘spiritual people’. It grows due to the recognition of the inhuman in humanity that can keep its last remains so profoundly shaken by all disasters of modern civilization. And only the rights born out of such shock of inhumanity can be called human rights.

CONCLUSION: DISSENT AS A MICROPHYSICS OF POWER Power is not a rule of some members of society over the others and it is misleading to distinguish between those who have it and those who make up the powerless. As Foucault comments: Power functions. Power is exercized through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them.44

If Patočka relates the solidarity of the shaken with the warfront experience of death and human mortality revealing the meaning of history as the drama of freedom, Foucault reminds us that modern society is the state of war without a front and the solidarity of the shaken assumes the acknowledgement that even the apparently universal and historical drama of freedom depends on a specific genealogy of power within the system of mutually confronting forces and structures of hierarchies and submissions. Unlike Foucault, Havel seemingly argues according to the classic canon of the social theory of modernity which distinguishes between ‘power’ and ‘the powerless’ and describes the modern technical civilization via the Hegelian



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and Marxist concepts of ‘man’s alienation’ or the Weberian ‘iron cage’ of ever growing efficiency and rationalization which is accompanied by the loss of the meaning of life. Like so many other philosophers, sociologists and intellectuals before and after him, Havel was extremely fascinated by the contradiction between rationally and bureaucratically organized society and the life within it which preserved its function, yet lost its meaning. A more careful reading of Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, nevertheless, reveals a fascination with power similar to Foucault’s philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s. Like Foucault, Havel considers power a problem of society, not merely politics. It is a momentary constellation and an effect of forces and strategies encountered by modern man living in global society everywhere – in the post-totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Bloc as well as in Western democracies. All these regimes struggle to achieve legitimacy by the ideology of economic growth and consumerism accompanied by bureaucratic administration and technical efficiency. Havel distinguishes between physical and metaphysical power – between manipulative mechanisms to control citizens and their ideological explanations.45 Post-totalitarian systems are typical of the decline of ideology promoting the unity of proletarians around the world, coinciding with the persistence of surveillance disciplining Havel’s famous greengrocer and normalizing his behaviour to ‘avoid problems’. Ideology as a bridge between man and the system is less important than the system’s ‘automatism’ pushing people into ‘living within a lie’.46 It is, therefore, this automatism that needs to be rejected in the name of ‘living in truth’.47 Havel also does not invite the fictitious character of the greengrocer to do anything more politically courageous than what Foucault admired on the Stern’s ‘ordinary trial’ witnesses, namely to say NO. However, this statement already represents a specific microphysics of power which is tactical and strategic because it realizes that such truth represents resistance, the power of which paradoxically grows hand-in-hand with its seemingly growing powerlessness vis-à-vis state violence and apparatuses of legal justice. Normalization, therefore, is not just one period of recent Czech history related to the communist consolidation of power after the 1968 invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies. It is a general power strategy typical of modern society. Subsequently, a dissident is neither a physicist of power granting the political system’s functionality, nor a metaphysician of power leading ideological disputes regarding its legitimacy. He or she is a microphysicist of power provoking the system to react and disclose its practices of disciplinization and subjugation in their extremities and thus delegitimize itself.48 Revolting against the system which, in Foucault’s words, ‘gives life’ is completely different from revolting against the system in the name of life or against the technologies of power in the name of their legitimacy. It is

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resistance against society masked by the categories of nation, people, and race. It is resistance against the system destroying societal differences and describing itself as totality. It is resistance against the totality of the biological category of race colonizing the state in the nation’s disguise and using political institutions to govern the whole society. However, such resistance does not mean a simple return to the democratic politics of civil peace. It has to promote anti-disciplinary rights challenging the totalizing rule present in all kinds of modern politics. Dissent is a microphysics of the power of the powerless which can effectively disrupt both the physics and metaphysics of state power. Its existential revolution means resistance against political existentialism which reduces politics to the problems of bare life and surviving in the constant fear and hatred growing out of it. It thus continuously reminds us that every politics is existential only to the extent to which human beings look for and find the sense of their existence in it. However, their existence is not exhausted by politics. Politics must never become the system of decision-making about the meaning of life and human existence. NOTES 1. Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 91. 2. Ibid., 90. 3. From Václav Havel, ‘Audience’, in Three Vaněk Plays: Audience, Protest, Unveiling, trans. Jan Novák (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 7. 4. Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless, 90. 5. Ibid., 61. 6. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Speech at the 25th Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp, 30 July 2014. Available at http://www.kormany.hu/ en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-viktor-orban-sspeech-at-the-25th-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp. 7. ‘Poland Turns Right: A Conservative Enigma’, The Economist, 31 October 2015. 8. Whenever referring to the classic and historically entrenched notion of ‘the rights of man’ in this chapter, I preserve the gendered concept of ‘man’ instead of using gender-neutral language. 9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967 [originally published in 1951]), 302. 10. Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless, 90.



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11. Ibid., 29. Unfortunately, the English translation uses the concept of ‘the aims’ of the system and ‘the aims’ of life. However, the Czech original reads: ‘Mezi intencemi post-totalitního systému a intencemi života zeje propast’; the translation should thus read: ‘There is an abyss between the intentions of the post-totalitarian system and the intentions of life’. 12. Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless, 39. 13. Fran Neumayr, Theatrum Politicum, 1760. Available at https://books.google. co.uk/books?id=gZlgAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA519&lpg=PA519&dq=franz+neumayr+ theatrum+politicum&source=bl&ots=_ZT0ammaw0&sig=-XH9kbAY_6HYYR6n NWb_EL4me6g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiy58PxoqTKAhXEVxQKHcGyAi UQ6AEIQzAH#v=onepage&q=franz%20neumayr%20theatrum%20politicum&f= false. 14. Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless, 36. 15. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 130. 16. See also James Dodd, ‘The Twentieth Century as War’, in Ivan Chvatík and Erika Abrams (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology: Centenary Papers (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 203–14. 17. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Col. J. J. Graham. New and Revised edition with Introduction and Notes by Col. F. N. Maude, in Three Volumes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & C., 1918). Vol. 1. Ch. I ‘What is War?’, par. 24. 18. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003), 16. 19. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 135. 20. For further information on Patočka’s ethics, see, for instance, Edward F. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patočka (New York: SUNY, 2002), 145ff. 21. Jan Patočka, ‘What We Can and Cannot Expect from Charta 77’, in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 346. 22. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 269. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 290. 25. Ibid., 295. 26. Ibid., 290. 27. See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 160. 28. Ibid., 161. 29. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002; first published in English in 1970), 420. 30. Sartre in an interview with Bernard Pingaud in the review L’Arc, No. 30, 1966. Quoted from Eribon, Michel Foucault, 163. 31. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’, 241.

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32. Ibid., 262. 33. Ibid., 80ff. 34. Ibid., 134. 35. Ibid., 258. 36. Jeremy Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense Upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution, ed. Philip Schofield, Catherine PeaseWatkin and Cyprian Blamires (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 317. 37. Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless, 72. 38. Quoted from Eribon, Michel Foucault, 277. 39. August Stern (ed.), The U. S. S. R. Versus Dr. Mikhail Stern: An Ordinary Trial in the Soviet Union (London: Johnathan Cape, 1978). 40. Quoted from Eribon, Michel Foucault, 278. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 279. 43. David Byrne, ‘The Civil Wars’, from the album Feelings (Luaka Bop/Warner Bros, 1997). 44. Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’, 29. 45. See, for instance, Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless, 26–9. 46. Ibid., 30–1. 47. Ibid., 72. 48. For further details, see Jiří Přibáň, Dissidents of Law: On the 1989 Revolutions, Legitimations, Fictions of Legality and Contemporary Version of the Social Contract (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

Chapter 6

The Soul as Site of Dissidence Simona Forti

In my work New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today,1 I devoted a chapter to tackling the philosophical bond between the idea of ‘caring for the soul’ as understood by Jan Patočka and the ‘care of the self’ put forward by Foucault. I am convinced that by looking at Foucault’s late courses through the lens of Patočka’s idea of soul, on the one side, and looking at Patočka’s idea of philosophical dissidence through Foucault’s notion of parrhesia, on the other side, we can shed new light on each of these ideas. In these pages I do not intend to go once more through the many coincidences among texts and themes that confirm the thesis of an affinity between the two authors. It is sufficient for now to say that the idea of the ‘care for the soul’, as intended by Patočka, and the idea of ‘life within-the-truth’ – as intended by other dissident Patočkian thinkers, such as Václav Havel – played a role in shaping Foucault’s later ideas, centred on the notions of ‘care of the self’ and ‘parrhesia’. Viewed through this hermeneutical lens, the last Foucault no longer appears as the bearer of a sheer relativistic aesthetization of Life, and Patočka no longer stands out as the thinker of a new Platonic-Christian humanism. Hence, what I will attempt to argue here is that in spite of Foucault’s ambivalent comments,2 Patočka’s notion of the soul not only does not at all respond to a metaphysical dualism, but it can be envisaged as the very site of dissidence. Far from being the outcome of a normative set of rules imposed from above on a subject who becomes the true dissident after conforming to it, dissidence as conceived of by the Czech author is akin to Foucault’s concept of ‘counter-conduct’: a specific, ‘auto-normative’ ‘form of bios’. The polarized mood of the Cold War prevented Western intellectuals of the Left from delving deeply into the philosophical core of the Eastern dissidence. The philosophers from the East who opposed communist regimes 57

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were too quickly subsumed under liberal anti-communist discourse or the label of a traditional Christian humanism. It is one of the merits of Foucault’s intellectual anti-conformism to grasp the philosophical and ethical implications of some of the dissidents’ writings: first of all the same de-substantialization of the idea of power that he, himself, was undertaking. Even if it is perhaps exaggerated, as Szakolczai claimed,3 to conclude that Foucault changed his vision about the relation between power and subjectivity thanks to the influence that Eastern dissidence had on his thought, the resonance is still striking. The crucial assumption that they shared was precisely a rejection of the idea that power is always rooted in an objectivizable, external reality; that it is always a power monopolized by ‘others’, from a place that is totally distant from our lives. It is the power of ‘other institutions’, ‘other groups’, ‘other classes’. It is the power of an ‘outside’ sphere over which we have no responsibility. This is precisely the view that Michel Foucault has always put into question, with particular emphasis, in his final works, on the role of subjectivity’s processes. Those who were involved in the Charter 77 movement formulated their political opposition and critique in philosophical terms, according to which domination, oppression, and the Gulag of communist rules were not the outcome of some essence of evil power. They were rather the result of daily actions that reinforced each other and ensured the functioning of the regime. The aim of Charta 77 was, first of all, to tear down the image of a rock-like, anonymous state mechanism that left innocent subjects with the sole option of enduring it. In itself, power is neither guilty nor innocent. For this reason, the search for a ‘good power’ – constructed in order to counter an ‘evil power’ – is both naïve and politically ineffective. The dissidents’ critique can thus be described as aimed at dismantling the myth of passive obedience and unmasking the subjective ‘desires’ of ‘depersonalization’.4 This is one of the sources of Patočka’s criticisms, and later Havel’s, against the ideological justifications with which we allow the mark of conformism to be imprinted on us, in both the East and the West. If it is true that the political pathologies of the contemporary world are the result of a hyper-rationalism turned to nihilism, the appeal to universalistic, normative theories do not suffice to counteract its consequences. When subjectivity remains unchanged, all that happens is an overturning of those who monopolize political action, without changing the real structure of the exercise of power. A much more useful approach is to probe into the microphysical dynamic of the collision between individuals – their lifeworlds – and the bureaucratic legality of the system claiming to be neutral and anonymous. As a matter of fact, all dissidents, regardless of their different origins – they ranged from rock fans to theologians – believed it was a duty to oppose the ‘institutional lie’ of the



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regime and to implement a series of actions and practices that responded to the so-called ‘life-in-the-truth’.5 It’s not surprising then that Michel Foucault, already in the 1977–1978 course on Security, Territory, Population, trying to express the meaning of the so-called ‘counter-conducts’, mentions the relevance of what is taking place in Central-Eastern Europe as a historical example of ‘counter-conduct’ practices. Although disliking the term, for him still too tied to a rigid political schema, Foucault reads the ‘dissidence’ in the East as practices of disobedience contra a sort of bio-political pastoral power. ‘We could speak’, he says, ‘of the pastoralization of power in the Soviet Union. Certainly there is bureaucratization of the party. There is also pastoralization of the party, and dissidence, the political struggles that we put together under the name of dissidence, certainly have an essential, fundamental dimension that is refusal of this form of being conducted. [...] The whole pastoral practice of salvation is challenged’.6 As if, Foucault continues, the ‘dissidents’, with their daily way of conducting themselves, of living and thinking their own lives, were refusing a pastoral system of obedience, its truth, and its endless examination that continually tells men and women what they are in the core of themselves, healthy or sick, mad or not mad, right or wrong. If not a true paradigm, the circularity taking place between the historical experience of dissent, the choices made by dissidents for an ethos of truth, and the involvement of philosophy, provided Foucault with an example of the implementation of the deconstruction of a substantialized notion of power. It was, for him, the possibility of observing how a subject can constitute itself as a force field of ethical and political resistance and as a locus of backward action against the pressures of a system of domination. Now, in what direction should we rethink the relation among subject, power, and truth? 1. WHAT IS A SOUL? ‘To be pregnant’, Patočka said at the end of the 1960s, ‘a philosophical thought, whatever it may be, should take a position on the front line’.7 Patočka’s life, of course, might have seemed as an example of parrhesia. Arrested by the political police, Patočka was struck down by a brain haemorrhage following a series of exhausting interrogations, the last of which, on Sunday 13 March 1977, lasted more than ten hours. While there can be no doubt about the political significance of his death, there nevertheless remains an unsolved question: What philosophical meaning can be attributed to it? Was it, perhaps, a sacrifice made in the name of the good which according to many interpreters defines the Christian horizon of the Prague thinker?

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Patočka’s language sometimes deceives. It seems often still in tune with traditional humanism’s lexicon. This is the reason why many interpreters have numbered the philosopher among the supporters of a renewed Christianized Platonism, of which the notion of ‘soul’ would be the main indicator. However, I am convinced that Patočka’s ‘asubjective phenomenology’, as he defines his own philosophy, responds to its heretical call through that very idea of soul, which does not imply a religious presupposition, but a radical theory of the ‘polemos’.8 In the 1973 book Plato and Europe,9 the text quoted by Foucault, Patočka diagnozed the crisis of European culture as obliviousness to the notion of soul. An invention of the Greek philosophers, regarded as mortal or as immortal, the soul was still something for which one ‘had to take care’. This was in fact the only way in which mortals could become immortals. This is the true lesson of the Greeks, first of all of Heraclitus. Immortality was not the true nature of the soul. Because far from being an entity or a substance, the soul is an energy, an activity, a movement triggered by a specific way of being and perceiving by the psyché. In this sense, for Patočka, the soul is that which enables one to overcome the simple dualism of the mythical world, the dualism between the everyday and the divine, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Here, then, even in the text on Plato, the distinction emerges which recurs in all of his works: the difference between the ‘forces of the day’ and the ‘forces of the night’. The conflict between these forces – which constantly recurs in different forms in every human life – is the movement of existence:10 a disturbance which shakes us from the guarantees of the forces of the day – from institutions to intimate feelings – and exposes us to the truth that reveals the precariousness of our life. Philosophy and thinking, then, mean ‘caring for the soul’; and ‘the care for the soul’ is nothing but the possibility that opens the way, for humans, to go beyond both: their daily strategies of surviving and their natural horror towards death; beyond habits and customs and beyond the natural fear which mythology talks about. Pre-Socratic philosophy – chiefly Heraclitus’s logos – thus discovered the ‘care for the soul’ to be that opportunity exclusive to man to question himself and reality. The Platonic doctrine brought this exercise to the apex of its expressive potential. To be sure, in spite of Patočka’s language, Plato and Europe already expresses the heretical intent. In other words, it is the intention to revive the notion of a soul as a guard against relativism, but also as a barrier to any substantialization of thought, either Christian or rationalistic. In the Heretical Essays, published in 1975, the awareness of duality and polemos acquires all the weight of ethical and political demands. In this work, the crisis of European rationalism fully shows itself in the wars of the twentieth century.11 In reality, Patočka states, we are not simply facing the advent of the ‘kingdom



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of the night’. The wars for the domination and partitioning of Europe were aimed at making the continent a giant complex of energy at the service of the ‘kingdom of the day’. It was therefore ‘the forces of the day’, those forces that claim to work for progress and to seek peace, ‘which for four years sent millions of humans into hellfire’.12 What have the bloody wars of the twentieth century and the ideologies that inspired them taught us? What ‘secret’ of the time is Patočka revealing to us? It is this: that a distorted rapport between life and death reached the apex of perversion in the twentieth century. For the individual ensconced in the forces of the day life is everything. It is the absolute value. Paradoxically, from the standpoint of the ‘forces of the day’, for the powers that accumulate life and energy, the life of the individual does not exist.13 Both of them act as if death did not exist. So Patočka’s ultimate message is unequivocal: death was not the century’s great undisputed grand dame, but life was, the life that monopolizes and captures both individuals and communities. The ‘powers of the day’ thereby lose their pristine innocence, and become the carriers of a power that moves downwards towards a final event of death. Not unlike Foucault, who interrogated bio-politics, a politics which brought about death in the name of life,14 Patočka accused the absolutization and maximization of life of being a powerful instrument of death. If looked at from an ontological perspective, Patočka appears to conclude that such forces have not only haunted the twentieth century, but it was only in this century that they managed so completely to bring about the separation between death and life, in such a way as to make life the complete opposite of death. In the pages of the Heretical Essays, the reciprocal otherness of life and death is one of the most powerful questioned issues. So, just for having denied its nocturnal face, its inextricable link with death, life is submerged by violence and death. Denied, death returns, but in the guise of devastation. By closing one’s eyes to death, by never ending with the ‘preparations for life’, as Musil says, death takes possession of life. An appeal to offer our civilization a faint possibility of change, of leaving behind the hegemony of force, comes to light in the lines of all the Heretical Essays. The call, to make a return to a different relationship between life and death, is mediated today, in contrast to Ancient philosophy, by the words of those who, shaken by the experience of war, have been able to grasp its deeper meaning. So, then, what is Jan Patočka suggesting to us? He is suggesting that there are two ways in which one can relate life and death, ways that are radically incompatible with each other. The first is that assumed by all the wars of the twentieth century and which continues to act not only in post-totalitarian regimes, but also under the surface of Western liberal democracies. To this way of thinking, death and the dead are no more than the necessary tribute paid for the affirmation of life, the price paid for the stabilization of its power.

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It is the cost demanded by the forces of the day to which in reality we all feel bound. Such forces are in the final analysis constituted and empowered by our ties, our needs, and by everything that roots life together in a system of safeguards and protections. The government of the forces of the day objectivizes our lives by promising to satisfy daily needs: in simpler words, by promising a way of life without any threat. To the eyes of those who have been at the front, however, the truth of a different relationship between life and death has been glimpsed. Only in this sense can one say that the sacrifice of the victims had a value: it has served to liberate us from the objectifying power of the forces of the day. Granting an ‘absolute meaning’ to the power of those who have died does not mean either sanctifying their ‘sacrifice’ or believing that it is the ultimate ethical conduct. Rather, it means recognizing that those deaths cannot and should not be justified in the name of anything else. ‘Dying for’ socialism and communism, ‘dying for’ the race or for democracy are only masks exploited by life to increase its power. Now, if death is instead accepted as constitutive of our individual lives, even the ‘sense of life’ can be rethought. Closer to Heraclitus than to Plato or Christianity, Patočka says that, as for those who had experienced the front line, there is another way of linking life and death together. First of all, those people know that death is not the nothingness that the forces of death claim it to be; the nothingness that they constantly use to enslave us while at the same time denying its relevance. Only by recognizing the inevitability of the night can we overthrow, or at least distance ourselves from, the absolutist sense of the day conferred by the logic of power; only in this way do we manage to deconstruct all the narratives and calculations that maximize life. This is an experience that can be had only individually, but makes no sense if it cannot be shared and communicated. On it rests the ‘solidarity of the shaken’.15 It is the solidarity among those who, having had all their assumptions shaken, can no longer view them as obvious. It is a solidarity that transcends all forms of belonging, a solidarity that cannot be identified with any class, profession, nationality, or culture. It is the community of those who have been able to understand what is at stake in life and death and therefore in history, and are also able to understand that history is this conflict between naked life, shackled by fear, and ‘life at the peak’, which sees clearly that life and peace have an end. Only the individual capable of understanding this and capable of change, by a sort of metanoia, is a ‘spiritual man’. I do not believe, then, that Derrida, in The Gift of Death,16 is right: in Patočka, self-sacrifice does not have only a religious meaning. When he speaks of a place and a time for change, or of the subject of responsibility, he does not speak of a sense of an otherworldly salvation, of an eschatological finale. It is true that at stake is a metanoia, but an unusual one which has no



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other place and time than those of the attitude of the self to itself. This is a person who ‘lives in truth’ for the simple reason that he or she knows that the care for death cannot be disassociated from the care for life. And if a way out of the collapse of European history can be conceived by recalling the past, it is not a religious past, but rather the philosophical past: in particular, that ‘care for the soul’ [epimeleia] which from the beginning characterized Patočka’s ideas as a negative Platonism. The theme of the epimeleia in fact stems from a series of writings from the mid-1950s, posthumously published in a text titled Negative Platonism.17 These essays contain incontestable evidence of Patočka’s attempts, from the beginning, to distance himself from every endeavour to create an integral humanism as a possible escape from nihilism. More clearly than in the book devoted to Plato and Europe, and in a less dramatic way than in the Heretical Essays, in these pages it is already beyond doubt that the soul should not be understood in a metaphysical sense. ‘Care for the soul’ refers to the ‘movement of distancing ourselves from what we are immersed in’. As he would repeat in the book of 1973, the soul is the place of ‘philosophizing’, if by philosophy we mean the action of a life which leaves itself, puts itself into question, and returns to itself. From Socrates, philosophy was therefore not seen as a guide for a soul journeying towards the eternal truth. Rather it is the praxis of interrogation, the kind of interrogation that triggers the process of thought. Such a perspective has no other objective than to avoid the identification of life with one of the simple opinions provided by its context. Patočka’s Socrates is therefore the heretic who shakes the foundations of Greek society; he is the merciless critic of all those who believe they have the truth and of those who presume to be able to deduce absolute rules from the doxa. In other words, ‘negative Platonism’ is completely different from the metaphysical Platonism on which Western philosophy has built its structure. Patočka’s approach certainly owes a debt to Nietzsche and Heidegger, but while they rejected the Platonic works in toto, Patočka instead – not unlike Arendt and Foucault – saves and enhances the dialogues from which it is possible to extract an autonomous ‘Socratic moment’. The Heideggarian ‘step back from metaphysics’ cannot, according to Patočka, get over Socrates. Socratic philosophy is a ‘negative philosophy’ not only because it refuses to assume any positive content of truth, but also because it appropriates negativity as a condition of being able to be free; that is to say, being capable of a distance, of a shift, or of overcoming all types of objectivization and identification. The greatness of Socrates, in short, was his ability to maintain the transcendence of the given reality without ever reaching a point that would put an end to actual transcending. This, according to Patočka, is Socratic freedom. In contrast to positive Platonism, which believes in the possibility of a path of elevation up to the idea, negative Platonism never claims to go

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beyond concrete, historical experience. It simply retains its awareness of its transience. Patočka compares Socratic freedom to the notion of chorismos, used earlier by Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics to try to explain the separation between idea and reality. Patočka’s chorismos does refer to a separation, but not of two realms coordinated or bound by a third that comes to embrace them. Chorismos is the separation itself or, better, it denotes the very movement of separation.18 We find the same idea of transcendence and movement at the centre of the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. There is an undeniable continuity between these early writings on Socrates and the essays of the mid-1970s, in which the figure of the dissenting intellectual takes form. The spiritual person, he wrote in those years, is a man who exposes himself to the negative.19 It is he who lives without roots. It is he who has the sense of wholeness, a totality that is not anything objective, but the device of ‘a disobjectivising power’. For this reason, it cannot be translated into a doctrine of the truth nor into a doctrine of the good. But not for this reason is it arbitrary. Our capacity for truth depends on our ability to distance ourselves, to free ourselves from the clutches of objects and objectivity. The call to truth is the call to freedom. Patočka’s Socrates, viewed through the lens of Heidegger, intertwines freedom and truth. Truth means, as with Heidegger, ‘leaving things be’; it also, principally, indicates a movement of life that is constituted as an ethos: ethical freedom that in the first instance allows us to challenge the given norm and to distance ourselves from the naivety of passed-on convictions. The soul – we may say using other terms – is a process of subjectivation, not far from the idea of care of the self as parrhesia in Foucault’s later works. It is a practice of continuous questioning by the subject of him/herself and his/her conditions, of having become what he/she is and of why reality is configured in its present form. While Patočka did not abandon the term soul, a heavily connoted term, he used it mainly in the Greek sense of a specific skill or ability. It is, in other words, the term that stands for the action of transcendence,20 in the sense of being continuously changing. Becoming ethical subjects is therefore to succeed in perceiving the difference between life as it is presented to us and life in its communality with death, and being able to make this tension into the ‘non-ecstatic’ and ‘non-orgiastic’ antidote to the power of the everyday. The significance of the words that have been used by metaphysics receives a radical deconstruction in Patočka’s work. The soul – at least as I see it – is not a substance separate from the body, neither is it something that survives the body and that can aspire to eternal life. It is that which in the subject constantly offers resistance. It is the movement that distances itself from the power of things, from the authority of politics, from the blackmail of



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violence, and from the pressure of the desire of life. In a word, it is the power to resist another power. 2. ‘LIVING IN TRUTH’ AND THE WORLD OF KITSCH It might be worth following the traces of Patočka’s appeals to ‘philosophy’, as a constant practice of ‘care for the soul’, into the political works written by many of the intellectuals who gravitated around Charter 77. Moreover, the convergences among these ‘dissident’ texts, Patočka’s Socratism and the ethos of truth telling as put forward by Foucault find one more piece of evidence. Dissident thought can be seen as posing to political reality the question of the true life of parrhesia. Allow me only to mention the Lithuanian winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature Czesław Miłosz and his claims about the Central-Eastern European ‘philosophical way’.21 In Une autre Europe, written during his exile in Paris and published in 1964, the obsolescence of traditional conceptual categories is made evident by key experiences in the form of tragic life choices, made by the people of Eastern Europe.22 The driving force of real change cannot come about by simply overturning institutional powers. If there is hope, it lies in a conduct of life that one decides to adhere to on a daily basis. This ethical choice is what Miłosz, too, defined as ‘the philosophical way’: breaking down the mechanisms through which power reproduces itself by focusing on the concrete and the everyday. The resonance between the parrhesia and the form of life that ‘cares for the soul’ is best exemplified in one of the most famous accounts of daily life at the time of real socialism: The Power of the Powerless,23 the little masterpiece by Václav Havel, which, beside Patočka’s call, also elaborates the article by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Live Not by Lies!’24 Havel’s essay is not simply a manifesto calling for individual ethical action, but is intended as a critique showing how a network of relationships is made denser, starting from below, by compromise upon compromise, until eventually it confirms and strengthens the system of domination. Havel was very clear that what could really disrupt the system of oppression was not so much a heroic sacrifice or a grandiose isolated gesture, as an effort made up of small acts which, precisely because they were neither outstanding nor openly political, would be the stumbling block for the regime. This was a regime in the late stages of real socialism, which, as Havel – perhaps the most direct heir of Patočka’s philosophy – said, no longer worked on the basis of terror, thus making it possible for dissidents to create a small crack in the vicious spiral of domination. This was because, first, power now made use of ‘normal’ means

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directed at establishing implicit and explicit rules, and no longer resorted to a continuous state of emergency. Second, what was at stake was no longer the conduct dictated by an enthusiastic support of recruits to the ideologytruth, but rather the daily survival of the so-called ‘existential lie’: a conduct consisting of a set of external actions, which contributed to the maintenance of the regime no less than to the internalization of the ideological faith and of violent repressive mechanisms. Certainly, unlike the totalitarian climate that the great Lithuanian writer had fought against, the one that Patočka and Havel grappled with was a climate of ‘half war’, which has its own peculiar ways of objectivizing and destroying people, turning them into raw material at the disposal of power. While resistance is no longer punishable by immediate execution, the penalty is to rot in jail, in isolation, with ‘life plans and possibilities wasted’.25 The observations of the two Czech thinkers pertain, in fact, to the last stage of ‘real socialism’, when it was certainly possible for dissidents to open up a chink in the wall of fear. More so than before, then, the urgent topic of thought becomes the dynamics of the normality of evil, in its dual meaning. First of all, in the sense that power now works with ‘normal’ instruments aimed at the establishment of norms, both implicit and explicit, and it no longer appeals to a continuous state of exception. Second, because what is at play is not so much the behaviour dictated by an enthusiastic adherence to the premises of the ideology-truth, so much as the everyday life of survival in the so-called ‘existential lie’. Everyone, by accepting the rules of the game – as done by the greengrocer who exhibits, without any political faith, a sign saying ‘Workers of the world unite’ in his window, next to the onions – allows that play to continue.26 Without the obedience of the greengrocer, the obedience of the office worker would be called into doubt, without the conformity of the office worker that of the teacher would be at risk, and so on, in an endless feedback loop. Each proposes something for the next to repeat because everyone believes the other has the same expectation. In this way, through seemingly innocent gestures, each contributes to the construction of the bleak landscape of everyday life. And the easy absolution that everyone accords himself is, according to Havel, a deception, because each by his or her conformity compels the other to accept power. Certainly, all are obedient victims of the system, but by acting in this way, they are also guilty parties. When a person adapts to the circumstances, he or she collaborates to the perpetuation of the same. ‘They do what is to be done, what is appropriate to do, but in that way they confirm that it is all appropriate and should be done’. Thus, in essence, ‘everyone helps everyone else to remain obedient’.27 Havel never tires of repeating that the ‘life-within-the-lie’ cannot be reduced to a domination that the few impose upon the many, but is something that harnesses everyone and which everyone helps to create. In other words, there is in each of us a part that agrees with,



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and in fact desires, such a system. This is the part which blocks the free and risky gesture of the Self (the action of what Havel defines as the ‘better me’) in favour of objectivizing compliance.28 As in the case of Patočka, Havel’s language could undoubtedly give the impression that his text was a dialectic between the authentic and inauthentic, all the more so when he used a phrase so provocative and seemingly naïve as that of ‘living in truth’. Milan Kundera, who argued against Havel from the time of the Prague Spring,29 did not hesitate to make him the target of fierce criticism. His major work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being,30 could be read as a long polemic against Havel, which complicates the ethical position of dissent. Kundera asks: When is it possible to distinguish, especially at the level of everyday life, between a ‘life within the lie’ and a ‘life within the truth’? The circularity between truth, freedom, and dissent, in short, is a much thinner line. The entanglement of life and power is close to the point of being intractable. Much more than for Havel, for Kundera, as it is for Foucault, power relations are, before any other determination, relationships between bodies, and are therefore inevitable. They illuminate the psychological dynamics that, once triggered, remain for the most part constant, and govern as many private situations as they do political events. Many of Kundera’s characters experience, as Lacan might have suggested, relations of power as if they continued the encirclement of the individual by the mother, as if they were prolonging that first and fundamental balance of power. Obedience to domination’s power – what Havel would call ‘life-in-the-lie’ and Patočka would have referred to as lack of ‘care for the soul’ – is of course transmitted by means of coercion and fear, but also by a subordination that is, so to speak, spontaneous, driven by an ambivalent and vertiginous power, almost as if it were ‘an irresistible desire to fall’. This is what can push us towards the magic circle and its attractive force. It can count on a subject with a troubled identity that, driven with conflicting forces he or she does not want to recognize, is often the obstacle to its own release. Many of Kundera’s characters, therefore, remain stuck in relationships that produce negativity and suffering. Kundera’s microphysics, so to speak, thus produces the polemic against Havel, and his supposed belief in authenticity, well beyond the parameter of political relationships, to envelop, as we have said, personal relationships. The critique made by Kundera is in reality a more profound and radical challenge. It relates not only to communism, but also concerns all the ‘European, religious and political faiths’, all the visions that begin from the assumption that the world is just and being is good. Kitsch, ultimately, is no more than ‘this categorical agreement with being’.31 From this perspective, he criticizes the ‘position’ of the dissident as the bearer of authenticity, even though he

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himself does not hesitate to put forward a scathing critique of his times, and of the political regime under which he has lived. Instead of speaking about truth and not-truth, he more softly laments the disappearance of the tragic. This is the sense of his indictment of kitsch that we find in the memorable pages of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, pages which became, against the intention of their author, emblematic of dissident philosophy. In its original ontological meaning, kitsch consists in the action that eliminates from the visible sphere everything that in human existence may appear essentially intolerable. It is the ‘empire of the positive’. As categorical agreement with being, the kitsch, for Kundera, has as many names as the answers which claim to resolve the question of being. It can be Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish; fascist, communist, or democratic; national or international; feminist or male chauvinist. In actuality, it is no different from the attitude that never puts life and its meanings into question: when a specific norm of life prevails, it is adopted as the only existing possibility. What the norm has excluded in order to assert itself, what it has overshadowed or constrained, has no importance. The only thing of importance is that being be! The unwritten motto of the May Day parades, and all the other marches, communist or otherwise, was not ‘Long live Communism’ but rather, writes Kundera, ‘Long live life!’32 The great power of political movements is measured by the capacity that they have to appropriate that tautology, especially their capacity to proclaim it to others with conviction. ‘Often I think: tragedy has deserted us; and that may be the true punishment’.33 There is no doubt for Kundera that when we lost our perception of the tragic, ushering in the triumph of the positive – the world of kitsch – we at the same time regressed to an elementary dualism. If we are required by the symbolic order in which we live to expel the negative, if everything is done to anaesthetize the sense of tragedy, then the return to an interpretation of human conflicts in terms of an elemental struggle between good and evil is inevitable. Ultimately, this is where the strength of real socialism lies. Now, in spite of his desire to distance himself from a dialectic between authentic and inauthentic – the naïve opposition that, in his opinion, nurtures the moral pride of the ‘professional dissidents’ – his condemnation of kitsch is a firm stance in favour of a space for dissent. ‘If someone asks me why I am in conflict with power of my country,’ we read in The Art of the Novel,34 ‘I reply: because I defended and I continue to defend the novel and its spirit.’ To defend the novel, for him, means taking a stance in supporting a concrete existence that has not been expunged of its diverse, discordant possibilities, standing up for a narrative in which the truth is not the exclusive possession of any of the characters, but only the inextricable movement that brings them together and separates them. In other words, to remain faithful to writing a novel means for him to oppose the categorical agreement with being, to open



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oneself up to a way of life that creates friction with the real, and to make space for a gap through which the tragic can continue to make itself perceptible to us. But is a ‘life in truth’ that Havel thematizes, following in Patočka’s footsteps, really so different from Kundera’s condemnation of kitsch? Is it not also a way, admittedly somewhat naïve, of describing a form of life that seeks to create friction with the unquestioned norm of life? What if it is not – as Kundera polemically assumed – just a label of authenticity to be stuck on a role, even in the case of the dissident? We could try to think of it as an ‘aesthetics of existence’, in Foucault’s sense; namely, as the choice of an ethos that opposes the ‘categorical agreement with being’. The only thing it presupposes is the free act of refusing to participate in the game, the decision to not respect its rules. As we have already pointed out: for Havel, ‘living in truth’ certainly cannot mean restoring a presumed legality against an illegality – in itself, the law is meaningless. But nor should ‘living in truth’ be taken as denoting a codified disagreement, whose practice one knows beforehand. ‘In truth’ may include ‘any means by which a person or a group revolts against manipulation’: from striking workers to rock concerts.35 Precisely because every expression of freedom, in the sense of an action that was not planned and predetermined, is in itself a political threat; any profanation of the rituals with which the regime draws its own magic circle – from abstention to a publicly announced break – is potentially subversive. It is subversive because it disrupts the trajectories along which the system applies its pressures. This is what lies behind Havel’s clearly stated opposition to an idea of ‘dissidence’ as a profession, which he rejects as vigorously as he denies the efficacy of a traditional vision of political opposition. This is because in reality, as we have previously stated, there is no polarization of power relations that would allow us to clearly locate the opposing positions, and also because the need of each person to resist the pressures of ‘auto-totalitarianism’ does not come from an a priori image of political change, but from the concrete intentions of individuals and their desire to not be dominated. The aims of an opposition to revolutionize the system through violent action makes no sense, not ‘because the idea seems too radical, but on the contrary, because it does not seem radical enough’.36 In the first instance, then, ‘living in the truth’ means the possibility ‘for anyone’ to embed change inside a deeper layer than governmental or technological changes to the system. It is a point of departure, starting from facticity and from below for the movement of an individual life that begins to express its own desire for change. To make this happen, individuals must emancipate themselves from their own compromise with post-totalitarianism, by first of all refusing to reproduce the system’s mechanisms inside themselves. What Václav Havel called the ‘existential revolution’ is, in reality, the movement of withdrawal and dis-identification

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from the hegemonic norm of life: the free act, as he puts it, that is alone capable of breaking the vicious circle of objective guilt.37 What we need to break the normality of evil, then, is an ‘existential revolution’. Havel refers to Heidegger’s diagnosis of the epoch of planetary technology, and he shares the German philosopher’s judgement on the global crisis of the West and democracy. However, he firmly rejects the fatalistic conclusion. With the desire to subvert the meaning of all historical theodicies, he challenges the resigned tone in which we are told that ‘only a God can save us now’ from the evil of nihilism.38 Salvation will not come from History or from the System. If there will be salvation from that power which becomes domination, it will only arrive from ethics, from choosing an ethos of freedom as a form of life and a style of thought. Havel’s way of conceiving dissidence acts only indirectly on the structure of power. It does not organize parties and it does not consolidate the multitudes. Nevertheless, a ‘life in truth’ is not restricted to the existential and ethical spheres; it can be made immediately political. The conceivability of ‘another life’, no different from Kundera’s perception of the tragic, opens up the space for an indirect pressure on power, because the expressive dimension of a ‘life in freedom’ will inevitably force the system to react, making it constantly oscillate its response between forced tolerance and repression. As Havel intends a ‘life in truth’, it must at the same time be a ‘life in freedom’. What if one day the greengrocer stopped displaying the sign with the slogan? What if he started refusing to vote and saying what he thought at party meetings? Maybe he would be transferred to a manual labour job and see his hopes go up in smoke for spending his vacation in Bulgaria and sending his kids to college. He would probably be persecuted by all the people who administer punishments and who make it their business to ensure that the ‘automatism’ of the system continues. However, his actions would not be merely an individual offence. Far more seriously, he would break the rules of the game; as such, he would be disrupting the game. Crying out that the emperor is naked, precisely ‘because the emperor is in fact naked’, the greengrocer would break through the stone facade that seeks to encircle the entire life of individuals and society. Through that narrow opening in the curtain, he would demonstrate to all that the nakedness of the emperor can be seen and touched. Escaping from the rules of the game and interrupting the inertia of everyday life, may in certain contexts prove to be extremely dangerous actions. The fact that they are able to become examples proves that they have the power to communicate the contagion – one with potentially subversive effects. This is why intellectuals in Prague never tire of repeating that true dissidence is nothing but thought. Far from being a purely speculative activity, ‘living in truth’ is an ‘athletics of the judgment’ that reflects on the conditions of existence: it is the adoption of an ethos that withholds its consent



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to the ‘categorical agreement with being’ and which, for this reason, remains silent when required to shout ‘Long live life!’ NOTES 1. Simona Forti, New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), in particular 267–306. 2. See Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). In the Lecture of 22 February 1984, Foucault talks about Patočka’s book Plato and Europe strongly recommending it to his students. Although Michel Foucault recognizes the importance of the book and its discussion about the notion of epimeleia, he considers the Patočkian idea of soul as an idea still tied to a dualistic conception of human beings. I think this opinion of Foucault’s is partial and somewhat misleading. 3. Árpad Szakolczai, ‘Foucault passe à l’Est’, in Alain Brossat (ed.), Michel Foucault. Le jeux de la vérité et du pouvoir: études transeuropéennes (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1994), 105ff. See also, Caterina Croce, L’ombra di pòlemos, i riflessi del bios. La prospettiva della cura a partire da Jan Patočka e Michel Foucault (Milano: Mimesis, 2014), and Sergei Prozorov, ‘Foucault’s Affirmative Biopolitics: Cynic Parrhesia and the Biopower of the Powerless’, Political Theory (9 October 2015): 1–23. doi: 10.1177/0090591715609963 4. On this see Václav Bělohradský, Il mondo della vita: un problema politico. L’eredità europea nel dissenso e in Charta ’77 (Milano: Jaca Book, 1981), 20ff, and more recently Francesco Tava, The Risk of Freedom: Ethics, Phenomenology and Politics in Jan Patočka, trans. Jane Ledlie (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015). 5. In Prague, but also in Brno and Bratislava, everyone knew of the illegal meetings being held. Certain European intellectuals, mostly French – Derrida and Vernant to mention the best known – supported the clandestine groups with funding and ‘banned’ books, but very often also by participating personally in the discussions. It was in this context that the names of authors thought to be ‘decisive’ for political action emerged. Among them, in fact, most important of all, was Michel Foucault. 6. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France (1977–1978), ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Pelgrave Macmillan, 2007), 267–8. 7. See Entretien avec Jan Patočka (1967) [Interview on Philosophy and Philosophers], in Etienne Tassin and Marc Richir (eds.), Jan Patočka: philosophie, phénoménologie, politique (Grenoble: Millon, 1992), 31. 8. On the notion of ‘asubjective phenomenology’ see Paul Ricœur, ‘Préface aux Essais hérétiques (1981)’, in Lectures 1, Autour du politique (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 74–83; Renaud Barbaras, Le mouvement de l’existence. Études sur la phénoménologie de Jan Patočka (Chatou: Éditions de la Transparence, 2007); Barbaras, ‘Phenomenology and Henology’, in Ivan Chvatík and Erika Abrams (eds.), Jan Patočka and

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the Heritage of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 99–110; Domenico Jervolino, ‘Reading Patočka, in Search for a Philosophy of Translation’, in Chvatík and Abrams (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology, 57–70; Barbaras, L’ouverture du monde: lecture de Jan Patočka (Chatou: Éditions de la Transparence, 2011). 9. Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe (1973), trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); on Socrates see the series of lectures held by Patočka in Prague in 1947, Italian translation and Czech original text: Jan Patočka, Socrate. Lezioni di filosofia antica (Milano: Rusconi, 1999). 10. See Jan Patočka, Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine (1946), ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989); and Jan Patočka, ‘The Movement of Human Existence: A Selection from Body, Community, Language, World’ (1968), in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 274–84. 11. Jan Patočka, ‘Does History Have a Meaning?’ in Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. E. Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 80ff. 12. Jan Patočka, ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and Twentieth Century as War’, in Patočka, Heretical Essays (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 119ff. We also read: ‘How do the day, life, peace govern all individuals, their bodies and soul? By means of death; by threatening life. From the perspective of the day life is, for all individuals, everything, the highest value that exists for them. For the forces of the day, conversely, death does not exists, they function as if there was no death, or, as noted, they plan death impersonally and statistically, as if it were merely a reassignment of roles. Thus in the will to war, day and life rule with the help of death. […] Those who cannot break free of the rule of peace, of the day, of life in a mode that excludes death and closes its eyes before it, can never free themselves of war’, (ibid., 129). On this, see James Dodd, ‘The Twentieth Century as War’, in Chvatík and Abrams (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology, 203–14. 13. Patočka, ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and Twentieth Century as War’, in Heretical Essays, 125ff. 14. As it is well known, Foucault starts writings about bio-politics in Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality (1976), trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1998); and in his 1975–1976 lectures gathered together in the collection entitled ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 15. See Jan Patočka, ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and Twentieth Century as War’, in Heretical Essays, 123ff. 16. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (1999) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), in which he tackles Patočka’s essay ‘Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why?’ in Heretical Essays, 95–118. 17. See Jan Patočka, ‘Negative Platonism: Reflections Concerning the Rise, the Scope, and the Demise of Metaphysics – and whether Philosophy can Survive it’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 175–206. On the idea of



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‘negative platonism’, see Eddo Evink, ‘The Relevance of Patočka’s Negative Platonism’, and Tamás Ullmann, ‘Negative Platonism and the Appearance-Problem’, in Chvatík and Abrams (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology, 57–70 and 71–86. See also Edward F. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patočka (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), and Philippe S. Merlier, Patočka. Le soin de l’âme et l’Europe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009). Lastly, see the thorough essay by Francesco Tava, ‘La verità nel mezzo di ciò che è: intorno al “platonismo negativo” di Jan Patočka’, in the Italian edition of Jan Patočka, Platonismo negativo e altri frammenti, ed. Francesco Tava (Milano: Bompiani, 2015), 7–72. 18. Jan Patočka, ‘Negative Platonism’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 193. We also read: ‘Chorismos meant originally a separateness without a second object realm. It’s a gap that does not separate two realms coordinated or linked by something third that would embrace them both and so would serve as the foundation of both their coordination and their separation. Chorismos is a separateness, a distinctness an sich,’ ibid. 19. Jan Patočka, ‘The Spirital Person and the Intellectual’ (1975), in Living in Problematicity, ed. Eric Manton (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2007), 55. 20. On the soul as movement, see Paul Ricœur, ‘Préface aux Essais hérétiques (1981)’, in Ricœur, Lectures 1. Autour du politique, 74–83. 21. In 1951 Czesław Miłosz was in Paris as the cultural attaché and decided to seek political asylum. In 1953 the first edition of his masterpiece was published: La pensée captive. Essai sur les logocraties populaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); English translation: The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1990). 22. Czesław Miłosz, Une autre Europe, trans. George Sédir (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 23. Václav Havel, Moc bezmocných, first appeared as samizdat in 1978, was translated into French and Italian in 1979; English translation: Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 23–96. On the intellectual biography of Havel, see John Keane, Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (New York: Basic Books, 1999) and Jean Picq, Václav Havel: la force des sans-pouvoir (Paris: Michalon, 2000). 24. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Live Not by Lies!’, in The Solzhenitsyn Reader, ed. Edward E. Ericson and Daniel J. Mahoney (Willmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2009), 556–60. 25. Patočka, ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War’, in Heretical Essays, 134. 26. Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless, 24. 27. Ibid., 80ff. 28. We also read: ‘There is in everyone the desire for freedom, for dignity as a transcendence of being, of a free experience of existing, yet at the same time in everyone there is the desire for indistinction, of blending into the crowd’, ibid., 64.

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29. See Milan Kundera, ‘Český uděl’ [Czech Destiny], Listy 7–8 (1968): 1, 5; Václav Havel, ‘Český uděl?’ [Czech Destiny?], Tvář 4, 2 (1969): 30–3; Milan Kundera, ‘Radikalismus a exhibicionismus’ [Radicalism and Exhibitionism], Host do domu 15, 5 (1968–1969): 24–9. 30. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael H. Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). 31. Ibid., 241. 32. Ibid., 243. 33. See Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 111. 34. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (1986), trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1988). On the particular form of subversion that Kundera’s work represents see François Ricard, Le dernier après-midi d’Agnès: essai sur l’œuvre de Milan Kundera (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). 35. Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless, 23. 36. Ibid., 43. 37. This is also stated by Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2000). 38. On page 55 of ‘Power of the Powerless’ Havel refers explicitly to the interview with Heidegger in Der Spiegel of 13 May 1976: ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns helfen.’

Part III

POLITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY

Chapter 7

Polemos in Jan Patočka’s Political Thought James Dodd

1. THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE DISSIDENT Any reflection on the political meaning of the philosophy of Jan Patočka, writ narrowly or broadly, invariably finds its way to a consideration of the implications of the final days of the philosopher’s life as the spokesperson for Charta 77. A manifesto written in late 1976 and signed the following year by a loosely associated group representing a relatively wide cross-section of the Czech intelligentsia, Charta 77 called on the Czechoslovak government to honour the guarantee of human rights that had been articulated in various formal treaties and agreements of which it was the signatory, above all the Helsinki Accords of 1975. This reminder of its sworn obligations was not welcomed by the authorities, and was interpreted as a direct challenge to the authority of the communist state. In fact, Charta 77 was meant to be just that, though its demands had been couched in terms that conformed to the letter of the law. The official and unofficial response was characteristically harsh, the politics and practices of normalization launched after the 1968 Prague Spring had by now become fully entrenched: the text of the Charta was suppressed, its signatories persecuted and ostracized; Patočka himself, seventy years old at the time and in poor health, was repeatedly harassed by police interrogators until he finally succumbed to a brain haemorrhage that same year.1 Patočka is thus a figure that belongs to the history of dissidence in EastCentral Europe during the communist period. In a way this fact helps to orient us in a reflection on his political ideas, but in a way it does not. The motivations behind an individual’s involvement in any political movement, or mutatis mutandis any movement at all, remain more often than not very difficult to untangle and bring into focus. This is especially true when, as was the case with Charta 77, individuals risked almost certain persecution. 77

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Why expose oneself, one’s family, friends, and colleagues, to the dangerous consequences of an action that will, moreover, almost certainly result in failure? There is almost never one answer to this question; accordingly, we should be wary of generalizing from the expressed motivations of one individual to those of everyone involved, just as we should avoid drawing from the general import and meaning of a movement too many conclusions about what might have brought someone to take the risk. Things become arguably even more complicated in cases of a philosopher such as Patočka, for whom political life represented not only a field of action (or at least expression), but also an object of proper philosophical reflection. Fundamental questions of the meaning of responsibility and personal risk are intertwined in Patočka’s philosophical writings with the motivations of thinking, of an attempt to cultivate philosophical insight. Philosophy, in other words, belongs just as much to that complex of motivations that led Patočka to embrace Charta 77, as do his moral, personal, and political beliefs. In fact Patocka’s philosophical thought is palpably close to the surface in two texts that he circulated on the same day as the appearance of the Charter (3 January 1977): ‘The Obligation to Resist Injustice’ and ‘What We Can and Cannot Expect from Charta 77.’2 The critique of modern technological civilization, so central to Patočka’s understanding of modern humanity, provides a central frame for each; likewise his ideas about the centrality of responsibility and moral existence as a whole provide much of the content.3 The result is that it seems obvious that we have, here, an instance of a moral philosopher who has been driven by his ideas to confront the patent injustice of the situation in which he finds himself, and that this confrontation will take the explicit form of a powerful appeal to the conscience of both those who perpetrate injustice and those who have chosen to be passive witnesses. Additionally, it seems obvious that this appeal in turn strives to speak to basic human truths expressed by the central concept of human rights. Consider this passage from ‘The Obligation to Resist Injustice’: The idea of human rights is nothing other than the conviction that even states, even society as a whole, are subject to the sovereignty of moral sentiment: that they recognize something unconditional that is higher than they are, something that is binding even on them, sacred, inviolable, and that in their power to establish and maintain a rule of law they seek to express this recognition.4

This apparently seamless continuity between the thought of a philosopher and a political act of protest is, however, potentially misleading. First of all, Patočka was not a ‘political philosopher’ in the sense of a theoretician. He did not labour to produce theories of the state, political rights, or sovereignty in order to provide for an understanding and justification for a set of



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readily identifiable and familiar moral and political commitments. Though one may find in these two texts on Charta 77 a clear expression of the values of democratic liberalism in its most familiar form, it is far more difficult to identify examples in Patočka’s philosophical writings in which the same ideas are expressed in such an unequivocal, direct fashion. The philosophical texts of Patočka offer, on the contrary, much more evidence of a complex, deep, and even troubling thinker of the human condition, for whom the liberal democracies of the West, with their pursuit of the technological domination of the planet and embrace of consumerist culture, are just as inhospitable to authentic existence as the world of the authoritarian regimes in the states then under Soviet domination. Patočka, one might say, would likely have been a dissident had he lived in 1970’s London or New York, struggling against the dominion of a crude consumerism cloaking itself in the ideals of liberal individualism; it so happened he lived in Prague, and that it was the politics of that particular time and situation that set at least the immediate parameters of his struggle. This is not to suggest that Patočka did not act out of the moral and political convictions expressed so powerfully in these two texts from 1977. I believe that he most certainly did, and at considerable personal risk. Yet the person and the philosopher are not the same thing, though they are not completely different either. I wish only to suggest that, looking at these two texts from the perspective of Patočka’s political thought, or the way in which the nature of the political is articulated within his phenomenological philosophy, it is difficult to avoid the impression that Patočka could have said so much more, that there is a wealth of questions and issues left unspoken, perhaps for the sake of brevity of rhetoric and certainly out of the interests of political calculation. What was left out is, however, important to consider, not only to help untangle the specifically philosophical motivations that led Patočka to his involvement with Charta 77, but also to help free a reflection on Patočka’s thinking about the political from the oversimplified ideological labels that his contemporary status in political memory as a dissident intellectual threatens to accrue. The triumphalist narrative that took hold in the post-1989 West, with its proclamation of the inevitable world domination of democratically governed, liberal societies, not to mention capitalism, is alive and well, and would have us see in Patočka an important intellectual proponent of the justice of its cause. This perception of Patočka’s significance is not wholly false, but it does obscure significantly the nuances of the complex philosophical perspective he developed over the course of an extremely fascinating and productive intellectual life, one that spanned virtually all of the significant events in the history of the twentieth century. Patočka’s thinking on the nature of political existence is much richer than the labels we are used to employing

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when reconstructing the politics of the Soviet era, even if at the same time it is also often ambiguous and perplexing. Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of those parts of Patočka’s philosophical oeuvre that directly touch on the theme of political life is the central role played by the Heraclitean concept of polemos [war, strife].5 My intent in what follows is to take some first steps towards elucidating Patočka’s conception of polemos, in an attempt to understand how and why it comes to take, in texts from the same period as Charta 77 (such as the Heretical Essays) this prominent role.6 Yet, in doing so, I will not stray too far from the two Charta 77 texts just cited, for my thesis is that the former remains just below the surface of the latter: though polemos is not mentioned in either of the two texts, nevertheless, as a broader reflection on Patočka’s thinking suggests, it is in fact at the core of the basic philosophical gesture that ultimately animates each of them. 2. THE MEANING OF THE POLITICAL The distinction between the sociopolitical sphere of state power and the moral sphere, which we noted above, demonstrates that Charta 77 represents no political act in the strict sense, that it constitutes no competition or interference with political power in any of its functions. Charta 77 is neither an association nor an organization; its basis is strictly personal and moral, and so are the obligations it entails.7

Commentators on the two Charta 77 texts we are here citing unanimously emphasize Patočka’s tactic, like that of the Charta itself, of highlighting the personal, ‘non-political’ character of the initiative, in order to avoid arrest and prosecution under the anti-sedition laws of the state.8 This is, of course, a ruse. The pressure of conscience – even though Patočka also states explicitly that Charta 77 has no interest in being the conscience of the state – is being deployed here in a decidedly political fashion.9 The subsequent and all-tooexpected persecution of those involved would show that this was precisely the interpretation adopted by the authorities. Yet, this implicit agreement between Charta 77 and its opponents does not really address the question of just what actually constitutes an explicitly ‘political’ act. If it is not at least partially definable in terms of a division between private expressions of belief and conscience and the exercise of public instruments of power, then what does define it? What is the nature of that space in which a formally apolitical expression of moral conviction can take on the valence of the political, or where the naked violence of an authoritarian regime could conceivably be deployed to lay claim to a monopoly of all things political?



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To properly orient this question in terms germane to Patočka’s political philosophy, it is helpful to engage in something of a historical digression. One of the most interesting aspects of Patočka’s political thought is his understanding of the nature of the historical emergence of political life.10 How politics comes into history is an essential element in understanding its nature and defining characteristics. For Patočka, politics – the political proper – emerges against the background of, and in fundamental opposition to, what he describes as the mythical world of prehistorical humanity. The political is thus not simply one form among others of the communal organization of human beings (e.g., in contrast to the family, or religion); it is instead a distinctive manner of being, one that makes its appearance at a particular point in human history, before which it makes little sense to talk about ‘political existence’ as such. But perhaps most important for Patočka is that the emergence of the political – and here what he has in mind is above all the emergence of the Greek polis – at the same time inaugurates the emergence of a new kind of world. All human worlds for Patočka, whether historical or prehistorical, political or apolitical, can be understood as a form, a permutation of the fundamental openness to the world and things that defines human life existentially. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and on fundamental themes of Aristotelian philosophy, Patočka describes this openness as essentially structured as a threefold movement, or a threefold unfolding of the manner in which life opens up a space of encounter in which we relate to things, one another, and ourselves.11 The first of these that Patočka elaborates is the movement of rootedness, of being born into a concrete situation that initially opens existence onto the plenitude of being in a way indifferent to reason or justification. The second is the movement of defence, of the sheltering and protecting of that which is essentially an exposed and contingent irruption of existence into the world. Finally, the third is the movement that illuminates an implicit ordering and order present within the otherwise raw contingency of human effort at self-preservation in the wake of having been born. This final movement draws humans back from their immersion in things, orienting them towards an insight into the essence of their lives as openness, thus fashioning an openness that provides the possibility of something like understanding and truth. The mythical, ‘pre-historical’ world exhibits this threefold movement in a particular way, one that establishes a priority of the first two movements, those of rootedness and defence, over the third movement with its implicit promise of a relation to truth. This involves, above all, an explicit relation to time. In the case of mythical humanity, the past is given priority; meaningfulness, whatever it may otherwise be, is ultimately grasped in the form of a repetition of what was. Here, life lives out of a pregiven understanding of itself, following tracks of meaningfulness long since laid, and which always

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remain impervious to human insight – not so much because they are obscure and difficult to comprehend, but because they are not approachable at all as problems of comprehension. Such a world is thus ‘pre-historical’, not because there are no records (there are, of course, and Patočka, always the consummate scholar, cites the Mycenaean temple records that were preserved on clay tablets discovered in Knossos12), but because historical consciousness has not yet taken root as an organizing mode of life. Human beings are always ‘historical’ to the extent to which their lives are the movement of openness as such, but they only exist historically when history is embraced, when there is an explicit taking up of the fundamental movement of openness as that which guides the order of meanings, or the world as a horizon of manifestation. In the absence of this embrace, what exists (beings) and that thanks to which anything has existence (openness) appear on the same plane; what makes something possible is indistinguishable from that something itself. The result is that prehistorical humans live, as Patočka puts it in one of the most striking phrasings in the Heretical Essays, within a kind of ontological metaphor: For them [mythical humans] what-is and being, phenomena and the movement of their manifestation, converge on a single plane, reminiscent of the language of poetic metaphor: here, relations that elude common empirical experience are expressed with twists of such experience, though with the help of conjuctions, distinctions, and variations that are impermissable in the ordinary world and are not thematized as such.13

The ancient city is an example of something that refracts this ontological metaphor: the city is a concentration of human existence, the originary space of its manifestation gathered together into a unique, concrete expression, one that reveals the manner in which humans exist in the world. Yet, the ancient city remains oriented around the priorities of mythical existence – it is the site of rootedness and defence; it represents both the endurance of the past and a sense of the sacred as both guarantor of life and the source of its ultimate fragility. The ancient city is, so to speak, a primordial expression of a basic orientation to the ‘truth’ of human existence: its fundamental subjection to power, whether that of the gods or the demi-god-like greats among humans, and the inviolable necessities of sustenance and self-preservation. The city as a space of manifestation, as the being of a deeper openness that is not reducible to the particular individuals and forces that compose its individuality, is fused with those same individuals and forces. The relation to truth, to openness as such, is not absent here, but latent.14 For Patočka, the twin emergence of political life and philosophy – the two being for him inextricable – can be understood as a temporal and existential



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reorientation to a meaning of truth determined by an explicit embrace of this latent openness. It represents, as it were, the rebirth of the primordial ancient city as the polis, an event that for Patočka marks a fundamental if not wholly clean break with a past indifferent to both the historical and political potential of human existence. Unlike the ancient city, the polis is no longer the site of an accepted submission to a power virtually indistinguishable from divinity or the cosmos; power is now something contested, and with that open to unexpected results. In short, power and rule are now uniquely open to their own future. The difference between the ancient city and the polis thus has to do with a fundamental transformation of the meaning of action. Again drawing on Arendt, Patočka in the Heretical Essays characterizes the polis as a life of initiative, or ‘a life in active tension, one of extreme risk and unceasing upward striving in which every pause is necessarily a weakness for which the initiative of others lies in wait’.15 The political and the philosophical thus differ from the mythical with respect to the manner in which human possibility is made manifest in an essential sense. The polis is not so much the birth of a new world, in the sense of some kind of alternate reality of action wholly transcending animal existence, as it is a shift in the way that human beings pursue themselves, their possibilities, and futures. Human life, whether mythical or non-mythical, is always a pursuit of the possible, always a movement; but to pursue beyond the limits of the given, beyond the patterns of preformed existence, is to unfold possibilities in the form of transformations, or fundamental changes that are pursued in full consciousness of what is at risk: ‘Here life is not received as complete as it is, but rather transforms itself from the start – it is a reaching forth [vzmachu]’.16 Reaching forth means that the course of time no longer takes the form of a repetition, or of an expression of settled meanings; the future is instead decoupled from the past, at least enough so that some sort of a decision can be made with respect to the meaning of each. ‘Reaching forth’ also implies for Patočka that political life is a pursuit of human possibility that is itself without foundation – it is a reach in the sense of a gamble, a grasp at what is not secure or implicit in our expectation of security. As such, it is a life that is not simply exposed, and with that, it is fragile, relative to the forces that dominate the world (that are the world); it is also a life that is actively risked and precarious, one that ‘does not stand on the firm ground of generative continuity, it is not backed by the dark earth, but only by darkness, that is, it is even confronted by its finitude and its permanent precariousness of life’.17 Accordingly, human finitude as well gains a different sense: humans are no longer the lesser powers in a hierarchy of being, though nor have they become the most powerful. Their existence instead marks the space for a promise of something new, to again evoke an important Arendtian theme. Thus, finitude

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now means something different, but it remains just as fundamental to the meaning of human existence. If the mythical, the prehistorical, is characterized by a certain kind of unconsciousness, expressing itself through images relative to which it has no interpretive distance, then political existence, however ‘conscious’, is nevertheless beset by a certain characteristic darkness. And for Patočka this darkness is ontological, it expresses that receding ground which at the same time gives or allows for the manifestation of whatis, of beings. In properly political life, historical in its essence, this darkness takes the form of an experience of the rootlessness, the groundlessness of existential possibility. The meaning of this groundlessness and the question whether to embrace it or, on the contrary, to reject it in favour of the value of stability and coherence, is one of the core themes of Patočka’s philosophy. And it is a reflection that haunts the two texts on Charta 77. For it implies that, beyond any structural distinctions between those who are authorized to fulfil public functions and those who are forbidden a role in determining how they are to be carried out, or the difference between those who are allowed to speak and those who are only allowed to be spoken to, to act or to remain passive, there is a more primordial space of political existence understood as a common problematicity. ‘Political’ action in this philosophical sense is the pursuit of the possibilities opened up by this problematicity – it is the pursuit of possibilities inherent to a consciousness of the promise implied by the difference between the meaning of the past and the future, and the guiding sense of being situated at a moment in which the decision of this meaning is in play. Thus, what constitutes a ‘political act’ is an act that has a decision about the status, significance, and force of human problematicity as its guiding daimon.

3. POLEMOS For all these reasons, we consider a time when it became possible to sign a Declaration of Human Rights a new historical epoch, the stage for an immense outreach, since it represents a reversal of human consciousness, of the attitude of humans to themselves and to their society. Not simply or primarily fear or profit, but respect for what is higher in humans, a sense of duty, of the common good, and of the need to accept even discomfort, misunderstanding, and a certain risk, should henceforth be our motives.18

For reasons beginning already to become apparent in our summary presentation of some motifs of Patočka’s philosophy of history above, the figure of confrontation, of strife, is at the centre of his account of the essence of



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history, politics, and philosophy. The thought here is a difficult one. What does it mean that strife – even war [polemos] – is not the exception, but central to political life, rooted in its very origin? Is Patočka, in texts such as the Heretical Essays and elsewhere, committing himself to an account of human communal life that is fundamentally agonistic, saddled with inevitable irruptions of conflict, violence, and destruction? Is the evocation of ‘risk’ at the end of this passage just cited meant to signal the possibility that the new epoch, the ‘reversal of human consciousness’ heralded in the first lines, will more than likely unravel, throwing us back into a state of devastating strife that agreements such as the Helsinki Accords were meant to prevent? We thus need to look closer at Patočka’s use of the concept of polemos. Its root significance has to do with the problem of human finitude. Discomfort, risk, misunderstanding, likewise all the varieties of strife and conflict into which they are embedded, relate to human finitude, to the limitations of understanding and action, and ultimately to death. As described above, the beginning of history on Patočka’s account is in its fundamentals the emergence of a new and distinctive relation to finitude and death; yet, it is a new relation that remains a modification of a very old one. Thus, the point is not to argue that somehow in prehistory mythical humans were unaware of their finitude, or even that they gave death a different, false meaning ripe for being replaced by a ‘true’ account offered by philosophy and the founders of the new humanity of the polis. Death had not suddenly taken on a distinctively moral significance, nor was freed from superstition and tied to individual conscience or responsibility. Instead, to embrace the historicity of existence is nothing less than to understand human life as something that emerges from its own groundlessness, its brute problematicity, and in that sense, from nothing. This nothing is not a simple absence borne or weathered, but something cultivated; it is the beginning of a sense of the promise of freedom, and it takes the shape of an insight into the groundless meaning of the being of all that is, of all that can be said to be. What is ‘higher in humans’ (to again echo the passage quoted above), what remains standing when everything else seems to be lost, is precisely this groundless insight. Patočka’s descriptions of the beginning of history thus focus on the beginning of a life, of a being that reorients itself as one who is capable of seeing across the landscape of beings in their emergence; it is a being that exists in being cut by the tension between what shows itself for what it is, and what refuses and recedes into a nothingness that is implicit in all striving, all fixing, and determining of things for what they are. In other words, what replaces the ‘ontological metaphor’ of prehistorical, mythical humanity is a new form of seeing. It is a seeing that sees things for what they are. Not the past, but the present is now the axis of attunement,

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an attunement to the manner in which things emerge into presence, into manifestation. And it is the presence of emergence in the form of that which is contested and in conflict, thus within the dynamic of an individuation that is inextricably woven with the nothingness of finite being. It is this striferidden, tension-filled emergence that, Patočka argues, one finds articulated in the theme of polemos in the fragments of Heraclitus.19 Polemos is at once a power that binds all to all, the strife [eris] that lies within the inwardly stretched, tension-ridden harmony of manifestation; but it is also at the same time the manner in which all that exists is understood and grasped in insight, in logos: The power generated by strife is no blind force. The power that arises from strife is a power that knows and sees: only in this invigorating strife is there life that truly sees into the nature of things – to phronein. Thus phronesis, understanding, by the very nature of things, cannot but be at once common and conflicted. To see the world and life as a whole means to see polemos, eris, as that which is common; xunon esti pasi to phroneein: ‘insight is common to all.’20

Passages such as these in the Heretical Essays are strongly reminiscent of Heidegger’s reading of Heraclitus in his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics.21 For Heidegger as well, Heraclitus’s polemos is tightly bound up with logos, and above all to physis [nature]. This is a connection Heidegger makes repeatedly in the Introduction to Metaphysics, such as, for example, in the following passage: Logos is constant gathering, the gatheredness of beings that stands in itself, that is, Being. So kata ton logon in fragment 1 means the same as kata physin [according to phusis]. Phusis and logos are the same.22

Phusis on Heidegger’s account means emergence, manifestation, or appearance: ‘The roots phu- and pha- name the same thing. Phuein, the emerging that reposes in itself, is phainesthai, lighting-up, self-showing, appearing’.23 What emerges is manifest as something set apart, within limits that are animated by a confrontation with what distinguishes it from other things, thanks to which it becomes fixed within its logos. To ‘see’ (or to understand, in the sense of phronesis) what is in accordance with its logos is thus to track its emergence as phusis; it is to witness the event of its strife, thus to ‘be’ or exist in the event horizon of a conflict, of the emergence of a being into the open landscape of beings. It is in this sense that logos, phusis, the world opened by strife, is something ‘common’ [xunon]. This commonality is, in turn for Heidegger, now turning to Fragment 114, something in play at the very core of what it is



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to be a polis. The polis is not merely a collected manifestation or an acquired achievement of organization that provides an indifferent stage for human speech and action; it is also a collected manifestation as the dynamic event of being, which means that it is a unity held together in tension. The ‘common’ here thus does not indicate some abstract, universal principle, but the commonality of a finite bond, a hold on oneself and on things, which is always coupled with a seeing thanks to which what is, what exists, is gathered together into the bond of its logos. In the polis, this commonality of the logos takes the form of the unity of nomos, or ‘law’, as a specific face of collected presence constitutive of the being of the city: The eon, the being, is according to its essence xunon, a gathered coming to presence; xunon does not mean the ‘universal’, but rather what gathers everything together in itself and holds it together. For example, according to fragment 114 such a xunon is the nomos for the polis, ordinance [positing as placing together], the inner composition of the polis, not something universal, not the sort of thing that floats above all and seizes none, but the originally unifying unity of what strives in confrontation.24

Heidegger emphasized repeatedly this figure of the originary unity of confrontation [Aus-einander-setzung], of what is set in a tension apart, as being at the core of Heraclitus’s thinking, and it is that which, for Patočka as for Heidegger, governs the operative meanings of polemos in Fragments 53 and 80. The concept thus expresses an original ontological signification of war. Polemos so conceived represents in this way a properly historical form of Patočka’s third existential movement that we sketched above: it marks a moment in which openness, both to what appears, what becomes manifest, and to the appearance of what refuses to appear, becomes an explicit theme of human comportment and thereby determines its specific form. Polemos thus describes comportment, one inwardly determined by a seeing that is at once in tune with the darkness and the light of things. Patočka: To delimit a thing according to its being, however, means to see it in terms of the way it enters into openness (the realm of the individuated cosmos) by emerging out of the darkness; it means to see the lighting of being over all that is, the open night of what-is.25

‘Conflict’ sums up the essential determination of being as the groundless initiative to grasp and pursue the possible as it is illuminated by the insight, the seeing of polemos. Insight is in turn anything but disinterested contemplation, it is the life of an understanding experienced on an explicitly

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ontological plane. If so, as Heidegger also emphasized, then Heraclitus cannot mean war in a sense limited to an exchange of blows on a battlefield in competition for a particular prize. Just as little can this conception of polemos ultimately be understood from the perspective of its utility for the satisfaction of human needs, as seems to be the claim in Book II of Plato’s Republic. The polis, for neither Patočka nor Heidegger, emerges out of polemos; yet nor does polemos emerge from the interests of pursuing war or peace, narrowly understood as the conquest of wealth and property. Polemos and the polis are instead co-constitutive; and, here, both thinkers brush up against the possibility that violence is older than either politics or war, with roots in human existence that surpass insight itself. In Patočka, the result is that the emergence of polemos as a figure of thought in Heraclitus must be understood to be intrinsically political, but not in the sense of the reduction of being to primordial violence. Polemos in Heraclitus instead signals a profound transformation in the meaning of the violence of war: no longer merely the work of destruction necessary for preservation, war now becomes an essential dimension of the pursuit of the possible in a new and open horizon of the significance of what it means to fight. Again, the contrast with the established, non-problematical meaningfulness of the mythical world is central to Patočka’s analysis: Warriors prior to the emergence of political life find their support in a meaning woven into the immediacy of life, fighting for their home, family, for the continuum of life to which they belong […] in contrast to that stands the goal of a free life as such, one’s own or that of others; it is, essentially, an unsheltered life.26

Once history begins, how we fight changes, and how we comport ourselves ‘inter arma’27 provides a powerful symbolic instance of who we have become, as political beings. Battle as a political phenomenon is inscribed in the wake of a fundamental shaking of the pre-given meaning of the prehistorical, a shaking itself embraced and affirmed in the form of risk, of the groundlessness of pure initiative in a world of possibilities cut by the movements of strife and confrontation. The commonality of the polis, then, the existential rhythm of a properly political existence, is no longer the mere factical belonging together as a repetition of the past; it is now a being together in solidarity. This solidarity was expressed in ancient Greek political life by the rigid formation of the hoplite phalanx, the act of standing shoulder-to-shoulder and shield-to-shield in a harmonia of mutual effort; accordingly the phalanx served the Greeks as a visible symbol of the polis, expressing its spirit, not of conquest, but what Patočka calls the ‘solidarity of the undaunted’, a unity of existence that is ‘perhaps the only mode [of being human] that offers hope amid the storm of the world’.28



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4. OUR BONDAGE TO WAR We are convinced that no one fails to realize that the Helsinki agreements must be accepted if we are to break free of the bondage of wars and near-wars and that no one fails to recognize that such acceptance will call for many concessions.29

The discussion of polemos at the end of the second of the Heretical Essays signals the essential role of an embrace of risk, of an insight into the constitutive movements of tension and conflict; it further signals the role of problematicity, that fundamental theme of Patočka’s thinking, as a basic orientation of human beings, and not a passing stage of inconvenience that will eventually fade in the march of human progress. It also, as Patočka indicates in the following passage from the Heretical Essays, signals the enduring importance of the Greek experience for contemporary humanity – particularly given the basic unwillingness of the latter to exist historically: This beginning [of history] then reaches out to future historical outreach, especially by teaching what humankind does not wish to comprehend, in spite of all the immense hardness of history, does not want to understand, something that perhaps only latter days will learn after reaching the nadir of destruction and devastation – that life need be understood not from the viewpoint of the day, of life merely accepted, but also from the view of strife, of the night, of polemos. The point of history is not what can be uprooted or shaken, but rather the openness to the shaking.30

What does it mean to understand life from the ‘viewpoint of the day’? It means to take life as a given positivity, one that can either be augmented or destroyed; it also means to take given life as the ultimate basis, the ultimate good that stands as the absolute justification for all that is. It entails, in this sense, a form of bondage: there is nothing other or more than life, only its mere absence as a brutal shock of the exception, an affront to what ultimately can only have value – one’s continued existence as a living being. The ‘day’, in Patočka’s idiom, is what bonds us to preservation, and with that to perspectives that cleave close to our relation to things, to the world as an aggregate of objects and the potential energy for their production and destruction. The day in this way shapes our care for our being into a care for things; it emphasizes our need for safety, for shelter and sustenance, and for an undisturbed health. And with that, the day motivates a turn away from anything that unsettles, that forces the groundlessness of existence into experience. The day, in other words, unfolds as a refusal, a resistance to any letting go of things. Patočka’s history of Europe sketched in the Heretical Essays tracks the ascendency of the day, its growing dominion in human existence that unfolds

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in a dizzying array of spiritual tendencies and themes, from the Hellensitic to the Roman, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. One of the (refreshing) heresies of the Heretical Essays is arguably the refusal to pluck one tendency, one idea from the dense knot of these different spiritual strands in order to proclaim its dominance. For Patočka, history is ultimately not the story of a march of ideas, their introduction, and acceptance or rejection, but the movement of existence as such, the existence of a humanity that is only ambiguously ‘historical’ in an authentic sense. The complexity of the history Patočka sketches informs in salient ways his diagnosis of the contemporary situation, which is in turn characterized as constituted in accordance with a complex set of spiritual themes. One part of this set has to do with the nature of knowledge, its gradual shift away from the figures of insight and wisdom to science and technology. The latter express the interest of the day in the manipulability of things, the possibility of capturing the essence of things in terms of an ability to predict their behaviour under precisely defined conditions; ‘knowledge’ is thereby transformed into to a powerfully radicalized potential for material and spiritual organization. Another group of themes has to do with the relation of the human being to power, or rather how human existence has itself become a force in the world: here the interest of the day in security and preservation, takes on the form of a will to have, to possess, and thus humanize all of being in terms of a fundamental acceptance of only that which we can control and dominate. The two sets of themes work together: knowledge, as the grasp of the manipulability of things, supports and makes possible the dominance of the relation of possession, of a mastery that solidifies the hold of the day.31 The meaning of war (not to mention the city) again changes as a consequence. The human capacity for destruction increases exponentially: the more we understand things in terms of how they can be manipulated, the more we are in a place to orchestrate their destruction. Likewise, the more we are invested in things, in their accumulation and increase within the dynamics of the will to have, the more the sphere of human existence becomes a mass of positivity ripe for destruction. And, in turn, the more that human reality is experienced as a mass of forces in our possession, the more that change and action can only mean the rearrangement of these forces in response to a greater, overwhelming force. In this way the night, that reserve of the exceptional, of what lies outside of the techno-economy of the day, itself becomes pressed into the service of the day. We fight wars to destroy what we perceive to be the sclerotic structures of our concrete world that hold us back from acquiring more, whether it is more wealth, more security, or more freedom. The night of finitude, the darkness that remains an irremovable dimension of human affairs, becomes embodied in ‘the bondage of wars and near-wars’ and the enormous



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instrumentum of destruction that has been amassed by human beings. We should not forget that in the background of the Helsinki Accords, and by extension Charta 77, was the palpable sense of the moment that the planet had just managed to pause before settling the issue of who will command the future by means of a nuclear holocaust. How to manage a competition, the basic premise of which was the possibility of mutual destruction, determined the fundamental existential question of the age, one that was, from Patočka’s point of view, being determined wholly in terms of the logic, or the economy of the day. 5. EXPECTATIONS AND HERESY In sum, what we expect from Charta 77 is that it will introduce a new ideal orientation into our lives. [...] It is a new orientation to basic human rights, to the moral dimension of political and private life.32

Patočka’s philosophical challenge in the Heretical Essays to shift from an orientation of the day, in its modern form of a will to have and a knowledge to manipulate, to one of the night, of polemos as an existence together in risk, a solidarity of the undaunted, of the shaken, haunts the two Charta 77 texts that we have been citing.33 It is a challenge at once philosophical and political. Above all, it is an appeal to once again embrace a specifically historical existence; and it introduces a tension in almost every line of these two texts on the Charta. The call to polemos sounds, in their repeated admonition in the Charta texts, to accept the risk of resistance, to move beyond the calculations of ‘fear and gain’,34 even if at the same time they speak from a fundamental commitment to peace, and with that to the hope of a world without war. The call to polemos underlines the questionability of all of the evocations to a moral sense of purpose, inwardly problematizing the otherwise clear moral tonality of each text. Coming to these texts fresh from Patočka’s philosophical writings – even those written within months of the two Charta 77 texts, for example, ‘Masaryk’s Philosophy of Religion’35 – the reader can’t help but ask: What is the true nature of this moral dimension Patočka seeks to evoke, from what does it receive its orienting force? Is it a promise of reason, a hope in a world that, at the end point of history, will redeem the good and punish the evil? Is it a rational hope for redemption, as a reward for our diligence in resisting injustice? Or, on the contrary, is it a morality without reason, without a commitment to a world that would argue that everything has a meaning, everything has a purpose and an end, even the evils of injustice? What, in other words, is behind this faith in humanity, and what form of this faith is being expressed here?

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There is, in other words, a distinctive heretical dimension to these two texts on Charta 77, written so close to the philosopher’s death. This dimension remains invisible if they are read in isolation from the rest of Patočka’s reflections on history, politics, and philosophy. In a world in which morality seems to be in decline, the text calls for a recommitment to a moral vision of the world – yet at the same time it is questionable whether this is a ‘return’ to traditional conceptions of what is ‘highest’ in us, or, on the contrary, a far more radical embrace of that which transcends us in a darker, more unsettling fashion. In a world threatened by nuclear destruction, the text calls for a change of perspective, a reorientation that would save us from the threat of war and near-war, thus situating itself solidly on the side of the party of peace – yet, at the same time its continuous evocations of the necessity of risk, of accepting and embracing risk as a fundamental commitment, point to a conception of solidarity that is ruled not by peace – by the day – but by the night of polemos. Some might take all of this as evidence of inconsistency. I would, on the contrary, argue instead that Patočka’s thought should be recognized for what it is: a consistently profound meditation on the human condition, one that teaches us the wisdom of questions that do not have answers, and of problems the meaning of which do not reduce our capacity to solve them. Patočka was, in short, a true philosopher. NOTES 1. For some of the background history of Charta 77, see Vladimir Kusin, ‘Challenge to Normalcy: Political Opposition in Czechoslovakia, 1968–1977’, in Rudolf Tökés (ed.), Opposition in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1979), 26–59. On Patočka as a dissident intellectual, see Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Jan Patočka. L’Espirit de la dissidence (Paris: Michalon, 1998). 2. Jan Patočka, ‘The Obligation to Resist Injustice’ and ‘What We Can and Cannot Expect from Charta 77’, both in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1989). 3. Compare to Patočka, ‘The Dangers of Tehnicization in Science According to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger According to M. Heidegger (Varna Lecture)’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 327–39; also Patočka, ‘Séminaire sur l’ère technique’ [Four Seminars on the Problem of Europe], in Liberté et sacrifice, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Grenoble: Millon, 1990). 4. Patočka, ‘The Obligation to Resist Injustice’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 341. 5. Here I am echoing, without necessarily endorsing, a quasi-consensus in the literature on Patočka to the effect that his adherence to the thought of Heidegger prevented him from embracing fully the humanism and liberalism, not to mention the optimism,



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of that other great figure of Czech philosophy and politics in the twentieth century, Tomas G. Masaryk. See as exemplary of this reading two studies: Aviezer Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), and Edward Findlay, Caring for the Soul in the Postmodern Age. Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patočka (New York: SUNY, 2002). I hope to show in what follows that there is more to Patočka’s engagement with Heidegger than a tendency towards conservative reactionism, or any other label for anti-liberal views that may be circulating in our current political coinage. 6. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996). On the political significance of this text, see Petr Pithart, ‘Questioning as a Prerequisite for a Meaningful Protest’, in Ivan Chvatik and Erika Abrams (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 155–61. 7. Patočka, ‘The Obligation to Resist Injustice’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 341–2. 8. So for example see Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 130–1, 347. 9. Patočka, ‘The Obligation to Resist Injustice’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 342: ‘The participants in Charta 77 do not seek any political role or privilege for themselves, and least of all do they wish to be any moral authority or social conscience’. 10. Here, one should of course cite the first two of Patočka’s Heretical Essays, ‘Reflections on Prehistory’ and ‘The Beginning of History’, but also other texts such as Plato and Europe (also from the 1970s). See Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 11. On the threefold movement of human existence see Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1997); also Jan Patočka, ‘The “Natural” World and Phenomenology’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 239–72. 12. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 23–4. 13. Ibid., 32. 14. See Patočka, Heretical Essays, 13: ‘In this way their [mythical humans’] life resembles that of nonhuman animals who obviously live in order to live yet differs from it in its hidden possibility of problematization which can always be brought forth, though they neither do bring it forth nor intend to do so. Thus problematization is present, concealed, in a sense repressed, yet more than a mere privation’. Also cf. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 43ff. 15. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 38. 16. Ibid., 38. 17. Ibid., 38–9. 18. Patočka, ‘The Obligation to Resist Injustice’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 342–3. 19. See Heraclitus, Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary, ed. and trans. Thomas M. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), Fragments 53 and 80.

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20. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 42. Patočka is here citing Fragment 113 (Heraclitus, Fragments, 66–7), which echoes the phrase polemon eonta xunon in Fragment 80 (Fragments, 48–9). 21. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 155–63, 186f. On Heidegger, Heraclitus, and polemos, see: Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. 21–86; Nicolas de Warren, ‘Homecoming. Jan Patočka’s Reflections on the First World War’, in Michael Staudigl (ed.), Phenomenologies of Violence (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 219–23; and Sandra Lehmann, Der Horizont der Freiheit. Zum Existenzdenken Jan Patočka’s (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2004), 84–95. Also cf. another version of my own account given here, which explores these themes in reference to Patočka’s reflections on the First World War: James Dodd, ‘Philosophy in Dark Times: An Essay on Jan Patočka’s Philosophy of History’, in Religion, War, and the Crisis of Modernity. A Special Issue Dedicated to the Philosophy of Jan Patočka, ed. Ludger Hagedorn and James Dodd, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14 (2015): 64–92. 22. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 145. 23. Ibid., 110. 24. Ibid., 145. 25. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 42–3. 26. Ibid., 39. 27. Ibid., 41. 28. Ibid., 43. 29. Patočka, ‘What We Can and Cannot Expect from Charta 77’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 345. 30. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 44. 31. Ibid., 83–6; here the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth of the essays should be read alongside Plato and Europe, for a sense of the complexity of Patočka’s understanding of the spiritual history of Europe. 32. Patočka, ‘What We Can and Cannot Expect from Charta 77’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 347. 33. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 136–7. 34. Patočka, ‘What We Can and Cannot Expect from Charta 77’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 346. 35. Jan Patočka, ‘Masaryk’s Philosophy of Religion’, trans. Jiří Rothbauer, revised by James Dodd, in Religion, War, and the Crisis of Modernity, 95–135.

Chapter 8

Supercivilization and Biologism Darian Meacham

1. BIOLOGISM AND SUPERCIVILIZATION Towards the end of one of his last texts, ‘The Schema of History’ (Das Geschichtsschema, written in German between 1975 and 1976), Patočka poses a question that orients much of his late thought on the concepts of ‘post-Europe’, the ‘solidarity of the shaken’, and ‘war’ as the unifying theme of the twentieth century (and many of the chapters in this volume). The question is simply: Will ‘man’ of ‘the planetary era’ live in a manner that is effectively historical?1 Other contributions in this book have taken on this question in its positive sense by addressing the concepts of ‘postEurope’, ‘solidarity’, ‘community’, and ‘war’. Indeed the question of what it is to live ‘historically’ is the central concern of Patočka’s late work and it is parsed existentially, phenomenologically, and also, if sometimes rather obliquely, politically throughout his entire oeuvre. In this chapter, I am primarily concerned with the counterpoint to Patočka’s question. If, in the ‘planetary era’, living historically is a question, a desirable but seemingly rather unlikely possibility, what is the primary impediment? Patočka’s response to this is in the sentences, paragraphs, and pages which surround the question and specifically in one term: biology. Variations of the terms biology, biologic, and biological fill the final passages of ‘The Schema of History’. A politicized form of ‘biologism’ is, according to Patočka’s argument, the culmination of a radical mutation in the development of rational civilization.2 Hence, the question about the possibility of living historically is enveloped by questions and exhortations concerning the overcoming of a conception of human life that has been reduced to its biological functions or ‘plan’. 95

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Patočka seems to understand ‘biologism’, when applied in its most base sense to human life, as the reduction of life to its biological functions and mere survival: it is life understood in terms of energetic (e.g. caloric) requirements for sustenance, metabolism, energy output (quantifiable in measurements such as labour productivity), and the internal and external regulation of the organic system. Finally, it is the integration of this vital economy into a ‘planetary one’.3 Three terms need to be distinguished here: the natural science of biology, philosophy of biology, and, lastly, what Patočka calls ‘biological philosophy’ (or ‘biologism’). The latter term – biological philosophy – is distinct from but draws, not always legitimately, upon the former two. In a working note on ‘America as the Inheritor of Europe’, Patočka further describes biological philosophy as an ‘evolutionist, progressive empiricism’.4 One of the upshots of this mode of thinking is that the concept of truth is replaced by the concept of success (Patočka’s term) or perhaps better efficiency, as all metaphysics – what Patočka likely has in mind when he uses the term ‘intellectual view’ – is reduced to contingency. While he links ‘biologism’ to the ‘Americanization’ of Europe and the final ascendency of this mode of thought and its globalization with the two great European wars, Patočka is not at all insensitive to the preparatory exercises in biologism carried out in the processes of European colonization and imperialism.5 Ultimately, it is the ‘massification’ of all life under the ‘perilous form of industrial production’ that he thinks marks ‘biologism’ and the culmination of biological philosophy. I will take up the terms biologism and biological philosophy again in section two, but, regardless of their scope, these concepts stands in stark, binary opposition to Patočka’s conceptions of responsibility, freedom, the vocation of philosophy, and indeed politics qua ‘care for the soul’ – all focal points of his entire philosophical work. In the third of the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, Patočka describes the concurrent emergence of philosophy and politics properly speaking in the Greek polis as a break from the ‘bondage of life itself’ and with ‘subsistence as life’s content and service in the sweat of their brow’. His indebtedness to Hannah Arendt and her conception of the tripartite division of the human condition into labour, work, and action is apparent here.6 In Arendt’s schema, the dimension of human life that she calls labour, which is primarily about biological sustenance and reproduction, is linked to necessity, mere animal survival, and ultimately slavery; the third dimension, action, is linked to freedom, responsibility, and the political, properly speaking. The emergence of the ‘planetary era’ following the European wars of the twentieth century (into which the whole world was dragged) is again linked in Patočka’s thought to a return to the dominance of ‘biologism’ in political life and a posing of the question of whether there still exists the possibility of



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breaking this bond to mere survival and living in responsibility and freedom. That is, of whether there is still a possibility of living both properly politically and philosophically; the two being synonymous in Patočka’s lexicon with living historically. ‘Planetary’ in this context does not refer solely to globalization or interconnectedness. It has two interrelated senses. First, the ‘planetary era’ refers to the hegemony of one form of life – ‘biologism’ – over the two competing blocs of the post-war and post-European era: the United States and the Soviet Union. Both power bases served as regulators of economies of energy within their respective spheres. Patočka is also prescient of the rise of China as a successor to the Soviet Union as the other global power centre. ‘Planetary’ in this sense has a political meaning. The second sense of the term relates to the complete absorption of the cosmos into the economy of energy and the combining of vital material and energy economies. Many philosophers of Patočka’s generation were greatly astounded not only by the newfound capacities of technoscience to split the atom, which made total global annihilation possible for the first time, but also by the prospects opened up by spaceflight, which effectively opened up the possibility of the appropriation of the entire cosmos and its integration into the cosmic energy economy.7 It is only with the combination of these two senses of planetary that the term gains its full meaning: all of the cosmos is drawn up into a single form of life that converts it into scalable units of productivity. For Patočka, this totalizing logic was also bound up with the advent of total war, scientifically perfected in the course of the great European wars, which culminated in Europe’s destruction and removal from the seat of global power. In one of Patočka’s relatively few remarks about the Second World War he emphasizes its radicalism in this aspect: Into this situation then came the Second World War. Differing from the First World War, which was not so radical, everything down to the naked, physical roots was engaged in this war. It was no longer a war only bound within the limits of a clear political plan and budget; it also was not a war that would compromise only the old ideologies which had more or less become antiquated thus leaving people a certain intellectual reserve untouched by the fight. Everything was cast into the struggle. The phrase promoted in Germany was victory ‘at any price’, i.e. at the price of any kind of use or abuse of Man.8

The mobilization of all the resources available to a political power towards the war economy marks the era of total war, as does the legitimate targeting of all the enemies’ resources during total war, including the vital resources embodied in the civilian population – hence the need, following the war, to further strengthen the constraints on this logic such as the Geneva Conventions.

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But in Patočka’s analysis, the logic of war does not recede after the cessation of formal hostilities; rather, the phenomenon of total war has effectuated a transformation of technological civilization that cannot simply be hemmed back; hence, Patočka’s provocative definition of the twentieth century as war.9 In this sense, constraints on the carrying out of war, such as the Geneva Conventions, which apply only to non-combatants or those who are no longer active combatants, are rendered meaningless since they depend on the scope and territory of a war having reasonably clearly defined boundaries. What characterizes the twentieth century as war is that the logic of biologism no longer defines a limited sphere of human activity, but becomes the fundamental characteristic of contemporary civilization: Journalist Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: ‘We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.’10

However, or rather consequently, given the continued phenomenological nature of Patočka’s work, the concept of biologism does not only form a constellation with the concepts of history, war, and post-Europe.11 It also implicates Patočka’s critique of both Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld and his concept of the crisis of European humanity. In the following section I will examine this relation. I will then argue for an understanding of biologism along the lines of the concept of ‘scientific ideology’ that Georges Canguilhem developed in the 1970s. Considering biologism as a scientific ideology also has ramifications for how we should understand the relationship in Patočka’s thought, and perhaps political philosophy more generally, between phenomenology and Marxism.12 2. THE CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN SCIENCE AND THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN HUMANITY Patočka finishes ‘The Schema of History’ with a critique of Husserl and a question about the future and viability of phenomenology and phenomenological concepts to address this central question at the core of the modern situation: How, on the basis of the phenomenological concepts of life and experience, can we understand and overcome the biological departure point of the current epoch? The Husserlian critique of rational civilization as having forgotten the lifeworld is certainly profound, but his proposition for a renewing of the metaphysics of spirit [subjective transcendental phenomenology] is abstract and without contact with the essence of the modern situation: the question of knowing how, by way of mathematical physics, we have arrived at the supremacy of life, of biology?13



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Though Husserl’s concern for the formalization of the lifeworld in the mathematical sciences, namely physics, and the subsequent double forgetting of the lifeworld by the sciences was indeed insightful, he misses the true character of the ‘crisis’ of the European sciences and indeed of European humanity and also provides an insufficient solution in his form of subjective transcendental phenomenology. Husserl’s concern lay in large part with a loss of the connection between the formalized sciences and the value-laden structures of the lifeworld. The formalization of scientific findings and indeed language is not itself what is at issue; to the contrary, it is necessary for the foundation of scientific reasoning in the first place. What Husserl was concerned with was a double forgetting. The first part of this double is composed of two elements: first, that the lifeworld of everyday experience, practice, and perception was forgotten as the ground for the formalizations of ideal objects of the natural sciences, and, second, that transcendental constituting subjectivity was likewise forgotten as the ground of the sense-structures of the lifeworld. This first forgetting is constitutive of science itself. To achieve both its universality and supra-temporality, fundamental characteristics of scientific formalizations or idealities per se, scientific discourse must function at a level of abstraction or formalization that forgets – in the sense of directing its attention away from – its origin and fundamental ground in the lifeworld and perceptual life. In the crisis theory that Husserl develops in the Crisis of the European Sciences and the surrounding texts, this first forgetting could be considered a crisis with a small ‘c’. It is a crisis that is both necessary and constitutive of formalized scientific discourse. The second part of the double forgetting is a forgetting of the first forgetting. The efficacy of the formalized discourse of natural science leads to a forgetting to go back to the things themselves. The natural sciences, in their success, have come to mistake the map of phenomenal reality that they create out of experimentally verified formalities for the experienced territory that the map depicts. In doing so, the sciences become estranged from that territory (the lifeworld). This results in a kind of colonization of the lifeworld by the ungrounded though extremely efficient natural sciences. The concept of colonization is apt in describing the Husserlian phenomenon of Crisis at a social and political level. The institutions put in place to scientifically organize society are not experienced as organic to the lifeworld, but rather as interloping interventions from a purely formal reality that has been long severed from its foundation and now operates independently of it. A sort of alienation develops between lifeworldly experience and its regulation by institutions that no longer recognize the lifeworld as a font of truth or value. In this situation the value of scientific rationality – in a true sense, which Husserl aims to recover, develop, and ground through his phenomenology – becomes unapparent to experiencing

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subjects whose relation to it becomes one of estrangement followed by imposition. This is Crisis with a big C transposed onto a social and political level; it threatens the link between the European sciences and European humanity; the link that for Husserl is the essence of Europe.14 Husserl’s rejection of naturalism (or physicalism) should be read in this framework. It is not in any sense a rejection of either scientific method or even entirely of naturalism itself. To the contrary, Husserl maintained that naturalism held the door open for philosophy as a rigorous science insofar as it respected the need to build a ‘philosophy from the ground up’ (from the things themselves) in opposition to constructing a ‘system’.15 But, due to its insufficient grounding, that is, its estrangement from the lifeworld and the sense-formations from which it was initially built, naturalism threatens and ultimately destroys objectivity. Husserl understood naturalism as the idea that everything that is, is part of ‘nature’ qua object of the natural sciences. In other words, everything that is, is either physical or has something physical as its basis.16 Mental life, properly speaking, loses its autonomy and dignity and becomes a secondary correlate to physical processes. In this way, not only are cognitive processes physicalized, but so also are ethical and logical norms of thinking. While the formalized natural sciences (again, Husserl has in mind here primarily physics and empirical psychology, he had different views about biology) dealt almost exclusively with efficacy within their own formalized domains, Husserl understood them to take as a given that nature as understood by the natural sciences, that is, physicalist nature, was being-in-itself.17 Naturalism ignores the question of ‘what is givenness?’ – the driving question of phenomenology – thus its uncritical scientific method is grounded in the assumption that what is given is what is, and remains, consequently, at its base unscientific, despite the great efficacy of its technique.18 This is problematic at the life worldly end, that is, practical and political, not least because in the place of the sciences and scientifically grounded explanation comes superstition, ideology, and Weltanschauungsphilosophie or ‘world-view philosophy’. We can turn to Leo Strauss’s analysis of Husserl’s position to better understand why Weltanschauungsphilosophie posed a threat to the aim of rational civilization and how it is tied into the ungroundedness of the natural sciences. Strauss is particularly insightful in this context precisely because he is asking the question of whether there is indeed space for political philosophy within Husserlian phenomenology. His answer is that this space is precisely in the elaboration of philosophy as a rigorous science between the pincers of naturalism and Weltanschauungsphilosophie. Weltanschauung is described by Strauss as ‘life-experience of a higher order’, including not only experience of the world, but also religious, aesthetic, ethical, political, practical-technical experience, etc.19 As Husserl writes: ‘A worldview and a worldview



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philosophy are cultural formations that come into being and disappear in the stream of the development of mankind, whereby their spiritual content is determinately motivated under the given historical circumstances’.20 Max Scheler, referring to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s use of the term, provides a perhaps clearer definition in referring to weltanschauung as ‘forms of “apprehending” and envisaging the world which prevail at a given time over a given area (forms not necessarily conscious or acknowledged)’. It is a synthetic and historically relative wisdom or worldview that provides form(s) to experience for subjects within a specific temporal, geographical, and cultural location. Weltanschauungsphilosophie is, subsequently for Husserl, the attempt to ‘conceptualize wisdom or give it a logical elaboration, or more simply to give it the form of science’, most of the time by drawing on the findings of the natural sciences to support a particular form of Weltanschauung:21 Worldview philosophy accordingly presupposes all the individual sciences as treasure-troves of objective truth, and to the extent that it finds its goal in satisfying as far as possible our need for definitive and unifying, all-comprehending and all-understanding knowledge, it regards all individual sciences as its foundations. As a consequence, it occasionally calls itself scientific philosophy, since it is built on firm sciences. However, since, properly understood, not only the scientific character of the foundations belongs to the scientific character of a discipline, but also the scientific character of the goal-setting problems, the scientific character of the methods, and especially also a certain logical harmony between the guiding problems on the one hand and such foundations and methods on the other, the expression ‘scientific philosophy’ does not mean much.22

The problem is that there is an incompatibility between a temporally and geographically local Weltanschauung and the supra-temporality of rigorous science – including philosophy.23 The importing of scientific formalities to support a Weltanschauung is fundamentally unscientific, but also politically and socially speaking hard to resist.24 Nonetheless, for Husserl, Weltanschauungsphilosophie cannot provide a rational ground for civilization. For Patočka, the attempt to scientifically rationalize all political conflict according to one particular worldview was the fundamental characteristic of what he referred to as ‘radical supercivilization’. I will return to this concept in a moment. In 1911, the year that ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’ was published, Strauss writes that Husserl does not pay much attention to the societal impact that the undermining of Weltanschauungsphilosophie as a cultural foundation might have for people accustomed to its comforting blanket of relative certainty. He also, according to Strauss, takes it for granted that ‘there will

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always be a variety of Weltanschauungsphilosophien that peacefully co-exist within one and the same society’.25 And he considers neither the possibility of societies that impose a single Weltanschauung and refuse to tolerate rigorous science (in the Husserlian sense) as a civilizational project, nor that tolerating an indefinite number of Weltanschauungen is itself a Weltanschauungsphilosophie – liberalism. By 1935, the year of Husserl’s lectures in Vienna and Prague on the ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity’ and ‘Crisis of the European Sciences and Psychology’, he was certainly aware of these possibilities. Speaking in Prague to an audience that included Patočka, one of the organizers of the talk, Husserl warned: ‘Those who are conservatively contented with the tradition and the circle of philosophical human beings will fight one another, and surely the fight will take place in the sphere of political power’.26 Coarsely put, the crisis of the European sciences is about a schism between the formalized discourse of the natural sciences and the lifeworldly discourse and practice of values and value-oriented activity. Contemporary Weltanschauungsphilosophien qua self-proclaimed ‘scientific-philosophy’, though having its roots in traditional philosophies, emerges as a particular symptom of the current crisis. Scientific rationality is confined, though in a limited fashion, to the discourse of the natural sciences and only finds its way unscientifically into the sphere of values and politics via culturally relative Weltanschauungsphilosophien posing as universally valid under a garb of ungrounded scientific idealities. This is not a problem for the now ‘autonomous’ natural sciences which continue to operate with ever-increasing efficiency. It is, however, a problem for value which is cut off from its rational ground and impoverished by this departure. While the scientific method may have now been divorced from value, the practice of science is not. It remains guided (an indeed funded) by value-laden lifeworldly institutions, the institutions of politics.27 Subsequently, the development of the natural sciences is oriented by a field of value that is alienated from the form of rationality that it is tasked with cultivating. Ideology and not rationality slides in as the normative ground for the development of science. In the warning that Husserl gives, scientific rationality becomes a technology of ideology and not the civilizational grounding that it should be. Hence, the crisis of the European sciences becomes a crisis of European humanity that threatens the very aim of a rational civilization, which for Husserl, and in a slightly different sense for Patočka, defines the essence of Europe. Transcendental phenomenology is proposed by Husserl as a scientific ground for both the formalized natural sciences and the study of the lifeworld. The investigation of the eidetic structures of consciousness’s constituting activities and conscious givenness – how something is given to consciousness and what processes in consciousness bring something to givenness – was



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meant not only as a rational ground for the sciences but also as a bridge between the sphere of science and the sphere of value. In other words, by grounding both the natural sciences and value in a science of how givenness is constituted for consciousness, the objectivity of both spheres could be saved and brought into contact with one another, forming the basis for a properly rational society. Husserl thusly viewed the task of transcendental phenomenology as civilizational in its scope and stakes. It is very important to underline how his critique is an attempt to deepen and properly ground European rationality, not in any way limit it.28 In this sense, as Karel Novotny shows in this volume, Patočka follows his master’s steps. His critique of the idea of European ratio, and with that his critique of Husserl’s attempt to reground European ratio through transcendental phenomenology must be understood not as a way to contrast reason, but rather as a way to give it new grounds. Patočka’s critique of Husserl in the quote that ends ‘The Schema of History’ has two parts, the first is that Husserl’s civilization grounding proposal – transcendental phenomenology – is too abstract, the second is that it misses the real question concerning the crisis of the sciences and Weltanschauungsphilosophie: ‘How by way of mathematical physics have we arrived at the supremacy of life, of biology?’ It is true that biology escapes the criticism that Husserl levies towards psychology and also does not receive the focus that he gives to physics in the descriptions of the Crisis of the European sciences. In fact Husserl, in Appendix 23 to the published Crisis text, says that biology is the science that is closest to transcendental philosophy.29 In a banal sense, it is obvious that biology is much closer to the things themselves than formalized mathematical physics. Husserl also contended that biology should be thought of as the ‘universal science of sense formation’ insofar as it was the science of relations between organisms and the world and also internal organismic relations, which were best characterized in terms of sense-formation (or constitution in a broader sense).30 In this regard, Husserl’s understanding of biology was much closer to that of his contemporary Jakob von Uexküll than the positivist mechanistic biology which von Uexküll called physiology but that we would today associate with biology writ large. But, in a way, Husserl’s treatment of biology is besides the point, as Patočka is not concerned with this or that conception of the biological or life sciences, but rather with ‘biologism’. Thus, the question that Patočka thinks is at the heart of the modern problematic is different from the question of the proper understanding of biology. It is a question about the limits of biological thinking. How did biological models for the regulation of metabolic and other mechanisms in the vital struggle against morbidity and death become models for thinking about human existence in its totality and how did these models come not only to

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dominate but become the form of rational civilization – what he calls elsewhere ‘supercivilization’ [Nadcivilizace]?31 The question does not just concern a gap between the sciences and the lifeworld or a forgetting of the generative origins of scientific idealities in the lifeworld, but also and perhaps most significantly, how to think about the idea of crisis in terms of a form of colonization of the lifeworld by a kind of formalized discourse that refuses any constraints on the application of biological concepts outside of the sphere of the life sciences.32 Patočka’s question about how we got to this situation is also linked to the previous statement that Husserl’s prescriptions for a Europe in crisis are flawed in their abstractness. Here, we can see the emergence of a strain of not just politicized phenomenology, which Husserl’s work on the concept of Crisis obviously already was, but also political phenomenology which aimed to address questions of political ideology head on and specifically ‘biologism’ as a specific form of ideology. In section 3, I will argue that ‘biologism’ can be considered a form of what George Canguilhem refers to as ‘scientific ideology’ (a term that is on the surface self-contradictory). It is also closely related to Husserl’s definition of Weltanschauungsphilosophie. In this form of ‘scientific ideology’ (not Patočka’s words) Husserl saw not just a threat to philosophy as rigorous science, but the entire project of rational civilization. Biologism as concerns Patočka is the planetary form of what he called ‘radical supercivilization’ (a concept he developed in the 1950s). Writing nearly thirty years later in the late 1970s, the dominant ‘biologist’ paradigm is liberal-democratic capitalist civilization, but Patočka also applies the term to the worldview of both allied and central powers in the First World War, the Chinese communist regime, and all sides in the Second World War. He exempts the Wilsonian vision of the United States as ‘the sole power which, during the conflict, put forward an idea that, independently of all biological necessity, issues from the sphere of secular Christianity: the emancipation of peoples’.33 In reference to biologism, Patočka also speaks of modern industrial civilization, but the distinction between industrial and post-industrial civilization is not relevant here; what is relevant is the quantification of all activity in terms of economic productivity. To borrow a term from J. F. Lyotard, this can be thought of in terms of ‘performativity’: the orientation of all activity within a society is towards maximum efficiency in the ratio between input and output. This ‘technological criterion’ of an energetic economy is what marks ‘radical supercivilization’. ‘Radical supercivilization’ is thus a conceptual category that Patočka used to identify particular traits belonging to the three main variants of twentieth-century industrial civilization: fascism, socialism, and liberalism. The concept cannot however be reduced to its particular historical instantiations. Rather, it is used to identify the supposed rationalization of



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civilization: in this form of governance, society is not ordered according to the desires or dictates of a ruler or ruling class, but is rationalized and ordered according to rational principles. But Patočka also differentiates between what he calls ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ supercivilization. The designation of the former, which he saw significant value in and credits with ‘unprecedented social accomplishments’, lies in the extent of this attempt at rationalization.34 A moderate rational or supercivilization does not attempt to eradicate all political dissent or difference through the forced consent to the rational model adopted by the civilization. Moderate supercivilization leaves space for political conflict, including for positions considered to be irrational at the time or within the pervading and dominant political discourse and structure of governance. But, in Patočka’s understanding, moderate supercivilization is grounded on a rigid division between private and public. An individual is allowed to maintain a space of freedom, even in contradistinction to the rationalizing norms of society as long as his or her position does not become public or interfere with the rationalization of society. This is why, according to Patočka, freedom in moderate supercivilization becomes an empty concept. Thus, moderate supercivilization remains a step away from a pluralist democratic space where political conflicts and opposing positions should be allowed not only to have space within the private sphere (freedom of religion for example) but also within the public sphere, where these ‘irrational’ positions may put forward their case for a particular view of the good life and the corresponding organization of society. Patočka nonetheless credits the liberal version of moderate supercivilization with at least being aware of the necessity ‘to defend metaphysical freedom against the intervention of the traditional centralism of the state’.35 While moderate supercivilization allows an outlet for political tension in the maintenance and autonomy of the private sphere, radical supercivilization contains an ‘internal contradiction’ that is in fact proper to all forms of ‘supercivilization’, though the moderate variety manages to sublimate it in the private sphere. It manifests itself in radical supercivilization in the attempt to fully suppress all apparently irrational elements within society. More precisely, the unscientificness of radical supercivilization comes from closing off the possibility of falsification concerning the validity of the organizing principles of society. In this sense, political pluralism and some forms of democratic structure become fundamental elements of rational civilization insofar as they maintain precisely the potential for falsification inherent in scientific methodology: a rational ordering of society that does not accept and indeed investigate the possibility of its own falsifiability is fundamentally irrational. It was this dynamic of irrational mutation in rational society that Patočka saw as one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century Europe.

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The pseudo-scientific ordering of fascist and Soviet communist forms of society are obvious cases of this. No less obvious is the oft-repeated mantra of ‘there is no alternative’, beloved of Margaret Thatcher and adopted by other proponents of some radical forms of economic liberalism in Europe. Not surprisingly, the phrase is also found in the work of Herbert Spencer an ardent proponent of economic liberalism whom Patočka also discusses as a thinker who refuses the question of history, precisely by attempting to biologize it.36 Thatcher’s mantra was meant to hammer home the idea that the scientific ordering of society according to the rational principles of the free market was the only possibility, precisely because it was the scientific possibility. But closing off the possibility of falsifying these ideas is, as Patočka points out, fundamentally unscientific. But this is exactly the mark of a ‘radical supercivilization’: a claim to rationality that in fact overturns the very basis of rationality and is grounded not in scientific method, but in a particular worldview, in this case, concerning the behaviour of subjects and a particular view of the good life taken to be scientific in its ground.

Figure 8.1  Example of a campaign advertising material of the CDU for the 1994 election for the Landtag of Thuringia. From the Archiv für Christlich-Demokratische Politik (ACDP).37



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The ‘internal contradiction’ of rational or supercivilization is also related to the double forgetting of generative origins that constitutes the crisis of the sciences and European humanity in a Husserlian sense. In Husserl’s understanding of the crisis, the natural sciences need the first ‘forgetting’ of the lifeworldly origins of scientific idealities to formalize and make progress. Forgetting in this sense is synonymous with formalization. The second forgetting, which constitutes the real crisis aspect of the theory of crisis is a forgetting of the first forgetting. The sciences, or those doing sciences, forget that the idealities or formal objects that they work with have been generated and operationalized by an initial process of forgetting of origins or grounds. The formalizations come to be taken for reality itself: mistaking the map for the territory. The second forgetting is a natural consequent of success engendered by the first, that is, it is the success of the formalized sciences that facilitates the forgetting of the forgetting, so to speak. Husserl introduces his concept of the phenomenological Rückfrage or questioning-back as a curative for the second forgetting and its symptoms. The Rückfrage is a tracing back into the practical engagement of the lifeworld and eventually the constituting powers of transcendental intersubjectivity and subjectivity of the generative processes that culminate in scientific formalizations. It is introduced as a defence mechanism against the second forgetting: the fail-safe device of rational, that is, properly scientific, civilization. But the Rückfrage needs to be instituted in a concrete community of scientists in order to be functional and needs to begin from a premise that the validity, including in an ethical and political sense, of the organizing institutions can indeed be not only brought into question but falsified by the activity of the Rückfrage. For Patočka, the problem is transposed onto rational civilization itself; it is further politicized. Rational civilization contains an internal contradiction insofar as the drive towards rationalization of problems/conflict becomes ideological, with biologism as a rational outcome of a mode of organization that takes energetic output, efficiency, and productivity as primary. But this rational outcome is ultimately unscientific as it is ungrounded and closes off the fundamental dimension of freedom and responsibility that would allow for the possible falsification of the mode of organization. Biologism is thus not rational but a form of Weltanschauungsphilosophie that morphs into ideology. Insofar as the diagnosis is ideology, there is a Marxist element to this line of thought, but the response is not dialectical materialism, which succumbs to the same internal contradiction insofar as it rules out the possibility of falsification. On the unscientific nature of orthodox Marxism, Patočka writes, in his essay on supercivilization: The metaphysical traits of dialectical materialism stem from scientific categories that are still impregnated with old-fashioned metaphysical dogmatism. This

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circumstance emerges very clearly if we take into account the indispensable role that, in this conception, is played by the concept of historical necessity, [according to which] the historical process develops according to a logical necessity, following the fundamental rules of the dialectics. […] What the historical materialism needs to find in the progression of history is not mere probability, but rather an ‘inflexible necessity.’38

Thus Patočka’s response to biologism remains phenomenological.

3. BIOLOGISM AS SCIENTIFIC IDEOLOGY Let’s now take up the question that Patočka says defines the contemporary period: How, by way of mathematical physics, we have arrived at the supremacy of life, of biology? I will answer this question through recourse to the concept of ‘scientific ideology’ developed by Canguilhem in his writings on Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences (1977). The argument that I wish to pursue here is that Canguilhem’s development of this concept in relation to the traditional Marxist notion of ideology is helpful in answering Patočka’s question above, but also in arriving at a better understanding of the relation between Marxism and phenomenology and whether there are indeed phenomenological approaches to the kind of political questions that Patočka thinks frames our period. The traditional Marxist notion of ideology (which Marx borrowed in name from the eighteenth-century French philosophers Cabanis and de Tracy and in spirit from the manner in which Napoleon criticized these original ‘ideologues’) does not take into account the possibility of a scientific ideology. Ideology is precisely what is opposed to science insofar as it is a system of representations that stands between the knowing subject and the reality of the thing known. Ideology distorts the reality of the thing while claiming to illuminate it. In Marx’s account, ideology was a means of protecting and maintaining a particular social structure that benefitted one party (capital) over others (labour) while maintaining that the structure in question was indeed reflective of the truth of things themselves. Ideology ‘inverts the relationship between knowledge and the thing known’39 insofar as, rather than offering a true insight into the structure of reality, it offers a distortion. Science and economic science in particular, is proposed by Marx as a remedy: ‘Tear the veil that is ideology’s only substance’. Hence, Canguilhem points out that a ‘scientific ideology’ should be a contradiction in terms as ideology is by definition unscientific. The Marxist definition of ideology ties in further with Patočka’s understanding of radical supercivilization. The task that ideology performs within



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a given context is to placate social conflict and, in particular, class struggle. Ideology is that construct within a civilization claiming to be organized on scientific principles which masks the fundamental irrationality of the social structure. However, as Canguilhem points out, Marx’s notion of ideology is predicated on the idea that it will cease to exist when a social structure is instituted on the basis of the eventual triumph of that class whose destiny it is to abolish all classes, the proletariat. As Patočka noted (see above), this aspect of orthodox Marxist theory was itself not open to falsification. Scientific ideology differs, strictly speaking, from political class ideology in the classic Marxist sense, although it is without doubt that a scientific ideology can also serve the interests of a political class. A scientific ideology does have a history of ‘verification and falsification’, that is, the system of representations that constitute it to belong to the history of science, properly speaking, and not to the domain of pseudoscience, which never risks the encounter with verification and falsification. What marks a scientific ideology as ‘ideology’ qua distortion is the extension of an explanatory system beyond its established and proper scope of verification.40 It is thus a scientifically ungrounded attempt to apply ‘norms of scientificity’: ‘Scientific ideology neglects the methodological requirements and operational possibilities of science in the realm of experience it has chosen to explore’.41 It is at this point that the scientific aspect of the scientific ideology ‘is pushed aside by ideology’.42 According to Canguilhem, a scientific ideology comes to an end when it is expelled from the ‘encyclopaedia of science’, that is, when its norms are shown to be operating outside of their proper scope of verifiability. Canguilhem highlights the potential political nature of this process of expulsion in saying: ‘What science eventually finds is not what the ideology suggested looking for’.43 Herbert Spencer serves as a case study. In short, Spencer sought to apply a now falsified theory of evolution, which he derived from nineteenth-century theories of thermodynamics and embryology, to social and economic spheres in support of free market economics, individualism, and competition. As Canguilhem points out, the extension of scientific propositions outside of their proper scope of application is done for ‘practical’ or political reasons. In the case of Spencer it was to legitimate the structure of nineteenth century English industrial society both against the claims of traditionalists (religion) and demands for more workers rights (socialism). We can see how Spencer’s evolutionism was an ideology in both the ‘scientific’ and Marxist sense. He also sought to justify British colonialism by way of scientific theory and ideology. As Canguilhem notes, his ‘ideology’ gave the term ‘primitive’ to the domains of linguistics and anthropology, and its ‘remnants can still be found in the behaviour of advanced societies towards so-called underdeveloped countries; a residue that has remained long after its expulsion from the encyclopaedia of science’. Spencer’s ascription to the idea that ‘there

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is no alternative’ was the result precisely of his attempt to give a scientific and indeed biological grounding to his social theory. But this attempt is ultimately shown to be invalid, if not outside the history of science properly speaking (a history of verification and falsification), then by its attempt to extend this scope of domain-specific norms beyond their remit. We can also see a clear relation here between scientific ideology and a form of Weltanschauungsphilosophie that attempts to appropriate the domain-specific norms of the special sciences as treasure troves of objective truth, and ultimately as legitimation of practical and political aims. Scientific ideology becomes a sort of tool of Weltanschauungsphilosophie. My contention here is that we can begin to answer Patočka’s question of how we arrived at the supremacy of life through the idea of biologism as scientific ideology. Biologism is precisely the extension of the concepts and norms of biology beyond their proper scope of application, forming from them a general social and political theory. This is why both Canguilhem and Patočka point to Spencer’s work as an instance of biologism and scientific ideology. The concept of regulation deserves special mention here. What Canguilhem deftly illustrates in his essay on the concept is how the idea of the dynamics or economy of a system functioning to maintain certain constants made its way from mechanics into biology and then into social theory.44 In the contemporary state of biologism that Patočka both laments, the regulated system has become a planetary one. It is an economy of energy, and the task of regulation is to ensure the most efficient rate of energy productivity of the planetary system. But this idea of a healthy planetary system is arguably scientific ideology turned ideology. The scientific concept at stake, regulation, is not only applied outside of its proper scope of validity but has also lost its place within its proper science, or has, at the very least, undergone significant metamorphoses since the easy analogy between a mechanical regulator (or governor), organic, and social regulation as the central organizing concept of a vital system. However, as Canguilhem points out in relation to Spencer, these concepts having been pushed out of the encyclopaedia of science, find new life serving a practical political purpose. Seen in this light, the political task of phenomenology, which Patočka questions at the end of ‘The Schema of History’ bears a relation to Marxism: a science is needed to tear off the veil of ideology. In this case, it is the scientific ideology of biologism. Marxism, or one version of it, proposes dialectical materialism as the method necessary to perform the unveiling. The issue for Patočka, as for many others, is that Marxism takes an unscientific turn in closing itself to possible falsification.45 Phenomenology, as the study of the constitutive processes of sense-formation, can be proposed as the methodological counter



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to ideology insofar as it remains open to constant processes of revision and verification. This is, however, a significant reformulation of Husserl’s notion of Crisis. What is at stake is not a gap between scientific rationality and the lifeworld, but rather an illegitimate and ultimately irrational extension of certain biological concepts into the institutions that govern and indeed constitute sense within it. The shift from scientific ideology to ideology occurs when the system of representation is maintained for its political and social utility in the interests of specific parties despite having made its departure from the sphere of history of science, which is a history of verification and falsifiability. This dynamic is illustrated clearly in the mantra of ‘there is no other way’. Here, in politics, phenomenology joins the philosophy of the concept and the history of science in interrogating the constitution of systems of representations, the institutions that hold them in place, and the kind of subjects they create. We must recognize that Patočka considered that subject which is reducible to its organic life, to mere survival, to be a product or object of biologism, and subsequently a function of scientific ideology not a verifiable scientific reality. Consequently, we can also better understand the significance of openness to the sacrifice of one’s own life (a key concept in Patočka’s thought) to be a central element in the refusal and ultimately falsification of biologism and subsequent openness to the possibility of living in history. The possibility of sacrifice does not show the openness to living in history and problematicity (ideas which are explored elsewhere in this volume) to be irrational or even outside the scope of scientific reason; to the contrary, it is an act that pulls back the veil of scientific ideology. But the opening of this possibility and the unmaking of biologism as scientific ideology is dependent upon the phenomenological interrogation of the structures and institutions that allow a scientific ideology to maintain its hold long after it should have become ‘inoperative residue in the history of the human sciences’.46 Because systems of representations and institutions create subjects, the idea of an asubjective phenomenology that Patočka used to reformulate Husserl’s phenomenology gains a political impetus. Therein also lies the response to his implicit question of whether phenomenology could address the central question of the age: how life in the form of biologism came to dominate thought. Phenomenology could offer resources, but its scientificity had to also draw into consideration the processes of manifestation that formed the subject itself and not retain a dogmatic attachment to transcendental subjectivity in the fashion that Patočka thought Husserl had. We can see that Patočka, in the analysis and critique of biologism, affirms and utilizes what seem to be closely related analyses; on the one hand, Husserl’s analysis of crisis and on the other Marx’s critique of ideology. But both also fall short in their capacity to respond to central question of modernity. They

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fall short precisely for failing to completely and adequately follow through on their own demands for scientific rationality. I have argued here that the relation between biologism and scientific rationality is best understood through Canguilhem’s development of the concept of ‘scientific ideology’. Patočka’s response, which I can only indicate here, is to attempt a radicalization of phenomenological thinking. The task of phenomenology, in its adherence to rationality, is to maintain the phenomenological epochē such that it does not lead, through a series of methodological jumps, to the reduction to transcendental subjectivity, but remains in its purity an unceasing dismantling and interrogation of the sensestructures that mediate the appearance of our world, including the subject itself; hence, Patočka’s insistence on an asubjective form of phenomenology that placed the analysis of the free movement of the lived-body methodologically prior to an active sense of constituting subjectivity. This is both a way of tearing the veil from all forms of ideology and an investigation of the nature of appearance, its processes, itself. In this way, phenomenology maintains its scientific nature, but also impresses the rigorous criteria of scientific methodology on the sense-structures of the world. It then becomes a rigorous form of Geschichtliche Frage [historical questioning or Rückfrage in Husserl’s lexicon] that incorporates the history of science as a dimension of the history of appearance. In doing so, phenomenology could become a kind of dissident activity contra biologism and indeed contra the reign of life. NOTES 1. Jan Patočka, ‘Le schéma de l’histoire’ [The Scheme of History], in L’Europe après l’europe, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2007), 36. 2. See ibid., 30–6. 3. The influence of Heidegger’s ‘Question Concerning Technology’ (Die Frage nach der Technik) is clear in the idea that ‘biologism’ converts all vital being into a natural resource (the awkward term ‘standing reserve’ is most often used in English) to be exploited. 4. Jan Patočka, ‘Note sur l’ère posteuropéenne’ [Problems of the Post-European Epoch], in L’Europe après l’europe, 264–6. 5. Ibid., 265; in this note he refers to a European ‘rush to the riches of the world’ pursued with a new intensity and methods. 6. See Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 62. Much of the Heretical Essays is an engagement with Hannah Arendt’s philosophical anthropology, and specifically with the tripartite conception of the human life that she presents in The Human Condition. Patočka, in the Heretical Essays, speaks of an attempt to ‘phenomenologize’ Arendt’s analyses and his philosophy of the ‘three movements’ of human life is the outcome of this attempt.



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7. See, for example, the ‘Introduction’ to Arendt’s The Human Condition. Arendt describes the contemporary conditions of technological civilization as one wherein the possibility emerges for the total annihilation of the species and terrestrial nature through nuclear war and also the possibility for humans to live in an environment that is entirely technological, that is space travel. Patočka also mentions the possibility of the human race destroying itself on several occasions. See, for example, Patočka, Heretical Essays, 133. 8. Jan Patočka, ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’, Studia Phaenomenologica 7 (2007): 92. 9. See the title of the Sixth Heretical Essay, ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War’. See also, Ludger Hagedorn’s contribution to this volume. 10. 60 Minutes (5/12/96) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8] last accessed 01/02/16. See Simona Forti’s chapter in this volume for an analysis of this attitude: ‘To this way of thinking, death, the dead, are no more than the necessary tribute paid for the affirmation of life, the price paid for the stabilisation of its power. It is the cost demanded by the forces of the day to which in reality we all feel bound. Such forces are in the final analysis constituted and empowered by our ties, our needs, by everything that roots life together in a system of safeguards and protections. The government of the forces of the day objectivises our lives by promising to satisfy daily needs: in a word, by promising a way of life without any threat’. Infra, 61. 11. This subsequently brings Patočka’s late work into dialogue with Kojève, as explored in Riccardo Paparusso’s chapter of this volume. 12. The relation between Patočka’s thought and Marxism is further explored and developed in Francesco Tava’s contribution to this volume. 13. Patočka, ‘Le schéma de l’histoire’, in L’Europe après l’europe, 36. 14. See the contributions of Stanciu and Novotny to this volume for further development of this theme. 15. See Leo Strauss, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy’, in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 34. 16. See Edmund Husserl, ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 2 (2002): 253–4: ‘The naturalist, to focus particularly on him for the moment, sees nothing but nature and first and foremost physical nature. Everything that is is either itself physical, belonging to the unitary nexus of physical nature or it is indeed something psychical but then something changeable that merely depends on the physical, at best a secondary, “parallel accompanying fact”’. 17. Ibid., 253. 18. Ibid., 259: ‘Every kind of object that is to be the object of rational discourse, of prescientific and then scientific knowledge, must manifest itself in that knowledge, thus in consciousness itself, and allow of being brought, in accordance with the sense of all knowledge, to givenness. All kinds of consciousness must allow of being studied in their essential connection and their relation back to the forms of givennessconsciousness belonging to them’. 19. Strauss, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy’, in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 36.

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20. Husserl, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’, 280. 21. Max Scheler, in distinguishing his understanding of Weltanschauungsphilosophie from Husserl’s writes: ‘Husserl gives the name Weltanschauungsphilosophie to exactly what I can, with far more historical justification, “scientific philosophy”, that is, the attempt either (in the spirit of positivism) to shape the available “results” of science into a “definitive” metaphysics or Weltanschauung or to reduce philosophy to scientific doctrine, that is theory of scientific method and principles’. Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (London: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 82. 22. Husserl, ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’, 283. 23. Ibid., 287: ‘The “idea” of worldview is accordingly for each age a different one, as should be quite clear from the foregoing analysis of its concept. By contrast, the “idea” of science is a supratemporal one, and here that means that it is not limited by any relation to the spirit of an age. Now connected with these distinctions are essential distinctions in the directions of practical goals. After all, our life goals are generally of a double nature, some are for time, others for eternity, the former serve our own perfection and that of our contemporaries, the latter also serve the perfection of posterity, down to the most distant generations. Science is a title for absolute, timeless values. Every such value, once discovered, belongs henceforth to the value-treasures of all subsequent mankind and obviously determines forthwith the material content of the ideas of culture, wisdom, worldview, as well as that of worldview philosophy’. 24. For Patočka the attempt to scientifically rationalize all political conflict was the fundamental. 25. Strauss, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy’, in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 37. 26. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die tranzendental Phänomenologie, second edition (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), 335. Cited by Strauss, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy’, in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 37. 27. Though seemingly taking place in a different world, the discourse surrounding the European Commission’s Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) initiative, which is embedded in the Horizon 2020 funding framework, sometimes strikes a very similar note to Husserl’s description of the crisis of the European sciences. At the core of RRI is the idea that science needs to be brought back into contact with European society as experienced and lived on a day-to-day level. The estrangement of these two risks science coming to be seen as extraneous to the European lifeworld and either undervalued or rejected. 28. See Patočka’s description on Husserl’s concept of Crisis in ‘The Dangers of Technicization in Science according to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger according to M. Heidegger’: ‘Science becomes a technē, the art of a precise calculation of nature – which would not be bad in itself, were it done fully consciously, if humans were aware, at each step, of just what they are doing, cloaking the primordially given world, subjective and imprecise, in an ideational garb which transposes it into a precise universe of truths for al land so makes it calculable’. In Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 329.



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29. See ‘Addendum XXIII of the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology’, trans. Niall Keane, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 44, 1 (2013): 6–9 30. See, Darian Meacham, ‘Biology, The Empathic Science’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 44, 1 (2013): 10–24. 31. Supercivilization in Patočka’s thinking clearly leads to a form of biopolitics, to use Foucault’s term, wherein the regulation of life itself (the life of the population over which a power is sovereign) becomes the overriding concern of political power, as all other forms of power are in a sense derived from this. Biopower as understood by Foucault is famously the power to make live and let die as illustrated by such institutional arrangements as national health systems, and the regulation of caloric inflow into occupied territories. This is another possible seam of investigation in the relation between Patočka and Foucault, and the subsequent development of Foucault’s biopolitics by people like Agamben and Esposito. 32. Habermas uses this term to describe the relation between the lifeworld and the instrumental rationalities of bureaucracies and market forces. 33. Patočka, ‘Le schéma de l’histoire’, in L’Europe après l’europe, 31. 34. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 132. 35. It is contentious whether Patočka can be considered a thinker whose thought is amenable to democratic theory. His support for human rights, pluralism, and the possibility of falsification within a society’s structures would point to the affirmative. This subject is taken up in more detail in Adam’s and Caraus’s contributions to this volume. 36. Patočka, ‘Sur la philosophie de l’histoire’ (1940) [On the Philosophy of History], in L’Europe après l’europe, 181. 37. By CDU – This file was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the KonradAdenauer-Stiftung, a German political foundation, as part of a cooperation project. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KAS-Bonitz,_Peter-Bild-15535-1.jpg. 38. Jan Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’, in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 1: Péče o duši I (Prague: Oikoymenh, 1996), 300. See also Francesco Tava’s chapter in this volume for a more in-depth examination of this issue. 39. Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 30. 40. Ibid., 38. 41. Ibid., 33. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 34. 44. See ‘The Development of the Concept of Biological Regulation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century’, in Canguilhem, Ideology and Rationality, 81–102. 45. Patočka rejects orthodox Marxist dialectical materialism on the grounds that it succumbs to dogmatism. As cited earlier: ‘The metaphysical traits of dialectical materialism stem from scientific categories that are still impregnated with old-fashioned metaphysical dogmatism. […] What the historical materialism needs to find in the progression of history is not mere probability, but rather an “inflexible necessity”’. Guided by this unfalsifiable doctrine, really existing socialism becomes not merely unscientific, but ideology, pushing aside the fundamental tenants of scientific

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methodology. This has a disastrous impact on the way that the human being comes to be understood: socialism ‘looks on [the human being] externally like a thing among things, a force among forces; and it is an ideology that organizes these forces’ (Patočka, ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’, 93). Thus, Patočka contends that dialectical materialism mutates precisely into a form of biologism. 46. Canguilhem, Ideology and Rationality, 37.

Chapter 9

Caring for the Asubjective Soul James Mensch

Jan Patočka’s readers are often puzzled by his concept of the soul. In the Heretical Essays, the Czech philosopher speaks about the ‘care for the soul’. Such ‘care’, in Greek philosophy, assumed two forms. In its Platonic version, Patočka writes that its object was ‘to render our soul [into] that firm crystal of being in view of the eternity’ that is one of the soul’s possibilities.1 In its Aristotelian version, the goal was not personal immortality, but rather to ‘care for the soul so that it could undertake its spiritual journey through the world … in complete purity and undistorted sight and so, at least for a brief while, achieve the mode of existing proper to the gods’.2 For the Romans, this care took on the form of ‘striving for the rule of law’ throughout their empire.3 In Christianity, it assumed a religious form directed to the soul’s salvation. According to Patočka, its continual practice shaped European self-consciousness. In his words, ‘The care of the soul … gave rise to Europe. This is a thesis that we can maintain without exaggeration’.4 In fact, for him, ‘what makes humans just and truthful is their care for their soul’.5 What, however, is the ‘soul’ that is the object of such care? This question achieves its special force from the fact that, at the time of such remarks, Patočka was developing his ‘asubjective phenomenology’. This is a phenomenology that dispenses with the modern concept of a subject. For Kant and Husserl, the appearing of the world is a result of the activities of the subject. It is the fundamental explanatory factor. Thus, for Husserl, Patočka writes: ‘The appearing of a being is traced back to the subjective (to the ego, experience, representation, thought) as the ultimate basis of its elucidation’. By contrast, ‘in asubjective phenomenology, we take the subject, like everything else, to be a “result”’. Its appearing results from the same ‘apriori rules of appearing’ that govern other things.6 One of these rules is that appearing 117

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implies a subject to whom things appear. But this, for Patočka, means that the subject is only ‘a definite position that a being satisfies’.7 It is defined as a ‘role in manifestation’, which is set by the requirements of manifestation. Thus, the fact that appearing is perspectivally structured signifies that it is coordinated to a given spatial-temporal point of view. The subject is simply this point of view. Patočka calls it an ‘empty ego’ since all its content originally comes from what manifests itself.8 As a structure, the subject or ego is just a reference point. Whatever we may think about his attempt to describe appearing asubjectively, one thing is clear. The soul that is the object of our care is not the subject. The solicitude for the soul that makes us just and truthful can hardly be a care for an empty reference point. Given this, what exactly is the soul? How are we to care for it? In what follows, I will discuss Patočka’s answer. 1. ARISTOTLE’S SOUL To do so, however, I shall have to make a detour and speak of Aristotle’s conception of the soul. This is because Patočka’s attempt to develop his asubjective phenomenology occurs in the context of his study of Aristotle. As Patočka writes, regarding this study, ‘In our days, when philosophy is again searching for an asubjective ontological foundation, an Aristotle, stripped of dogma, is … topical’.9 Aristotle’s appeal comes, in part, from the fact that his concept of the soul is not that of a ‘subject’ in any modern sense of the word. Such a conception, Patočka remarks, is absent ‘in ancient philosophy’. He adds ‘psyche is never understood as a subject … but always in the third person, [it is understood] impersonally, as a vital function’.10 Thus, for Aristotle, the soul is the actualization of the living body’s capability to be alive – this, by virtue of the soul’s being its functioning [energeia] as a living body.11 As Aristotle expresses this, ‘If the eye were a living creature, its soul would be its vision’.12 It would be ‘the seeing of the eye’.13 The key term here is energeia, which I just translated as functioning. This term, which Aristotle coined, is made up of two words, en and ergon. It literally means being at work and is sometimes translated as being in act. Thus, a builder functions when he is at work (or in the act of) building. Similarly, an eye functions when it is seeing. Such functioning, for Aristotle, involves movement. In fact, he defines movement as ‘the functioning of the potential as potential’.14 To explain this, he uses the example of building. He writes, ‘When building materials … are actually functioning as building materials, there is something being built; and this is [the process] of building’.15 Their functioning involves something being built; there is a transformation of the building materials, which realizes something beyond



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such materials – for example, a house. As this example makes clear, such functioning is actualization. Through the process of building, the house is being built. At the end of the process, an actual house exists. Movement, then, is actualization. This holds even though not all movements have a stopping point. Circular motion, for example, has no finite end. It does, however, actualize a given, circular orbit. Here, too, actualization takes place through movement. For Aristotle, then, not only has energeia ‘been derived from movements’, but ‘to be in act seems, above all, to be a movement’.16 Patočka sums up Aristotle’s doctrine with regard to motions that actualize entities: ‘Motion is what makes the existent what it is’.17 It realizes the existent. Such realization, we should note, does not just concern the processes by which a being comes to be. It also concerns the movement by which it maintains itself. Thus, the metabolic processes that were at work in a sapling continue when it is a mature tree. Its actualization as a mature tree is itself an ongoing movement. To apply these notions to the soul, we have to note that, for living creatures, motion is not random: for Aristotle, it is organized around a goal. This goal is specified by the organism’s essence. Aristotle’s word for ‘essence’, which he coined, is: τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι, which means literally: what it was to be.18 So regarded, the essence is what we grasp through a retrospective regard. Having observed an organism’s development from an embryo to an adult and then onward to its senescence, decline, and death, we can ask, retrospectively, what was it supposed to be? What was the goal of this process? What did it aim at? The essence specifies both this goal and the order in which it is achieved. Broadly speaking, it specifies the how of the movement by which the organism actualizes itself. In Patočka’s words, The possible determinations [of an entity], which are initially absent, become present through movement. The movement synthesizes them, that is, makes them simultaneously present. It effects this synthesis conformably to the law and rule that characterize the particular entity. These laws and rules are the entity’s essence. They determine what can and cannot be simultaneously actualized in the same entity. Thus, the essence of the plant is such that it can only accomplish its principal functions of growth and reproduction in a typically successive order.19

The essence of the plant is what specifies this order in its reaching the goal. As for the goal itself, it is that of the actualization of its potentialities to be a fully functioning plant: the plant that is bearing the seeds for the next generation. This goal, according to Patočka, is active (effective). The individual actions of the plant in reaching maturity are the means for its action. Thus, the plant’s taking in water and nutrients are the means by which the goal acts

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to bring about the adult individual. In this, the actions function ‘as the bearer and, at the same time, as the realiser of the goal’. This signifies, Patočka adds, ‘the goal of a being is not to accomplish this or that, … [the goal] is everything that it accomplishes. … It is its being itself that becomes the goal in everything that its essence brings together’.20 This effective, acting goal is, thus, present in all the being’s movements – both those that bring it to development and those that it engages in as a fully functioning organism. In stressing the unity of the action of this goal, Patočka intentionally runs together Aristotle’s distinction between kinesis, defined as movement towards a goal, and energeia, understood as an entity’s movement or functioning when it is at its goal. He writes: ‘Now, the entity as a goal [and] the goal as the entity itself are only possible if the entity exists through movement. Movement is not basically a progression from this to that, but rather a moving in place. Precisely as the actualization of that which is potentially – dunamei – already there, movement is simultaneously the presence of the goal and the progress toward it’.21 As the presence of the goal, movement is energeia, as progress towards it, it is kinesis. The key here is the fact that an entity exists through movement – the very movement that actualizes it and that maintains it when it is at the goal and fully functioning. This is what allows Patočka to assert: ‘Movement is not simply what realizes goals, it itself is a goal’.22 In other words, the goal of the movement is the movement that actualizes and then maintains the fully functioning organism. Understood in these terms, the soul is such self-directed movement. It is the actualization of the living body as living by virtue of being the self-directed movement through which such actualization takes place.23 Aristotle calls the soul ‘the arché [ἀρχή] of living beings’ – that is, their principle or origin – by virtue of its being that which actualizes them.24 It is the vital functioning by which they are. Patočka takes this definition in the most radical sense possible. For Aristotle, as he notes, movement or change is always change of something, this being an underlying substrate. Such a conception of movement, however, ill accords with the fact that it is through motion – particularly the movements involving the genesis and growth of the organism – that the bodily substrate of movement is itself realized. To be faithful to this insight, Patočka proposes ‘radicalizing Aristotle’s conception and understanding of movement as the original life that does not receive its unity from an enduring substrate but rather, itself, generates its own unity as well as that of the thing in movement’. Only this, he claims, ‘is the original movement’.25 He also says that such movement is ‘ontological’ since it results in the being – the ontos – that is actualized. Movement, then, is the ‘asubjective ontological basis’ that he is searching for. The soul, itself, can be defined asubjectively by taking it as the movement that results in living beings.



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2. MOVEMENT AND EXISTENCE Patočka writes that his goal is ‘a philosophy of a distinctive kind, one that takes movement as its basic concept and principle’. ‘What is distinctive about our attempt’, he adds, ‘is our interpretation of movement; we understand it independently of the dichotomy between subject and object’.26 Its independence comes from the fact that it is not itself an entity, but rather the realization of entities. As Patočka expresses this: ‘Movement is what makes a being what it is. It unifies and maintains cohesion; it synthesizes the determinations of the being. The persistence and the determinations of substance, and so on, are movements’.27 His point is that movement is the very existence of what exists. It is its actuality or being in act. This insight can be put in terms of the etymological sense of term ‘existence’, which is that of standing out – ex and istimi in Greek. Things stand out, that is, ex-ist, by affecting their environment, such affection occurring through their motion. On the most basic level, living beings do this through engaging in metabolism, that is, by exchanging material with what surrounds them. Inanimate objects do this through such motions as the vibration of atoms, the movement of electrons, the flux of subatomic particles, and so on. Without such motions, entities could not distinguish themselves from their environments; they could not affect them. Environmentally, then, without movement, they are indistinguishable from non-entities. If we accept this, then we can also say with Patočka, ‘movement is … what founds the identity between being and appearing. Being is being manifest’.28 This follows because the movement that makes something stand out or exist also makes it present to its environment. It appears in affecting it, and it affects it through its motion. How it affects it is given by its essence, understood as the ‘how’ of its motion. The motion, in other words, exhibits the ‘what it was to be’ or the ‘essence’. For Patočka, this essence serves as ‘the unitary framework for all the movements that occur in a being’. It determines which movements can be simultaneously present and it also determines the order of their succession. Now, although the goal specified by the essence is different for different species, it is, in a broad sense, the same for all living beings. It is the actualization of all that the being can be within the framework of its essence. In Patočka’s words, the goal is ‘the maximum of the qualifications simultaneously determining the same substrate, the maximum of presence’. It is also ‘the most stable or durable presence’.29 This is the presence, for example, of the mature tree, the tree capable of flowering and bearing seeds season after season. For a human being, it is the adult who has reached maturity, who is now capable of actualizing, in a harmonious manner, all his or her potentialities. To make explicit this actualization, Patočka describes the three motions of existence that actualize our full humanity. Each such motion gives us a

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distinct way of standing out. In doing so, each has a distinct temporal orientation.30 In the first movement, which Patočka calls the ‘instinctive-affective movement of our existence’,31 the accent falls on the ‘already’. Here, the future is ‘passively accepted as a coming’; it is something that ‘merely repeats and activates an already given potential’.32 Thus, for Patočka, the infant has no initial projects. Its initial potentialities are those it is born with. They are activated in response to its nurturing environment. The potentialities to walk upright or to speak a human language, for example, are not possibilities a child takes as goals to be realized. As innately human, their realization is a repetition of what preceding generations have realized. This involves, Patočka writes, ‘our own acceptance by that into which we are placed’. It is only by being accepted by our caregivers that we can ‘develop our own possibilities, those which are inherently given’.33 We need them to teach us how to talk, walk, dress, and feed ourselves. Through them we actualize our human potential. They mediate our relation to the world, supplying our needs. In Patočka’s words: ‘The accepted being is initially a mediated being; the world, for it, is its parents, those who take care of it’.34 The dominant feature of this state is that of enjoyment.35 It evinces, Patočka writes, ‘the blissful bonding which assimilates the outside without which we could not live’.36 What disturbs this initial state is not just our growing control and mastery of our body’s potentialities, but also the contingency that is inherent in such dependency. Patočka adds that an ‘essential contingency … is rooted here. No one is master of the situation that sets him into the world’.37 One can call for one’s parents and they may not come. One’s needs, as mediated by them, can find an uncertain fulfilment. Seen as a response to such contingency, the second motion of our existence attempts to overcome it through our own agency. It is, Patočka says, the ‘movement carried out in the region of human work’.38 Its emphasis is on the present, on the tasks at hand. In working to fulfil our needs, we take on ‘the service and bondage of life to itself’.39 We labour to acquire what we need to live. If our first motion of existence uncovers the world primarily in its sensuous aspects, the second deals with it as pragmata. In Patočka’s words, this movement ‘is concerned only with things, sees only things, albeit purely in their utensility and not in their independence’. It knows them only in terms of their use values. For it, ‘there are always only networks of instrumental references, every “here” serving merely to refer beyond itself, to the connections – both personal and object-connections – of the undertaking’.40 The same holds for its grasp of other persons through the second movement. While the first movement discloses others as caregivers, as responding to our passivity with an activity that manifested the inwardness of a you,41 the second tends to see others as use values. This vision overlays an acknowledgement of them ‘as movements of existence’ like ourselves.42 Yet, immersed



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as we are in an endless cycle of means and ends, the constant temptation is to interpret persons as means for our ends. Thus, the ‘second movement’ comes to be ‘characterized by the reduction of man to his social role’. Viewed as such, the ‘other can be exploited, turned into a provider on a one-time temporary basis or enduringly and systematically’. Thus, there is here an ‘ever-present impulse to exploit the other wherever possible, since we ourselves are under the same pressure’.43 The second movement is, thus, categorized as one of ‘work and struggle … in work, man confronts things; in struggle, he confronts people as virtually attackable or attacking’.44 The link between the two is our seeing our fellows in terms of work and, hence, as reduced to social roles that can, through struggle, be appropriated for our purposes. Like the things that we use for our projects, we fail to grasp them in their autonomy. This means, Patočka writes: ‘Nothing independently disinterested and dedicated, neither the authentic self nor an authentic undertaking, can develop in this sphere.’45 To understand the third movement of existence, we have to note that the first two movements do not simply uncover aspects of the world. They also work to conceal. Thus, in Patočka’s account, the sheltering world of the first movement conceals the harshness of the world beyond the home. In his words: ‘Concealment has here the peculiar form of screening, shelter, safety’. It exists in the form of protection ‘by the protectors in their unprotected adult life’.46 Not that the child’s life is without its tensions. It has its own ‘antagonisms, jealousies and hatreds’.47 What rules within the home are instinctual affections and drives, the very things that suffer concealment in the second movement. Thus, when the second movement dominates, ‘the sphere of the instinctual, affective movement is repressed and forgotten’.48 This means, he writes, that ‘[t]he sphere of the dramas of primary convergence with their fixations and feelings of hatred, their identifications and rejections are now relegated into that darkness from which they spring’.49 What is ultimately repressed is the world of our ‘having been’, the world of the inborn possibilities that we are instinctively driven to actualize. Thus, in the second movement, the present represses the past.50 Engaged in the practical business of earning a living, we focus on the present: ‘It is no longer the overall relationship to what is already but rather a relation to this or that present matter which requires our whole commitment’.51 In contrast to the first two movements, the third attempts to break through such concealments. It is, as Patočka states, ‘the movement of breakthrough, or actual self-comprehension’.52 He adds, ‘What is at stake in this movement is … the encounter … with one’s own being. … In the last movement, the true movement of existence, the point is to see myself in my own most human essence and possibility’.53 Thus, rather than losing oneself in one’s instinctive, affective life or in the world of work, one confronts oneself as a multilevel motion of existence, as a person who realizes possibilities through his or

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her activities.54 At issue is this realization of possibilities. In the third movement we face our responsibility for it. This can be put in terms of the fact that the third movement shifts the horizontal emphasis of our standing out to the future. In this change of focus, the future is not regarded in terms of the possibilities of our given situation – possibilities that we can project forward as goals to be realized. In Patočka’s words, ‘The accent on the future requires, on the contrary, that the already existent cease to be regarded as the decisive instance of possibilities’.55 At issue is the situation itself, that is, ‘the mass of these particular possibilities’ that the given situation affords us.56 The point is not to let them ‘conceal the essential’, which is our action of realizing them. In this motion, I confront my responsibility not just for realizing and, hence, manifesting these possibilities, I also confront myself – namely my ‘possibility either to disperse and lose myself in particulars or to find and realise myself in my properly human nature’.57 Thus, in the third movement, we break our ‘bondage to the particular’ and face our freedom with regard to its appearing. Patočka writes in this regard: ‘The third movement is an attempt at shaking the dominance of the earth in us, shaking what binds us in our distinctness’.58 This dominance of the earth is our ‘bondage to the particular’ – that is, to our roles in life with all the particular certainties that our personal and professional lives afford us. Such certainties define us; they give us our ‘distinctness’ as, for example, a business person, a journalist, a craftsman, or a professional politician. Overcoming this bondage involves the shaking of our certainties. Now, for Patočka, this shaking occurs through the problematization of our existence – that is, through the undermining of its certainties by continually questioning them. Directed towards the political order, this questioning opens up a community to its freedom, that is, to the fact that the choices facing it are ultimately its own. In the back and forth of political debates that it creates, it opens up the political space for political action. This is a space in which things are considered in the light of the multiple, contending possibilities for their disclosure. They ‘vibrate’, as it were, with the different uses they can be put to. The political life that is carried out in this open sphere is, Patočka remarks, ‘from freedom’ and ‘for freedom’.59 It is from freedom, since it proceeds from open debate. It is for freedom since it wills itself, that is, wills the continuance of the motion of existence (the shaking) through which such public, political space appears in genuinely free debates.60 3. CARE FOR THE SOUL Basing his views on the notion that actualization arises through motion, Patočka takes the soul as the self-directed motion that actualizes a living



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being. The soul, in other words, is the functioning that brings the living being to maturity and maintains it in its being alive. If we accept this essentially Aristotelian view of the soul, then Patočka’s account of the motions of existence through which we actualize and maintain ourselves can be read as a description of our souls. The care for our souls is, correspondingly, the care for such motions. Thus, the care provided by our parents and guardians is crucial to our development. It shapes the motion by which we actualize ourselves.61 Failure, here, can damage the further development of our potentialities. The care for the first motion of our existence is, in fact, the care for our growing and developing souls. Similar assertions can be made about the second motion. In the world of work, we realize our social existence. We stand out as embodying our social and professional roles. Care for the soul as care for this motion involves caring for the workplace environment. As such, it involves all the advances in labour legislation that have taken place in the last 150 years. From the shortening of the work week to the introduction of rules regarding workplace safety, such advances aim at humanizing our working environment. This involves not just the stipulation of minimum ‘living wages’, which Adam Smith, among others advocated. It also involves our attempts to provide full employment. As numerous studies show, longterm unemployment has a crippling effect. People experiencing it feel less than fully human. In Patočka’s terms, we have to understand our attempts to combat it as care for our souls. The third motion of existence is, as indicated, that of ‘problematization’. Its exemplary figure is Socrates, whose motion was that of constantly questioning the assumptions of his time. The problematization that such questioning occasions is, Patočka writes, ‘something fundamentally different from negation’. Rather than being ‘a subjective caprice’ or ‘something arbitrary’, the questioning that problematizes ‘is something founded on the deepest basis of our life, only here do we stand our ground’, rather than on the certainties that we previously assumed.62 This ground is our own freedom. Problematization demands that we take responsibility for it, that we acknowledge that the certainties that we assume are not fixed, but are, in part, the result of our choices. According to Patočka, ‘the spiritual life’ based on such problematization ‘is precisely also action based on the insight that reality is not rigid’, that we act ‘recognizing [the] plasticity of reality’.63 His point is that in the human world, ‘reality’ results from our decisions. We construct our social and political worlds. Care for the soul in this context is care for our freedom as we engage in this. This is because to problematize something is to place it in the context of its alternatives. It is to ask why we have shaped our world in the way we have, rather than in some other fashion. Such a questioning robs our given world of its necessity. It points to its appearing as a result of our own motion, a motion that results from our choice to actualize one of our

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collective possibilities. Here, as Patočka states, ‘care of the soul is fundamentally care that follows from the proximity of man to manifesting, to the phenomenon as such, to the manifesting of the world in its whole that occurs within man, with man’.64 What we care for, in this instance, is the motion by which we stand out from the world by exercising our freedom. This care for the third motion of our existence is distinct from the Sorge or care that characterizes Dasein in Heidegger’s account. Both philosophers focus on human freedom, that is, on our responsibility for the actions by which we determine ourselves and our world. In Patočka’s view, however, Heidegger’s conception of freedom lacks a moral content. Thus, echoing the critique of Medard Boss, Patočka writes that Being and Time must be modified to take into account ‘the problem of the conditions of the possibility of a moral and historical life’. At issue is ‘the possibility of that heroism that belongs to every moral decision’. This is also a heroism ‘that pertains to the acquisition of clarity with regard to the historical situation in which people express themselves in their originality’.65 According to him, the same lack of moral content affects Heidegger’s conception of everydayness. Heidegger describes everydayness in terms of inauthenticity and the forgetting of Being. But, as Patočka remarks, such everydayness conceals not just the authentic self but also ‘that being with others that excludes the anonymity and substitutability of everyone for another’. The reference, here, is to ‘the human modes of behavior that we would call open – such as acts of devotion or the activities of artists and thinkers’. Breaking the concealment of everydayness is to expose ourselves to these modes. Such modes, he adds, cannot be understood in terms of ‘either the pragmatic tasks or the solicitude [Fürsorge] for others’ that Being and Time analyses.66 What is required is the thought that freedom and the responsibility it entails involves more than the individual agent. Thus, political freedom is by definition collective. Its actualization involves the back and forth of public debates, where contending parties present one another alternative possibilities. For such debates to function, these parties cannot be anonymous and substitutable for one another. They must present themselves publically and voice their different views. In this context, responsibility involves not only responsibility for one’s own existence but also for that of others. All parties are affected by what is collectively decided upon and actualized. Morality in this context involves both being aware of the possibilities that life offers us and keeping open the public space where we can offer such possibilities to one other. Viewed in this perspective, Patočka’s defence of human rights can be seen both as a moral action and as a form of care for the soul. The rights to associate, assemble, and discuss, to petition and publish are essential for our freedom. They are conditions for our ability to call into question the existing interpretations – be they social, economic, moral, or political – that define



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our relations to others. To defend such rights is to defend the motion of problematization that actualizes us as political and social beings. For Patočka, this defence, which he engaged in as a spokesman for the Charter 77 movement, is a moral imperative. The Charter asserts that ‘the idea of human rights is nothing other than the conviction that even states, even society as a whole … recognize something unconditional that is higher than they are, something that is binding even on them, sacred, inviolable’.67 For Patočka, this means that ‘it is morality that defines what being human means’.68 To sacrifice oneself in the defence of such rights, as Patočka did, is to do so in defence of the motion of existence that makes us truly human. It is, in fact, the ultimate moral expression of our care for the soul. NOTES 1. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 82. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 83. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 82. 6. ‘What is the difference between subjective phenomenology and asubjective phenomenology? In subjective phenomenology, we explain things in terms of the subject. The appearing of a being is traced back to the subjective (to the ego, experience, representation, thought) as the ultimate basis of its elucidation. In asubjective phenomenology, we take the subject, like everything else, to be a “result” [of appearing]. There must be apriori rules as much for my own entrance into appearing as for the appearing of other things’. (Jan Patočka, ‘Corps, possibilités, monde, champ d’apparation’ [Body, Possibilities, World, Field of Appearance], in Papiers Phénoménologiques, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams [Grenoble: Millon, 1995], 127). All translations from the French are my own. 7. Jan Patočka, ‘Phänomenologie als Lehre vom Erscheinen als solchem’ [Phenomenology as the Doctrine of the Appearing as Such], in Vom Erscheinen als solchem: Texte aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Helga Blaschek-Hahn and Karel Novotný (Freiburg; München: Alber, 2000), 120 (first excerpt: [2r] Epoché und Reduction in den ‘Fünf Vorlesungen’). All translations from the German are my own. 8. Ibid., 121. Patočka also calls it the empty subject as in the assertion: ‘The subject to whom everything shows itself is empty, while the subject that is filled [with content] has neither precedence nor priority over other worldly realities’. Ibid., 123. 9. ‘Aristotle’s ontological methods are one thing. Quite another is the project of his fundamental thought, which is to understand the being of a finite entity in terms of the embracing movement of the growth of an entity. It has not been shown that this project is inseparable from the imperfect empiricism with which he begins or the specific conceptual means of the thought [he employs]. In our days, when philosophy

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is again searching for an asubjective ontological foundation, an Aristotle, stripped of dogma, is therefore topical’. (Jan Patočka, Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs [Aristotle, His Predecessors and His Successors], ed. and trans. Erika Abrams [Paris: Vrin, 2011], 253). 10. Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1998), 8. 11. De Anima, 412a28 (See Aristotle, On the Soul. Parva Naturali. On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964], 68–9). 12. De Anima, 412b19–20 (See Aristotle, On the Soul, 70–1). 13. De Anima, 413a (See Aristotle, On the Soul, 70–1). 14. ‘Since any kind of being may be distinguished as either potential or completely realised, the functioning of what is potential as potential, that is “being in movement”: thus, the functioning of the alterable as alterable is “qualitative alteration”; … the functioning of that which can be generated or destroyed is “generation” or “destruction”; the functioning of what can change its place is “local motion”’. Physica, 201a10–15 (See Aristotle, Physics, trans. Richard Hope [Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1961], 42). 15. Physica, 201a16 (See Aristotle, Physics, 42). Here, the motion involves coming to be or generation. 16. Metaphysica, 1047a30–33. (See Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Richard Hope [Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999], 185). 17. ‘Phénoménologie et ontologie du mouvement’ [Phenomenology and Ontology of Movement], in Papiers Phénoménologiques, 31. 18. In Latin, it was translated as quod quid erat esse, which was shortened to quidity. 19. Jan Patočka, ‘La conception aristotélicienne du mouvement: signification philosophique et recherches historiques’ [Aristotle’s Conception of Movement: Philosophical Meaning and Historical Researches], in Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 131. This account of essence is Patočka’s reworking of Aristotle’s static concept in terms of motion. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Here, Aristotle moves beyond the example of the house. The house, as opposed to the living being, is inanimate. Animate beings have an internal principle of motion (see Physica, 193b5). Inanimate entities do not. Thus, if the workmen that build a house were within the materials being used, then the house would be an animate, natural entity. This would mean that the built house would not be static. As animate (or besouled), it would have within it the principle of its motion. It would exhibit selfdirected motion. To use another of Aristotle’s examples, if the carpenter that builds a bed were within the wood that is used, then the bed would be a natural entity. The animate principle actually within the material of the bed shows itself when we plant the (green) wood of the bed and it sprouts. What then comes forth, Aristotle writes, ‘would not be another bed but wood’ (Physica, 193b11. See Aristotle, Physics, 25). The soul, then, in Aristotle’s view, is not the completed goal of the living body’s



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process. It is the origin or principle of this process. As such, it is the self-directed motion that brings the living being to maturity and maintains it. 24. De Anima, 402a8. My translation. 25. Jan Patočka, ‘Nachwort des Autors zur tschechischen Neuausgabe (1970)’ [The ‘Natural World’ in Meditations by the Author Thirty-Three Years Later], in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem. Phänomenologische Schriften I, ed. Klaus Nellen und Jiří Němec (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990), 242–3. 26. Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, 153. 27. ‘La conception aristotélicienne du mouvement’, in Papier phénoménologiques, 136. At issue, then, is ‘the problem of movement ontologically conceived, the problem of movement that is not a simple relation, the result of a constitution, but rather the very movement that constitutes the being of entities, which itself exist through movement and becoming, not simply exteriorly and relatively, but in terms of everything that they are’. Ibid. 28. ‘Movement is the foundation of all manifestation. Now, manifestation for Aristotle is not the manifestation of something whose essence remains untouched. On the contrary, the entire entity enters into the phenomenon; for “being” means nothing else than to determine a substrate; the determination of the substrate is movement, and, as we shall see, movement resides precisely in manifestation. Movement is, thus, what founds the identity between being and appearing. Being is being manifest’. Ibid. 29. Ibid. Pierre Rodrigo objects to Patočka’s adoption of this concept of the essence. In his view, it undercuts the radicality of the notion of motion. He writes in this regard, ‘Mobility ought never to be conceived as an attribute of the essence but as essentiality itself, that is, as the being mobile of that which is mobile. … But, in spite of his declarations and his frequently affirmed wish to “radicalise” Aristotle (or to strip him of dogma, P[apiers] P[hénoménologiques], n. 3, 31), Patočka, in my opinion, never gets to the point of thinking through, in all its radicality, the ontological negativity that, strictly speaking, constitutes movement’. Pierre Rodrigo, ‘L’émergence du thème de l’asubjectivité chez Jan Patočka’, in Renaud Barbaras (ed.), Jan Patočka. Phénoménologie asubjective et existence (Milan; Paris: Mimesis, 2007), 40–1. To this, it may be replied that only by maintaining the notion of essence as the framework for actualization, can Patočka use the concepts he derives from Aristotle to ground his conception of human rights. Such rights form the framework for our actualization as fully human. 30. ‘The emphasis – laid now on the past (on what we passively accept as given), now on the present (which we actively modify), and now on the future (in regard to which the modifying takes place) – is what gives each of the three movements its distinct sense’. Patočka, ‘Nachwort’, in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, 246. 31. Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, 148. 32. Patočka, ‘Nachwort’, in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, 246. 33. Ibid., 248. 34. Ibid., 248–9. 35. There is a strong parallel here with the analyses of Levinas. See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 141.

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36. Patočka, ‘Nachwort’, in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, 249. Patočka also calls it ‘the movement of our instinctive life’. This is the life we share with animals. He writes, describing it: ‘The first and fundamental movement, that without which the other movements would not be possible, is thus something relatively autonomous. It is the movement of instinctive life – the movement that initially lacks a relation to the particular mode of a thing’s existence, the movement that only secondarily includes this relation and that also exists independently of it. A human being, as an animal, is also an entity who instinctively senses and is affective. He is an entity who opens himself to the world in a passive harmony with it and responds with a reflex motion to the stimulations he receives. In our movement of being anchored [in life], or being rooted, which from the beginning to the end represents the fundamental basis of the polyphony of life, there is also, equally, a harmony with the global aspect of the world; there is an impulse towards attachment, towards vital warmth, fusion, happiness, an impulse to distance oneself from being an outsider, from aversion. This is an impulse that realizes itself in the movements of our body and is organised in ways of behavior, in both the rhythms of repeating activity and in the actions that instantly resolve themselves’. Jan Patočka, ‘Leçons sur la corporéité’ [Lectures on Corporeality], in Papiers Phénoménologiques, 108. 37. Patočka, ‘Nachwort’, in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, 250. 38. Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, 148. 39. Patočka, ‘Nachwort’, in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, 256. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 251. 42. Ibid., 257. 43. Ibid., 259. 44. Ibid., 260. 45. Ibid., 259. 46. Ibid., 249. This, of course, does not obviate the fact that many children are exposed to harsh realities that belie this nesting image. 47. Ibid., 250. 48. Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, 158. 49. Patočka, ‘Nachwort’, in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, 255. 50. This, of course, applies to non-traditional, modern societies. 51. Ibid., 255–6. 52. Ibid., 261. 53. Ibid. 54. It should be noted that there is, here, no question of abstracting the third movement from the first two. All three motions form the multi-level motion of our existence. Drawing an analogy of the motion of existence with that of a melody, Patočka writes: ‘Just as a polyphonic composition is a unitary movement, which, in turn, is composed of movements, each of which has its autonomous meaning, modified in a specific way by the meanings of the other movements – so also the movement of our existence unfolds in many zones of movement that are relatively autonomous, none of which, however, can be grasped exclusively by itself. Rather, they mutually modify and influence one another’. Patočka, ‘Leçons sur la corporéité’, in Papiers Phénoménologiques, 108.



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55. Ibid., 246. 56. Ibid., 261. 57. Ibid. 58. Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, 159. 59. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 142. 60. The perspective, here, is the Western one that begins in Greece. Patočka does not take up the non-European traditions of freedom and political action. 61. The necessity for the support and nurturance of others continues throughout our lives. Such social support is a basic developmental need throughout the life cycle. It is because of this that Patočka affirms that we cannot view any of the motions of existence in abstraction from the others. See the citation in note 48 above. 62. Jan Patočka, ‘The Spiritual Person and the Intellectual’, in Living in Problematicity, ed. Eric Manton (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2007), 60. The text of this and the following ‘Discussion’ is from a transcript of a tape recording of a private seminar given on 11 April 1975. It was initially published in samizdat. 63. ‘Discussion’, in Living in Problematicity, 66. By the ‘spiritual life’, Patočka does not mean a religious life that in some traditions can demand unquestioning obedience, but rather the opposite. 64. Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 27. 65. ‘Cartesianism and Phenomenology’, in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Phenomenology and Selected Writings (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 324. 66. ‘Nachwort’, in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, 275. 67. ‘The Obligation to Resist Injustice’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka, Philosophy and Selective Writings, 341. 68. Ibid.

Part IV

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Chapter 10

He Who Saw the Deep The Epic of Gilgamesh in Patočka’s Philosophy of History Nicolas de Warren INTRODUCTION In a letter written in 1971, Jan Patočka confided to his friend Eugen Fink the loss of what he called ‘European Faith’.1 This crisis of faith was at once personal and philosophical, and reflected not only a growing dissatisfaction with Husserl’s phenomenological thinking, but, more generally, a marked dissatisfaction with the dimming political landscape of the early 1970s and increasingly hopeless assessment of the present ‘Titanic epoch’ in which individual human freedom was crushed into a ‘subatomic and decentered plasma-gruel’. Patočka finds himself caught between the eclipse of European Faith, which Husserl could still possess in the Crisis of the European Sciences on the eve of Europe’s self-destruction, and his own Cold War distress, which, in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, witnessed a return of political oppression and censorship in Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe. As Patočka remarks, although he is unable to muster Husserl’s original form of European Faith, he is not fully divested from its legacy, for what still remains is protest. This power of resistance, as I shall argue is this chapter, hangs critically with the vestige of Europe as a philosophical Idea, its discovery of eternity in Ancient Greece, and the historically decisive passage to Europe from Ancient Mesopotamian civilization. Within this philosophical narrative of beginnings, Patočka’s interpretation of the Epic of Gilgamesh – the terminal point of my chapter – occupies a central role, not only in its exemplification of the prehistorical and natural world prior to the advent of Europe, but as significantly, for its implicit critique of today’s world adrift in the wreckage of a Europe after Europe. Taking into consideration what has been called ‘le plus ancien des grands récits que nous rattachons à notre patrimoine’ [‘the oldest of the great narratives that connect us to our heritage’], the boldness of Patočka’s reading of Gilgamesh, unique among philosophers, consists in 135

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reaching back to an epic narrative of a world before Europe in order to anchor a searching reflection for a renewed Europe to come.2 In ‘Europa und Nach-Europa’, an unfinished text from the 1970s, Patočka speaks once again of Husserl’s European Faith. As he suggests, even though Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences aimed to prevent the ‘final catastrophe of the European world’, its vision might nonetheless still inform ‘the situation of humanity after the catastrophe’.3 Husserl’s enduring relevance does not stem from nostalgia for a European world of yesterday, but, on the contrary, from the imperative for a renewal that would lead to a ‘postEuropean world’. To think of Europe after Europe is to pursue a Europe yet to come. The originality of the Crisis of the European Sciences consists in Husserl’s formulation of Europe as a philosophical principle. As Patočka observes, Europe is conventionally defined in two basic ways: as a historical reality covering a geographical space and as a heritage spanning a breadth of time. Husserl’s proposition, however, was to consider Europe first and foremost as an Idea and, more specifically, as a philosophical Idea, by which Patočka understands, ‘an insight into what is’ and responsibility towards truth. To speak of Ancient Greece as the location for the origin of Europe, and to speak of Europe as an inheritance that might still have purchase today, is to speak of a historical possibility of human existence guided by the project of truth, whose beginning and end is determined by the place and time of a responsibility and likewise, as Husserl diagnosed with twentieth century, by the place and time of an oblivion. The distress writ small in Patočka’s letter mirrors the planetary distress of the modern age, and more specifically, the blinding of the European Idea in the twentieth century. ‘It is clear’, as Patočka declares, that ‘Europe has come to an end’.4 Contrary, however, to a prevailing perception of Patočka’s thinking in its condition of distress and call for resistance as primarily political in orientation, the Idea of Europe, as a response to and responsibility for the human condition, is first and foremost metaphysical in meaning. Indeed, it is only in its metaphysical aspiration that the political radicalism of Europe distinctly emerges, and this exceptional significance of Europe distinctly appears when contrasted with Europe’s prehistory in Near Eastern civilizations. With this emphasis on Europe as a philosophical Idea, Patočka can be seen as elevating the Classical metaphorical transfiguration of the Greek word for Europe to a philosophical concept of uncertain origin, first appearing as a geographical designation in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, ἠμὲν ὅσοι Πελοπόννησον πίειραν ἔχουσιν

ἠδ’ ὅσοι Εὐρώπην τε καὶ ἀμφιρύτους κατὰ νήσους all the men that inhabit the fertile Peloponnesus and Europe and the sea-girt islands 



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Εὐρώπη [Europe] is composed of two terms, ευρυς (eurýs) [‘broad’ or ‘wide’] and ὄψ (óps) [‘face’ or ‘eye’] – but is also suspected of having its source in the Akkadian word erebu, ‘[for the sun] to go down, set’, (and hence, Europe’s designation as the Orient).5 The term Εὐρώπη commonly received a metaphorical association with the epithet γλαυκῶπις (glaukōpis) attributed to the goddess Athena, ‘she of the wide-eyes’. Although the meaning of γλαυκῶπις admits various readings and resists any straightforward translation, in its metaphorical resonnance it evoked clear-sightedness and wisdom, as depicted with Athena as ‘owl-eyed’ (γλαύξ [glaúx], ‘little owl’, has the same root as γλαυκός [glaukos], ‘gleaming’ or ‘silvery’).6 Athena’s grey-eyed gaze shares with owls a night-time power of perspicuity. Setting aside its linguistic and mythological meanings, the term γλαυκῶπις is philosophically instructive in its resistance to any single translation for Patočka’s own proposal to consider Europe as an Idea, as ‘wide eyed’, without imposing any dominant translation of this Idea, thus retaining the possibility of Europe as still shining, or flashing forth, in its openness, even as it has entered an age in which it no longer possesses any vision for itself. 1. OUR SHIPWRECKED EXISTENCE Europe, in fact, has multiple beginnings and endings. As Patočka remarks, ‘Europe came into existence upon the wreckage, first of the Greek polis, and then of the Roman Empire’.7 In this regard, although there is a beginning to Europe, there is no the Beginning; likewise, although there are endings to Europe, there is no ending that would not leave the residue of its possible renewal. With each death of Europe, an inheritance nonetheless remains, its enduring Idea. With each return, the Idea is retrieved and yet lost once more in translation. The history of Europe, from its Greek inception to its twentieth-century self-destruction, traces, in this manner, a moving image of eternal recurrence, not of the same, but of a resistance to an unyielding anthropological constant of human existence that ‘man is always in a helpless situation, committed to an adventure that cannot end well’.8 One cannot stress enough this anthropological constant for the shaping of Patočka’s conception of philosophy and Europe. As he examines in Plato and Europe, the human condition is defined by a permanent situation of distress. This default condition expresses our mortality, that human existence has a beginning and an end, the trajectory of which we inhabit. This finite condition of human existence does not in itself, however, and contrary to Heidegger’s analysis of death in Sein und Zeit, distinguish or separate human life from the natural world, but rather, firmly establishes the continuity of human life within the natural world as the order of beginnings and endings, or physis in this principal Aristotelian sense. Death is not an exception to man’s natural

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existence or the chance of possible escape, but its profound confirmation. It is a rootedness that mankind must however suffer as the accent falls decidedly on decline and the ‘helplessness’ of mankind to escape his own natural existence. In speaking of mankind’s anthropological distress, Patočka employs in Plato and Europe the Classical image of human life as a shipwreck. Yet, unlike its established association of a sea voyage, as Hans Blumenberg has explored, where the distressed condition of the vessel is witnessed by a spectator who stands afar on stable land, in Patočka’s use of this image, the spectator function of witnessing and testimony, or theoria, remains ensnared within the vessel’s draft, even if giving witness and testimony to the distress of man elevates human existence.9 The shipwrecked condition of human existence is not suffered blindly, for in the suffering of life to its own nature, and through this nature, to nature as such, human life is endowed with a leeway of orientation that procures a meaning-bestowing distance towards mankind’s natural helplessness. As Patočka notes, for human beings to always find themselves in a situation is ‘to find oneself in a situation precisely because it has yet to be decided’. Although the human condition is inexorably marked by decline, human life is nonetheless an adventure, an activity where what is at stake is unknown and at risk. It is precisely because the human condition is nonetheless an adventure that reflection is required as well as possible. To claim that human existence is an adventure which does not end well is both to say that the adventure has an end and that this end is not predetermined in its meaning. Mankind suffers its natural existence from the inside; different orientations towards its own finitude are possible, and hence, different forms of life and culture. Reflection navigates within the irreducible gap between the inevitable end and its indeterminate meaning. As a form of distance, reflection gives breadth for human life to not receive itself without question. The life we naturally suffer must either be accepted or avoided, but is never merely received without afterthought or protest. This struggle with decline, with ourselves, is the struggle of meaning, of how we are to conduct our existence. Human existence is an adventure because its meaning remains open and contested, despite the inevitability of its end. We do not pass quietly into the night. Of the different orientations available to human existence, Patočka identities three basic forms, or three movements of human existence: the movement of acceptance, the movement of defence, and the movement of truth. Of these three, the movement of truth is predicated on reflection in the specifically philosophical sense given to this notion by Patočka. What distinguishes philosophical reflection is its orientation towards ‘the complete situation of human existence’, where ‘complete’ carries two entwined meanings: ‘in reference to the whole’ and ‘in elevation from our condition’. This combination characterizes the



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precariousness of philosophy. If philosophical reflection relates to the whole, it does so while implanted within the whole, even as it remains animated by an aspiration to elevate human life above its natural, death-bound existence. It takes into view something higher and more than life itself, and seeks to measure the sense of the living and the dead from this perspective. If Patočka speaks of the movement of truth as an elevation, it is decisively not to promote or endorse philosophical reflection as an escape or overcoming of mankind’s finite existence. On the contrary, philosophical reflection is both an acute awareness of mankind’s helplessness to escape its inevitable decline and an aspirational resistance against such helplessness. It is this irreconcilability, this movement back and forth between earthly life and the divine, between men and the gods, that distinguishes philosophical thought in its precarious transcendence. As a movement, this transcendence within immanence elevates human life without offering the illusion of either escape from or complete mastery over mankind’s helplessness. Indeed, it is precisely the denial of either illusion that renders philosophical thought powerful in its powerlessness, but by the same token, exposes philosophy to the seductive power of each. Ours is a tragic condition. We are defined by the inability to escape decline and yet we aspire to raise our existence to what Patočka calls joy. We know the adventure will not end well, and yet, the adventure is just that: one where the sense of its ending remains to be decided, and must be decided, over the course of the adventuring itself. The adventure is thus deciding itself. 2. THE SEARCH FOR MEASURE Our tragic condition is exposed to two temptations which emerge from the movement of life itself: the projection of false transcendence (idolatry) and the complete absorption into immanence, the refusal of transcendence, through a projected mastery over the world, where we either stand at its periphery (paganism) or at its centre (Titanism). There is, however, a third way, Europe. Yet, as Patočka argues in the concluding essay of the Heretical Essays, ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War’, and reflects upon once again in Plato and Europe, ‘Europe destroyed itself in the span of 30 years, in two wars’.10 In these seminars, Patočka highlights in his search for a new orientation the philosophical reactions of Masaryk and Scheler to this original catastrophe of the twentieth century and their mutual, albeit divergent, efforts to discover a principle of equilibrium for Europe. In this meditation on Europe’s demise, Patočka surprisingly invokes a contrast between Europe and Near Eastern civilizations, thus inscribing the trajectory of Europe in a philosophically deep history reaching back to Ancient Mesopotamia. As Patočka remarks, ‘In complete contrast to Near-Eastern

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civilizations’, Europe lived ‘for thousands of years in a state of equilibrium with the human environment’.11 With the First World War, Europe plunged into a profound state of disequilibrium in which ‘the wars and revolutions of our century have their origin’.12 To be sure, Patočka cannot mean that the contemporary situation of mankind returns, in its loss of equilibrium, to the condition of human life in Near Eastern civilizations. Yet, Patočka’s observation does imply that Europe’s self-destruction reverts the human condition to an ‘un-historical’ and ‘natural’ condition of existence in the specific sense of ‘post-historical’ wreckage. This ‘post-historical’ condition of existence contrasts both with the genuinely historical existence of an eclipsed Europe that has been and the ‘pre-historical’ existence of the Ancient Near East that once was, and from which Europe emancipated and distinguished itself. Insofar as the wreckage of Europe brings forth a condition of existence in an antithetical sense to what Patočka understands as genuine ‘historical existence’, mankind in the closing decades of the twentieth century can be said to have landed in an inverted image of ‘pre-historical existence’ in which it is not the gods, but man, who claims the centre of the cosmos as his own. With the advent of post-historical life, the world of Ancient Mesopotamia is turned inside-out, not in any cultural or political form, but in a metaphysical form. Human existence is thrown back in being thrown forward into a post-European Titanic paganism. In its most telling characteristics, ours is an age defined by the absence of epic and tragedy. This ejection of human existence from history and collapse of Europe turns on the precise meaning of equilibrium, and its catastrophic loss, invoked here by Patočka, who distinguishes between three different notions of equilibrium, all of which play into the narrative of Europe’s self-destruction. He does not provide any particular labels for these three notions, but for the sake of discussion, he can be seen as distinguishing between ecological, political, and metaphysical notions of equilibrium/disequilibrium. Writing and thinking in the 1970s, his perception of socio-economic disequilibrium is influenced by the analyses of the Club of Rome (founded in 1968). Published in 1972, The Limits of Growth presented the results of computer simulations of the general consequences of the interaction between economic and demographic growth on the planetary environment.13 This form of disequilibrium is taken (as with the Club of Rome) by Patočka as not limited to Europe, but as encompassing the entire planet. As he notes, ‘The disequilibrium we are positing today is not something that concerns solely European man in a particular historical period, but rather regards man sui generi today in his relation to the planet’.14 The planetary distress of contemporary mankind is ecological as the disruption of mankind’s relation to his environment, or natural world. A second form of disequilibrium is identified by Patočka with the political system of European states and the modern notion of the nation state.



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A principal cause of the First World War can be attributed to the self-destructive combination of political disunity and unbridled economic power (i.e., the drive for ecological mastery identified in the notion of disequilibrium above) fostered through a modern political system of sovereign states. As Patočka argues: ‘These states had various degrees of internal organization, wealth, and economic development, and they (or those most important) were, above all, simultaneously engaged in an enterprise to take possession of the world’.15 The critique is twofold, against modern state sovereignty and against imperialism/capitalism. This condition of European anarchy, where sovereign states do not ‘recognize any higher authority’, coupled with the outward planetary expansion of European power, has produced a rife condition for Europe’s self-implosion. As Patočka notes: ‘Disunity after all lies in the fact that there was a row of sovereign states at various levels here’.16 In his reflections on the First World War, Patočka echoes the absence of genuine solidarity in a manner that exhibits a noteworthy resemblance with the British political philosopher Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s argument in his 1915 booklet After the War and 1916 work The European Anarchy. Dickinson likewise argues that the international system of sovereign states, the legacy of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, and modern concept of state sovereignty from the 1600s, represents an ‘anarchic’ political system in which nation states behaved towards each other on a permanent footing of antagonism and hostility. Rather than ensuring peace, this system of ‘balance of power’ produced the opposite consequence of disequilibrium and strife. As Dickinson observes, against the background of this system of sovereign states, European populations could not cultivate any trust towards each other, thus breeding an atmosphere of enmity and suspicion among its peoples that, on Dickinson’s argument, governments exploited in their virulent embrace of nationalism. In After the War, Dickinson proposes that what is at stake with the Great War will in fact be determined by how the war is to be won. He cautions with historical prescience against pursuing unconditional victory over Germany and advocates instead the triumph of peace, of a peace achieved in victory rather than of a victory achieved at the expense of peace. This securing of peace would critically depend on the establishment of a European Union in which the power of state sovereignty would recede against the advancing dawn of European solidarity. Dickinson’s vision of a transnational Europe beholds the promise of perpetual peace in terms very much implied by Patočka’s own claim: ‘What does a sovereign state mean? It is what does not recognize any higher authority above it, so that it is impossible to decide conflicts between these states’.17 This pursuit of European solidarity from the ashes of the First World War, as the triumph of peace and not ‘victory’, would prove to be the elusive and ever waning horizon of Europe during the turbulent years after 1918.

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This political form of equilibrium represents in Patočka’s mind an important desiderata of the post-war writings of Masaryk and Scheler. Both Masaryk and Scheler, the former in his 1925 Světová revoluce (World Revolution, translated into English as Making of a State)18 and the latter in his 1929 collection of essays Philosophische Weltanschauung and in particular, his lecture ‘Der Mensch im Zeitalter des Ausgleichs’,19 sought a new equilibrium for Europe from the cataclysm of the First World War. But although Patočka especially recognizes the significance of Scheler’s effort, he argues that this quest for equilibrium must reflectively reach back to ‘the very origins of Europe and through these beginnings to the very relation between mankind and his place in the world’.20 The expression ‘man’s place in the world’ here echoes Scheler’s 1928 Die Stellung des Menschen im  Kosmos.21 This deliberate affinity with Scheler reveals the metaphysical form of equilibrium/disequilibrium which animates Patočka’s thinking and the manner in which, through this reference, he situates his own effort to rethink Europe vis-à-vis the spiritual catastrophe of the First World War. What is at stake with the Idea of Europe is first and foremost neither an ecological (in the sense of the Club of Rome) nor a political (in the sense adopted by Dickinson and Masaryk) form of equilibrium, but rather, an equilibrium between the two facets of human existence, helplessness and aspiration. The project of Europe is an effort to resolve, without dissolving, mankind’s tragic condition. In the shipwreck of the twentieth century, we are left with the haunting question of whether ‘this European inheritance [...] can maintain equilibrium, keeping humanity at the same time in a state of spiritual elevation and in balance with natural ecological situation on this planet’.22 3. THE DISCOVERY OF ETERNITY Patočka identifies the challenge of responding to the original catastrophe of the twentieth century as an issue of regaining metaphysical equilibrium, and the failure to do so, as the primary reason for Europe’s grand demise. This pursuit of equilibrium speaks to the human condition. The metaphysical would encompass and render possible the ecological and the political. It is an equilibrium that would embrace mankind’s helplessness within the world through an aspiration for transcendence, and in so doing, would guard against the twin temptations of false transcendence and complete immanence. A critical assumption to this metaphysical project of Europe is its unique discovery of philosophical reflection, the origins of which reach distantly into pre-Socratic thought. In turning to the fragmentary traces of Europe’s philosophical origin, Patočka follows in the path of Heidegger, who, in his 1946 essay ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’, argued that ‘das Geschick des Abend-Landes hängt an der Übersetzung des Wortes ἐόν’, such that the



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‘basic words’ of Western thought are already bespoken in the archaic experience of pre-Socratic thought.23 For his part, and in contrast to Heidegger’s pre-Socratic readings, Patočka repeatedly emphasizes the Greek experience of being as ἀγήρως (agērōs), ‘never-aging’ or ‘ageless’. In the earliest surviving fragments of Western thought, Anaximander speaks of το άπειρον (to apeiron), ‘the boundless’ or ‘infinite’, as ἀγήρως, which echoes in turn the Homeric characterization of the gods as ἀθάνατος ϰαί ἀγήρως (athanatos kai agērōs) [‘immortal and ageless’], as ‘deathless’ and ‘imperishable’, as alive and divine, το άπειρον, as the principle of all things that ‘encompasses and steers all things’, where the conjunction of ‘to steer’/‘to guide’ and ‘to encompass’/‘to pervade’ in Anaximander’s fragment possess cosmological and political significance.24 What attracts Patočka’s attention is this experience of the ‘agelessness’ of being as marking off a resistance within the ebb and flow of manifestation to any seamless consolidation of ‘what-is’ into ‘being-present’. As he states: ‘But philosophy says: no, the world is not in decline, because the core of the world is being, and being has no beginning and will not perish, being can neither begin nor end – it is eternal’.25 In returning to Anaximander with an accent on the agelessness of being, it is as if Patočka seeks to reanimate his discovery of το άπειρον as the ἀρχή (arché) [‘source’ or ‘principle’] of all things while at the same time suspending its original, contested meanings as either an intellectual principle, an infinite space, or as ‘being’.26 To speak in philosophical shorthand, Patočka thinks further into the experience of what Heidegger called the ‘epoché of Being’ [die Epoche des Seins] – the manner in which being withholds itself from its own allowance of manifestation – in a more intrepid form in which το άπειρον in its ‘agelessness’ exceeds and resists any seamless manifestation in nature.27 The various names of philosophical thought given to this original experience of eternity would thus translate an undecidable principle of resistance against any translation, or manifestation itself.28 The ‘substrate’ (το ὑποκειμενον) of ‘the agelessness of infinite’ is neither ‘being’ nor a material or spatial thing, but freedom as an unbounded resistance against the decline of the world and as an elevation of vitality, or life itself. As Patočka explains: ‘It [eternity] is after all a resistance, a battle against that fall, against time, against the entire declining tendency of the world and of life. In a certain sense, this battle is understandably futile, but in another sense it is not, because the situation in which man finds himself varies accordingly to how he confronts it. And freedom of mankind lies – perhaps – exactly in this!’29 Throughout these considerations of the Greek discovery of eternity, it is important for him to stress that this experience of eternity does not represent a ‘pallid intellectualism’ or ‘idea’ in an abstract sense, as either a psychological notion or a metaphysical entity. Instead, this pursuit of eternity as an aspirational resistance against the decline of the world is embodied in a form

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of life dedicated to the care for the soul. The care for the soul is the defining contribution of Greek philosophy and therewith, of Europe, to mankind’s self-understanding. Central to the ‘care for the soul’ is the question of immortality, as famously discussed in Plato’s Phaedo, where these two considerations are inseparably linked: That, if the soul is immortal, we must care for it, not only in respect to this time, which we call life, but in respect to all time, and if we neglect it, the danger now appears to be terrible. For if death were an escape from everything, it would be a boon to the wicked, for when they die they would be freed from the body and from their wickedness together with their souls. But now, since the soul is seen to be immortal, it cannot escape. (Phaedo, 107c)

The care for the soul is orientated towards a preparation, or care, for death (μελέτη θανάτου) which Socrates equates with the beginning of philosophical thought and the life of philosophy. The origin of philosophical thought in Socrates’s singular fate coincides with the invention of a novel discourse on death other than mythology and religion. In its meditation on human finitude, philosophy is not merely another form of discourse, but more emphatically, as with Socrates, a unique form of life that embodies a ‘triumph over death’, as Patočka remarks in the Heretical Essays. This triumph over death is neither mastery nor escape, but a pursuit: life lived in the pursuit of wisdom resembles death in living form, or, otherwise expressed, lives death, metaphorically.30 While Patočka acknowledges that some Greek thinkers, such as Plato, ‘conceptualized an idea of an immortal soul’, not all did, and this qualification weighs significantly in his proposal to distinguish between immortality and eternity. For as he notes, even those Greek thinkers who reflected on the nature of the soul, where the issue of the soul’s immortality is either unclear or absent, nonetheless ‘believed that it is necessary to care for the soul’.31 The care for the soul can be disassociated from any necessary philosophical commitment to immortality, while still retaining what is central to its philosophical significance, an elevation of human life to a condition comparable to the gods. In this distinction between immortality and eternity, the latter can be understood as a ‘de-ontologization’ of immortality, where the soul is not thought as a ‘substance’, but as a freedom manifest through a life in truth. With eternity as the animating principle for the care for the soul’s elevation, the achievement of a life worth living takes an orientation towards eternity, and not immortality, if the latter represents an imperishable state of being or afterlife. Whereas the quest for immortality is predicated on the abandonment of the body, as the embodiment of natural decline and decay, the pursuit of eternity is bound to the perishability of the world.32 As Patočka



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states: ‘This is the attempt to embody what is eternal within time, and within one’s own being, and at the same time, an effort to stand firm in the storm of time, stand firm in all dangers carried within it, to stand firm when the care of the soul becomes dangerous for a human being’.33 We resist not death, but its natural declination without an equivalent aspiration of our own. The shipwreck is neither averted nor salvaged, but nonetheless redeemed. Eternity is resistance against decline. It is not a suspension of nature, but an aspiration against its inevitability. In this regard, the conversion of the soul towards eternity represents a disruptive ἐποχή of naturalism, in a first sense, as generation and corruption. In a second sense, ‘naturalism’ characterizes the naïveté of pregiven and accepted meaning. In this twofold configuration, human existence is helplessly inscribed within the natural order of decline as well as beholden to an understanding of the world as taken for granted. The unquestioned givenness of the world, however, presupposes attitudes of acceptance and avoidance; the world is never merely received, but accepted or avoided in its pregivenness. These cyclical movements of inscribe human existence within the metabolism of the natural world as an order of beginnings and endings. Most significantly, the naïveté of the world is characterized by assuredness in the world. Human existence finds itself at home in a world which encompasses human life within an immanent unity of meaning, or cosmos. This assuredness in the world does not belie our mortal condition, but on the contrary, domesticates humanity within the inscrutable and uncontrollable expanse of beginnings and endings, the expanse of nature itself. We are at home in the world not despite our mortality, but on its basis, due to its fertilization into an economy of meaning in which we find our place within an adventure greater than ourselves. As exemplified with Near Eastern civilizations, if the pregiven world of natural existence provides an unquestioned home for human beings, where the sense of home is its assuredness, it is likewise a world in which human beings do not stand at the centre. The sense of having a place in the world is determined by an orientation towards transcendence, and in the case of pregiven natural existence, the sense of transcendence that gives place to human life within the world might be broadly termed paganism: a cosmological understanding of the world in which human life is neither alone nor at its centre. The natural world is not bereft of transcendence, yet transcendence does not break with the natural order of the world, and thus remains beholden within the world. Both gods and men exist within the world. Much as the natural world is not bereft of transcendence, in the sense of a world pervaded and populated by the sacred, the acceptance of human finitude within natural existence is likewise not the complete absence of freedom. The crossing over from Near Eastern civilizations to Europe is not a passage from a ‘closed’ world to an ‘open world’, from ‘non-freedom’ to ‘freedom’.

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Human existence is never simply received, but accepted (or avoided), and the fundamental mode of this acceptance is work. Homo faber represents for Patočka a basic mode of being in the world determined by the project of sustaining life against its natural self-consumption, or decline. The burden of human existence is experienced as a condition of servitude as well as liberation. As Patočka remarks, ‘We cannot simply take life in indifference but must always “bear” it, “lead” it – guarantee and stand for it’.34 The freedom, however, that organizes the world built and sustained through work turns on the project of life lived for the sake of life itself. But since human life must partake of a sense of transcendence that gives it its place, its sense of being at home in the world, the fundamental sense of life when lived for itself is a sense of life lived for another life which in return gives life to human beings. Life lived for the sake of life becomes organized around a sense of life as a gift and it is in the sense of gratitude that life transcends its own living in partaking of a communion with a living more than itself. These elements of work, transcendence, and gift define Patočka’s implicit conception of paganism in its most advanced stage with ‘the great empires of the ancient world’, that is, the civilizations of the Ancient Mesopotamia (and presumably also Egypt – though the latter never enters into Patočka’s picture). As he remarks: ‘Life in them [the great empires of the ancient world] was devoted about all to the reproduction of life, to the preservation of its vital flame. Nothing suggests that humans here raise a claim to anything else beyond that.’35 4. HOUSEHOLD WITH THE GODS It is telling of the inscrutable origins of religion that the Sumerian and Akkadian words for ‘gods’ or ‘divine beings’ are of unknown origin. A clue is nevertheless given from their Cuneiform pictographs – having a form akin to a star – which can also serve as symbols for the words ‘above’ and ‘sky’.36 Within Ancient Mesopotamia, the transcendence of the gods is characterized by the their superiority, power, and unending life.37 Unlike monotheistic religions as well as Buddhism – the great religions of the Axial Age – Mesopotamian religion was not founded or brought into the world at a particular time and place by a human personality, to whom a sacred wisdom is revealed. Mesopotamian religion is ‘unhistorical’ and ‘natural’, pregiven within an immemorial human time.38 It is also a ‘natural’ religion in the Patočkian sense of naturalism: the transcendence of the gods is housed within the world and manifest in the concreteness of human transactions with the gods. As the scholar of Sumerian religion Thorkild Jacobsen notes, Mesopotamian religion is organized around ‘the experience of the Numinous as immanent in some specific feature of the confrontation, rather than as all transcendent’.39



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The religious experience of the ‘wholly other’, the Numinous, as an experience of mysterium tremendum et fascinosum, dwells within the world. The power of the sun deity is expressed in the visible sun; the power of the goddess of fertility is present in reproduction. This in-dwelling of the sacred reflects mankind’s dependence upon the well-being and caprice of the gods. The gods operate within the natural world as power, reward, and punishment. As Jacobsen elaborates: ‘Because of this characteristic manner of experiencing the Numinous both the name and the external form given to encountered numinous power tended in earliest Mesopotamia to be simply the name and the form of the phenomenon in which the power seemed to reveal itself’.40 This pervading presence of the gods is expressed in the polytheistic form of Mesopotamian religion as well as in the theocratic arrangement of human society. As emphasized by Patočka, cities were organized around temples with each city having its own resident deity. As indicated with the Sumerian and Akkadian words for ‘temple’, a god’s temple was his or her household. They were staffed with priests and other retinue attending to the daily cares and needs of the inhabiting god’s well-being: meals were prepared, clothing was laid-out, beds were made for the deity, and gardens were properly tended. As a centre of economic and ritual activity, temples anchored the life of the city. As Jacobsen writes: ‘Its presence [temple] among the houses of the human community was visible assurance that the god was present and available’.41 Patočka perceives a testimony of this communication and commune between men and gods in the Akkadian creation myth of Atrahasis. In this narrative, the three archaic deities Anu, Enil, and Enki – gods of sky, wind, and water – placed the burden of caring for the ageless gods on the shoulder of lower deities (the Igigi), who were given the role of tending agriculture and water irrigation (essential for the rise of cities in Ancient Mesopotamia), as well as tasked with digging the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. These deities rebelled against such servitude, and after heeding the righteousness of their cause, incited the god Enki to envision the creation of new beings, whose labour and toil could be used instead. Taking up this creation, the goddess Ninmah fashioned figures of clay. The gods decreed that one among them, the god of intelligence, Geshtu-E, would be killed, and his flesh and blood became mixed with the spit of the Igigi into the sculpted clay. Ten months later, human beings were born of the world.42 In his own retelling, Patočka calls attention to this killing of the god Geshtu-E for the invention of human mortality. A god does not die for the redemption of mankind’s mortality, but on the contrary, dies such that mankind can be born and marked with mortality. For human beings, the world is a household meant to support the deathless life of the gods whose existence is not burdened by work. ‘Human life, by contrast’, as Patočka writes, ‘is one of self-maintenance through work,

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exertion, and pain, and the link between work and life is death’.43 Human beings labour in order to support the lives of the gods, who, in turn assure the ordered maintenance of the cosmos. Formed from clay and the body and blood of a sacrificed god, human beings, as finite mortal beings, participate in transcendence. Death is here not a gift from the gods, but a reminder that men are not gods, even as they partake of deathlessness in death. As written in Tablet I of the Atrahasis narrative: Geshtu-E, a god who had intelligence, They slaughtered in their assembly. Nintu mixed clay with his flesh and blood. They heard the drumbeat forever after. A ghost came into existence from the god’s flesh, and she proclaimed it as his living sign. The ghost existed so as not to forget the slain god.

In so far as the death of a god gives life to mankind, human beings participate in the divine insofar as individual mortality does not introduce discontinuity, but establishes continuity in the perpetuation of human life as such. The apparent discontinuity and violence of death is sublimated into a constitutive power of generational continuity among human beings, and through this continuity of the human species, both cultural memory and an orienting sense of the sacred are implanted into human consciousness. Archaeological evidence for this function of death in the constitution of the sacred and the implantation of the cosmos as a home can be gleaned from the discovery of the Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Anatolia. Although much of the purpose and function of Göbekli Tepe remains entirely unknown, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt has argued for considering this extensive collection of structures as the first (known) ‘temple’ or permanent (man-made) religious site of human existence. The earliest layers of Göbekli Tepe date back 12,000 years, thus preceding the invention of the wheel, written script, and, most significantly, the domestication of animals, agriculture, and sedentary life.44 Of fourteen ‘temple’ structures identified, four have presently been excavated. In each ‘temple’, a pair of T-shaped stone figures stands at the centre, surrounded by a circular stone wall in which smaller such figures are embedded. The central pair has been interpreted as anthropomorphic statues with totemic animal figures or carvings. Most significantly, these T-shaped figures appear to be headless. For Schmidt, these structures are sanctuaries associated with rituals of some kind, most likely dedicated to the meaning of theses totemic figures: whether ancestors, gods, or deceased individuals of elevated social significance remains, however, unknown.



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The importance of this discovery resides in challenging a long-held view among anthropologists and archaeologists that the transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer society to sedentary forms of social existence was driven by the domestication of animals and discovery of agriculture. Schmidt argues that Göbekli Tepe speaks instead for a pre-agricultural establishment of settled structures and constructed space of human gathering. Harking back to a thesis first proposed by Lewis Mumford, Göbekli Tepe could be seen as evidence that the origin of towns did not develop from smaller conglomerates of villages, but on the contrary, that the town has its origin in religious sanctuaries, or ‘temples’. The implantation of human collective existence in a space of dwelling – the household – is based on the institution of the sacred in conjunction with an attitude towards human mortality, or mythology of death, where death provides the underlying continuity and solidarity of human beings with each other, the living and dead. Among Neolithic sites within Anatolia, the town Çatalhöyük provides another example for Patočka’s philosophical intuition concerning the significance of death for mankind’s implantation, his dwelling or household, within natural existence. Numerous houses were built on top of the buried graves of ancestors, whose skulls were frequently removed from their bodies, and circulated among the living, thus allowing for an imminent contact and presence, in remembrance, with past kin.45 The transcendence of the living was literally based on the immanence of death within the household. Within Patočka’s philosophical framework, the prehistorical human condition, as exemplified in an advanced form in Ancient Mesopotamia, inhabits a world of transcendence within immanence. In work, human life experiences its own subjugation to itself, and yet, insofar as work sustains life through a domination over nature, there is a sense of life that escapes the cycle of beginnings and endings, and the inevitability of decline. This life projected beyond is not that of mankind, but of the gods, who are deathless; human life becomes lived for the sake of the deathless ones, lived for the sake of unending life itself. The freedom of work through which life becomes selfsustaining emancipates man from helplessness, from fear of death, but in exchange for mankind’s subservience to the gods. In contrast to the world of immanence within transcendence, or Europe, and its twofold origins in Athens and Jerusalem (the latter considered exclusively by Patočka in terms of Christianity, and hence, as Rome), the transcendence of the gods in prehistorical existence issues from world. In this transcendence within immanence, human beings find their place in the world within the household of the gods. In the Atrahasis myth, the creation of human beings is not without consequence. Human beings populated the planet with catastrophic effect – ‘the land bellowing like a bull’. In anger, the god Enlil planned to destroy mankind with a plague. Yet, Atrahasis, a wise man, who served the god Enki,

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convinced the rulers of mankind to reduce their clamour, and offer instead gifts to the gods in recompense for withholding man’s destruction. This prevention of Enlil’s punishment for the ‘noisy’ and wanton ways of men is the root of religion and ritual sacrifices to the gods. One thousand and two hundred years after the averting of this catastrophe through the invention of religion, mankind once again ran amok and raised a cosmic din that prevented Enlil from sleeping. As punishment, the gods withhold their gifts: nourishment, rain, etc. Mankind would have been destroyed were it not for the god Enki who allowed fish to return to human beings. Enraged, Enlil sends a Flood to finally destroy human existence; however, Atrahasis was warned by Enki, who built a boat which he filled with animals and his family, thus saving himself, animal life, and his kind from the Great Deluge. For Patočka, the Myth of the Flood reflects upon the precariousness of human existence and offers a cautionary tale for the fatal consequences of pursuing an absolute and irresponsible quotient of power. It is also a narrative that reveals the profound tension in Ancient Mesopotamia between mankind’s exposure to nature and mankind’s domestication of nature. The symbol for this tension between the fragility and the assuredness of human life is water as both the life-giving source of the Tigris and Euphrates and self-same source of catastrophic destruction. Patočka speaks of the Flood as representing ‘the threat of death not only to each individual, but to the entire human species in the form of global catastrophes which, without exterminating all of humanity, indicate to all individuals that they are threatened so that they can never secure their lives by their labor’.46 One cannot help but wonder whether he is speaking here only of a mythical past or whether there is equally a caution to be heard for an age defined by the Titanic illusion of claiming absolute power over the centre of the world even as we are no longer truly at home in this world. We have made the world our own without making it our home. 5. GILGAMESH’S QUEST There is a pull of truth in myth that places its significance between unthinking naïveté and philosophical reflection. As with art, myth for Patočka gives expression to what he calls a ‘total sense of the situation’ in a determinate historical epoch. Yet unlike art, myth harbours a form of proto-reflection. There is a thinking to myth that reveals the truth of the human condition in what Patočka calls ‘an ontological metaphor’. Myth is an absolute metaphor that gives expression to the Unbegrifflichkeit of the lifeworld.47 Unlike proper philosophical reflection, the ontological metaphor of myth does not transform human consciousness and incite the kind of ontological conversion which Patočka identifies with genuine philosophical reflection and its discovery



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of eternity. Myth does not break with the assuredness of the natural world even as it reveals the human predicament. As Patočka remarks: ‘Myth is not any kind of consolation, it is not some kind of support, it is not any kind of irrational injection; this is harsh awareness, or if you like harsh revealing of our revealedness/nakedness’.48 There is a tension in the myths that attract Patočka’s notice between two opposing movements of human existence, the movement of acceptance and movement of refusal or avoidance, the power of release. This irreducible tension is both revealed and domesticated within mythical consciousness; it remains harsh, yet without redemption, thus bringing human consciousness to the verge of philosophical reflection and self-transformation. Historically, that moment of consciousness on the verge of ‘crossing-over’ to Europe and philosophical consciousness (the origins of which Patočka identifies with both Greek tragedy and pre-Socratic thought) is exemplified with the Epic of Gilgamesh, which possesses for Patočka a liminal significance within his reflections on ‘pre-history’ and Ancient Mesopotamia. It is a mythological awareness at the threshold of philosophy as μελέτη θανάτου. Rilke was one of the first to call attention to the Epic of Gilgamesh’s sensibility for the mystery of death. As Rilke writes to Katherina Kippenberg, ‘hier ist das Epos der Todesfurcht, entstanden im Unvordenklichen unter Menschen, bei denen zuerst die Trennung von Tod und Leben definitiv und verhängnisvoll geworden war’ [‘Here is the epic of the fear of death, as it emerged from time immemorial among human beings, when the separation between death and life first became definitive and fateful’],49 Patočka follows suit in reading Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality as an existential confrontation with death.50 Whereas Socrates (as well as Christ, albeit with more muted expression in Patočka’s thinking) embodies a confrontation with death in an absolute responsibility towards eternity, Gilgamesh represents an existential awareness of death which remains bound to the desire for immortality. The difference between eternity and immortality, as reflecting two contrasting manifestations of ‘being-towards-death’, can be encapsulated through a contrast between a life defined by an immanence within transcendence and a life defined by a transcendence within immanence.51 Whereas in the former instance, the soul’s movement of transcendence breaks with immanence, thus provoking a reversal of orientation (flipping, as it were, the polarities of immanence and transcendence), in the latter instance, the soul’s movement of transcendence remains bound within immanence and the natural world. Whereas the former crystallizes into a ‘shaking of pre-given meaning’ and reaching into a darkness without an antipodal day, the latter’s disturbance returns to a world unchanged in peering into a darkness from which it shirks. As Patočka writes: ‘The content of this [the Gilgamesh Epic], then, is the fascination with death and, in this context, also with work which, ever facing the threats from without and the self-devouring of life within, results in the exhaustion of life by the “great-household”’.52 This confrontation with

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death clearly exerted a force on Patočka’s thinking. In Plato and Europe, he remarks to his audience: ‘All of you have experienced that it is the truth. There really is that eternal volcano rumbling inside us’.53 This ‘eternal volcano’ is presumably the figure of Gilgamesh, whose restlessness drives the heroic narrative of his epic quest. The Epic of Gilgamesh is constructed around two confrontations with death and brings together two narrative traditions into the epic’s final form. As Jacobsen argues, it is ‘precisely in this contrast [that] lay, in nuce, the central theme of the [...] epic’.54 The pivotal moment that marks the transition between two different forms of adventure is the demise of Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu, whose death is ordained by the gods as punishment for the violation of divine order and immodest degree of hubris. Bereft and bereaved, Gilgamesh must face his own mortality and launches into an existential protest against the inevitable decline of human life: that ours is an adventure does not end well. In the arc of Gilgamesh’s heroic quests against the gods with his friend Enkidu to the latter’s death, there is, properly speaking, no confrontation with death, but rather, an attempt to secure immortality through a reputation achieved against the deathless ones, the gods. Man here measures himself in defiance against the gods. With Enkidu’s death and Gilgamesh’s ensuing anxiety for his own mortality, Gilgamesh takes up a personal quest to secure immortality for himself, not through deed, but through a search for wisdom. In this quest, he seeks out Uta-napishti, who gained eternal life from the gods as recompense for his survival of the Great Flood, and seeks out his precious secret. Whereas in the first narrative arc, Gilgamesh defies the gods in attempting to span the ontological gulf between death and deathlessness, in the second quest, he undertakes a more profound defiance, or better, resistance, not against the gods in their deathless nature, but against human nature itself in its irrevocable finitude. This resistance against nature in pursuit of immortality is already signalled by Gilgamesh’s refusal of the advances of Ishtar – goddess of fertility, love, war, and sexuality – whom he refuses to marry. In anger, Ishtar summons the Bull of Heaven who is then killed by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Enkidu’s death is ordained as the heavy toll for this impiety. With Enkidu’s death, the stage of action becomes transformed from the theatre of the world housing gods and men to an Odyssey of the soul with Gilgamesh’s aspiration to triumph over his own mortality. Ultimately, whereas it is the gods who inhibit Gilgamesh’s first quest for immortality, with the exacting price of Enkidu’s life, his failure to secure Uta-napishti’s secret wisdom of eternal life stems from his own finitude, as he succumbs to the most mundane of human propensities, the carelessness of sleep. King and founder of the city Uruk, Gilgamesh’s narrative tells of his quest for wisdom: ‘He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden, / he brought back a tale before the Deluge’.55 As king, Gilgamesh is responsible



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for the maintenance of order in the city; its walls protect and demarcate the dwelling of men from the hostility of nature. In his dual nature as divine and human, Gilgamesh represents the seamlessness of divine transcendence within human immanence. This seamless order of meaning is not only cosmological; it is as significantly political. As Patočka notes, there existed within Ancient Mesopotamia ‘no sharp boundary between the world and the “great household” of the empire. [...] There is no boundary in principle between the world and the empire, for even the empire itself must be understood on the basis of something that is not the work of humans, of the unfree life that is given of them as their lot; the ruler himself is active not only within the human community and through it, but it is he who mediates between humans and the rest of the order of the world’.56 There is more than likely an esoteric dimension in play with Patočka’s statement. It speaks to any historical condition of human existence in which the lifeworld cannot maintain a boundary between itself and ‘Empire’. An ‘unfree life’ is a life condemned to serve within a great economic household, where the dominant sense of life is the sustaining of life itself, whether of the People, the Nation, or the gods. In mediating between the city of men and the empire of the gods, Gilgamesh embodies the human achievement of work (he has built the walls of Uruk) and divine transcendence among men. Gilgamesh stands above men: ‘He stands tall, magnificent, and terrible’. As king, his role is to ensure that mankind serves the gods.57 Most significantly, the city is the locus of fertility and reproduction, both in terms of an indispensable agricultural basis, or cultivation of nature, and in terms of human procreation, or cultivation of human continuity and cultural memory. However, something is not right in the state of Uruk. Gilgamesh is restless. His existence is animated by a force within which he seeks immortality through heroic deeds. This restlessness in being aims both above and at mankind. Gilgamesh is depicted as pacing back and forth within the walls of Uruk ‘like a wild bull lording’ and he ‘harries without warrant [...] the young men of Uruk’ (I, 63; 67). His tyranny reaches a pitch of unacceptable transgression when he begins to exert jus primae noctis over the young brides of warriors, thus intervening in the process of sexual procreation and genealogical descent. The people of Uruk entreat the goddess Aruru to find a solution for Gilgamesh’s intolerable waywardness. She recognizes that Gilgamesh’s restlessness reflects his loneliness and decides that what he lacks is an Other. This lack of being and surplus of force defines Gilgamesh in his twofold being. Aruru decides to create a companion for Gilgamesh: Enkidu, ‘the savage man from the midst of the wild’, who roams with animals and grazes on grass; his body is matted with hair; his hair is thick as barley. Despite his wild origins, Enkidu is lured into the fold of men by ‘a harlot’, Shamhat, who humanizes him through sexual intercourse, and then leads him

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to Gilgamesh, for she knew ‘by instinct’ that ‘he should he seek a friend’ (I, 214). Gilgamesh, for his part, saw Enkidu come to him in a dream, which his divine mother interpreted as announcing that he shall find in Enkidu a companion, friend, and, as she informs, husband: ‘Like a wife you’ll love him, caress and embrace him / he will be mighty, and often will save you’ (I, 271–2). The tragic arc of their subsequent companionship is concealed in these pronouncements since Enkidu’s death shall in fact be provoked by Gilgamesh’s own actions. Upon his entrance into Uruk, Enkidu challenges Gilgamesh and prevents him from exercising his jus primae noctis, yet after a struggle, both take to each other as friends: ‘They kissed each other and formed a friendship’ (II, Y 18). In this embrace, a terror seizes Enkidu’s heart. This episode is recounted just at the moment where the extant textual basis breaks off and picks up again with Gilgamesh’s proposal to Enkidu: a heroic challenge of slaying the monster Humbaba who lives in the Forest of the Cedar. This break in the textual record of the Gilgamesh narrative intriguingly leaves open whether Gilgamesh’s proposed heroic quest is meant to pacify or divert Enkidu’s sudden anxiety, or whether Enkidu here succumbs to a premonition of his own demise as the fatal consequence of his heroic adventures with his new-found companion.58 After the heroic slayings of Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh declares: ‘Who is the finest among men? / Who the most glorious of fellows? / Gilgamesh is the finest among men! / [Gilgamesh the most] glorious of fellows’ (VI, 172–5). Humbaba had begged for his life, yet Gilgamesh is cajoled by the unmoved Enkidu to slay him, and for this refusal of mercy and outright impiety, the gods ordain his death. It is the killing of the Bull of Heaven, sent against the city of Uruk by the spurned goddess Ishtar, that finally initiates the death of Gilgamesh’s companion. Gilgamesh’s moving lament at the loss of his friend sounds the depths of anguish in which he comes to face himself as mortal. His anxiety for his own death dislocates him from the dwelling of men and their sedentary ways; his acceptance of ‘pre-given meaning’ is ruptured. Gilgamesh begins to wander the earth, to the edge of the world in search of the elusive secret of eternal life. He seeks Uta-napishti, sole survivor of the Great Deluge, and one who was blessed with eternal life by the gods. Gilgamesh reaches the Waters of Death and convinces the Boatman to take him across. Upon their meeting, Uta-napishti, reaffirms to Gilgamesh the inevitability of death and natural decline, but also reminds him of the proper duties of kings. Insistent on obtaining Uta-napishti’s wisdom, which would cure him of his own mortality, Gilgamesh, however, fails a test of sleeplessness for a week, yet does not depart empty-handed. At the behest of Uta-napishti’s wife, Siduri, Gilgamesh is told of the plant of life which grows deep beneath the sea. He manages to secure some of this precious, rejuvenating plant and begins his journey back to Uruk. While bathing at a pool,



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a snake steals his eternal gift of life and, despairingly and in tears, Gilgamesh returns to Uruk. As he approaches, the Boatman points to the sturdy enclave of Uruk, a symbol of mankind’s endurance as a species, if not as an individual. As Patočka comments: ‘He returns to the only one of his deeds that proved to be viable, to his mighty city wall and his founding of an empire that, most reliably if only temporarily, provides humans with protection’.59 The philosophical moral that Patočka extracts from Gilgamesh’s homecoming is ambivalent. On the one hand, Siduri imparts to Gilgamesh the wisdom of finite human existence, as Patočka speaks here of the ‘delimination of human possibilities from the perspective of a finite life that is bound to itself’. On Patočka’s reading, Gilgamesh is recalled to his human condition from his heroic drive towards Titanism through an ontological conversion of ‘beingtowards-death’. His anxiety for his own death is provoked by the death of his Other, Enkidu. In this new orientation towards his ownmost as the possibility of his own impossibility, Gilgamesh searches for a wisdom that would allow his triumph over death, or, in other words, his achievement of personal immortality. Thwarted, however, by the carelessness and need of sleep (for the gods, by contrast, sleep is not a need, but a pleasure), Gilgamesh returns to a world politically and ontologically unchanged, as symbolized in the walls of Uruk. Gilgamesh’s tragic wisdom of finite existence is, on the other hand, not fully accomplished. As Patočka argues, Gilgamesh did not confront the possibility of his mortality in any form of ‘solidarity’ with Enkidu. In fact, as Patočka remarks, ‘for all his grieving over Enkidu, Gilgamesh in his panic thinks only of himself, is only terrified for himself’.60 With this characterization, Patočka evidently alludes to Heidegger’s conception of Angst and being-towards-death, here implicitly identified with the form of Gilgamesh’s attitude towards his own death.61 His orientation towards death is not marked by a form of solidarity that would integrate his ‘shaking’ or ‘anxiety’ into an experience with an Other. While the possibility of his own impossibility provokes a rupture with ‘pre-given meaning’ and the natural world, it does not establish in this darkness an instant of proximity with the Other, Enkidu, who likewise faced an angst-inspiring anticipation of his own death. Without this ‘solidarity of the shaken’ between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the political as well as ontological force of Gilgamesh’s transformative experience is arrested in flight, as it were. Gilgamesh returns to a world as its king, not as its revolutionary. The ambivalence of Patočka’s reading is revealing of a critical assumption that structures his philosophical framing of the beginning and the ending of Europe. Patočka’s Heideggerian characterization of Gilgamesh’s thanatos solipsism echoes his construal of Enkidu as originally Gilgamesh’s enemy. As Patočka speaks of Enkidu’s arrival in Uruk: ‘Gilgamesh first [has] to test his strength against the human-beast Enkidu, a powerful enemy whom he

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turns into his helper and protector’.62 This ‘turning of his enemy’ does not pass through the constitutive experience of polemos (which, in fact, is experienced against the gods and their creatures) nor ‘being-towards-death’, which, in fact, is exclusively experienced singularly, as Gilgamesh’s thinking of himself, and not, as the singular plurality of the solidarity of the shaken. And yet, Enkidu cannot so conveniently be construed as Gilgamesh’s enemy. Although he does indeed come to Uruk to challenge Gilgamesh, and is fashioned by the gods for the explicit purpose curbing Gilgamesh’s tyranny, he, as significantly, is created as an answer to Gilgamesh’s loneliness. Gilgamesh anticipates the arrival of Enkidu in dreams that announce him as his companion, friend, and husband. Each is defined by a loneliness that is supported through the other, in the companionship of adventure. Nevertheless, Enkidu’s death provokes the awareness of a genuine form of loneliness: not the restless loneliness of a will to power, but the anxious loneliness of being-towards-death. It is this loneliness, absolute and unforgiving, that Enkidu’s death brings to consciousness in Gilgamesh. Within the structure of Patočka’s philosophy of history in the Heretical Essays, the mutually supporting construal of Enkidu (initially) as an ‘enemy’ and of Gilgamesh’s confrontation of death as bereft of genuine solidarity is telling of how Europe might find a new beginning in the aftermath of the wars of the twentieth century and of the twentieth century as war. The absence of solidarity in Gilgamesh’s anxiety over the death of his companion leads him to course in quest of immortality and stands in contrast with the ‘solidarity of the shaken’ of those who triumph over death jointly in a polemos in which what is at stake is neither immortality nor empire, but an ageless power of resistance against the fate of inevitable decline and the lure of its Titanic mastery. It is a power befitting neither of kings nor saviours, and still awaits its proper mythology and form of philosophy which would lead to a Europe after Europe amid its epochal shipwreck. NOTES 1. Letter of 29 November 1971. Eugen Fink and Jan Patočka, Briefe und Dokumente 1933–1977, ed. Michael Heitz and Bernhard Neßler (Freiburg: Alber Verlag, 1999), 89. 2. Thierry Hentsch, Raconter et mourir. Aux sources narratives de l’imaginaire occidental (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2002), 79 [‘the oldest of the great narratives that connects us to our cultural heritage’]. 3. Jan Patočka, ‘L’Europe et après’ [Europe and Post-Europe], in L’Europe après l’Europe, ed. Erika Abrams (Paris: Verdier, 2007), 42. 4. Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, trans. P. Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 9.



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5. Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 290–1. 6. Karl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks (London: The Grove Press, 1951), 151ff. Susan Deacy and Alexandra Villing, ‘What Was the Colour of Athena’s Aegis?’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 129 (2009): 121: ‘Glaukos is the most prominent colour term associated with Athena […] as well as being one of Athena’s most common epithets, is also one of the most intriguing, open as it is to a variety of interpretations and translations’.  7. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 10. 8. Ibid., 2. 9. Hans Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 1979). 10. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 9. 11. Ibid., 7. 12. Ibid. 13. http://collections.dartmouth.edu/teitexts/meadows/diplomatic/meadows_ltgdiplomatic.html. 14. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 9. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Tomáš G. Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations, 1914–1918, trans. Henri W. Steed (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co, 1927). 19. Max Scheler, Philosophische Weltanschauung (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1929). 20. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 8. 21. Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Darmstadt: Reichl, 1928). 22. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 12. 23. Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), 340. ‘[T]he destiny of the West rests on the translation of the word ἐόν’. Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 260. 24. Gerard Naddaf, The Greek Concept of Nature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 66. 25. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 12. 26. On the different possible interpretations of arche and to apeiron, see Marcel Conche, Anaximandre. Fragments et témoignages, traduction, introduction et commentaires par Marcel Conche (Paris: PUF, 1991), 54–77. 27. Heidegger, Holzwege, 333. 28. Here would be the occasion to compare Derrida’s reading of Anaximander and this notion of the ‘undecidable’ of the ‘higher law’ in Specters of Marx with Patočka’s reading of ‘eternal’ (ἀγήρως) as resistance and freedom. The sparse fragments of Anaximander would be the first terrain of contestation between Heidegger, Patočka, and Derrida on the question of philosophy and Europe. 29. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 13. As Marcel Conche suggests, the boundless [aperion] as ‘eternal’ [aio] signifies in Anaximander’s thought ‘what retains its vital force’. See Conche, Anaximandre, 148–9.

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30. As suggested by Françoise Dastur, La mort. Essai sur la finitude (Paris: PUF, 2010), 71. 31. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 13. In Éternité et historicité, Patočka argues that Plato’s immortalization of Socrates through his writings and fabrication of ‘Platonism’ effectively congealed the irreducibility of Socrates, and, indeed, his undecidable identity, into an image of thought centred on a metaphysics of presence. Jan Patočka, Éternité et historicité [Eternity and Historicity], ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Paris: Verdier, 2007). 32. In the Cratlyus, Socrates observes that the Greek word soma was understood within the Orphic cult as the ‘tomb (sèma) of the soul’ (400b). 33. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 87. 34. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. E. Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 15. 35. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 16. 36. Jean Bottéro, Mésopotamie. L’écriture, la raison et les dieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 381. 37. For expressions of the gods’ transcendence, see Wilfred G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). 38. Bottéro, Mésopotamie, 367, who speaks in Patočkian vein when he writes that ‘la religion mésopotamienne n’était pas “historique”, mais “primitive”. Elle n’avait pas été fondée, à un point nommé de l’histoire, par un puissant esprit religieux qui avait su imposer autour de lui, puis diffuser et institutionnaliser ses propres sentiments et convictions concernant le sacré’. [‘Mesopotamian religion was not “historical”, but “primitive”. It was not founded at a designated moment called history by a powerful religious soul who knew how to impose around him, and then diffuse and institute, his own feelings and convictions regarding the sacred’.] 39. Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness. A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 5. 40. Ibid., 6. 41. Ibid., 16. See also Bottéro, Mésopotamie, 407ff. 42. For the Atrahasis Myth in English, Myths from Mesopotamia: Gilgamesh, the flood, and others, trans. Stephanie Dalley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 43. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 17. 44. Klaus Schmidt, Sie Bauten die ersten Tempel (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007). 45. For the archaeological findings and cultural function of the ‘skull cult’, Ian Hodder, Çatalhöyük: The Leopard’s Tale (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 146, 165, 226ff, 261. 46. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 19. 47. A comparison with Hans Blumenberg would here be interesting. 48. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 48. 49. Rainer Maria Rilke and Katherina Kippenberg, Briefwechsel (Wiesbaden: Insel-Verlag, 1954), 191. See William L. Moran, ‘Rilke and the Gilgamesh Epic’, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 32 (1980): 208–10. For the reception of the Gilgamesh Epic since its rediscovery in 1853 in literature and the arts, Theodore Ziolkowski, Gilgamesh Among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).



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50. It is not known to me whether Patočka was familiar with Rilke’s correspondence to Kippenberg. For the presence of Rilke in Patočka’s teaching, see the testimony of Marketa Špiritovás, Hexenjagd in der Tschechoslowakei Intellektuelle zwischen Prager Frühling und dem Ende des Kommunismus (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2012), 322. 51. On the significance of Christianity for Patočka’s thinking, see Nicolas de Warren, ‘The Gift of Eternity’, in The New Year Book for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14 (2015): 161–80. 52. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 21. Bottéro considers Gilgamesh an example of une mythologie de la mort that gives representation to mankind’s aspirational struggle against his inscrutable mortality. 53. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 48. 54. Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness, 215. 55. The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated and introduced by Andrew R. George (London: Penguin Books, 1999). I shall cite from this translation of the Standard Version with indication of tablet and line: I, 1. In 2011, twenty new lines from Tablet V were discovered by the Sulaymaniah Museum in Kurdistan, Iraq. For the Tablet, its English translation, and its significance, see Farouk N. H. Al-Rawi and Andrew R. George, ‘Back to the Cedar Forest: The Beginning and End of Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš’, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 66 (2014): 69–90. 56. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 21. 57. See Bottéro, Mésopotamie, 407ff. 58. As Bottéro proposes, Mésopotamie, 211: ‘mais on dirait que Gilgameš, pour rassurer son ami, atterré devant ce cauchemar, tente de lui suggérer qu’il faut, pour en comprendre le message, procéder par inversion des valeurs et que, par suite, une songe aussi terrible ne peut être que rassurant’. [‘But we could claim that Gilgamesh, in order to re-assure his friend from his nightmare, attempts to suggest to him that he must, in order to properly understand its message, begin with an inversion of values, for which, such a terrible dream could only be re-assuring’.] 59. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 20. 60. Ibid., 21. 61. On the importance of the intersubjective integration of experience in Patočka’s thinking as argument against Heidegger’s conception of Angst and its revelation of Dasein’s ‘ownmost’, see Francesco Tava, The Risk of Freedom. Ethics, Phenomenology, and Politics in Jan Patočka, trans. Jane Ledlie (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 101ff. 62. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 19.

Chapter 11

The Dark Night of the Care for the Soul – Politics and Despair in Jan Patočka’s Sixth Heretical Essay Daniel Leufer

Recent years have seen a proliferation of work dedicated to exploring Jan Patočka’s significance both as a phenomenologist and as a political thinker. Indeed, as a former student of both Husserl and Heidegger who ended his life as a political dissident, Patočka does seem to represent an ideal figure through which to explore the complex relationship between abstract phenomenological thought and concrete political action. Patočka’s act of political resistance against the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as a spokesperson for the Charter 77 movement and his death ten days after a resultant police interrogation lend themselves to romantic retelling. But just how clear-cut is the relationship between Patočka’s philosophy and his political actions? Can he be said to have a distinctively political phenomenology which led him to his act of resistance? From one perspective, Patočka’s involvement with the Czechoslovakian dissidents as a spokesperson for Charter 77 can be seen as a seamless extension of his previous philosophical commitments, confirming his place in a lineage of noble philosophical sacrifice stretching from Socrates through to Boethius and up to contemporary times. Some commentators, however, have expressed doubt as to whether Patočka’s involvement with the Charter and his adoption of the vocabulary of human rights can be seen as entirely consistent with his earlier philosophy.1 Indeed, one could potentially (although perhaps not convincingly) argue that Patočka simply got swept up in events and that his political action bore little or no relation to his deeper philosophical ideas. It is, of course, beyond the scope of this chapter to address so deep and broad a question as that of the ultimate significance of Patočka as a political thinker. Instead, I will attempt the more modest task of exploring the political significance of what is – for better or worse – Patočka’s best-known and most influential text: his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. 161

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In particular, I will focus on the sixth of these essays, the ominously entitled ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War’. For it is in this essay that Patočka presents some of his most intriguing and yet elusive ideas from a political point of view: his reference to the idea of a ‘sacrifice for nothing’ as a way to overcome the instrumental logic of modernity and his notion of the ‘solidarity of the shaken’ as that which could save humanity from spiritual self-destruction. However, it is also in this essay that Patočka makes his most ambiguous gesture from a political point of view: his appropriation of the Fronterlebnis [experience of the front line] discourse of the First World War, and, in particular, his discussion of Ernst Jünger.2 My aim in this chapter is to investigate Patočka’s thinking in the sixth heretical essay in order to assess the political significance of its philosophical claims. To do so, I will investigate his discussion of war and politics in the twentieth century through his interaction with Ernst Jünger. Ultimately, I will argue that, at least as far as the Heretical Essays are concerned, Patočka cannot be said to put forward anything like a straightforward political philosophy, but rather something which consciously undermines the boundaries between philosophy, politics, and, perhaps most strangely, religion. 1. THE QUESTION OF DECADENCE The sixth heretical essay has often met with an understandable bewilderment, troubling unprepared readers with its ‘strange, frankly shocking passages about the dominance of war, of darkness and the demonic at the very heart of the most rational projects of the promotion of peace’,3 to repeat Paul Ricœur’s well-known description. Indeed, on an initial reading, Patočka’s bold metaphysical discussion of the First World War appears surprising after the fifth essay’s more familiar discussions of technology and modernity. On closer analysis, however, its necessity as a continuation of the previous essays becomes clear, especially when it is placed in the context of the fifth essay’s strange conclusion. As such, let me begin this discussion of the sixth essay at the end of the fifth. The fifth essay is dominated by the question which forms its title: Is technological civilization decadent, and why?4 According to Patočka’s definition, a life can be described as decadent when through its very functioning it undermines its own foundations: ‘when it loses its grasp on the innermost nerve of its functioning, when it is disrupted at its inmost core so that while thinking itself full it is actually draining and laming itself with every step and act’.5 A society or civilization is thus decadent when it encourages such a form of existence, what Patočka calls an addiction to what is inhuman, to that extent to which it destroys our humanity. Just as the glutton undermines



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his ability to live a life of luxury by gradually destroying his body from overconsumption, the decadent society gives rise to a form of human existence which ‘mutilates itself precisely when it seems full and rich’.6 Such a society produces individuals who further pollute both it and one another, presumably to an eventual point at which it will collapse from internal corruption and rot. However, the titular question of the fifth essay is not merely meant to lead to a condemnation of technological society; there also resides something of a minimalistic hope within its formulation. For if technological society is in fact decadent, this would mean that something within it will gradually and surreptitiously undermine its functioning, thereby eventually creating the possibility for something new and healthier to take its place. In this formulation we can hear an echo of Heidegger’s essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’,7 and of his cherished lines from Hölderlin’s Patmos: ‘Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch’.8 The hope implied in Patočka’s question is that the very development of technological society will lead to its own destruction, thus opening the space of possibility for a spiritual or philosophical renewal. If, on the other hand, technological civilization were not decadent, the frightening alternative would be that it could develop indefinitely, destroying ever more fully the ‘noble’ vestiges of ancient civilization to create some sort of ahistorical technological dystopia. Contrary to what one would expect from the progression of the essay’s analyses, however, neither the former dream nor the latter nightmare is confirmed at the essay’s conclusion. Patočka says that although initially it may seem clear that technological civilization is decadent, there are two reasons to hesitate before deciding whether this is true or not: first, more than any society before it, technological civilization offers the possibility of ‘a life without violence and with far-reaching equality of opportunity’,9 the possibility to finally overcome external misery and want through technical solutions; and second, that ‘the manifestations of decadence which we have noted and described in it are not simply its own work but a bequest of preceding ages’.10 Both of these reasons require unravelling. As regards the first, Patočka holds back from labelling technological civilization as decadent because rather than necessarily subjecting the human race to ever-worsening material conditions of life – and thereby gradually destroying its component individuals – it actually possesses the possibility to overcome problems of basic human need and thereby inaugurate a universal condition of material well-being for the human race.11 For this reason, then, it seems that technological civilization should not be called decadent because it could potentially foster human well-being, at least on a material level, although such an existence may not be what Patočka would call ‘fully human’.12 Indeed, Patočka further strengthens this argument by speaking about the possibility that in addition to such material well-being there could subsequently be ‘a turn from

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accidental rule to the rule of those who understand what history is about’.13 What he seems to propose here is a rule by some sort of spiritual elite over a technological society which could foster not only material but even spiritual/philosophical well-being in its members. It is, however, significant that Patočka does not speak of a society in which people en masse would ascend to a higher state of consciousness, but rather one in which the material wellbeing of the masses would be catered for as they were led by an enlightened minority. In contrast to the Marxist hope for a coming-to-consciousness and liberation of the proletariat, Patočka rather seems to place his hope in a coming-to-consciousness of the intellectuals. As we will see later in discussing his idea of the solidarity of the shaken, a clear sign of elitism clings to his thinking here. As regards the second reason, what Patočka claims here is that the manifestations of decadence in (European) technological civilization have come down to it as part of its heritage, presumably as part of the bequest of its Greek origins. As such, the signs of decadence in technological civilization would not be unique to it, representing some peculiar aberration of modernity, but would rather form the dark side of what was bequeathed to Europe by its progenitors. Expressing this in a somewhat different vocabulary, we could say that the possibility of the ‘care for the soul’ always entailed the possibility of the ‘care to have/dominate’, such that either one could rise to dominance over the other. The turning point of the sixteenth century would thus represent the rise to dominance of the care to have.14 What is particularly troubling about this for Patočka is its implication that these signs of decadence have been part of European civilization from its Greek beginnings, that perhaps they are even an essential element of it. In the context of Patočka’s philosophy of history, such tendencies to decadence would therefore go handin-hand with the very possibility of a higher freedom as opened up by Greek philosophy. According to Patočka, the ‘birth’ of philosophy in Greece broke the hold of mythological thinking on man and allowed a new form of human freedom and responsibility to appear. However, taking this notion of an inherited proclivity to decadence to the extreme, the possibility presents itself that decadence and human freedom form some sort of an inseparable pair, perhaps like the Janus-faced gift of the pharmakon [cure or poison], both cure and poison. Following this line of thinking, we could say that at the same time as philosophy’s break with myth opened up a new possibility of radically responsible human freedom, the breaking of the hegemony of myth also unleashed a slow-acting poison into human existence, one which only manifests its true effects in modernity, and in particular in the twentieth century. This realization complicates the leading question of the fifth essay to such an extent that in the following paragraph Patočka abandons it altogether: ‘Perhaps the entire question about the decadence of civilisation is incorrectly posed. There is no



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civilisation in itself. The question is whether historical humans are still willing to own up to history.’15 The implication here is that there is no isolated ‘technological civilisation’ as such, but rather that contemporary European civilization must be put in the context of what Patočka sees as its origin in Greek philosophy. In this sense, ‘technology’ forms an essential part of European civilization and the ‘essence of technology’ is only fully revealed in the twentieth century. As such, there is no European civilization without this dangerous technological element. But what does it mean to own up to history, especially when European history shows itself to be inherently Manichean, containing the germs of both radical freedom and technological evil? How is it that we can take up responsibility for history, and, in doing so, overcome the fallen state of technological civilization? With this cryptic remark we are suddenly launched into the sixth essay, ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War’. As I will show in what follows, it is precisely through a discussion of this relationship between the twentieth century and war that Patočka will attempt to answer the reformulated question of the fifth essay, the question of owning up to history. 2. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS WAR Before venturing into an analysis of the complexities of the sixth essay, let me begin by briefly stating the two claims underlying it which will be essential for our question (namely, the question of its political significance): first, Patočka claims that the essence of the twentieth century is war, that it is ‘an epoch of the night, of war, and of death’;16 second, he presents a vision of philosophy as negativity, a vision that has been developing throughout the Heretical Essays and which comes to fruition here. To understand the implications of the first claim, we need to investigate Patočka’s appropriation of Ernst Jünger, and in particular of the idea of ‘total mobilization’ as the essence of twentieth-century war. Furthermore, as will become clear in what follows, Patočka collapses the distinction between war and peace and thereby leads us to understand total mobilization as the essence of twentiethcentury political existence as such. With regard to the second claim, we will need to look at the ever-present figure of Socrates in Patočka’s reflections to understand the role he sees philosophy as playing in this epoch of war. Let us begin, then, with the question of war in the twentieth century. In approaching Patočka’s complex thesis about the twentieth century as war, we must first understand his discussion of war in its most straightforward manifestation: as the global military conflict which took place from 1914–1918. How does Patočka characterize it?

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The First World War is the decisive event in the history of the twentieth century. It determined its entire character. It was this war that demonstrated that the transformation of the world into a laboratory for releasing reserves of energy accumulated over billions of years can be achieved only by means of wars.17

For Patočka, what sets the First World War apart from all previous conflicts was the sheer amount of energy involved in it; no previous war had involved the marshalling and expenditure of energy on a scale which was even remotely comparable. Indeed, Patočka claims that the ‘Great War’ provided both the opportunity and, once underway, even the necessity for an ever-increasing release of force. The main influence on Patočka’s thinking here is Ernst Jünger, and in particular his writings from the 1930s such as Die totale Mobilmachung (1932) and Der Arbeiter, Herrschaft und Gestalt (1933).18 Jünger, a highly decorated veteran of the First World War and key figure in Germany’s radical Right wrote these and many other influential and controversial essays during the interwar period.19 Although Patočka mostly only invokes Jünger’s analyses of war and politics, and does not in any straightforward way align himself with his anti-democratic, pro-technological responses to the problems he identifies, we must nevertheless be cautious about Patočka’s largely uncritical discussion of one of the central figures of German right-wing political thought. But let us defer such critical remarks for the moment; first we must follow Patočka’s appropriation of Jünger’s ideas. According to Jünger, what ultimately determined the course of the war in its late stages was the degree to which the belligerent states were capable of what he calls ‘total mobilization’, an idea which plays a central role in Patočka’s own interpretation of the war: ‘This is a mobilization that requires extension to the deepest marrow, life’s finest nerve. Its realisation is the task of total mobilization: an act which, as if through a single grasp of the control panel, conveys the extensively branched and densely veined power supply of modern life towards the great current of martial energy’.20 Whereas the conflicts of previous times were to some degree conducted according to fixed budgets and resources, Jünger claims that what tipped the balance in favour of France, Britain, and America was their capacity to overcome all limitations to achieve a level of mobilization which the conservative societies of Germany, Tsarist Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire could not match. By transforming their societies into ‘volcanic forges’ for the production of men and material for war, these ‘progressive’ societies gained the upper hand over their conservative counterparts. Describing post-war Soviet Russia as emblematic of this level of total mobilization, Patočka refers to it as being ‘unhampered by those muting factors represented in the rest of the world by respect for tradition, for former ways of comprehending being which now appear as outworn superstitions and a means of manipulating others’.21



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From this perspective, the effectiveness of a state in twentieth-century war would depend upon its ability to overcome all obstacles to mobilization, be they ideological, economic, spiritual, or humanitarian. Indeed, total mobilization seems to lead towards total nihilism, to require it even; any traditional beliefs or values which would restrict the exercise of a pure will to power must be rooted out to allow the total marshalling of societal energies. Such nihilism – the lack of belief in any ultimate, transcendent meaning – could thus be seen as the defining conviction of the twentieth century, something Patočka points out when he says that underlying the First World War was ‘the slowly germinating conviction that there is nothing such as a factual, objective meaning of the world and of things, and that it is up to strength and power to create such meaning within the realm accessible to humans’.22 In a sense, then, a state’s effectiveness in war – its ability to totally mobilize – would be determined by the depth to which it could take its nihilism. For Patočka, the key insight of Jünger is that this ever-increasing mobilization is not just a feature of wartime, but that it continued to shape human social existence even after declarations of peace. Indeed, in Jünger’s descriptions of war and peace, we see that a fundamental intermixing has occurred: war has become industrial, the soldier is replaced by the worker, and times of peace are conducted in the image of martial operations: ‘our daily life, with its inexorability and merciless discipline, its smoking, glowing districts, the physics and metaphysics of its commerce, its motors, airplanes, and burgeoning cities. With a pleasure-tinged horror, we sense that here, not a single atom is not in motion – that we are profoundly inscribed in this raging process [of total mobilisation]’.23 Total mobilization thus turns out to be the essence of both war and peace in the twentieth century. This collapsing of the simple war-peace dichotomy is one of the key moves of Patočka’s sixth essay, for by claiming that even the inter- and post-war periods are characterized by total mobilization – namely, the consummate instrumentalization of and mastery over every aspect of existence – Patočka is able to advance his thesis of the twentieth century as war. Taking this idea to its conclusion, we can say that Patočka sees the politics of peacetime as mere continuations of war by other means, in an inversion of the famous Clausewitzian idea that war is the pursuit of politics by other means.24 According to Patočka, then, the peacetime politics of twentieth-century Europe was nothing more than a deceptive means of continuing the total mobilization first unleashed in the First World War. The war of 1914–1918 was therefore the definitive unmasking of something hidden and repressed throughout Europe’s long centuries of ‘progress’. As such, the descent into the total mobilization of the twentieth century was always a possibility, if not an inevitability, for Europe. Moreover, looking back to the unsettling ending of the fifth essay, we can also see what Patočka meant by saying that there is

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no such thing as ‘civilization in itself’: we cannot speak about one period of European civilization in isolation from its history, rather, we must see these signs of decadence from the perspective of the historical development of Europe, as something contained in it from the beginning. The proclivity to total mobilization is thus something underlying European society itself, the dark side of its liberation from myth. Owning up to history, taking up responsibility as historical individuals, will therefore mean taking responsibility for this dangerous element of instrumentalization and, hopefully, thereby understanding how to overcome it. But just how convincing is this analysis of the essence of the twentieth century as total mobilization? From Jünger’s perspective, in 1930s’ Germany, the continuation and indeed intensification of total mobilization is indisputable. The massive rearmament programme undertaken by the Nazis in the interwar period was a clear attempt to harness as much energy and material as possible towards the goal of avenging the humiliation of Versailles. Moreover, the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union was showing how even a relatively technologically backward state such as Tsarist Russia could be transformed into a ‘volcanic forge’, to repeat one of Jünger’s favourite metaphors. This, however, is from the perspective of the 1930s. The question is whether it still makes sense to speak of such mobilization in later periods such as, for example, Czechoslovakia in the 1970s or in the contemporary European Union. Although on the surface it seems that we cannot find anything approaching the interwar levels of mobilization in these later periods, Patočka claims that in his own time it is merely the outer aspect of this mobilization which has changed, while the ‘true force’ underlying this process remains just as active: It might be pointed out that the extreme means of mobilization, where systematic terror was reflected in show trials and in the destruction of entire groups and strata, in the slow liquidation in forced labor and concentration camps, has been gradually abolished: the question, though, is whether this abolition represents a true demobilization or, on the contrary, a war that establishes itself as permanent by ‘peaceful’ means.25

Patočka here claims that even though the more vicious, grotesque manifestations of this mobilization have receded, its essence remains active and continues to exert its influence upon humanity. It seems therefore that total mobilization, although most visible when it takes the form of actual war or the grotesque pantomime of Stalinist state terror, actually points to a ‘deeper force’ at work in the twentieth century. These insidious forces at work in the catastrophes of the twentieth century are referred to by Patočka as ‘the forces of the day’, but how precisely should we understand Patočka’s day-night dichotomy?



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Patočka’s use of the terms ‘day’ and ‘night’ in the sixth essay can seem paradoxical at first. On one side we have what he calls the ‘forces of the day, of life, and of peace’; on the other, the ‘night, death, and war’. Although one would expect him to condemn the forces of the night for the twentieth century’s descent into total war, Patočka instead points the finger of blame at the forces of the day. We thus come to the seemingly paradoxical situation in which it is precisely these forces of the day, life, and peace which are behind the increasingly destructive conflicts of the twentieth century. In the following passage, Patočka illustrates how this paradoxical situation arises: How do the day, life, peace, govern all individuals, their bodies and souls? By means of death; by threatening life. From the perspective of the day life is, for all individuals, everything, the highest value that exists for them. For the forces of the day, conversely, death does not exist. [...] Thus in the will to war, day and life rule with the help of death. The will to war counts on generations yet unborn, conceiving its plans from their viewpoint. So peace rules in the will to war.26

Fundamentally, what underlies the shifting terminology of Patočka’s interpretation of the war is a particular conception of life and death. According to him, what characterizes the perspective of the day more than anything else is that it takes life to be the highest value for humans and thereby rejects all other values as subservient. From this perspective, death is nothing more than the ‘cessation of functions’ and enters into calculations just like any other variable. On the balance sheets of the forces of the day, we find the indifferent economic calculations according to which millions of men are sent to their death in order to ensure a better life for those who remain behind or those not yet born. As such, it is the values of the day which incite war, and it is in the name of these same values that war is ended. As we will see later in Patočka’s discussion of sacrifice, understanding things – and indeed living – according to the forces of the night, means living in an authentic relation to one’s own death, in contrast to the mere instrumentalization of human life characteristic of the perspective of the day.27 What is perhaps most important about Patočka’s distinction of day and night is how it allows him to collapse the superficial distinction between war and peace: although the forces of the day have shown themselves most clearly at work in outright war, Patočka points out that their motives do not always correspond to a state of war: ‘These forces themselves never die, only exhaust themselves, indifferent whether they are destroying or organizing. Fundamentally, their “impulse” is rather to organise, to get on with the task from which the war only distracts them’.28 We thus end up in the paradoxical

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situation of what Patočka refers to as a ‘war against war’ in which the noble name of peace is used to justify the ever-increasing instrumentalization of life. It seems that the fundamental task of these forces is the aimless accumulation of energy and material, energy which is simply held in reserve29 as a preparation for future conflicts, or, in the case of the nuclear arms race, as a deterrent to our enemies who also accumulate without restriction. As we saw earlier, war seems to be the most convenient way for this energy to be released, but now we see that there are also more subtle – more ‘peaceful’ – ways in which this takes place. 3. BEYOND POLITICS? Before going any further with Patočka’s analyses, however, let me here introduce a critical perspective on his discussion of the war (and the twentieth century as such). According to him, attempts to explain the First World War (and thus the twentieth century) from an economic, sociological, or psychological perspective miss its true essence. But is it not too sweeping a gesture to simply write off so many sophisticated disciplines as mere ‘nineteenth-century’ ideas?30 And could we not say in response that all of this talk of the ‘forces of the day’, of ‘deeper meanings’ and ‘secret processes’ is nothing more than a form of mystification, covering over the actual economic and social processes at work in the twentieth century? From a Marxist perspective, for example, one could say that all of these problems (loss of authentic community, mass alienation, etc.) are the result of capitalist exchange relations and therefore have an economic solution: the destruction of capitalism and the emancipation of the proletariat. Patočka, however, seems to reject any such economic or large-scale political solution as redundant, as mere nineteenthcentury thinking. In order to better understand what it is that Patočka rejects and thus his own position, I believe it will be useful to show here precisely where he diverges from a more straightforwardly political position such as, for example, the Marxist one. Moreover, we will also see that Patočka’s own position is itself vulnerable to criticism from the very ‘perspective of the day’ which he so flippantly rejects.31 In order to illustrate this, let us briefly look at the parallels and divergences between Patočka’s discussion of the all-pervading instrumental logic of total mobilization and György Lukács’s description of commodification and reification from his 1923 work, History and Class Consciousness. As we will see, in their analyses, the two thinkers often converge, but in their response they take fundamentally opposed paths. Just as Patočka sees the tendency to total mobilization as a process which tends to instrumentalize both the world and human beings, so too does Lukács speak of the manner in which ‘commodity



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exchange together with its structural consequences [is] able to influence the total outer and inner life of society’.32 For both thinkers, both society and individual human existence are threatened by a dominating logic of instrumentalization, which threatens to erode authentic human existence. According to Lukács, the commodification of the worker’s labour power becomes symbolic of the commodification of every aspect of society, its instrumentalization or mobilization: ‘[The worker’s] fate is typical of society as a whole in that this self-objectification, this transformation of a human function into a commodity reveals in all its starkness the dehumanised and dehumanising function of the commodity relation’.33 Moreover, he also sees the instrumentalizing logic of commodification as tending to displace all other modes of being, subjecting existence as a whole to its ultimately meaningless logic: ‘The fact that the “natural laws” of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that – for the first time in history – the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified laws’.34 However, despite the evident similarities in their analyses of the problem facing twentieth-century man, Lukács and Patočka diverge sharply on the question of a solution. Whereas Lukács sees the cause of the problem rooted in the capitalist model of human relations, Patočka tends to see total mobilization as primordially rooted in human existence. For Lukács, then, the solution to the problems caused by commodification lies in overcoming capitalism as an economic system. According to Patočka, however, any economic solution would remain in the domain of the forces of the day and would do nothing to combat the logic of total mobilization. As such, total mobilization tends to take on the character of a ‘cosmic’ or ‘ontological’ process in his descriptions. Indeed, it is here we can see the strong influence of Heidegger’s understanding of technology upon Patočka: for whereas the Marxist thinker could see technology as a mere instrument misused by capitalist power but which could ultimately be put to proper use – given its social function in a communist society – Patočka follows Heidegger in rejecting such an understanding of technology as a merely neutral instrument. As Heidegger puts it, ‘So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master it’.35 As such, putting technology ‘to use’ would only engulf us further in this poisonous logic of instrumentality and mastery. For Patočka and Heidegger, then, what is needed is something which fundamentally shatters this logic, which opens up a different relationship to beings by not attempting to master them or instrumentalize them. As we will see, Patočka claims that the possibility to break out of this instrumental logic lies in understanding things from the perspective of the night.

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But if the perspective of the day can be said to be that perspective which attempts to analyze things according to economic or social processes (thus including a Marxist perspective such as Lukács’), what then does it mean to try to understand the First World War, and indeed the twentieth century, from the perspective of ‘the night’? If we were to be somewhat uncharitable to Patočka, we could say that it means abandoning all forms of scientific, economic, sociological, and historical investigation in favour of wild metaphysical speculation on ‘deeper causes’. For is it not precisely these disciplines which Patočka dismisses as ‘mere’ nineteenth-century ideas incapable of grasping the ‘essence’ of the war, as mere ‘ideas of the day with its interests, ideas of peace’?36 In relation to the guiding question of this article, could we not even say that Patočka here abandons a political perspective altogether in favour of something akin to religion or mysticism? It could indeed be argued that the move to explain things ‘from the perspective of the night’ is symptomatic of a sense of despair with regard to political and social action, something perhaps quite understandable given the circumstances in which Patočka was writing. The tragedy of two world wars, the failure of the Prague Spring, and the ruthless systemic violence of ‘normalization’ in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s would certainly test one’s political optimism. Unlike Lukács writing in the early 1920s before Soviet communism showed itself to be as corrupt and violent as the capitalism it was supposed to overcome, Patočka was deep in the mire of Soviet-led normalization. Nevertheless, from Lukács’s perspective, the tendency exhibited by both Heidegger and Patočka to ascribe the corruption of technological thinking to a fundamental feature of human existence is characteristic of reactionary ‘bourgeois’ thinkers who ‘divorce these empty manifestations [of commodification] from their real capitalist foundation and make them independent and permanent by regarding them as the timeless model of human relations in general’.37 Indeed, one could argue that Patočka’s speculations on the First World War and the ‘essence’ of the twentieth century are merely classic examples of reification, understood by Lukács as the process whereby ‘a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a “phantom objectivity”, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people’.38 By ascribing the ills of the twentieth century to an ineluctable ‘fundamental’ or ‘cosmic’ process such as total mobilization, Patočka could be accused of covering over the fact that all of these problems are in fact the result of humanly created, and thus humanly alterable, relationships. However, such a critique would be premature at this point. We must first look at what his solution to the problem of total mobilization is; only then can we evaluate the standing of these critiques.



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4. SACRIFICE FOR ‘NOTHING’ As we saw earlier, what underlies the day-night dichotomy in Patočka’s thinking is our relationship to life and death. The dilemma we face in the twentieth century is that the forces of the day have elevated life to the position of highest value, but, as Patočka claims, mere life can only ever provide a relative meaning which ultimately cannot combat the sense of profound meaninglessness which seems to be our existential condition in modernity. According to Patočka, then, what man needs in the fight against total mobilization is a means of reconstituting an absolute meaning for his existence and this is precisely what he finds hints of in the Fronterlebnis of Jünger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.39 In their descriptions of the front line, Patočka finds an account of the discovery of a sense of absolute freedom at the front. What strikes him here is that it is through an authentic relation to death that this sense of freedom is achieved. For Patočka, the sacrifice demanded of soldiers in the First World War was merely relative because the ultimate value for which this sacrifice was undertaken was mere life, the lives of anonymous others, the lives of future generations: ‘Peace and the day necessarily rule by sending humans to death in order to assure others a day in the future in the form of progress, of a free and increasing expansion, of possibilities they lack today’.40 Because the ultimate value underlying this sacrifice is itself merely relative, such sacrifice can do nothing to break the ineluctable logic of total mobilization. However, in the midst of this merely relative sacrifice, Patočka also sees a realization emerging: the realization that life is not everything, that life is not the ultimate value. In being pushed to sacrifice himself for the nihilistic aims of the war, Patočka claims that the soldier on the front line has the possibility to realize that the hegemony of the values of the day can be shattered through authentically taking hold of self-sacrifice as a fundamental possibility of human existence. By freely choosing to sacrifice (or at least risk) one’s life at the front, Patočka claims that the soldier thus renounces life as the highest value and thereby it loosens its hold on him: Peace transformed into a will to war could objectify and externalize humans as long as they were ruled by the day, by the hope of everydayness, of a profession, of a career, simply possibilities for which they must fear and which feel threatened. Now, however, comes the upheaval, shaking that peace and its planning. [...] Thus the night comes suddenly to be an absolute obstacle on the path of the day to the bad infinity of tomorrows.41

The realization here is that the forces of the day can be overcome because the worst that they can threaten one with is death. In freely choosing to confront

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death at the front, one undermines life’s claim to be the ultimate value by sacrificing oneself for nothing, by sacrificing oneself in a way which cannot be integrated into a system of economic calculation. Understandably, at this point in Patočka’s analysis, the reader may start to feel a sense of unease. This talk of the absolute freedom of a noninstrumentalizable, useless sacrifice does not sound particularly reassuring or promising as a way to overcome the forces of the day, nor is its political significance immediately obvious. Although in a sense we can follow Patočka’s claim that through this authentic sacrifice we undermine the claim of mere life to be the highest principle, the problem still remains that we have no higher value to put in its place permanently. The sacrifice of the soldier, who goes over the top in order to risk his life for his comrade, or for some other value or reason, remains miniscule when seen from the perspective of the death toll of the war. We also clearly see where he breaks from Jünger here: in contrast to Jünger’s nationalist rhetoric and his enthusiasm for actual war, Patočka clearly shifts the focus to spirituality and to a spiritual community, albeit one which finds some sort of parallel in the concrete community of First World War veterans to which Jünger so often refers. In order to understand how this notion of sacrifice can develop into a true opposition to total mobilization, we must investigate two further notions of Patočka: the manifestation of the front in peace and the notion of the solidarity of the shaken. So, how does Patočka see the front as manifesting itself outside of actual physical war, that is, in times of peace? Currently war has assumed the form of that half peace wherein opponents mobilise and count on the demobilisation of the other. Even this war has its front line and its way of burning, destroying persons, robbing them of hope, dealing with them as with material for Force being released. The front line is the resistance to such ‘demoralizing’, terrorizing, and deceptive motifs of the day. It is the revelation of their real nature, it is a protest paid for in blood which does not flow but rots in jails, in obscurity, in life plans and possibilities wasted – and which will flow again once the Force finds it advantageous.42

Clearly, the situation within which Patočka wrote these lines must be taken into account. When he says that war has ‘currently’ taken this form of a half-peace which demoralizes and terrorizes those who oppose its values, we can see a clear reference to the situation of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. In this situation, behind the Iron Curtain in the course of the Cold War, this ‘cold mobilization’ was undoubtedly hard at work, shaping the lives of those who lived there through subtle forms of structural violence. The question which emerges here is what the idea of the front and the notion of sacrifice can mean in such a situation which is not one of outright war.



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The front which Patočka describes here is the front which masks its true character, where the ultimate misfortune we face is not necessarily physical death but rather whatever punishment best suits the forces of the day to mete out to those who oppose them. In changing the focus of his descriptions to the front of peacetime, we can notice a fundamental shift in how Patočka is using the term sacrifice. Sacrifice here no longer seems to be about actually dying so much as risking life and everything that pertains to it as a means of opposing the total mobilization of this peaceful war. In putting our prospects of a comfortable life on the line, Patočka seems to say that we deal a blow to the forces of the day by demonstrating that death remains open to us as a possibility which can never be fully co-opted by the powers that be. Yet, even still, this does not seem fully satisfying as a form of ‘political’ opposition; indeed, it could be argued that with all this rejection of politics and this privileging of sacrifice we are more in the territory of the religious. After all, what seems to be at stake here is our authentic humanity, our ‘soul’ even, rather than some concrete political cause. Indeed, it even seems that Patočka would be forced to say that a sacrifice for a concrete political cause (such as that made by hunger strikers, for example), would be merely naïve and still prey to the logic of instrumentality. But perhaps the most pertinent question which emerges is one raised by Patočka himself: How can this sacrifice, this overcoming of the hegemony of the day, be turned into a historical force? How can it move beyond a mere individual authentic relation to death and become a political factor? Patočka’s own answer to this lies in the elusive notion of the solidarity of the shaken. According to him, this would be something like a bonding together in problematicity – a solidarity in the pursuit of problematic meaning: The means by which this state is overcome is the solidarity of the shaken; the solidarity of those who are capable of understanding what life and death are all about, and so what history is all about. That history is the conflict of mere life, barren and chained by fear, with life at the peak.43

However poetic and euphoric Patočka’s descriptions of the solidarity of the shaken are, we must constantly keep in mind that this ‘possibility for authentic being-together’ is something which forever founders on a dark sea of nihilism. Because Patočka sees the only authentic relationship to meaning as one which is endlessly problematic, there can be no conception of salvation, deliverance, or hope from the perspective of his philosophy of history. Nor can there be an idea of a positive political programme because he has rejected ‘the perspective of the day’ as merely falling prey to the logic of total mobilization. As he says himself, the proclamations of such a solidarity of the shaken could only ever be negative:

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The solidarity of the shaken can say ‘no’ to the measures of mobilisation which make the state of war permanent. It will not offer positive programs but will speak, like Socrates’ daimonion, in warnings and prohibitions. It can and must create a spiritual authority, become a spiritual power that could drive the warring world to some restraint, rendering some acts and measures impossible.44

Here, we see this idea of philosophy as negative and the centrality of Socrates to Patočka’s thinking. Because Patočka understands philosophy as Socratic, as fundamentally a form of radical questioning or negativity, his ‘spiritual authority’ can offer no positive political programme to challenge the total mobilization of the twentieth century. As Patočka sees it, the communism of the Soviet Union and the capitalism of the United States are but two superficial guises of this nihilistic instrumentalization of existence. More than that, however, he seems to see any alternative positive political or economic programme as necessarily being corrupted by the poisonous logic of mobilization. This means that authentic human existence is forced to withdraw from the polis, or at best to operate on its fringes.45 In fact, this idea of the fringe is perhaps central to understanding the political significance of Patočka’s sixth heretical essay. I would argue that what Patočka refers to as the perspective of the night is fundamentally nonpolitical. In his discussions of the twentieth century as an era of total mobilization, Patočka lumps most of what we would conventionally think of as politics into the category of the perspective of the day. What he opposes to this, the perspective of the night, has little to do with conventional political notions, and much more to do with mythical, philosophical, or even religious notions – in short, the spiritual.46 What we see in the case of Patočka’s confrontation with politics is the moment when politics crashes up against the domain of the spiritual, and is forced to face something which claims access to a higher authority, even if it is only negatively.47 Here, on the fringes or borderlines of political and spiritual life, the conflict takes place which Patočka sees as offering a minimal hope for humanity. As such, the question of the political significance of Patočka’s thinking in the sixth essay opens out onto a larger question of the place of spirituality in politics. In the extreme case of war, or under the violent oppression of totalitarianism – situations in which the question of life and death is forced upon one – we see a case where the spiritual and the political come up against one another. But in the mundane everydayness of peacetime politics in a liberal democracy, the relevance of ideas such as sacrifice is much less clear-cut. Indeed, I would argue that there is no straightforward way in which Patočka’s thinking in the sixth essay can be easily applied to concrete politics, but that it is rather something exceptional, a form of spirituality, which comes into conflict with the political in moments of crisis.



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5. CONCLUSION In conclusion, I would like to return to some of the criticisms mentioned earlier, and also to suggest one more myself. One criticism was that Patočka’s invocation of the perspective of the night – his talk of deeper forces and hidden processes – was an example of what some Marxists would call reification: obscuring the true nature of a phenomenon as a relation between people by ascribing to it a logic which stands beyond the sphere of human influence. From a Marxist perspective, this critique certainly holds because Patočka denies that the problems faced by contemporary man are merely the result of capitalist exchange relations, and thus can be solved through the liberation of the proletariat. However, if we do not fully ascribe to such a Marxist analysis, we can see that Patočka does allow for the possibility that human action can influence and combat the dominant instrumentalization of total mobilization: through sacrifice. Nevertheless, the problem still remains about how such a notion – which I would argue is more spiritual than political – can become a political force in anything other than extreme situations such as war or totalitarian terror. Of course there are still regions of the world (and perhaps there will be more) in which political terror is the rule and in which, therefore, Patočka’s thoughts ring true. But what about situations in which such extreme clashes between political power and spiritual life do not take place? Does a notion such as ‘sacrifice for nothing’ have any political relevance there? In a sense, perhaps this is asking too much of Patočka. Perhaps it is simply the case that what he has provided us with is a rich philosophy of spiritual dissidence, and asking for it to provide the foundation for concrete political programmes is simply asking the wrong question. However, there is one last criticism which still demands to be answered. As I pointed out earlier, there is a certain elitist tendency in Patočka’s formulations (no doubt exacerbated by his appropriation of Jünger). In the notion of the solidarity of the shaken, we see this come to its full development, for if the salvation of humankind lies in the solidarity of those who have been existentially shaken, whose naïve faith in the world has been lost, what then do we do with the unshaken? Are they simply to be led by their enlightened brethren? Or do we instigate something like a worldwide programme of existential shaking? In a sense, however, what this reminds us of is precisely Socrates’s mission: to induce others to care for their souls, to undermine their naïve certainty in life, to shake them. Perhaps here lies the key to understanding how Patočka’s sixth essay can be understood as political. But this then opens up a range of issues which go far beyond the scope of our question. Can such existential shaking become a political principle? Is it possible to claim that all faith must be shaken? Is there a space for the unshaken in an ‘enlightened’ society? These questions are not easily answered, but at the very least,

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Patočka reflections in the sixth essay certainly provide fertile ground for further thinking about the complex relationship between politics, philosophy, and religion. NOTES 1. For an excellent analysis of Patočka’s final ‘Kantian’ texts see Jakub Čapek’s article ‘Le devoir de l’homme envers lui-même: Patočka, Kant et la Charte 77’, Tumultes 32–33 (2009): 351–70.  2. In English, a discussion of Jünger, the Fronterlebnis literature and their relationship to National Socialism can be found in Jeffrey Herf’s Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 3. Paul Ricœur, ‘Preface’, in Jan Patočka, Heretical Essay in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), viii. 4. We could define this technological civilization as one in which the ‘care for the soul’ (the noble heritage of Greek philosophy) has been replaced by the ‘care to have’, something Patočka sees as occurring around the sixteenth century: ‘a wholly new idea of knowledge and cognition, profoundly different from that which motivated the care and concern for the soul: knowledge is power, only effectual knowledge is real knowledge, what used to apply only to practice and production now holds for knowledge as such, knowledge is to lead us back to paradise, the paradise of inventions and possibilities of transforming and mastering the world to suit our needs while those needs remain undefined and unlimited’, Patočka, Heretical Essays, 84. 5. Ibid., 97. 6. Ibid., 97. The relationship here would certainly not only be unidirectional, but rather reciprocal: individuals shape society, which in turn shapes a greater number of individuals, thereby driving both society and its component individuals further and further down a certain path. 7. For a discussion of the influence of Heidegger’s essay on Patočka, see Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, ‘Sacrifice and Salvation: Jan Patočka’s Reading of Heidegger on the Question of Technology’, in Ivan Chvatík and Erika Abrams (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 23–37. 8. ‘Where danger is, grows / The saving power also’. Cited by Heidegger in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), rev. and expanded ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 333. 9. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 118. 10. Ibid., 118. 11. Patočka is careful to say that this need not be actual or even probable, but only possible. 12. In terms of Patočka’s idea of the ‘three movements of existence’, such a life of merely material well-being would fall short of the third movement of existence, thus lacking true freedom and authentic humanity. We are here reminded of course of



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Arendt’s Human Condition, which was very influential on Patočka’s Heretical Essays. In her discussions of ‘labor’, ‘work’, and ‘action’, Arendt presents the claim that a life lived merely in material well-being is less than truly human because it denies us access to what is most properly human: free political action in the polis. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 13. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 118 (my emphasis). 14. See Patočka’s fourth heretical essay in particular for an account of this transformation. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 79–93. 15. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 118. I have significantly modified the translation here in two places. First, Kohák has translated ‘Civilizace o sobě neexistuje’ as ‘there is no civilisation as such’. What Patočka, however, seems to mean here is that there is no civilization in itself, that is, in isolation from its historical becoming, its movement from prehistory through to history, from myth to philosophy. Secondly, Kohák uses the bizarre phrase ‘to embrace history’ where the Czech text reads ‘zda dějinný člověk se chce ještě přiznávat k dějinám’, (Jan Patočka, ‘Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin’, in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 3: Péče o duši III, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba [Prague: Oikoymenh, 2002], 116). ‘Přiznat se k čemu’ can mean ‘to confess’, ‘to own up’, or ‘to plead guilty’ to something. Sandra Lehmann’s German translation captures the Czech well: ‘Ein Zivilisation an sich gibt es nicht. Die Frage wäre eher, ob sich der geschichtliche Mensch noch zur Geschichte bekennen will’. (Jan Patočka, Ketzerische Essays Zur Philosophie Der Geschichte, trans. Sandra Lehmann [Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010], 140). I am grateful to Francesco Tava for pointing out this problem with the English and for his clarification of the Czech expressions. 16. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 120. 17. Ibid., 124. 18. There is an English translation of the essay ‘Total Mobilization’ in the volume titled The Heidegger Controversy, 2nd printing, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 119–39. 19. A good account of Jünger’s thinking in the interwar period can be found in Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 70–108. Although Jünger expressed hypernationalistic and anti-democratic views, it is important to mention that he was never a member of National Socialist Party, and was eventually considered an enemy of the Nazis after the publication of his anti-totalitarian novel, Auf den Marmorklippen. Eine Gefährliche Begegnung (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994). 20. Jünger, ‘Total Mobilization’, 126–7. 21. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 128. 22. Ibid., 121. 23. Jünger, ‘Total Mobilization’, 128. 24. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 69. 25. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 133. 26. Ibid., 129. 27. Indeed, the perspective of the night is intimately related to philosophy understood as the care for death (μελέτη θανάτου). See Plato, Meno and Phaedo, ed. Alex Long and David N. Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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28. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 125. 29. Here we clearly see the influence of Heidegger’s notion of Bestand, the ‘standing-reserve’. See Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings. 30. He says: ‘The explanations of the war of 1914–1918 were always constructed with the help of nineteenth-century ideas, but those are ideas of the day with its interests, ideas of peace. It is not surprising that they proved incapable of explaining the fundamental phenomenon of the twentieth century, so different since that century is an epoch of the night, of war, and of death’. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 120 31. To be clear, my aim here is not necessarily to provide a Marxist critique of Patočka, but rather to show that the ‘perspective of the day’ cannot so easily be written off, because it provides critical resources which Patočka’s own position might struggle to deal with. 32. György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1990), 84. 33. Ibid., 92 34. Ibid., 91–2. 35. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, 337. 36. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 120. 37. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 95. 38. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 83. 39. For an in-depth discussion of Patočka’s reading of de Chardin, see Nicolas de Warren, ‘Homecoming: Jan Patočka’s Reflections on the First World War’, in Michael Staudigl (ed.), Phenomenologies of Violence (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 207–43. 40. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 129. 41. Ibid., 130. 42. Ibid., 134. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 135. 45. In fact, what Patočka speaks about here shares much in common with the reality of what Charter 77 would become. For example, one of its offshoots was a publication called INFOCH (Informace o Chartě 77) which would report, in an objective and deliberately non-sensationalist manner, abuses of power by the government in order to raise awareness of the activities of the authorities in the hope, however small, of shaming them into good behaviour. But, just like Patočka’s solidarity of the shaken, the chartists remained on the fringes, not directly opposing the Communist Party (which would have been illegal), but rather providing a moral voice in opposition to a seemingly amoral regime. See Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), especially 194–200. 46. See Patočka’s short seminar titled ‘The Spiritual Person and the Intellectual’ in which he discusses the idea of spirituality as encompassing philosophy, religion, and art. An English translation is available in Jan Patočka, Living in Problematicity, ed. Eric Manton (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2007), 51–69. Also, for a provocative discussion of Patočka’s invocation of Christianity (through Dostoyevsky) as a critique of



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Heidegger, see Nicolas de Warren’s article ‘The Gift of Eternity’, in Religion, War, and the Crisis of Modernity. A Special Issue Dedicated to the Philosophy of Jan Patočka, ed. Ludger Hagedorn and James Dodd. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14 (2015): 161–80. 47. See Patočka’s idea of a negative Platonism for a more worked out account of this negativity of philosophy. A translation of the essay titled ‘Negative Platonism’ is available in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 175–206. An in-depth and insightful discussion of the entirety of Patočka’s (as-yet-untranslated) ‘negative Platonism’ writings is available in Francesco Tava’s book, The Risk of Freedom: Ethics, Phenomenology and Politics in Jan Patočka, trans. Jane Ledlie (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015).

Chapter 12

The Heresy of History Patočka’s Reflections on Marx and Marxism Francesco Tava

Although Jan Patočka often addressed Marx’s thought, as well as the intellectual and historical development of Marxism, up till now the reasons for his interest, as well as the outcomes of his investigation, have seldom been made the object of analysis.1 The aim of this chapter is to begin to fill this gap by clarifying the various aspects of the complex bond between Patočka’s thought, Marx’s thought, and Marxism, as well as the importance of the latter two in the economy of Patočka’s philosophy. To do this, I will use the idea of history as a pivot concept, in order to show how the various interpretations of the meaning of history given by Marx, Marxist philosophers, and by Patočka himself, might be useful in helping us grasp both the similarities and the differences between these philosophical projects. To do this, I will proceed through several steps: I will first analyse Patočka’s initial encounter with Marx’s philosophy, which dates back to the 1930s and was mediated by the work of Ludwig Landgrebe. Second, I will provide a sketch of Patočka’s critique of the theoretical and political development of Marxism, through the concept of radical supercivilization, and his following analysis of the aporias into which historical materialism run up and their possible overcoming. I will then compare Patočka’s understanding of the meaning of history, developed in his late output, with the insight into this same problem provided by Karel Kosík, who by developing a critique of the materialistic understanding of history fostered an internal reform of Marxism, aimed at overcoming its dogmatic traits. Finally I will conclude by showing how Patočka’s heretical understanding of history can be interpreted as a positive answer to his critique of historical materialism.

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1. ENHANCEMENT OR EXPLOITATION? One of the first references made by Patočka to socialist thought, and specifically to Marx, is in an article published in 1946, that is, during the hectic period between the end of the Second World War and the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia. In this article, titled ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’,2 Patočka aims specifically at analyzing the idea of human being. According to his understanding, this idea arose in the Enlightenment and thenceforth developed until the end of nineteenth century, when it runs into a long-lasting crisis, mostly due to the shattering events of the world wars. According to him, after the First World War had disclosed the extreme fragility of liberalism’s most important tenants – that is, political freedom, democracy, and self-determination – and after the Second World War had determined their ultimate collapse, the very idea of human being, that is, the idea which should describe the inner and most peculiar traits of the human individual, had been substituted for a series of ideologies, which tend to define the human exclusively as a means in view of positive ends, such as the win over the enemy, the achievement of power, its enlargement, and its maintenance.3 In light of this historical transformation, Patočka points out how socialism might be considered both as an idea and an ideology, depending on how people interpret it. It can be an idea, as long as it is considered in the original sense which Marx attributed to it, namely as a thought aimed not just at interpreting, but rather at actively changing the world, by engendering an authentic transformation of human beings, which would eventually enable them to overcome the estrangement that characterized their position in the world until then. Yet, socialism can also become an ideology whenever in order to fulfil this revolutionary goal it ends up converting this same revolutionary force into a form of control and supremacy of the state over the individuals. ‘Socialism appeals to Man internally’,4 and in this sense it has to be considered as an idea: ‘It asserts and embodies human freedom in distinction from economic oppression and the exploitation of man by man’, but at the same time ‘it looks on [the human being] externally like a thing among things, a force among forces; and it is an ideology that organizes these forces’.5 Despite the different outcomes which originated from the same line of thought, according to Patočka, the socialist movement can be interpreted, both in its ideal and in its ideological facet, as an attempt to respond to the same fundamental need, that is, the need to overcome the crisis of the meaning of the human being. Only by addressing the alienation this being has been subjected to can a new form of humanism be established, beyond the tragedies that marked the first decades of the twentieth century. For Patočka, this character of humanism essentially inheres in the socialist movement, and can be considered one of the main reasons for its extended reception after



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the Second World War throughout the world.6 Nonetheless, while attempting to overcome the crisis caused by the loss of human being’s meaning, socialism runs into a new, even deeper crisis, insofar as its historical realization is denied by many concrete difficulties that caused its slowdown and its resulting sclerotization. The long-lasting sclerotization of the socialist apparatus in the post-war period became the object of Patočka’s analysis during the 1950s, namely in a time when Czechoslovakia experienced a form of harsh Stalinism that released its grip on the country only at the end of the following decade, during the brief pause of the Prague Spring. It is precisely in this period that Patočka coined the idea of a radical supercivilization and of its inner conflict.7 By supercivilization, he means a specific form of political power that originated in early modernity, but whose climax was reached only in the twentieth century. What characterizes this new political configuration is essentially the efficiency of its actions, which are grounded on an (ideally) perfectly rationalized technique of power, aimed at the systematic elimination of every internal and external element that could possibly obstruct its functioning, rather than on unpredictable bursts of violence used as a method of population control, as was the case in past civilizations.8 This does not mean, of course, denying that the past civilizations were also internally organized; the difference lies here in the extent, mechanisms, and also in the intentions of this organization, whose ultimate goal does not consist in just quelling dissent, conflict, and uncertainty, but rather in utterly resolving and normalizing all these issues. Since wars and conflicts are the consequences of the divisions and antagonisms between various political actors, the only way to achieve a new form of stability, and a consequent enhancement of the human condition, seems to consist thus in establishing a new form of imperium, into which all the conflicting forces that inhere in society would be rationally reduced, in the same way as one or more variables might be reduced in an algebraic equation.9 Despite all its efforts, however, the supercivilization seems to be incapable of achieving this goal, which should consist in overcoming the fears and trepidations that characterized human history, and which found their most tragic expressions in the twentieth century. Far from achieving the desired human enhancement, the supercivilization, in its most radical version, ends up indeed establishing a total and violent control over people, who instead of regaining their freedom and a real control over their own lives, run up against a new and even harsher form of exploitation and slavery.10 This abrupt passage reveals an internal dialectics within the system of supercivilization, which ultimately determines its decline. Far from generating an authentic harmony between people, the only way in which the radical supercivilization seems to guarantee its control over society consists in pitting individuals against one another, and in generating thus a situation of fear and mutual

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control. In this way, the collectivist project initially fostered by the supercivilization (‘ut omnes unum sint’)11 ends up giving way to new divisions and conflicts between the individuals. [What results] is not a harmonious unity, but rather a unity that emerges from the fear and the constant awareness of control and the possibility of being subjected to a punishment. The realization of the old idea of the unity of the human, of the abolishment of the opposition between public and private […] seems to undergo a mutation in the opposite direction. Externally the contrast is actually fixed, as no one has any more the opportunity to build a solid private dimension. Nonetheless, this in no way entails yet the cancellation of the difference between the private opinion and the point of view that is publically manifested.12

To the contrary, the stronger this attempt becomes to erase the difference between private and public and to establish a perfectly homogeneous society, the more urgent the necessity for individuals to conceal their authentic thoughts and feelings, insofar as they deviate from the public façade endorsed by the system. Many examples of this transformation from a humanist and collectivist project to a new form of political exploitation can be found in contemporary history. Nonetheless, the best exemplification of this phenomenon emerges only with socialism, whose original idea, in order to be preserved from the continuous setbacks it runs into, was finally turned into an ideology; in other words, the end of the entire process (i.e. human emancipation) becomes more important than its main actor, that is, those same human beings who are meant to be emancipated and whose destiny is subjected to the realization of the process itself, the outcome of which takes the form of an unshakeable progression. Indeed, it is not by chance that the same overturning observed by Patočka in his description of the dialectics of the radical supercivilization, later became a widespread topos in eastern-European political dissidence, whose main representatives frequently highlighted how lying became, in that historical context, the most typical tool in the hands of the establishment, in order to disguise the collapse of its harmonizing project, and the resulting relapse of a fracture between private and public within the socialist society.13 According to Patočka, however, the above described overturning is not simply due to unlucky historical contingencies, but, rather, has its roots in the materialist and dialectical understanding of history that lies at the core of Marxist socialism, and whose main character consists, for him, in the attempt to subject history to ideology. The metaphysical traits of dialectical materialism stem from scientific categories that are still impregnated with old-fashioned metaphysical dogmatism. This circumstance emerges very clearly if we take into account the indispensible role



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that, in this conception, is played by the concept of historical necessity, [according to which] the historical process develops according to a logical necessity, following the fundamental rules of the dialectics. […] What the historical materialism needs to find in the progression of history is not mere probability, but rather an ‘inflexible necessity’. A kind of necessity which cannot be traced in Hegel, but which rather originates from the ‘fatalism’ of nineteenth-century materialism, from the Système de la nature and other similar metaphysics.14

It is precisely by selecting historical necessity as one of the fundamental traits of its ideology that socialism could attempt to establish that harmonic imperium which is at the basis of the supercivilizing project, and it is by always defending this ideological facet, also at the cost of fostering an institutionalized lie,15 that socialism could survive, despite all the hindrances into which it ran. In light of these considerations, we see however that Patočka’s criticism is addressed not only to the ideology of real existing socialism, that is, to the historical and political conformation taken by the socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945, but also to Marx,16 insofar as the same risk of falling from the dimension of the idea to the one of ideology – that is, from an authentic understanding of the position of the individual in the world and in history to a superficial conception of the human as a mere and manageable source of power – is for Patočka present (at least potentially) in the materialistic understanding of history as a dialectical process, envisaged by Marx already in his early writings, and later developed during his collaboration with Engels.17 Patočka tackles this problem in his essay ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’: the dialectical method, as Marx understands it, has indeed the ability to ‘span the difference between present and future’,18 by conceiving history as a gradual process whose development tends towards the definitive emancipation of humankind and a total reconfiguration of the relations between individual and social reality. Nonetheless, in doing so, the entire process of the Idea, which essentially concerns human inwardness, is transferred to the things themselves. In other words, the individual ends up being considered a mere instrument in view of this goal, which is not present, but whose achievement becomes the only key of the whole process. ‘Thus the freedom of Man is something meta-human. It is realized somehow outside of Man by a process on whose end the freedom of Man stands as a future goal and not as this realization process itself’.19 As we will see in the following analysis of Patočka’s later output, the only way to overcome this condition will consist for him in recovering a space of human freedom, which is fundamentally settled within history, and not outside of its borders, in some undetermined future. A kind of freedom that consists in the willingness of human beings to recognize themselves as historical

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characters, as active members of society, with no more need or possibility to conceal their authentic beliefs in the shade of a harassed private dimension, but instead with the urge to finally become responsible of their own deeds, also at the risk of being in conflict with this society. 2. OTHERNESS WITHIN HISTORY A similar criticism of Marx’s dialectics can also be found in the work of another phenomenologist, Ludwig Landgrebe. Actually, as Patočka stated in an interview given in 1969, Landgrebe was the first to draw his attention to Marx’s early writings, especially to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which were first released only in 1932. Afterwards, Patočka himself suggested this same reading to Eugen Fink. It is interesting to notice how these representatives of the phenomenological movement manifested a keen interest in Marx’s work, in a period (the 1930s) in which they were collaborating as members of the Prague Philosophical Circle, the organization that in 1935 arranged Husserl’s lectures in Prague from which the Crisis of the European Sciences originated.20 This widespread interest can probably be explained by taking into account one of the main objectives of the Prague circle, that is – in Patočka’s words – conceiving philosophy ‘in an active way’,21 as essentially connected to the main problems of the present, while simultaneously rejecting any kind of mere formalism. Phenomenology represented for these thinkers the main path to engender this new kind of philosophy and Marx’s thought, especially as it emerges in his early output, arguably also represented for them a further important basis for comparison. In light of this circumstance, we can better understand the appreciation manifested by both Patočka and Landgrebe for the original message of Marxism. As we have already seen in the case of Patočka, however, the appreciation for Marx’s work manifested by Landgrebe does not prevent him from formulating a critique of the concept of a dialectical development of history. In an article from 1960 dedicated to this topic, titled ‘The Problem of Dialectics’, Landgrebe clarifies how Marx, by recovering the Hegelian concept of dialectics, maintained the idea that universal history results from the process of labour through which the absolute comes to know itself. The difference lays in the fact that, while for Hegel, the absolute spirit lies at the origin of this whole process, according to Marx, its authentic creator is the human being, and the historical process corresponds thus to the self-creation of humanity. In this sense, history is neither the history of the spirit (idealism), nor a form of natural history, which humankind only partakes in (rough materialism), but rather the history of the dialectical development of the relations of production that characterize the various phases of the existence of humankind.



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This point is clarified in The German Ideology, when, in order to distinguish the authentic materialist conception of history from the one given by idealism, Marx and Engels argue that: [The materialist conception of history] shows that history does not end by being resolved into ‘self-consciousness’ as a ‘spirit of the spirit’, but that each stage contains a material result, a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation to nature and of individuals to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and circumstances, which on the one hand is indeed modified by the new generation, but on the other also prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.22

What follows from this conception is, according to Landgrebe, the absolutization of humankind, due to the fact that the human being is here considered on one hand as the origin of history, since humanity is history’s unique maker, as well as on the other hand as its final outcome, since the historical process dialectically tends towards the emancipation of humanity. Hence humanity becomes the only reference point for itself: the self-production of human beings is considered a closed-circuit process, whose only goal is the self-preservation of the process itself, and history consequently becomes nothing but the irrefutable prognosis of this same process, the laws of whose development are scientifically definable. What gets lost here is the individual being, who is part of this process, and yet cannot be completely reduced to its internal mechanism, without losing her peculiar characterization: ‘Indeed the idea of a personal individuality, of their dignity and demand for freedom, can only be grounded on the fact that the human being, as a single being, far from being just an element in an always regulated process in which humankind produces itself […], is rather […] in a direct personal relationship with something that is for him completely unavailable’.23 In other words, human beings, understood as single beings, need to find a space of otherness within history, in order to distinguish themselves from it, and so to draw clear borders for their individuality. History therefore cannot be understood as a vector which leads from a known premise to a known end: the historical process is not just a straight line, but is rather characterized by the continuous emergence of interruptions and resistances which cannot be easily reduced to any form of constructive development. In Landgrebe’s words: ‘The organization of the human being is not a fixed magnitude, but something which must be always broken up, “transcended”, and […] only in this break can the human beings conquer themselves’.24 Understanding history through its breaks and fractures, and not on the basis of its mere progression, does not allow humankind to comprehend with

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scientific certainty the horizons of its action. Nonetheless, this approach will enable each single individual – and this is Landgrebe’s conclusion of his analysis of the problem of dialectics – to ‘act responsibly in each instant of history’,25 even without grasping the meaning of history as a whole. This same need of an alternative insight into history, more focused on its element of otherness, on its problematic and irreducible traits than to its positive development, is also shared by Patočka, though in a slightly different way. While for Landgrebe it is indeed necessary to acknowledge the breaks and fractures which characterize the historical process, Patočka for his part emphasizes that these fractures should not be simply acknowledged, but even actively provoked by the individual, in order to contrast any linear and onedirectional understanding of history. In this respect, we can see how, already in his above-mentioned essay from the 1940s, Patočka explicitly introduces a concept – sacrifice – which frequently recurs in his later output.26 It is indeed in the act of sacrificing themselves that, according to Patočka, the individual can interrupt the apparently unshakeable progression of history, and reject the idea that the meaning of this entire process only depends on its final outcome, and not on its single and irreducible instants: ‘Right in the fall, in the sacrifice in the middle of the struggle, without the result having been attained, thus outside of justification by this result can Man be glorified and fulfilled’.27 For Patočka, human fulfilment does not correspond therefore to the capacity of complying with historical progress, trying to interpret its tendency and forecast its result. On the contrary, the individual can fulfil herself only by rejecting this result-based logic, and engendering an action which, for its singularity, ends up breaking the rational link between means and ends. Sacrifice, the act through which human beings put everything at stake, even their own existence, notwithstanding the risks that their behaviour involves, holds, for Patočka, this power. The human figure that emerges from this description is an individual who, in spite of surrendering to the laws that according to dialectic materialism regulate historical becoming, does not give up struggling against history. It is the figure that refuses the inevitability of history’s outcome, and reintroduces into it an element of uncertainty and of otherness that can finally restore its authentic complexity. 3. GREAT HOPES: THE PHILOSOPHY OF OUR AGE In light of what has emerged so far, it must be remarked that Patočka’s reflections upon Marx and Marxism went through notable changes over the years. This does not imply a simple overcoming of his initial criticism, but rather a more complex understanding of this theme. An essay written in the period of the Prague Spring is particularly useful in order to understand



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the development of Patočka’s position. In this essay, ‘Intellectuals and the Opposition’,28 the philosopher underlines the need to redefine the role of the intellectual in society, whose main objective should consist in creating a space of ‘transcendence’, which would allow the individual to overcome the conviction that the world is something immediately given, and not the result of her actions and resolutions.29 It is by rediscovering this authentic role of the intellectual that the slow advance of what was defined elsewhere as supercivilization could be contrasted. In this regard, Patočka points out that Marxist thought can be also interpreted in a similar way, that is, as an attempt to problematize the human condition in the social system, and to foster its internal enhancement: ‘In Marxism, transcendence is also present in the form of a critique of the present state of capitalist production in the proletarian self-awareness’. Nonetheless, this attempt ended in failure, insofar as Marxist dialectics enabled exclusively the realization of a ‘horizontal transcendence’, which leads from one phase of social production to another, instead of enabling the overcoming of this same economic structure to which, according to this conception, life remains essentially subsumed. This concept utterly overlooks the fact that horizontal transcendence can have meaning only insofar as it enables a person to live other than in an immediate dimension, by also providing them with a greater possibility of truthfulness and personhood, and not solely for greater wealth in their immediate (sensuous) life.30

According to Patočka, it is therefore necessary to go deeper and overcome Marx’s economic language, without though losing hold of the dialectic element which is present in it: ‘Perhaps only the fulfillment of Marx’s dialectical materialism, that is, the dialectics of production through which man himself is produced, in a dialectics of that reason which comes to possess itself, will bring a solution in this field too’.31 In order to do this, however, bureaucratic control must be reshaped; the functionary will have to give up his position to a new figure of intellectual who would be capable of reintroducing a true, ‘vertical transcendence’ into reality, that is, a space of difference and otherness that could put this historical movement again into force. In other words, it is necessary to connect Marx’s effort to conceive a revolutionary dialectics to existential philosophy’s attempts to conceive human authentic life as something which transcends what is merely given. Only the intermingling of these two positions could allow humanity to overcome the historical and political crises which marked the twentieth century. What is striking about the above-mentioned excerpt is the fact that Patočka, for the first time, refers to Marxism as something that should not

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be simply rejected, but rather fulfilled. This implies the possibility for this conception to be reinterpreted in a new way, overcoming its ideological traits and highlighting its authentic revolutionary element. This change of perspective is probably due to the new hopes generated by the period of great political transformations, fostered by the young generation of Marxist philosophers and intellectuals in Czechoslovakia, that preceded the rise of the Prague Spring, in 1968.32 In this respect, it is remarkable that in ‘Intellectuals and the Opposition’ Patočka referred precisely to the young intellectuals as to the social group that would be able to reconcile what in the same essay he defined as ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ transcendences, leading thus towards a new and more complex understanding of the human social condition. One of these philosophers, Karel Kosík, had the chance, in the late 1950s, to follow Patočka’s seminars on Heidegger, where he became acquainted with the main issues of phenomenology and existentialism, which later became important elements in his reinterpretation of Marxist dialectics.33 Patočka also shown his appreciation for Kosík’s thought, defining it in another conference he held in 1968 in Germany as the ‘Czech philosophy of our age’.34 More specifically, he stated on this occasion that Kosík’s work leads our thought back to where it essentially wanted to be in the first half of the last century, namely as the thought of that fundamental transformation which man underwent in the modern age, represented by the fact that man no longer accepts the given, but he transforms it and thus at the same time transforms himself, his spiritual potential, and his world.35

What does this transformative element that Patočka identifies in Kosík’s thought consist of? Reading the Dialectics of the Concrete, which was published in 1963, in light of Patočka’s and Landgrebe’s criticism of Marx, we can easily notice how Kosík shared precisely the main target of this criticism: the dialectical idea of history. He also provided a deep reinterpretation of this issue from within Marxist reflection. According to him, indeed, the historical process does not simply correspond to the self-creation of humankind, but rather entails a fundamental and never fully resolvable clash between everydayness and history. While by everydayness, Kosík means ‘the organizing of people’s lives into every day’, that is, the setting of a time schedule that any individual ends up considering as the natural rhythm of their existence, by history, on the contrary, he means the combination of events that fundamentally exceed this regularity, problematizing the structure of the everydayness. The intertwining between these two dimensions is what actually preserves their authenticity: ‘The collision of these two words reveals the truth of each of them’.36



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In modern times, however, everydayness ends up becoming an allencompassing organization of people’s life: ‘In the everyday, activity and way of life are transformed into an instinctive, subconscious, and unreflected mechanism of acting and living’.37 This phenomenon, which certainly characterizes capitalist societies, but that can be also ascribed to the bureaucratic structure of real socialism, provokes a harsh separation of the two dimensions, and the consequent loss of the active tension which normally characterizes their relationship. The crisis that essentially affected human existence in the twentieth century can be ascribed, according to Kosík, to the incapacity of preserving this tension: ‘Divorced from history, the everyday becomes emptied to the point of being absurdly immutable. Divorced from the everyday, history turns into an absurdly powerless giant which bursts into the everyday as a catastrophe but which nevertheless cannot change it, i.e. cannot eliminate its banality or fill it with content’.38 What follows this loss of tension is, on the one hand, the attempt by history to simply control the everyday, directing it and determining in this way a positive progress towards the future. On the other hand, a new situation emerges, in which, conversely, history too can be overwhelmed by everydayness. This happens for instance with the historical event par excellence – that is, war – which certainly has the power to shatter the everyday of people, but that can also easily lose its shattering character, becoming normalized. The human being is able, indeed, to create a perfectly homogeneous rhythm of life, and to completely alienate herself in it, even when this rhythm implies painful, and apparently unbearable situations. In this condition the individual loses her sense of history, that is, the capability to recognize within her everyday life whatever transcends its regular course, by introducing in it an element of otherness, that is, that element of conflict and sense-destabilization, which prevents the individual from considering life as something univocal and monolithic. Patočka in the Heretical Essays has touched this same point as well, when he argued that the only way to understand if history does have a meaning entails answering the question of whether the human beings are still willing ‘to own up to history’,39 instead of passively accepting its course, as though it was something over which we are not directly responsible. It is precisely by directly facing one’s own responsibility towards history, addressing the elements of otherness that inhere in it, that is, its problems and conflicts, that the sense of history – and of the humankind within it – can eventually emerge. In Kosík’s words, owning up to history means rejecting the conception, according to which the everyday corresponds to the simply given, to the purely ahistorical dimension of the here and now, while history settles beyond human deeds, as if it were something that loomed over our lives, as a fatal destiny.

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Overcoming this situation entails understanding history not simply as the realization of a predetermined process, but rather as the empty space in which a free human praxis can be engendered.40 According to Kosík, Marxism is the only conception that is able to overcome the antinomy between everydayness and history. But, in order to do so, the materialist conception, according to which the historical process simply corresponds to the dialectical development of the relations of production, must be radically reinterpreted. The individual, in fact, should not only be considered exclusively as a social being, whose character is determined by the social and economic factors that surround her, but also as a social actor, who is capable of meaningfully and creatively operating in her world, by breaking its fetishized structures. 4. TOWARDS A HERETICAL IDEA OF HISTORY The idea of an active position which the individual can claim within historical becoming is also present in Patočka’s late output, although the beginning of the normalization, following the end of the Prague Spring, revealed all the difficulties that engendering this position would have involved. It is precisely in this period of harsh political control that Patočka was able to shape his heretical idea of history, where the ‘heretical’ element consists precisely in conceiving history not on the basis of its stable and never-ending progression, but rather highlighting its shut-offs and restarts. Also in this context, Marx’s materialistic interpretation of history represents for Patočka a fundamental counterpart, which he critically deals with in order to show his own conception. In the second ‘glosse’ to the Heretical Essays, the idea of dialectics is once again made the object of analysis. In this very short text, Patočka pinpoints how the main question of historical materialism, that is the question of the human social being, has to be considered as one of the most important issues of contemporary philosophy. The problem lay here in the way that the materialist conception addressed this question, namely by offering, through its dialectical method, ‘a logic of history’, whose ‘necessary course’ would constitute ‘the basis for a theory of revolution as a means for eliminating all social antagonisms, all contradictions and for launching of a new historical epoch in the sign of freedom’.41 This conception ‘which holds progress for an absolute necessity which requires the sacrifice of individual subjectivity’ is, according to Patočka, the kind philosophy of history ‘which dominates contemporary humanity’.42 Against this conception – and this can be a key to the interpretation of the whole Heretical Essays – Patočka offers an idea of history based not on a positive construction, but on the continuous possibility of a shaking, of the appearance of phenomena which exceed any possible



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rational and economic scheme, and of the re-emergence of prehistory right in the middle of the historical becoming. Once again, as we have already seen in other places of Patočka’s work, the difference between these conceptions can be interpreted as a juxtaposition of two different elements, both characterizing human existence: on one side, there is an element of horizontality and superficiality, according to which history results in the outcome of economic development and the evolution of the means of production; on the other side, an element of verticality and depth can be also detected, which urges humans to look at another and more complex level of reality, which tends to conceal itself, though without losing its powerfulness. This last element emerges many times in Patočka’s reflection, becoming a recurrent topic especially in his late output. For example, in a preparatory text, written in view of the first edition of the Heretical Essays, Patočka referred to a Weltgeheimnis – a ‘world secret’ – meaning precisely a hidden level of reality which needs to be rediscovered, in order to overcome the failures of modern thought, which according to his interpretation is still essentially based on a rigid rationalism.43 According to Patočka, the incapacity of escaping this latent rationalism characterizes both Marx’s social and political praxis and Husserl’s phenomenological method, since they both still refer to the realm of ratio as that which gives history its ultimate meaning.44 In the Heretical Essays, too, the emergence of a ‘shaking’ within everydayness can be interpreted in the same way as the outbreak in the middle of reality’s surface which ends up perturbing its equilibrium. This element of shaking, understood as a consequence of the clash between the dimensions of horizontality and verticality, which characterize human reality, can be easily considered an interpretative pattern for the whole of Patočka’s philosophical discourse. The target of this chapter consists however in emphasizing a more specific aspect of this problem, that is the importance that this interpretative scheme acquires in the definition of a heretical idea of history, whereby ‘heretical’ means precisely the opposition to any constructive and progressive idea of history, like the one fostered by dialectical materialism, but also, in a different way, by contemporary liberalism, according to which productivity and economic efficiency become history’s unique engines. It is precisely by contrasting these positive and flattened ideas of history that Patočka’s heretical programme originates, revealing its whole potential. Is it still possible to recover the revolutionary element of Marxism, whose aim should be enhancing and emancipating humanity, without surrendering to a reductive understanding of the historical becoming? Answering this question means for Patočka rejecting any teleological interpretation of history, according to which the historical course might be foreseen or even directed towards a calculated

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end. History maintains its authentic dialectical character only as long as this dialectics is understood not in a Hegelian, but rather in a Kantian sense, namely as a way to prevent the illusion of achieving knowledge beyond the phenomenality of what is given, that is beyond the limits of our experience. The idea of history that emerges here is essentially based on the shakings and on the conflicts into which individuals always run, as well as on the acknowledgement that these conflicting and irreducible elements, which continuously interrupt the stability of the everydayness, are what history is really made of, and not simple setbacks in its course. Human individuals can partake in such a history, only insofar as they are willing to embrace its fragmented and conflictual nature, surrendering any hope of framing a simplistic historical scheme. Rejecting the idea that history can be interpreted as an evolutionary process, aimed at a precise and immutable end, does not imply, though, that history is meaningless, but only that its meaning is not the one supplied by this line of thought. The importance that Patočka attributed to history and its true meaning becomes apparent not only in the Heretical Essays, but also in the numerous texts published during the same period, which often stemmed from seminars and private lectures held in those years. In one of these lectures, Patočka highlights that history is not an evolutionary process, as Hegel or Compte put forward, but that it rather consists in that course of events in which humanity succeeds in opening a public space in the name of its freedom.45 Yet, no outer force or logic of history can determine this opening, which for Patočka corresponds to the birth of the Greek polis, but rather exclusively the historical character of the individual. The human being is the one who bears and practices his own being: in this consists his historicity. We are not dealing with a ready-made individual that stems, so to say, from nature’s hands, but rather with someone who, having somehow achieved his own being, is now entrusted with it, and must therefore fulfill it in all its possibilities – this is his responsibility.46

History should be therefore interpreted, according to Patočka, as the neverending struggle between human fulfilment and decline; between the chance for human beings to claim their authentic, active position in history, and the relapse into a prehistoric phase of their existence, in which any problem and conflict is simply rejected in favour of a merely functional explanation. As Patočka reminds us in this heretical essay, the public space is constantly shaken by the clash between these two orientations: on the one hand, the security of a harmless life based on rational and functional choices; on the other hand, a ‘life in tension’,47 which longs for an even greater level of awareness and responsibility. It is exclusively on the basis of this negative,



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necessarily unresolved dialectics, that Patočka’s heretical idea of history finds a clear definition. NOTES 1. The only exception that I have knowledge of is the article by Ilja Srubar, ‘Praxis, travail et dialectique. Essai sur le rapport de J. Patočka avec le marxisme’, Cahiers philosophiques 50 (1992): 153–64. I will show in what follows how I intend to address this issue from a different angle. 2. Jan Patočka, ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’, Studia Phaenomenologica VII (2007): 89–96. 3. In this essay, written right after the end of World War II, Patočka emphasizes how this conflict was even more radical than the Great War. ‘Differing from the First World War, which was not so radical, everything down to the naked, physical roots was engaged in this war. It was no longer a war only bound within the limits of a clear political plan and budget; it also was not a war that would compromise only the old ideologies which had more or less become antiquated thus leaving people a certain intellectual reserve untouched by the fight. Everything was cast into the struggle. The phrase promoted in Germany was victory “at any price”, i.e., at the price of any kind of use or abuse of Man’, Patočka, ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’, 92. This statement seems to contradict what Patočka would later maintain in the Heretical Essays, where all the attention is focused on the First World War. Concerning Patočka’s understanding of war, see in particular Ludger Hagedorn’s chapter in this volume as well as Nicolas de Warren, ‘Homecoming. Jan Patočka’s Reflections on the First World War’, in Michael Staudigl (ed.), Phenomenologies of Violence (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 207–43. 4. Patočka, ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’, 91. 5. Ibid., 93. 6. By stressing this element of humanism within Marxism, Patočka seems to anticipate a line of thought that would take hold only in the 1960s, commonly known as socialist or Marxist humanism. See in particular Erich Fromm (ed.), Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965); James H. Satterwhite, Varieties of Marxist Humanism: Philosophical Revision in Postwar Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). 7. See Jan Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’ [The Supercivilization and Its Inner Conflict], in Sebrané Spisy, vol. 1: Péče o duši I (Prague: Oikoymenh 1996), 243–302. 8. It should be remembered that Patočka distinguishes between a moderate and a radical version of the supercivilization, both aiming in different ways at the same accumulation of power. The two versions only partly correspond to western liberalism, on one hand, and to eastern socialism on the other. 9. As Ľubica Učník has cogently shown in her chapter, this same scheme which characterizes radical supercivilization can be detected not only in the case of socialist countries, but also in contemporary neoliberalism.

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10. While on the one side this appears to be the inevitable end of the dialectics of radicalism, on the other side, Patočka seems to be more optimistic about the outcome of moderatism, at least in its liberal conformation. Western liberalism is indeed still aware of the necessity ‘to defend the metaphysical freedom against the intervention of the traditional centralism of the state’, Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’, in Péče o duši I, 283. 11. Gospel of John, 17:21; quoted by Patočka in ‘Nadcivilizace’, in Péče o duši I, 263. 12. Ibid. 13. Intellectuals like Solzhenitsyn, Kołakowski, and Havel have all pointed out the peculiar meaning that lying acquired within the real socialism. Havel, in particular, by emphasizing the distinction between living in truth and living in a lie, explicitly manifested his debt towards Patočka, to whom his main work – The Power of the Powerless – was dedicated. See also, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Live not by Lies’, in The Solzhenitsyn Reader, ed. Edward E. Ericson and Daniel J. Mahoney (Willmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2009), 556–60; Leszek Kołakowski, ‘Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie’, in Irving Howe (ed.), 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 122–35; Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 23–96. Simona Forti has addressed this same issue in her chapter. 14. Jan Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace’, in Péče o duši I, 300. Here, Patočka addresses the same critique both to Marx’s materialistic conception of history, and to dialectical materialism, as it emerges especially in Engels’s works, and later on in Plechanov and Soviet Marxism. The difference between historical and dialectical materialism, which Patočka seems to overlook here, is not relevant to the issue of this chapter. 15. See Kołakowski, ‘Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie’, in Howe (ed.), 1984 Revisited, 127. ‘[The] lie really becomes truth or, at least, the distinction between true and false in their usual meaning has disappeared. This is the great cognitive triumph of totalitarianism: it cannot be accused of lying any longer since it has succeeded in abrogating the very idea of truth’. 16. In this respect, I partially disagree with Ilja Srubar’s analysis (see Srubar, ‘Praxis, travail et dialectique’, 153), according to which the thought of Marx is for Patočka more describable as an idea, while following Marxist tradition corresponds rather to an ideology. Indeed, in light of what Patočka argued in his essay ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’, the distinction seems to be much less clear. 17. This materialist conception emerges already in the Manuscripts of 1844, where it is stated that ‘religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law’. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 103. 18. Patočka, ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’, 95. 19. Ibid. 20. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Husserl’s lectures in Prague were recalled by Patočka in a short note that he wrote right after they were



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held (on 14 and 15 November 1935). See Jan Patočka, ‘Edmund Husserl v Praze’ [Edmund Husserl in Prague], in Sebrané spisy, vol. 12: Češi I (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2006), 495. About the inception and following development of phenomenology in the Czechoslovak philosophical context, see Michael Gubser, The Far Reaches (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 139ff. 21. In this respect, together with phenomenology and early Marxism, another element of inspiration for the members of the Circle was the thought of Emanuel Rádl. ‘[Rádl] represented in concreto the evolution of science of the time, which had moved from biology and the history of biology to philosophy, and to a philosophy intended in an active way [činně],’ J. Patočka, ‘K filosofovým šedesátinám’ [Interview on Philosophy and Philosophers], in Češi I, 610. 22. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 61–2. 23. Ludwig Landgrebe, Phänomenologie und Geschichte (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1968), 131. 24. Ibid., 134. 25. Ibid. 26. See, in particular, Jan Patočka, ‘The Dangers of Technicization in Science according to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger according to M. Heidegger’, in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 327–39. For an account of Patočka’s conception of sacrifice, see Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, ‘Sacrifice and Salvation: Jan Patočka’s Reading of Heidegger and the Question of Technology’ and Ľubica Učník, ‘Patočka on Techno-Power and the Sacrificial Victim (Oběť)’, in Ivan Chvatík and Erika Abrams (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology (Dondrecht: Springer, 2011), 23–37, 187–201. 27. Patočka, ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’, 95–6. 28. Published in English translation in this volume. 29. See infra, 14ff. Once again, as it was noticed before, the main reference of Patočka, in this definition of the role of the intellectual, is the work of Rádl. See, in particular, Emanuel Rádl, Krize intelligence [Crisis of the Intelligentsia] (Prague: Akademická YMCA, 1928). 30. See infra, 15. 31. See infra, 18. 32. Concerning Patočka’s interest in the Czechoslovak reform movements during the 1960s, and in the possibility of a return through them to the original meaning of socialism, see Erazim Kohák, Hearth and Horizon: Cultural Identity and Global Humanity in Czech Philosophy (Prague: Filosofia, 2008), 158ff. 33. See, in particular, Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and world, trans. Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976). A series of very insightful analyses of this work, and more in general of Kosík’s philosophy, can be found in Joseph G. Feinberg, Ivan Landa, and Jan Mervart (eds.), Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete (Leiden: Brill, 2016. Forthcoming). 34. Jan Patočka, ‘Česká filosofie a její soudobá fáze’ [Czech Philosophy and Its Present Stage], in Češi I, 327. Patočka later included this lecture, together with

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‘Intellectuals and Opposition’ and other texts from that period, in the collection O smysl dneška. Devět kapitol o problémech světových i českých [On the Meaning of Today. Nine Essays on World and Czech Problems] (Prague: Malá Fronta, 1969). 35. Patočka, ‘Česká filosofie a její soudobá fáze’, in Češi I, 326. 36. Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete, 43. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. ‘Perhaps the entire question about the decadence of civilization is incorrectly posed. There is no civilization in itself. The question is whether historical humans are still willing to own up to history’. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 118. I follow here Daniel Leufer’s proposed modification of the existing translation of Patočka’s text. See infra, 179, n. 15. 40. On the meaning of praxis within Kosík’s thought, see in particular James Schmidt, ‘Praxis and Temporality: Karel Kosik’s Political Theory’, Telos 33 (Fall 1977): 71–84. 41. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 146. 42. Ibid., 147. 43. See Jan Patočka, ‘Die Selbstbesinnung Europas’ [The Self-Reflection of Europe], in Perspektiven der Philosophie 20 (1994): 241–74. 44. ‘[Marx and Husserl] both attempt to bring to conscience the life bases of ratio, which were previously missed out. For the both of them, this ratio is in the end the principle that gives world history its own meaning’, ibid., 261–2. 45. See Jan Patočka, ‘Problém počátku a místa dějin’, in Sebrané Spisy, vol. 3: Péče o duši III (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2002), 283–300. For a compelling analysis of this essay, and of the concept of ‘telos’ within Patočka’s thought, see also Riccardo Paparusso’s chapter. 46. Ibid., 287. 47. Ibid., 293.

Chapter 13

The End of History and After Rethinking Kojève and Patočka on the Idea of Post-History Riccardo Paparusso

To Annaluisa, my mother

In this chapter, I will thematize Jan Patočka’s conception of the end of history. Such a task also offers the opportunity to reflect further on Alexandre Kojève’s idea of post-history. Indeed, the end of history, as it is conceived of by Patočka, consists of a return to the prehistorical stage of existence: namely, to a mere biological-economic relationship with the world. This consequence of the Patočkian philosophy of history seems to issue from the development of an element contained – although not further developed – in the famous note written about ‘the end of history’ which we find in the twelfth chapter of Kojève’s 1946 Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.1 Here, Kojève posits that, inasmuch as post-historical man no longer performs actions that are able to transform nature, he reshapes his own rapport with the natural environment in terms of the harmonious relationship characteristic of animal existence. 1. KOJÈVE’S IDEA OF THE END OF HISTORY In this first section, I will focus on the conception of the ‘end of history’ developed by Kojève in his above-mentioned 1946 book, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.2 What does the ‘end of history’ mean here? There is nothing apocalyptic in the answer. It does not signify any cosmic catastrophe, any end of the universe or of the world in which we live. Rather, it defines that time in which European history realizes its potential or, as we shall see later, consumes itself because it continues forward without aims or direction. 201

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To arrive at an understanding of the end of history, we have to start with Kojève’s definition of the human being as time and desire. He proposes an equivalence: human-time-desire. According to Kojève, human existence is time. This time is not natural, cosmic time: rather, it is a historical time founded on the supremacy of the future. How then should we understand the future, and subsequently its temporal supremacy? The future is, in its proper sense, denial. It is action that nullifies the continuity of nature. Nature in itself never changes; it repeats eternally its cycle of generation and corruption. Only an external factor can interrupt or transform nature, and this factor is precisely human projection towards the future. Indeed, the leap to the future is directed, more fundamentally, to what is not fixed in nature; the future gestures towards the non-natural. The time of the future is a specifically human time, directed towards the non-natural and coinciding with human desire. The act of desiring is central here as it aims for something that does not exist, something that cannot be fixed in nature. Now, on the basis of what we read in Section A of the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we can say that what desire understands as non-natural is other desiring humans – what the desiring human desires is other humans. More specifically, the desire specific to our human condition is the desire for recognition from other(s), or, better still, social/political recognition. Therefore, as Kojève argues, historical time and historical action commence with the human desire to be recognized as something more than a natural life concerned only with its sustenance (as is the case in the biological stage). The internal aim of history, therefore, is universal, absolute recognition among human beings. This is all to say that the historical process ends, that is, reaches its own complete realization, when it offers to human beings the conditions of possibility for a mutual recognition of their freedom from the bond to biological life. For Hegel, this condition of possibility is concretely realized by Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena (1806) in which Hegel sees the germ of the universal and homogeneous state, where the differences between slaves and masters are definitively cancelled. In other words, in this new form of the state, which Hegel saw in Napoleon’s Empire, each individual recognizes itself in the world, in which, therefore, absolute truth and identity appears. Kojève offers this understanding of the historical process in his famous note on post-history written in the appendix to the twelfth lesson of his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. This note is composed of two parts: the first, smaller, written in the first edition of book (1946), the second, longer, added in the second edition of the same work (1948). I will quote a passage from the note to the second edition: Observing what was taking place around me and reflecting on what had taken place in the world since the Battle of Jena, I understood that Hegel was right to



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see in this battle the end of History properly so-called. By the end of this battle the vanguard of humanity virtually attained the limit and the aim, that is, the end, of Man’s historical evolution. What has happened since then was but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon.3

So, by inaugurating the state where complete social and political recognition was, in principle, possible, Napoleon’s victory in Jena affirms itself as the last authentic historical action. From that point on, there is no more room for any action that, from a historical point of view, could be defined as original. Every new political act is nothing more than an actualization of what is already potentially contained in Napoleon’s arrival at Jena: namely, the idea of universal freedom, of human recognition among men as free human beings. For Kojève, the two world wars play a key role in the spatial extension of the end of history: they transfer to the rest and peripheries of the world the result of the Battle of Jena. Specifically, they trigger a process of Europeanization of the world. I quote again from the second edition of the same note. From the authentically historical point of view, the two World Wars with their retinue of large and small revolutions had only the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the peripheral provinces into line with the most advanced European historical positions. If the Sovietization of Russia and the communization of China are anything more than or different from the democratization of imperial Germany […] it is only because the Sino-Soviet actualization of Robespierrian Bonapartism obliged post-Napoleonic Europe to speed up the elimination of the numerous more or less anachronistic sequels to its prerevolutionary past.4

The Kojèvian conception of the end of history which I have just outlined constitutes the necessary terms for comparison for a thematization of the idea of ‘post-history’ sketched by Jan Patočka. On the one hand, this idea – as we will see more in detail – goes beyond Kojève’s thinking: indeed, it arises from a non-teleological, and thus non-progressive, philosophy of history which therefore negates the Hegelian structure of the Kojèvian conception of history. On the other hand – as I will show at the end of the next section – Patočka’s reflection on the end of history radicalizes and brings to fruition an element of the Kojève’s analysis of the end of history that I have for now parenthesized. 2. TELOS WITHOUT MEMORY OF ITSELF. THE END OF HISTORY ACCORDING TO JAN PATOČKA Before treating in earnest Patočka’s understanding of the concept of the end of history, it is helpful to briefly dwell upon a short episode in Patočka’s

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biography in order to get a basic idea about the philosophical relationship between Jan Patočka and Alexandre Kojève. In 1929 Patočka spent a research stay of one year in Paris. Here, the young Patočka had the opportunity to attend a course on Jan Hus held by Alexandre Koyré,5 the Russian-French historian of science who, together with Martin Heidegger, was one of the most influential thinkers in the education and subsequent philosophical reflections of Alexandre Kojève. That sojourn exercised an undeniable influence on Patočka’s mature thought. Indeed, the French philosophical tradition is an inescapable point of reference and constant basis of comparison within the oeuvre of the Czech philosopher. At the time, the Kojèvian reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit exerted a profound influence on contemporary French philosophy. To gain some idea of the influence exerted by Kojève on the French philosophical environment, one need only note the personalities who attended the lessons that he delivered between 1933 and 1939: Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Aron. Consequently, the interpretation of Hegel proposed by Kojève served as a significant point of reference for Patočka’s philosophical development. Patočka testifies to this himself in an interview conducted in 1967, titled ‘K filosofovým šedesatinám. S Janem Patočkou o filosofii a filosofech’ [For the sixtieth birthday of a philosopher. With Jan Patočka about philosophy and philosophers]. In a passage of the conversation published by the journal Filosofický časopis, Patočka described his relationship with Alexandre Kojève as something that significantly influenced his own spiritual destiny.6 As he declares in the same piece, the Czech thinker never met Alexandre Kojève personally. Nonetheless, in 1948 Kojève sent to Patočka a copy of his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel; he had the interest in spreading his own interpretation through a socialist Central European country.7 Reading Kojève’s book, Patočka was inspired to study Hegel, translating and editing the Phenomenology of Spirit from German to Czech in 1960.8 In effect, Kojève is cited in two Patočkian texts devoted to Hegel: Úvod k [Hegelově] Fenomenologii ducha (Introduction to [Hegel’s] Phenomenology of Spirit)9 and Hegelova Fenomenologie ducha, Přednáškový cyklus na FF UK 1949/1950 (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a series of lectures at Charles University Philosophy Faculty, 1949/1950).10 Here, we must note that Patočka did not begin reading Alexandre Kojève’s philosophy until 1948. Indeed, one year earlier Patočka quoted a text written by Kojève, the 1946 text Hegel, Marx et le christianisme,11 which he cited in the fifth notebook of his diary: ‘Kojève’s reading of a Hegelian atheist in the Critique of last year. Kojève’s translation of Hegel (recently)’.12 Patočka refers again to Kojève in the twelfth notebook: ‘B … according to Kojève distinguishes between the relationship to the thing (the work) and



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one to humanity (the fight, the recognition); therefore it is still in relationship with God’.13 In order to retrace Patočka’s clearest expression about the end of history we have to look at the 1972 text titled ‘Christianity and the Natural World’. This text comes from a private seminar, and consists of Patočka’s lesson and a debate. Here, I quote a rather long passage from a part of the as yet unpublished debate: The end of history [konec dějin], in the sense by which I have spoken about it, does not have anything in common with the Christian one, which means judgement. I believe that history, in the proper sense of the word, is always a history of a certain kind of setting-upright [napřímení] of man over his biological stage. At the same time, this elevation is a fight against all the threats to which the human being is exposed and which loom over him, starting from his biological basis and from his own historical creations. The latter, in fact, open up ever-renewed possibilities of falling back below the level of freedom that was originally reached. As though man’s focus on biological life had established itself at the beginning of history, and had re-emerged at its end. Our dilemma lies precisely in this oscillation. […] How is it possible that man, having emerged from the prehistorical stage and having crossed the historical process, was able to return to that biological level?14

History, for Jan Patočka, thus begins by the emancipation of human life from its biological level, but does not itself develop as a teleological process towards the perfection of this beginning. Rather, the course of history is truncated by several turning points. On the one hand, these turns give impulse to the original emancipation; on the other hand, they open up new possibilities of falling below the original level of historicity. This oscillatory movement produces the return of biological life as the fulcrum of human existence. Actually, Patočka’s conception of history is crossed by a telos: human freedom or – to use a more accurate Patočkian word – responsibility [odpovědnost]. However, this denotes a telos that, in contrast to the Hegelian and Kojèvian one, loses the memory of its own manifestation. Now, a telos without memory of itself is a telos without discourse on itself, a telos without logos. As such, it does not trigger a teleological process, but, paradoxically, it transfigures itself into a movement of the reduction of life to its biological foundation. It would not be possible to further develop the interpretation here put forward without at least a glance at Patočka’s understanding of prehistory and, therefore, at his idea about the beginning of history itself. Prehistoric humanity – as Patočka argues in the ‘heretical essay’ titled ‘Reflections on

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Prehistory’ – leads an existence totally overwhelmed by the concern for fulfilling its biological needs. In so doing, it acknowledges a mythic-poetical narrative as the sole referent of its comprehensibility. Myth, and the divine power it evokes, is the centre of gravity of the prehistoric world. It gives meaning to an existence immobilized in a non-problematic state, which has drained itself in the effort to resist consumption. In the above-mentioned ‘heretical essay’, the thematization of the prehistoric dimension is backed up by the interpretation of the myth of humankind’s creation as set out in the epic of Gilgamesh, in which meaning lies in the conception of human existence as being irretrievably destined – in accordance with divine will – to work [práce], in order to release the divinity from the burden of daily prostrations.15 By using the paradigm coined by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer,16 we could define prehistoric existence as merely bare life [zoé]: life undressed of any qualifications. Its course is essentially regulated by a logic of restitution, by an economic circularity: it wears itself out to get back a return [výkon], to fill the emptiness of its corporeal needs; it empties itself to fill the vacuum that it digs; it lives to gain. History, to the contrary, flourishes on the ground of the original Greek polis. It begins its course in the moment in which human life affirms itself as bios which rises against subjugation to its own natural foundation by recognizing responsibility as its inalienable destiny, taking it on as a fundamental duty. According to Patočka, in his own take on the analyses contained in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, man’s entry into history – and therefore the original assumption of responsibility as the fundamental duty of humanity – coincides with the establishment of the Athenian polis. In contrast to the situation in ancient Asian civilizations, the polis is a community which the people recognize as ‘their own work’17; not as ‘the effect of absolute power exercised by primordial sovereign forces’, ‘but as a space which men create’ ‘for one another’ – a public space where those allowed citizenship (which was a small minority of the population of ancient Greek city-states) feel a fundamental duty to act with and for others – for their fellow citizens and for their successors (and most importantly for their ancestors). Now we should ask: Why does the appearance of political life correspond to the original manifestation of history? The answer is to be found in the particular relationship with the other that political life establishes by its action, by its antagonism. Unlike the pre-political warrior, the political agent does not fight for an other who is helpful for the sustenance and continuity of his own economic-natural life. Rather, he fights for an other whose reaction is unpredictable: the responsibility of the political man is addressed to someone who does not guarantee his biological support, but who could represent instead even a potential threat to the political agent’s survival.



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In other words, political existence is responsible for an incalculable other who cannot promise any fulfilment, any return. Consequently the relationship to the other characteristic of political action deactivates the economic circularity which regulates the prehistorical rapport to the world, and in so doing inaugurates the course of history, the telos of which can be nothing other than responsibility for the undetermined other. Now, in light of what we have argued above, we are able to gain a deeper definition of the telos guiding Patočka’s philosophy of history. As we have just seen, history is triggered by the action of responsibility for an undetermined other, committed to by the original political life. Therefore, such responsibility configures itself as the foundation, the principle running through history, as history’s aim, as its telos. In other words, the act of responsibility consists in a kenotic movement, an emptying of itself from itself that can neither predict nor demand a return into itself. The responsibility is an infinite gift [dár] which does not open any horizon for a compensation. It is a sacrifice for nothing [oběť za nic], a gesture, which, by using other Patočkian terms, we can define as self-denial [věnování]. By using these words we recall a passage from the fifth ‘heretical essay’ where Patočka thematizes the Christian-Pauline configuration of responsibility: we can define responsibility as a ‘self-forgetting goodness and a self-denying (not orgiastic) love’. In order to break off the circuit of the return which regulates the world built upon bare life, the genuine gesture of responsibility for the other has to necessarily forget itself in the same instant of its performance so that it can prevent and neutralize the possible waiting for a restitution. It must lose the memory of itself. Now, a telos with no memory of itself is incapable of repeating its path and, consequently, cannot undertake any task of progressive self-realization. Because it forgets itself, the end of history is unable to remember and store the level of self-actualization achieved in the previous step. Therefore, it cannot guarantee any gradual continuity between its current phase and those phases by which it is preceded and followed. Consequently, any phase within the course of the telos is itself a new emergence of the telos itself, appearing as if for the first time. After all, responsibility as such – as a gift that excludes any logic of calculation and computation – can drive history only by emerging as an event that is unique, which cannot be simply repeated. In effect, this is why it can deactivate the cyclical time of the prehistoric mythical sphere and spark historical time whose distinctly historical rhythm is characterized by instants, by facts that are incalculable and unpredictable in their own singularity. In other words, such a telos is the horizon of the sense of history. It works as a guide to the historical path without activating a teleological development, without calculating any single stage of history as a necessary moment of the final, complete actualization of itself. In fact, any calculation by the historical path of its own telos

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would amount to an effective betrayal of itself, effectively transfiguring itself in light of the economic principle of redemption which governs prehistory. As an inevitable consequence, the process of the historical telos – the course of manifestation of responsibility – is articulated by a few, inherently unpredictable, decisive moments. However, subsequent to every such moment, the telos – being oblivious of itself – inevitably gets lost, and thereby always runs the risk of definitively dissolving itself in favour of the prehistoric, non-historical supremacy of the concern for biological fulfilment. Now it is clear that in this context, the ‘end of history’ cannot be seen as a definitive completion of the historical process. Rather, this expression indicates the process of the re-emergence to the pre-eminence of biological life which Patočka discerns in the contemporary civilization. The conception of the end of history as humanity’s fall into an animal dimension flows as a subterranean line through the pages of Patočka’s major work, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. This is testified to by a passage we find in the third ‘heretical essay’, ‘Does History Have a Meaning?’: Yet today’s dominant philosophies, one overt, the other covert, conceive of humans and their essential interests as a biological organism, a part of the material world, though not as we live our corporeity but as we appear in the perspective of a meaning-less, basically natural scientific theory: as an organism maintaining a metabolic exchange with its context and reproducing itself. Thus it seems as if the whole movement of history, after all the drive for absolute meaning in politics, in philosophies of a metaphysical cast, in religion that probed as deeply as Christianity, ended up where it began with the bondage of life to its self-consumption and with work as the basic means of its perpetuation.18

To be more precise, in Patočka’s thought, this post-historical world, in which humanity sinks once more into a prehistorical condition, coincides with the era of technology that Heidegger defines by the concept of Gestell. Hence, in order to complete this inquiry it is crucial that we thematize Patočka’s interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of Gestell. In his analysis on the ‘epoch of technology’, Patočka – following Heidegger’s lead – identifies the essential core of technology in ‘nothing technological’, but rather in the Gestell. The term Gestell indicates the particular configuration of the human experience of Being as interpellation, which calls man to liberate and accumulate, as we read in the Heretical Essays, ‘all the effectiveness potentially contained in the things’ in order to reduce the world to a reservoir of potential forces or energies, all to be used for an ever-increasing expansion of life. As Patočka explains in the 1973 text, ‘Four Seminars on the Problem of Europe’, we human beings, provoked by Gestell, ‘no longer have before us objects that allow themselves to be known […] that stand before us as



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independent objects of perception’.19 Our relationship with reality exhausts itself comprehensively in an ‘order that concerns itself exclusively with obtaining a result [výkon] from things. Gestell is simultaneously the creation of a humanity that does nothing other than carry out these orders […] to the point that he loses sight of everything that does not fit into this system, which is not an order capable of ensuring the common, ordinary functioning of needs and of their satisfaction’.20 In light of this quotation, we could affirm that the technological world seems to bring life to its prehistorical level, where, on the basis of mythical narration, it understands and accepts itself as being absorbed by providing for sustenance. Therefore, we could understand Patočka’s analysis of technology as the result of the integration of Heidegger’s idea of Gestell with the Arendtian conception of contemporary, secularized human life as a one whose only contents are ‘the desires, the appetite and the unconscious needs of its body’.21 If, on the one hand, Patočka develops his reflection on technology on the basis of Heidegger’s notion of Gestell, he nevertheless distinguishes his thematization from Heidegger’s by establishing a necessary relation between the technological understanding of the world and the submission of humanity to the power of a merely economic life, that is, natural life exclusively oriented to fill the emptiness dug by its own needs. In a certain sense, we could say that the Gestell analyzed by Patočka is a specific understanding of Being that calls for human existence to consecrate itself to the prehistoric condition of exclusive care for self-consuming life. ‘Gestell exercises its power on us by our life, by what binds us to life’,22 that is, techno-power provokes the human life to hold itself to life, to reduce itself to the level of mere living life. Therefore, the Patočkian reflection on Gestell invites us to consider that the technological interpellation imposes upon humanity the integration of nature into a ‘system of universal computation, prevision’23 in order to fundamentally guarantee the maximum degree of satisfaction in life and thus extend, as much as possible, the range of its needs and the horizon of its possibilities. The result aimed at by this technological understanding thus coincides with the reinforcement of life and the extension of the possibilities of its satisfaction. The technological return is the return of life to itself. The most evident proof of the thesis proposed above lies in the reflection on war in the twentieth century offered by Patočka in the sixth ‘heretical essay’, ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War’. Here, he conceives of the wars of the twentieth century as the necessary condition for the understanding of Being as provocation, Gestell. The First World War is the decisive event in the history of the twentieth century. It determined its entire character. It was this war that demonstrated that the

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transformation of the world into a laboratory for releasing reserves of energies accumulated over billions of years can be achieved only by means of wars. Thus it represented a definitive breakthrough of the conception of being that was born in the sixteenth century with the rise of mechanical natural sciences. Now it swept aside all the ‘conventions’ that inhibited this release of energy – a transvaluation of all values under the sign of power. Why must the energetic transformation of the world take on the form of war? Because war, acute confrontation, is the most intensive means for the rapid release of accumulated forces. Conflict is the great instrument which, mythologically speaking, Force used in its transition from potency to actuality.24

Now, for Patočka, that which essentially distinguishes war in the twentieth century lies in the fact that it is approached only from the point of view of the economic-vital dimension: ‘from the perspective of peace, day, life, excluding its dark nocturnal side’.25 To be more specific, the First World War reconfigures war as a collective sacrifice enacted for the ‘intensification and the extension of life’s possibilities’.26 Peace and the day necessarily rule by sending humans to death in order to assure others a day in the future in the form of progress, of a free and increasing expansion, of possibilities they lack today. Of those whom it sacrifices it demands, by contrast, endurance in the face of death. […] That self-sacrifice, that surrender, is what is called for. It is called for as something relative, related to peace and to the day.27

To get to the point, it could be said that, in Patočka’s thought, Being appears as Gestell – as the reduction of nature to an available reservoir of forces – by a more fundamental appeal to carry out an intensification of the sacrifice exclusively enacted for the interests of a vital dimension completely deprived of problematicity: for a merely bare, natural life.28 3. RETURN TO KOJÈVE. THE NATURAL IMMOBILITY OF POST-HISTORICAL MAN. In this concluding section we have to come back to Kojève’s note on posthistory in order to focus on an element which, as I said in the first paragraph, has been left in suspense. As we read in the note at the first edition of his Introduction, ‘the disappearance of Man at the end of History is not a biological catastrophe. Man remains alive as an animal in harmony with Nature or given Being’.29 In the extension of the same note added to the second edition, Kojève writes: The definitive annihilation of Men properly so-called also means the definitive disappearance of human Discourse (Logos) in the strict sense. Animals of the



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species Homo sapiens would react by conditioned responses to vocal signals or sign ‘language’, and thus their so-called ‘discourses’ would be like what is supposed to be the ‘language’ of bees. For this reason in these post-historical animals there would no longer be any [discursive] understanding of the World and of Self.30

In light of this quotation we can see, more deeply, that Kojève’s thesis about the end of history is not a triumphal one, but heralds the end of human beings as previously defined and understood – namely, as beings striving towards the future and towards mutual recognition. In place of historical humans, the triumph of Europeanization has rendered humans beings like insects.31 As we have seen, historical time, as conceived of by Kojève, aims towards the future, towards that which is not yet present. For this reason it proceeds by the nullification of the fixity of nature. When man accomplishes and brings to completion the historical act, his existence loses its orientation towards the not-yet-existing and falls into the immobility of nature.  In other words, when European history realizes – with respect to its potential ‒ absolute human freedom, Europe at the same time triggers a process by which man falls back into his prehistorical (and, thus, animal) level, in which the concern for biological sustenance, and therefore for the economic system, affirms itself as the dominant centre of human life. How can we explain this paradox? Why does the potential absolute manifestation of freedom coincide with the return of humanity to its animal level and, therefore, with the absolute denial of freedom? The answer lies in the fact that when humans achieve the potential total affirmation of freedom they can no longer accomplish any authentic action, precisely because every action would only be the repetition of events by which the absolute realization of freedom was reached in the first place. Now, if man stops authentically acting, he also stops denying nature. Consequently, he is absorbed into the natural space and so falls back to the prehistorical animal, and now economic, level. This animalization of humanity extends itself to all the world and reaches its extreme realization by the planetary affirmation of the ‘American way of life’ which, according to Kojève, proposes the satisfaction of material needs and, so, the concern for the fulfilment of biological necessities, as the very centre of society. Historical time, as we have already seen above, aims at non-being, at what is not yet present. For this reason, it proceeds by the nullification of the eternal presence of the fixity of nature. However, paradoxically, once man accomplishes and brings to completion the historical act, it closes its opening to the not-yet-existing and falls into the same immobility of nature. Nature is independent of man; being eternal, it subsists before him, he is born into it and it continues after him. And as we have just seen, man, who is time, also

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disappears in spatial nature, and because of this disappearance, nature itself continues to exist without time. Hence, already within the Kojèvian philosophy of history, the inheritance of Hegelian finalism coexists with an ambivalent conception of the notion of telos: the regulatory principle of history, the desire for recognition that develops itself in a progressive way; however, such evolution activates, at the same time, a sort of subterranean movement of loss, of self-betrayal, of the historical telos. Thus, the apical moment of historical time, the moment of its completion, produces an inescapable movement of absorption of human time by the eternity of natural, cosmic, time. Patočka’s conception of the end of history represents the refusal of the Hegelian foundations upon which Kojève builds his idea of the same concept. Yet, the concept of post-history that Patočka sketches could be read as issuing from a process of perfection or actualization of what is contained in the long note to the twelfth lesson in Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. In other words, it could be said that in reading Kojève’s long note, Patočka focuses mainly on the coincidence between the wise man and animal life. By radicalizing this equivalence he outlines a philosophy of history essentially characterized by a telos which endlessly risks returning the historical process to the prehistorical level, thereby nullifying history. By accomplishing this operation, Patočka brings to light and develops a nonHegelian philosophy of history that flows, subterraneanly, along the foundations of the same Hegelian architecture as the Kojèvian philosophy of history.

NOTES 1. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). 2. Kojève’s reading of Hegel was perhaps the most influential of the twentieth century. His lectures had an almost unprecedented influence on the development of French philosophy. They were attended in person by Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Aron. Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have also attested to the influence of Kojève in the development of their work. 3. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 160. 4. Ibid. 5. See ‘Entretien avec Jan Patočka sur la philosophie et le philosophes’ [Interview on Philosophy and Philosophers], in Etienne Tassin and Marc Richir (eds.), Jan Patočka. Philosophie, Phénoménologie, politique (Grenoble: Millon, 1992), 11. 6. Ibid., 27. 7. Ibid. 8. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fenomenologie ducha, ed. with notes and comment by Jan Patočka (Prague: ČSAV, 1960).



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9. See, Jan Patočka ‘Úvod k [Hegelově] Fenomenologii ducha’ [Introduction to (Hegel’s) Phenomenology of Spirit]. Unpublished text. Jan Patočka Archive, 3305, 14, footnote n° 12. 10. Jan Patočka, ‘Hegelova Fenomenologie ducha, Přednáškový cyklus na FF UK 1949/1950’ [Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Series of lectures at the Charles University Philosophy Faculty, 1949/1950]. Unpublished text. Jan Patočka Archive, 3306/3306, 8, footnote no. 42. 11. Alexandre Kojève, ‘Hegel, Marx et le Christianism’, Critique 1 (1956): 339–66. 12. Jan Patočka, [Unpublished Diary], V, 29th May–27th July 1947, 3000/670. Unpublished text. Jan Patočka Archive. 13. Ibid., 6th October 1949–14th February 1950, 3000/115. 14. Jan Patočka, ‘Křesťanství a přirozený svět’ [Christianity and Natural World] (1972), in Archivní soubor: Přirozený svět a pohyb lidské existence, Vol. 3 (Prague: Samizdat, 1980), 2.7: 13. 15. See Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 16–20. 16. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 17. Jan Patočka, ‘Problém počátku a místa dějin’ [The Question on the Beginning and Place of History], in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 3: Péče o duší III, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2002), 284. 18. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 73–4. 19. Jan Patočka, ‘Čtyři semináře k problému Evropy’ [Four Seminars on the Problem of Europe], in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 3: Péče o duší III, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2002), 388. (See also the French version: ‘Séminaire sur l’ère technique’, in Liberté et Sacrifice, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams [Grenoble: Millon, 1990], 278). 20. Ibid., 388 (278). 21. Arendt, The Human Condition, 320–1. 22. Jan Patočka, ‘Čtyři semináře k problému Evropy’, 391 (282). 23. Ibid., 401 (296). 24. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 124–5. 25. Ibid., 120. 26. Ibid., 130. 27. Ibid., 129. 28. See Riccardo Paparusso, ‘Life, Technology, Christianity: Patočka’s Sacrifice for Nothing and its Economic-Mythical Roots’, in Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík and Anita Williams (eds.), Asubjective Phenomenology (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH, 2015), 187–97. 29. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 158. 30. Ibid., 160. 31. Kojève’s comments about the language of the bees are likely in reference to Karl van Frisch’s 1927 book Aus dem Leben der Bienen. Van Frisch was the first ethnologist to translate the ‘waggle dance’ performed by bees.

Part V

RETHINKING THE COMMUNITY

Chapter 14

On the Significance of the Ancient Greek Polis for Patočka and Castoriadis Philosophy, Politics, History Suzi Adams Consideration of the Ancient Greek polis and its significance was central to the philosophical projects of both Jan Patočka and Cornelius Castoriadis. At first glance, there are some similarities between their respective approaches to the meaning of the polis. Both understand it as a world historical event, on the one hand, and as the twin birth of philosophy and politics, on the other. From this starting point, each thinker develops a distinctive interpretation of the significance of the polis for philosophy and human affairs. While they both emphasize the importance of the non-foundationalism of the polis, as well as the centrality of philosophical interrogation of received forms, ideas, and institutions, Castoriadis and Patočka hold different political stances towards the value of democracy. That notwithstanding, a shared interest in a theory of history underpins their approaches to the significance of the Greek polis, which, as this essay argues, is the most fruitful point of comparison between them. Yet, despite the richness of their respective accounts of Ancient Greece – and the potential bridges between them – there has been next to no comparative work on their thought. The present essay begins to fill this gap. It provides some necessarily brief and preliminary reflections on the meaning of the Ancient Greek polis in their respective thought (especially in relation to questions of politics, philosophy, and history) that highlights possible points of convergence, as well as discontinuities. It argues that their respective approaches to history are best understood as different articulations of creative emergence that emphasizes the importance of understanding social change as a form of qualitative movement.

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1. PATOČKA AND CASTORIADIS: THE POLIS AND POLITICS Despite Patočka and Castoriadis’s similar emphasis on the importance of philosophical interrogation in a world of problematicity, their political stances were ultimately quite different. Castoriadis’s political activism emerged from council communism, whereas Patočka’s experience of socialism in Czechoslovakia brought about different interpretative challenges. As part of his critique of Marx, Castoriadis identified revolutionary potential in the direct democratic and explicit self-understanding of society’s self-institution (and self-limitations) of the Ancient Athenians. He abhorred the privatization and ‘general conformism’ of life in the second half of the twentieth century, and embraced the public and agonistic character of a life where ‘freedom’ was understood in a positive sense: as the freedom to participate in the affairs of the public-political sphere. Castoriadis understood the institution of the Ancient Athenian polis as the historical birth of the project of autonomy. With his understanding of this phenomenon anchored in Marxian and Aristotelian debates on praxis, Castoriadis elucidated the project of autonomy as one of social doing that manifests itself in modernity as the contestation of central social imaginary significations (and accompanying constellations of power that are embedded in the institutional field) of ‘autonomy’ and ‘the infinite pursuit of pseudo-rational mastery’ in order to bring about the overthrow of capitalism and technocratic society (which are both linked to the signification of rational mastery) and to ‘make be’ [faire] an autonomous society (based on radical democracy). (I return to a discussion of Castoriadis and the project of autonomy later). As an East-Central European, Patočka’s situation was very different to that of Castoriadis. He lived through two world wars, the vagaries of Soviet communism as instituted in Czechoslovakia, and the eruption of the Prague Spring in 1968 – and the subsequent repression of its reforms – and he is best known for later activity as political dissident and founder of Charta 77. Here I agree with Edward Findlay that Patočka’s work ‘does not depend on his historical experience with dissidence; instead, it is the dissident experience that is made additionally meaningful through his political philosophy’.1 But Patočka consistently sought to articulate the implications of his lifeworld in philosophical rather than political terms (and this was extended to his interpretation of the Ancient Greek polis). This is linked to his articulation of modernity, which he understands to be characterized by a strong rationalist principle (with its roots in the Enlightenment); modernity itself was elucidated as a ‘supercivilization’.2 Within this understanding of modernity, however, an internal crisis between ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ versions can be distinguished. The moderate version understands the limits of its universal reach and success, and does not seek to master the whole of human life and the natural world through abstracting rational principles from the human



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situation. The moderate version can find a way to co-exist with ‘civilization.’ The radical version, on the other hand, is incompatible with ‘civilization’ and seeks to derive rational keys to ‘solve’ all of the dilemmas faced by the human condition in modernity. Patočka’s own stance is more attuned to the moderate version (he certainly rejects the radical version), but it remains an open question to what extent he can be considered a democrat (and thus to what extent he embraced the sociopolitical form that the Ancient Greek polis instaurated). He was certainly no radical democrat, in the sense that Castoriadis was – that is, as one who grounded the possibility (and desirability) of direct democracy/autonomy in a self-reflective turn of social creativity – nor was political dissidence an enduring aspect of his philosophical approach to politics, but rather emerged as the result of specific historical circumstances. Nonetheless, Patočka’s thought arguably demonstrates an ongoing effort to come to terms with democracy. In this way, he drew on the experience of Ancient Greece to help him rethink the internal structure of modernity. However, it does seem that for him ongoing activity in the polis – as the exercise of political freedom – could accompany a certain tendency to lose sight of the ‘care for the soul’, and would be in danger of losing the proper balance between reflection and politics.3 Where Castoriadis tended to venerate the Ancient Greek polis, identifying in it a ‘germ’ for future projects of autonomy, Patočka, sought not to idealize it ‘as if it arose from the spirit of selfless devotion to “the common good”, analogous to the perspective of the guardians, as it is postulated – not described – in Plato’s Republic’.4 Instead, he grasped not only its emergence as a gradual crystallization (whereas Castoriadis tended to focus on it as a ‘rupture’ with preceding sociopolitical forms, and emphasized its blossoming in the fifth century),5 but also highlighted that it came about because of – and not in spite of – the internal divisions of the polis, historical contingencies, and background cultural assumptions that worked anonymously in its emergence. Thus, Patočka saw its internal divisions more clearly than Castoriadis did. In particular, Patočka notes that the emergence of the polis was characterized by internal and external conflict, epitomized perhaps most fully by the fight against tyranny – diametrically opposed to ‘the spirit of the polis’ – which played a significant part in its emergence. Patočka sums up the significance of the polis thus: Here, in very specific conflicts on a modest territory and with minimal material means is born not only the Western world and its spirit but, perhaps, world history as such. The Western spirit and world history are bound together in their origins: it is the spirit of free meaning bestowal, it is the shaking of life as simply accepted with all its certainties and at the same time the origin of new possibilities of life in that shaken situation, that is, of philosophy. Since, however,

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philosophy and the spirit of the polis are loosely linked so that the spirit of the polis survives ultimately always in the form of philosophy, this particular event, the emergence of the polis, has a universal significance.6

But where Castoriadis emphasized the mutuality and interplay of politics [la politique] and philosophy [la philosophie], Patočka emphasized the philosophical element that the institution of political freedom manifests. It is the life of ‘the shaken’, a life of ‘constant vigilance’, which is simultaneously a ‘permanent uprootedness, lack of foundation’,7 and characterizes political freedom as the ‘freedom of the undaunted’.8 He tells us ‘that means that the renewal of life’s meaning in the rise of political life bears within it the seed of philosophical life as well’.9 The significance of the rise of the polis is the ‘shaking of accepted meaning’.

2. CASTORIADIS, AUTONOMY, AND HUMAN CREATION In the present context, Castoriadis is perhaps less familiar to most readers than Patočka. As such, I shall next provide an overview of Castoriadis’s elucidation of the project of autonomy and ontology of social-historical creation. Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) was a Greek-French thinker best known for his elucidation of human creation and the project of autonomy. The polis of the Ancient Greeks was the only society to institute political power directly into the hands of its citizens, despite long histories of rule – both in Greece and surrounding areas – by variously instituted forms of sacred kingship and tyranny. For Castoriadis, the polis signified the first breakthrough to an autonomous society in human history (the second occurred with the advent of modernity, which Castoriadis dates back to the emergence of the autonomous cities between 1100–1300 CE). A democratic society knows itself to give – to create – its own laws, norms, values, and customs (its own nomoi). They are humanly made, not given (determined) by an extra-social source, such as God, or Nature, or Reason. As the form of society is a human self-creation, its laws and customs as well as its overall form [eidos] can be altered: these are not given once and for all. For Castoriadis, direct democracy meant the participation of all citizens, as opposed to contemporary forms of representative democracy, which he viewed rather as oligarchies.10 Thus, the Ancient Greeks were significant for both elements of his intellectual project: they instituted or created themselves as a democratic polis, which was a new political form for the human condition, and thus held significance for Castoriadis’s political philosophy of autonomy and ontology of human creation. Castoriadis’s ontology of the social-historical as a self-creating mode of being aimed, among other things, to elucidate the mode of being that made



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the direct democracy of the Ancient Athenian polis possible. As such, as Dick Howard has noted, it is to be understood as a ‘political ontology’.11 That being said, Castoriadis was also clear that ‘at this level, and almost all others, creation has no value content, and politics does not allow itself to be “deduced” from ontology’:12 human creativity creates not only democracy but also the gulag. Castoriadis elucidated human creation as the radical self-creation (or self-institution) of society. This was central to his vehement critique of Western philosophical thought, which he understood as the tradition of positing ‘being’ as ‘being-determined’. On his account, the social-historical – the ‘radical imaginary’ of the ‘anonymous collective’ as ‘instituting society’ – creates itself as that particular society (understood in the first instance, as the political form of that society). Castoriadis argues that the Ancient Greek creation of democracy was an ontological creation – it brought the democratic political form into being. He understands such human creation as creation ex nihilo. By this, he means that the new form is neither reducible to – nor deducible from – its antecedents. It is not a deviation from an already given form; it emerges, rather, ‘out of nothing’ as the creation of ‘otherness’, of ‘other forms’. Castoriadis contrasts the ‘creation of otherness’ as alterity to the ‘production of difference’. For him, the production of difference falls under the rubric of ‘the same’; this is central to forms of identitarian thinking (or in Castoriadis’s terms: ensemblistic-identitarian thinking) which cannot grasp the radically self-creating mode of being of the social-historical. Understood in this way, human creation eludes frameworks of determinacy that have been characteristic of Western thought – whether that be causalism, rationalism, or teleology. As such, Castoriadis develops a radical critique of Western metaphysics understood as ‘being as determinacy’, on the one hand, and the ‘determinacy of being’, on the other. Castoriadis’s elucidation of creation emphasizes, instead, the radical immanency of self-creation as self-determination. Castoriadis’s political philosophy, properly speaking, is inseparable from his revolutionary project of radical social transformation to a participatory democracy that would overthrow capitalist, religious, and liberal projects. His elucidation of the project of autonomy emerged from a rethinking of his understanding of ‘workers’ self-management’ and his critique of Marx’s determinist understanding of history, that involved a critique of Lenin’s ‘vanguard’ (for that would be to externally determine the form of collective social doing as a kind of heteronomous technê), a reconsideration of psychoanalysis as a form of praxis, and a new wave of encounter with Ancient Greek thought. Central to his approach was his distinction between ‘the political’ [le politique] and ‘politics’ in the strong and explicit sense [la politique]. ‘The political’ refers to the institution and distribution of forms of political power that every society must undertake. For Castoriadis, ‘politics’ in the strong

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and explicit sense ‘puts into question the actual institution of society; it is the activity that tries to aim clearly at the social institution as such’.13 He tells us that politics [la politique] is part of the project of autonomy and emerged with the institution of the Ancient Greek polis. Politics, in this strong sense, is the reflective and lucid collective activity that aims at the overall institution of society.14 It pertains to everything in society that is ‘the participable in shareable’.15 The most important aspect is the interrogation of inherited laws, norms, and customs [nomoi].16 This questioning of the social institution has a philosophical aspect for Castoriadis as well. In the same way that he distinguishes between ‘the political’ [le politique] and politics [la politique], he also differentiates between what we might call ‘the philosophical’ [le philosophique] and ‘philosophy’ [la philosophie] in the emphatic and explicit sense that was instituted by the Ancient Greeks as the explicit and unlimited interrogation of the ‘instituted representations of the world, the idols of the tribe’.17 It is ‘the reflective activity of a reason creating itself in an endless movement, both as individual and social reason’.18 It does not reflect on facts per se but on ‘social imaginary significations and their possible grounding’.19 This prompts the demos to ask: What should we think? At the more concrete sociopolitical niveau, it provides the context for such questions as ‘What is justice?’ and, following on from that, ‘Are our laws just?’, while on the more intellectual level, it raises questions of knowledge and truth (and their meanings). 3. PATOČKA, SOCRATES, AND PLATO As with Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur, Patočka’s phenomenological philosophy emerged from a sustained encounter with Husserl’s and Heidegger’s thought. It is perhaps no coincidence that for each of these third-generation phenomenologists, a critique of the philosophy of consciousness accompanied an ongoing grappling with the question of the world (especially in its ‘a-subjective’ sense, to use Patočka’s terminology), and a concern to elaborate the sociality of the human condition was characteristic. Patočka’s political philosophy centres on a reactivation of Socratic insights, coupled with a critique and recovery of Plato’s metaphysics, which he termed ‘negative Platonism’. As such, Plato was his key intellectual interlocutor in the development of his political philosophy. As mentioned, Patočka’s political philosophy emerges in the first instance from an interpretation of the meaning and activity of Socrates’s thought, especially in relation to questioning as a non-objectivist mode of truth in a life of problematicity.20 Central to his approach is his reworking of the notion of the ‘care for the soul’, which highlights both human responsibility for action



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in the world, the practice of freedom in the polis while in reflective dialogue with oneself, and the quest for non-objectivist truth via questioning. Socrates, in this way, advocated for a reflective mode of freedom. In the Heretical Essays, Patočka tells us that which makes humans ‘just and truthful’ is their ‘care for their soul’. He goes on to note that ‘care for the soul means that truth is something not given once and for all, nor merely a matter of observing and acknowledging the observed, but rather a lifelong inquiry, a self-controlling, self-unifying intellectual and vital practice’.21 It is a quest for truth based on questioning, as a ‘knowledge of non-knowledge’ – and a quest for truth in its pre-metaphysical mode that presumes the capacity for problematizing given horizons and institutions in the search for more certain knowledge. It is also timely to recall that ‘freedom’ is to be understood in a trans-subjective sense: it is a domain of human life rather than a quality of the human being (I return to the notion of the ‘trans-subjective’ below). Patočka’s understanding of freedom, truth, and the care for the soul, which emerged from his rethinking of Socrates, built on his earlier (unfinished) project on negative Platonism (from the early 1950s).22 As such, it appeared well before his reflections on subjective phenomenology and the three movements of existence. As Arnason observes: The central paradox of Plato’s work is that although he produced – through his portrait of Socrates – the most accomplished example of philosophical questioning in its pre-metaphysical mode, he also provided a paradigm for metaphysical thought when he tried to extract positive answers from the very questions raised by Socrates. The open-ended and incessantly self-correcting totalizing stance becomes a positive knowledge of the fundamental determinants of the world as a totality.23

This notion of freedom was also based on a notion of transcendence (not to be confused with ‘transcendent’), which Patočka sometimes termed ‘trancensus’.24 It presumes the human capacity for looking beyond a given situation, on the one hand, and the anticipation of new horizons and possibilities, on the other, and, as such, was important for his understanding of future-oriented temporalities. Drawing on Arnason’s argument, which links Patočka’s negative Platonism to his articulation of the phenomenological problematic of the world and its hermeneutic transformation, we may say that this elementary sense of transcendence in Patočka’s work is integral to human experience; this experience of freedom involves a central connection to another horizon or level of reality beyond the merely anthropic. Arnason identifies this level with the world as an overarching horizon, and in relating Patočka’s interpretation of the chorismos as distancing, is able to interpret his negative Platonism along hermeneutical-phenomenological lines. In this

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vein, Patočka is seen to anticipate transcendental arguments concerning the preconditions of experience. Following on from this, the realm of Ideas in Patočka’s negative Platonism form the preconditions for truth as protoknowledge (or, more hermeneutically, as ‘pre-comprehension’) of an ‘open ended totality of beings’,25 and correspond ‘to the phenomenological theme of the world as a “horizon of horizon”, ever given but always involved in the constitution of experience’.26 Arnason’s point is that a phenomenology of the world requires a comparative hermeneutics in order to fully understand ‘the complexity and the openness to conflicting interpretations that become more evident when philosophical traditions and their latent meanings are taken into consideration’.27 Thus, following Arnason, negative Platonism is a form of non-objectifying knowledge that helps us more fully understand the preconditions of human life and the historical conflicts and tensions which can thereby emerge, from a hermeneutic-phenomenological perspective. The care for the soul occurs as the interplay of politics and philosophical thought in history (in the strong sense that Patočka gave it). In the fifth heretical essay, for example, he writes that ‘Socrates designated the polis, which is the proper place of history, as also the proper place of the care for the soul’.28 For Patočka, the notion of polemos is the precondition for the ongoing self-institution of the polis, history, and philosophy. In the same essay, he makes the further point that, as a response to decadence, the life of responsibility in relation to the care for the soul is to include philosophy but also political action (as life in the polis).29 Life in the polis is always to be understood in relation to his strong understanding of history (the third movement of human existence) which is characterized, like the polis itself, by freedom in problematicity. The life of responsibility and care for the soul as the ‘quest for clarity’ moreover involves an interplay between the sacred and the profane – Patočka calls it ‘living through the opposition’ – but it is not reducible to either.30 The ‘active daring’ of polis life remains complementary to living in problematicity, but there is also a tension between the two in that political action distances but still presupposes participation in the sacred. In this vein, however, historical tensions between all three aspects – the sacred and the profane, active life in the polis, and the care for the soul – may also be at play. These tensions and interplay also point to the particular configuration of what Johann Arnason has termed the ‘religio-political nexus’, to which I will now briefly turn. Arnason’s recent consideration of the religio-political nexus expands Durkheim’s understanding of religion as a ‘meta-institution’ of society, to also include an understanding of the political.31 Thus, the meta-institution of society is better understood as both political and religious. Through his articulation of the religio-political nexus, Arnason is able to achieve a twofold reorientation of civilizational analysis. First, he challenges Eisenstadt’s



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understanding of the ‘civilizational dimension’ to have first been explicitly articulated at the time of the Axial Age. Instead, through recourse to debates in historical anthropology on sacral rulership, Arnason extends the civilizational dimension to archaic civilizations, on the one hand, and, second, in so doing, he provides a more nuanced understanding of the civilizational dimension in the Axial Age civilizations, on the other.32 In this particular instance, the Ancient Athenian polis, especially in its democratic version, redefined the religio-political nexus in far-reaching ways. I will briefly but mention two instances. The first highlights the importance of Greek religion for the instauration and continuation of the polis. Robin Osborne has argued that it should be indeed characterized as a ‘polis religion’.33 The religious aspect of the polis is something that Castoriadis, for example, marginalized in his writings, possibly because it would pose difficulties for his elucidation of the polarity between autonomous and heteronomous societies, the latter being those which do not acknowledge their self-instituting capacity, and instead understand themselves to have received their particular sociopolitical form and associated nomoi from an extra-social source, such as (and especially) God. The second example, again following Osborne, highlights that in the democratic polis, the gods came to be understood as higher order citizens whose voice must also be heard in the assembly.34 This was something of which neither Castoriadis nor Patočka took adequate account. 4. CASTORIADIS, PLATO, AND ARISTOTLE Castoriadis’s central interlocutor, both for his political philosophy and his ontology (especially his later ontology of nature) was Aristotle, not Socrates. For him, Aristotle as pupil of Plato and inconceivable without him, is in a sense before Plato: ‘he belongs, to an essential degree, to the fifth century. … He is … a democrat in the Athenian sense’.35 Whatever the merits of this approach to Aristotle might be, however, it ignores the importance of his relationship to Plato, and the development of his own metaphysical framework (where Castoriadis tended only to recognize Platonism as metaphysics, Patočka recognizes three metaphysical traditions inaugurated by the Greeks: Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Democritan).36 While there is no doubt as to the central significance of Socrates for Patočka, he holds a less significant place in Castoriadis’s thought. For Castoriadis, Greek political thought is to be found in the ‘democratic political creation’, which end he dates at 404 CE – but he also adds another possible dating – 399 CE (i.e. with the death of Socrates).37 Socrates was an Athenian and man of the polis. In this context, Socrates is contrasted to Plato, with Plato found wanting: Socrates remained in the city, whereas Plato withdrew from the city.38 For Castoriadis,

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Plato was the ‘greatest philosopher who ever existed’,39 but also an enemy of democracy and the ‘total negation of Greek political thought’,40 which also includes, in this broad sense, his turn to metaphysics. Yet, Plato was indirectly more central to Castoriadis’s thought than a first glance might reveal. He appears, however, in purely negative form. Castoriadis’s almost visceral anti-Platonism is in contrast to Patočka’s tendency to draw on Plato when judging contemporary issues. Castoriadis, however, regarded Plato’s philosophy as ‘radically foreign to the Greek imaginary’.41 He goes onto tell us: Profoundly hating the democratic universe and its arborescences (‘sophistry’, rhetoric, political activity, even poetry), he constructs – by strokes of historical falsification, rhetoric, sophistry, theatrical scenes, and demagogy – a false image of it that was later to have weight historical effects: when referring to Plato, one still talks about ‘Greek political thought’, whereas he is the total negation thereof.42

Like Aristotle, Castoriadis seeks to dismantle Plato’s metaphysical and political philosophical frameworks. Castoriadis’s first sustained encounter with Plato can be found in the chapter on the social-historical in The Imaginary Institution of Society in his discussion of time and creation.43 The social-historical is characterized by ontological self-creation, yet ‘creation within inherited thought is impossible’.44 As such, traditional thought cannot grasp the social-historical. Castoriadis takes the example of the invention of the wheel to illustrate his point: The wheel revolving around an axis is an absolute ontological creation. It is a greater creation, it weighs, ontologically, more than a new galaxy that would arise tomorrow evening out of nothing between the Milky Way ad Andromeda. For there are already millions of galaxy – but the person who invented the wheel, or a written sign, was imitating and repeating nothing at all.45

As we can see, what is important for Castoriadis here is the human creation of a new form.46 Castoriadis argues against the understanding of ‘being as determinacy’ that he attributes to the Western philosophical tradition. In so doing, however, his primary target is Plato’s Timaeus. For Castoriadis, the cosmology of the Timaeus sets up the Western philosophical tradition’s obsession with being as determinacy, which occludes social-historical creation, and as such the true notion of time as qualitative change and creation. The notion of time is at the core of his understanding of creation: Time is creation. The spectre of the ‘spatialization’ of time is a central problematic of determinist metaphysics. His understanding of creation holds when ‘no identitary law, or group of laws, is sufficient to produce B starting from A’.47



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It is among other things a critique of mathematical reason as it applies to the human domain to understand/explain society. Anything significant about human societies cannot be posited within an identitarian framework. The demiurge however does not create but produce from a pre-existing framework: the form of the human world is given from an external source. The mode of being of the social-historical eludes Plato’s grasp. Aristotle’s significance for Castoriadis lies in his support for democracy, his approach to the physis/nomos distinction – and the aporias to which it gives rise regarding human affairs, and the notion of phantasia as it relates to the creative imagination. (The creative imagination was Castoriadis’s umbrella term for the radical imagination of the individual psyche and the radical imaginary of the social-historical).48 Castoriadis rejected the relevance of physis for human affairs, and affirmed instead the order of nomos, both in his political philosophy and his ontology of social-historical being. He recognizes, of course, that Aristotle stays within the thought of physis – and a corresponding ontology of determinacy. Because of this, the idea of creation could have no meaning for Aristotle: in this sense, ‘poiesis’ is a kind of ‘technê’ and is essentially imitative not creative (although there are some ambiguities). For Castoriadis, Aristotle ‘remains within determinacy: pure matter, like pure indetermination, is an abstractive concept, a limit of being and of thought’.49 However, when Aristotle reflects on the human condition, in Castoriadis’s view, ‘he cannot but help but find his way back to nomos’. Nomos here is a self-instituting human order, as opposed to an extra-social order – such as physis – that gives laws and norms to human societies, and in the case of physis, is both norm/telos, and ‘effective actuality’.50 On matters of polis and justice, for example, he cannot directly return to the order of physis,51 which, for Castoriadis, ‘explains the chaotic aspects of the Politics’.52 In these cases, Aristotle’s thought vacillates. Although he is inconceivable without Plato – and Plato remains in a sense his greatest interlocutor – Aristotle also debated with Democritus, Herodotus, and some of the Sophists, who sided more with ‘doxa’ than ‘episteme’, that is, with an understanding of knowledge as humanly created not externally and eternally given, and was important for Castoriadis’s rethinking of determinacy versus the non-foundationalism of human creation and autonomy. 5. PATOČKA, THE POLIS, AND THE BEGINNING OF HISTORY For Patočka, the emergence of the polis signified the beginning of history proper. As Paul Ricœur notes in his ‘Preface’ to Patočka’s Heretical Essays on Patočka’s account, ‘history is witness to the realization of freedom in a public space opened by freedom for freedom’.53 The emergence of the

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polis signifies then the simultaneous appearance of politics, philosophy, and history. There is an underlying unity to this triumvirate in his thought. Historical humanity is characterized by problematicity, in contrast to the certitude of what Patočka calls pre-history. This is what Patočka calls the natural world – the prehistorical, non-problematic world – a term that he borrowed from the early Husserl, but reconfigured in light of Husserl’s understanding of the lifeworld. Prehistorical humanity is not however without historiography, as Ricœur points out, but rather that the ‘vital cycle of reception and transmission is not broken; historiography can move indefinitely within the tranquil circle of eternal return’.54 Patočka elucidated his theory of history in interplay with the ‘three movements of existence’ and his asubjective phenomenology. In turn, these were part of his ongoing efforts to respond to the phenomenological problematic of the world. Patočka’s most systematic discussion of the three movements of existence occurs in two different places: in Body, Community, Language, World,55 and the Heretical Essays in the History of Philosophy,56 respectively. Each draws on and reworks Hannah Arendt’s tripartite distinction between labour, work, and action. Each falls under Patočka’s general notion of the asubjective, in the sense that his elucidations seek to both dismantle Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness and Heidegger’s disproportionate emphasis, in Patočka’s view at least, on subjectivity. In Body, Community, Language, World, the focus is the body and movement as lived corporeity, in such a way so as to elude the two aporia of subjectivity in Husserl and Heidegger.57 The three movements, each with its own temporal configuration, are elucidated here as: anchoring, self-sustenance, and transcendence. Important in the present context is the third movement of transcendence. Here Patočka draws on Aristotle’s conception of dynamis and kinesis as qualitative change, as ‘transformation, as possibility being realised’,58 which he links to Heidegger’s understanding of existence as the realization of possibilities, to forge an understanding of human existence as ‘life as possibilities in a process of realisation’.59 The ‘proto-type’ for the understanding of movement is the living being, where ‘“life itself is the goal of each individual movement” and the realization of certain (determinate) possibilities’.60 Patočka notes that, unlike Bergson, for Aristotle, movement is futural: it unfolds something that is not yet as the ‘movement of a self-constituting being’. Nonetheless, Aristotle’s elaboration of movement (as qualitative change) involves an unchanging substrate as its precondition and is, in this way, for Patočka, still too ‘static’ and ‘objective’ to be helpful in the human realm of existence. He thus proposes to radicalize Aristotle: ‘The possibilities that ground movement have no pre-existing bearer, no necessary referent standing statically at their foundation, but rather all synthesis, all inner interconnection of movement takes place within it alone’.61 In so doing, Patočka identifies the corporeity of lived



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experience (drawing on the Husserlian distinction between Körper and Leib) and dynamis as a possibility not yet present, ‘that can take the given into itself and forge a unified meaning’ as essential aspects of this phenomenologized, radicalized sense of movement as existence.62 Although each movement is ‘shared’ with others, this is conceptualized in terms of intersubjectivity rather than sociality, properly speaking. However, when we consider his elaborations of the three movements in Heretical Essays, which he wrote almost a decade later, the situation seems somewhat different. Here, the three movements are contextualized in terms of history instead of corporeity; this brings into relief not only the asubjective but also the trans-subjective contexts of the human condition and the world process. Indeed, the three movements are not so much contextualized within but embedded into a broader consideration of historical modalities and transsubjective modalities of the ‘sphere of openness’ as central to the human condition. Although Aristotle’s articulation of the tripartite soul (vegetative, animate, rational) is one source for Patočka’s three movements, his shift to a rethinking of history (which sits between a philosophy of history and the history of philosophy) can also be understood as his way of making sense of the Axial Age, of the ‘civilizational condition’ more generally, and of the uniqueness and significance of the Ancient Greek breakthrough to political freedom and institution of the democratic polis, in particular. As such, an account of human existence as ‘lived corporeity’ requires articulations of broader institutional and social dimensions of existence that have their basis in trans- rather than a-subjective contexts, more narrowly conceived. This is the domain of social reality proper – of culture and institution – that is irreducible to embodied and intersubjective analyses and, as such, requires its own articulation. Indeed, we can note three ways in which Patočka’s notion of asubjective phenomenology has been developed further. First, some, such as Karel Novotný, have deepened Patočka’s account of lived corporeity;63 second, Johann Arnason has developed a notion of trans-subjectivity that takes up the cultural, institutional, and civilizational aspects of history;64 and, third, Renaud Barbaras has articulated Patočka’s asubjective thought within what can be termed the ‘naturalising’ trend in phenomenology.65 6. PATOČKA AND CASTORIADIS ON ARISTOTELIAN MOVEMENT, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND THE TRANSSUBJECTIVE DIMENSION OF THE HUMAN CONDITION Before proceeding further, it is worth noting that the notion of ‘transsubjective’ is not always well understood. In phenomenology, it is sometimes equated with Heidegger’s ‘Das Man’. While the notion of ‘trans-subjectivity’

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shares with ‘Das Man’ a sense of indeterminate plurality and an anonymous level of sociality, the trans-subjective, in the way that it is used here, does not refer to an inauthentic mode of being. It is instead best understood as meta-normative. Castoriadis has offered the clearest elucidation of the transsubjective level of the human condition, although he frames it in socialontological terms. On his account, the trans-subjective is to be understood as the mode of being of the social-historical. It is elucidated as the ‘anonymous collective’ of society in its interplay of ‘instituting’ and ‘instituted’ aspects. It is always-already unmotivated, irredeemably historical, and irreducible to the intersubjective level of the social world. It appears as cultural projects of power that are embedded in institutions – understood here in the broadest sense – which alter themselves in, through, and as time (and specific forms of temporality). The trans-subjective context thus consists in the interplay of instituted patterns and instituting irruptions of cultural meaning, social power, and collective movement that are both in-the-world and opening-onto-theworld. Some, such as Habermas, have criticized Castoriadis for losing sight of the subject in the ‘hurly burly’ of anonymous sociality.66 But the subject is not reduced to nor submerged in the anonymous collective; rather, such transsubjective contexts both open up and limit possible varieties of subjectivity within cultural and civilizational complexes. Others, like Ricœur, equate the anonymous aspect of society with its structuralist formulation – especially as found in Levi-Strauss. As such, for Ricœur, anonymous structures relegate meaning to an epiphenomenon.67 To counter this, he develops a hermeneuticphenomenological notion of the self which he locates in what for him is the most important form of sociality: a reworked notion of Weber’s sense of (intersubjective) action, such that the world of concrete individuals can be elucidated. But the anonymous collective as the social-historical creates or auto-institutes itself as the very world of meaning (which Castoriadis terms social imaginary significations), and thus need not be reduced to ‘structures’. A closer, more hermeneutic reading of Ricœur also reveals a more positive, albeit latent and unsystematic, notion of the trans-subjective that is connected to his own articulation of the social imaginary understood as an open dialectic of ideology and utopia. Thus, the trans-subjective as understood here refers to levels of sociality beyond the subjective and intersubjective. Finally, in this context, Castoriadis’s use of the term ‘institution’ is important to note. It both draws on Merleau-Ponty’s elucidation of ‘institution’ as a critique of the Husserlian notion of ‘constitution’, on the one hand, while on the other hand, it emphasizes the properly societal element of the human condition as the social-historical. This level of social reality is irreducible to intersubjective analysis. Instead, the trans-subjective consists in the broadest levels of the social world, and comprises the precondition for meaningful accounts of subject-selves and contexts of intersubjective action.



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To return to Patočka, when he rearticulates the three movements of existence in the Heretical Essays, the sense of ‘a-subjective’ has shifted. It is no longer articulated around a lived corporeity but as a shared movement of history: it is a domain of human life, not an attribute of the human being. This variety of asubjectivity is better understood as ‘trans-subjective.’ This was not his primary focus: he was more concerned about illuminating the problematicity of life and the ‘shaken-ness’ of meaning that the creation of history and the polis brought about, and the care of the soul as the properly philosophico-practical response. But the elucidation of the polis community and its emergence in and as history goes beyond an intersubjective sense of lived corporeity. And here, a shared field opens up with Castoriadis’s understanding of the polis as a creation of the social-historical, as discussed above, although, for Castoriadis, the instauration of the polis did not signify the advent of history, tout court (part of his project was to argue for the creative historicity of all societies, even so called ‘cold’ societies), the Ancient Greek institution of autonomy created history in a strong and explicit sense. In this way, we might say that Castoriadis distinguishes between ‘history’ in the strong sense, as opposed to ‘the historical’ (along with the other two distinctions previously noted: ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, and ‘philosophy’ and ‘the philosophical’). But the most interesting aspect of their respective accounts lies in their reworking of the Aristotelian notion of ‘movement’. Patočka’s adaptation of Aristotle’s notion of physis brought it to bear on the anthropic layer,68 whereas Castoriadis’s notion of history wants to keep a clear distinction between the self-creating modes of being of the social-historical (and the order of nomos), and natural modes of being (and the order of physis). At that juncture in his intellectual trajectory (at the time of writing The Imaginary Institution of Society in the early-mid 1970s), Castoriadis elucidated a regional ontology of nomos as a self-creating and self-instituting mode of being. In his later work, however, he rethought the more positive aspects of Aristotelian physis, as qualitative change, and radicalized physis, especially in its aspect of alloiosis, to self-creation. In so doing, he shifted from a regional ontology of nomos to a trans-regional ontology of physis as à-être (as an always-becoming-being). However, he did not thereby collapse nomos into physis but maintained the tension between the two. For this reason, Castoriadis steadfastly disagreed with Francesco Varela’s notion of biological autonomy, as for him living beings still operated within functional closure, whereas an anthropic being was characterized by defunctionalization, and thus the possibility of instituting and articulating a world in openness, which is what allowed its problematization. He thus reserved the project of autonomy – for politics in the strong sense – for anthropos.69 At the same time, however, in expanding his understanding of self-creating regions of being to a trans-regional ontology,

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physis – in the sense of creative emergence – became the ground for nomosas-history, instead of its antithesis. Both Patočka and Castoriadis drew on Aristotle to rework a notion of qualitative movement that helps us to understand historical change, on the one hand, and the notion of creative emergence, on the other. Castoriadis explicitly links qualitative change to creation and hence to his philosophy of time-as-ontological-creation, while Patočka understands that different kinds of historicity allow for a more phenomenological reading of varieties of temporality, and the hermeneutic-phenomenological horizon of the world. Here, it is important to note that while the cultural aspect (as social meaning) is crucial, it is only so in interplay with a notion of social doing in its transsubjective form as socio-historical movement. While some social theories and philosophies have recognized the centrality of cultural meaning to the institution of the social world, they have generally subordinated social action to culture: it is understood to draw on symbolic and/or imaginary contexts of culture for its meaning. But this notion of social action is intersubjective not trans-subjective: it is an attribute of the human being and not a region of human life. The notion of ‘movement’ as a trans-subjective counterpart to ‘action’ however rearticulates this nexus in a new way. More concretely, the institution of the strong notion of history by the Ancient Greeks – for Patočka as the third movement of human existence, for Castoriadis as the project of autonomy – opens onto the very notion of history as a humanly articulated order in a life of problematicity and the pursuit of freedom and truth in the polis – and concomitantly onto the field of social struggle and conflict of interpretations that ensues. IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION These brief remarks have attempted to open up lines of critical dialogue between Patočka and Castoriadis. Each of them recognized the significance of the emergence of the Ancient Greek polis for the course of history, politics, and philosophy, but emphasized different aspects of the Greek experience and ‘grasp of the world’ for their respective projects. It was argued that the notion of ‘the movement of history’ offers a rich framework through which to understand social change that does not subordinate ‘movement’ to ‘culture’ but articulates them rather in mutual interplay. Further debate on these issues is required, and the pursuit of a dialogue between Castoriadis and Patočka holds possibilities for understanding the intercultural implications of their respective notions of history and meaning, for example, for non-European articulations of ‘history’ and ‘the historical’, ‘problematicity’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘freedom’ from a hermeneutical-phenomenological perspective.



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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS While writing this chapter, I was fortunate to be able to discuss key aspects of my interpretation of Patočka and Castoriadis with Johann Arnason. I would like to thank him for his generous engagement with my thought – as always. I would also like to thank Ludger Hagedorn, who kindly made the then unpublished version of Patočka’s essay, ‘Die Überzivilisation und ihr innerer Konflikt’, available for me to read. Finally, I would like to thank Erin Carlisle for her dedicated work on the references and copyediting when things got hectic.

NOTES 1. Edward F. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patočka (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 4. 2. Jan Patočka, Europa, Nach-Europa. Zur Phänomenologie einer Idee, ed. Ludger Hagedorn and Klaus Nellen (Freiburg: Alber, 2016), see especially part 3. 3. Jan Patočka, ‘The Spiritual Person and the Intellectual’, in Living in Problematicity, ed. Eric Manton (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2007), 51–69. 4. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 41. 5. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Athenian Democracy: False and True Questions’, in Cleisthenes the Athenian: An Essay on the Representation of Space and Time in Greek Political Thought from the End of the Sixth Century to the Death of Plato, ed. Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, trans. David Ames Curtis (Amherst, MA: Humanities Press International, 1996), 121. 6. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 41. 7. Ibid., 38. 8. Ibid., 39. 9. Ibid., 40. 10. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Greek “Polis” and the Creation of Democracy’, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, ed. David Ames Curtis, Odéon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81–123; Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis, Meridian (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 84–107. 11. See Dick Howard, The Marxian Legacy, 2nd Edition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 12. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Done and to Be Done’, in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 361–2. 13. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, ed. David Ames Curtis, Odéon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 125. 14. Ibid., 160.

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15. Ibid., 165. 16. Cornelius Castoriadis, Ce qui fait la Grèce: Séminaires 1982–1983. D’Homère à Héraclite. La création humaine II, ed. Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 41–2. 17. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, 125. 18. Ibid., 164. See also Suzi Adams, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), see especially 19–25. 19. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, 163. 20. I follow Findlay’s characterization here of Patočka’s understanding of a political philosophy in that Patočka enquires into the nature of politics and the (non-foundational) political model for human freedom, although it is not a political philosophy in the traditional sense. See Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age, 5. 21. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 82. 22. See, for example, Johann P. Arnason, ‘Negative Platonism: Between the History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History’, in Ivan Chvatík and Erika Abrams (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 215–28. 23. Johann P. Arnason, ‘The Idea of Negative Platonism: Jan Patočka’s Critique and Recovery of Metaphysics’, Special issue, ‘Post-Phenomenology’, Guest ed. Suzi Adams, Thesis Eleven 90, 1 (2007): 11–12. See also Arnason, ‘Negative Platonism: Between the History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History’. 24. Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, Cultural Memory in the Present, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 169; Jan Patočka, ‘The “Natural” World and Phenomenology (1967)’, in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 248. 25. Arnason, ‘The Idea of Negative Platonism’, 22. 26. Ibid., 23. 27. Ibid. 28. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 103. 29. Ibid., 102. 30. Ibid. 31. Johann P. Arnason, ‘The Religio-Political Nexus: Historical and Comparative Reflections’, in Religion and Politics: European and Global Perspectives, ed. Johann P. Arnason and Ireneusz P. Karolewski. Annual of European and Global Studies EUP (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 8–36. 32. For a more detailed discussion of Arnason’s approach to the religio-political nexus, see Adams, ‘On Johann Arnason and the Religio-Political Nexus’, Social Imaginaries 2, 2 (2016 forthcoming). 33. Robin Osborne, ‘Democracy and Religion in Classical Greece’, in Johann P. Arnason, Kurt A. Raaflaub and Peter Wagner (eds.), The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy: A Politico-Cultural Transformation and Its Interpretations (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 274–97. 34. Ibid. 35. Castoriadis, ‘Done and to Be Done’, in The Castoriadis Reader, 372.



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36. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 64–5. 37. Castoriadis, Ce qui fait la Grèce, 2. 38. Cornelius Castoriadis, cited in Pascal Vernay, ‘Introduction: “Living Thought at Work,”’ in On Plato’s Statesman, trans. David Ames Curtis, Meridian (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), xxii. It must be noted here that in his ‘Introduction’, Vernay reproduces the summary written by Castoriadis for the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) about these seminars, which Castoriadis titled ‘Institution of Society and Historical Creation: Democracy and Philosophy in Ancient Greece.’ Each following reference to Vernay’s ‘Introduction’ refers more specifically to Castoriadis’s summary reproduced therein. See ibid., xxi–xxiii. 39. Castoriadis, ‘Done and to Be Done’, in The Castoriadis Reader, 372. 40. Castoriadis, cited in Vernay, ‘Introduction: “Living Thought at Work”’, in On Plato’s Statesman, xxii. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1987 [1975]), 195ff. 44. Ibid., 196. 45. Ibid., 197. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 195. 48. Castoriadis, ‘Done and to Be Done’, in The Castoriadis Reader, 372. 49. Ibid., 373. 50. Ibid., 373–4. See also Suzi Adams, ‘Castoriadis’s Long Journey through “Nomos”: Institution, Creation, Interpretation’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 70 (2008): 269–95, and Adams, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation. 51. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Value, Equality, Justice, Politics: From Marx to Aristotle, and Aristotle to Ourselves’, in Crossroads in the Labyrinth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 260–340. 52. Castoriadis, ‘Done and to Be Done’, in The Castoriadis Reader, 373. 53. Paul Ricœur, ‘Preface’, in Heretical Essays, viii. 54. Ibid., xi. 55. Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, trans. James Dodd and Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1998). 56. Patočka, Heretical Essays. 57. Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World. 58. Ibid., 145. 59. Ibid., 154. 60. Ibid., 146. 61. Ibid., 146–7. 62. Ibid., 147. 63. Karel Novotný, ‘Liberté et incarnation. Esquisse des conditions de l’existence humaine selon Jan Patočka’, Chiasmi International 15 (2013): 111–26. 64. Johann P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Arnason, ‘The Idea of Negative Platonism’, 6–26.

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65. Renaud Barbaras, L’ouverture du monde: lecture de Jan Patocka, Philosophie (Chatou: Transparence, 2011). It is also worth noting here that each of these three thinkers – Novotný, Arnason, and Barbaras – have developed these versions of asubjective phenomenology as a dialogue between Patočka and Merleau-Ponty. 66. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Excursus on Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution’, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 327–35. 67. Paul Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 68. Jan Patočka, Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs, trans. Erika Abrams (Paris: Vrin, 2011). Like Castoriadis, Patočka also saw problems with Aristotle’s account of physis; chiefly, the notion of an enduring substratum underlying physis. 69. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘“Phusis” and Autonomy’, in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis, Meridian (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 331–41.

Chapter 15

Patočka’s Radical and Agonistic Politics Tamara Caraus

Humans cannot live without meaning, but this does not mean that they should always live within the embrace of a safe and unproblematic meaning, affirmed the Czech philosopher and dissident, Jan Patočka. Humans have to be prepared ‘to give up the hope of a directly given meaning and to accept meaning as a way’,1 that is, meaning as a quest for meaning. According to Patočka, humans discover the problematicity of meaning in the movement of shaking, questioning, and contesting naïve, given meanings. Nevertheless, the question about the absolute meaning of existence cannot be answered, because this meaning did not pre-exist before the question about its possibility, and neither will the answer be given after formulating the question as well. In questioning, an answer or a meaning can be found, but it has to be shaken further, because man has to ‘live not on firm ground, but rather on something that moves’,2 that is, with problematicity of meaning. These affirmations of problematicity of meaning contain, in nuce, a political theory of radical and agonistic democracy, although Patočka neither elaborated a political philosophy nor wrote about democracy. This chapter argues that Patočka’s thought provides a philosophical account on disagreement, dissent, and contestability, comparable to those elaborated by theorists of radical and agonistic democracy, such as Claude Lefort, Ernesto Laclau, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, William Connolly, and others. Nevertheless, why study the political philosophy of someone who does not consider himself a political philosopher? There are at least two reasons that make this exercise necessary: first, a vision of politics is always present in Patočka’s texts, permeating all aspects of his philosophy and offering an interesting case of ‘political philosophy of a non-political philosopher’,3 and, second, he was founder of a dissident movement, and his dissident activities 237

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were not only a reaction to the political situation of the time, but were also rooted in the core of his philosophy.4 Another question that requires clarification is how plausible is the framework of radical and agonistic political theory for Patočka’s political thinking, considered mainly a Plato-inspired vision of politics and a metaphysics of human rights. The assumption of this chapter is that radical and agonistic political theories provide a theoretical framework that avoids paradoxes and controversies that other readings of Patočka’s political thought have postulated. For example, using Patočka’s participation in Charter 77 as a baseline, he was described as the author of a metaphysics of human rights and as the guiding thread of the Czech dissident movement in the second half of the twentieth century.5 When his texts on problematicity, polemos, and permanent questioning do not confirm this humanist interpretation, he is criticized as reactionary.6 Also, one of the main exegetes of Patočka’s oeuvre argues that his thought cannot be a guideline for political action and cannot found a political science.7 Paul Ricœur in the introduction to the French edition of the Heretical Essays observes as well the ‘strange mix’ of humanist premises and the ‘shocking’ references to ‘darkness’, ‘night’ and war.8 Although Richard Rorty considers Patočka anti-foundationalist and postmodern, he nevertheless reproaches the centrality of Socrates and Plato in a postmodern account of foundations.9 Edward L. Findley goes beyond the disagreement regarding the status of Patočka’s philosophy: classical or postmodern, conservative or radical, Platonic or Heideggerian, and gives a plausible account of the strengths and limits of Patočka’s political thought.10 Findlay stresses that the most significant issue of Patočka is his engagement with the problem of a foundation for politics in a postmodern age. He argues that the Czech philosopher’s concern for classical ethics is coherent with non-foundationalist but also non-relativistic political thought. Nevertheless, Patočka’s political philosophy is at risk of remaining ‘strange’, ‘unique’, and ‘shocking’ if it is not evaluated in the context of other radical and agonistic political theories. Thus, the first section of the chapter argues that there is an implicit difference between politics and the political in Patočka’s texts, expressed in differences such as prehistory versus history, movements of anchoring and self-projection versus movement of breaking-through, life in balance versus life in amplitude, intellectual versus spiritual person, and others. The political has the role of the groundless ground of politics and existence in general, and this is the radical dimension of Patočka’s political thought. The second part shows that the well-known concepts from Patočka’s texts, such as ‘breaking-through’, ‘permanent questioning’, ‘problematicity’, ‘shaken solidarities’, polemos, and others, display elements from both radical and agonistic political theories. The third part of the chapter argues that these

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elements outline a vision of democracy that is both radical, pertaining to the foundation of democracy, and agonistic, referring to democratic practice and action within the conditions of permanent questioning, conflict, and polemos. POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL IN PATOČKA’S THOUGHT Politics has ‘special status’ in Patočka’s texts: it has the privilege of being born concomitantly with philosophy and history, it happens in the most authentic moments of life, it is an action of human beings living authentically, and it is irreducibly tied with the problematicity of life and meaning. This chapter aims to explain this ‘special status’ of politics in Patočka’s thought. The contention is that Patočka’s vision and use of the term ‘politics’ pertains to the difference between politics and the political that is characteristic of contemporary continental or post-structuralist political theory. The difference between politics and the political – la politique and le politique, die Politik and das Politische – tailored according to the Heideggerian notion of ontological difference,11 splits the traditional term of politics in two. The new term – the political – was introduced to indicate the specific rationality of politics, its autonomous quality vis-a-vis morality, economics, the social, etc., but most importantly, to point to its ontological dimension: the very moment of institution/destitution of society.12 The old term, politics, was kept as a term for the ontic practices of conventional politics: state, policy, police, a set of institutions and procedures. The conceptual innovation of the political and of the difference between the political and the conventional concept of politics is ‘an indicator or “symptom” of society’s absent ground’.13 Society is no longer grounded in the idea of God, in the benevolent will of the king or in a worldview that provides fixed meanings and certainties. The process of a slow but constant ‘dissolution of the markers of certainty’14 that occurs in modernity was accompanied by an awareness of the autonomy of politics, an awareness which leads to the primacy of the political.15 In the genealogy of the political difference, a distinctive notion of the political, used as an adjective, was first developed when Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, published in 1932, (in)famously differentiated the political from other domains of the social, and located the specificity of the political in the particular distinction between friend and enemy.16 This criterion was described as corresponding to the distinction between good and evil in the moral sphere, or beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere. For Schmitt, the friend/enemy distinction serves as the constitutive principle of a given community/society, thus an irreducible antagonism is postulated as

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ground of society. Arendt’s texts do not contain clear differentiation between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. However, given her permanent quest for the authentic form of politics, she was credited with the discovery of political difference.17 The authentic politics, differentiated from bureaucratic, economic, or instrumental forms of political rationality, presupposes responsibility for our common and collective life. For Arendt, ‘acting in concert’ or acting together is the criteria for authentic politics, that is, of the political. Thus, while the friend/enemy distinction inaugurates the Schmittian tradition of the dissociative political, Arendt inaugurates the associative political.18 Contemporary political theorists have further enriched the conceptualization of this distinction. For example, Lefort refers to the political as the moment by which the symbolic form of society-as-one is instituted, despite conflict and division within society.19 For Laclau, the political is both the disruptive moment of the dislocation of the social and the attempt of refounding of the society.20 Mouffe defines the political as the dimension of antagonism which she takes to be constitutive of human societies, while by ‘politics’ she means the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created ‘organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political’.21 Badiou relates the category of the political to ‘traditional/reified’ political philosophy, while retaining the category of politics for his proposal of politics as ‘truth procedure’ and event.22 For Rancière, the difference is between politics and the police, politics having here the role of the political. According to him, politics is the disruption of the visible – the order of police – by the invisible, the logic of equality.23 Although the political has a primacy because it refers to an instituting moment of the society and politics, all the authors mentioned above share the so-called neutralization thesis.24 According to this thesis, the primacy of the political is not triumphant but always in danger of becoming increasingly neutralized or colonized by the bureaucratized, technologized, and depoliticized society, that is, by politics. This thesis, elaborated at length by the founders of the concept, Schmitt and Arendt, persists in current elaborations of the political as well. For example, Nancy presents a sophisticated version of thesis as ‘the retreat of the political’.25 Mouffe maps the neutralization in consensus presupposed by deliberative democracy in Rawlsian and Habermasian style,26 while Rancière identifies several ways of eliminating politics, such as through archipolitics, parapolitics, and metapolitics.27 The difference between politics and the political is implicit in Patočka’s texts, and it is expressed indirectly in several differences advanced by the Czech philosopher and which will be briefly examined here. To grasp humans ‘as being in and of the world’,28 Patočka sets out a theory of three movements of human life: the movement of anchoring in corporeity and in world, the movement of self-projection, and the movement of breaking-through. According to Patočka, there is no politics in the movements

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of anchoring and self-projection. These are movements where ‘humans reproduce their vital process’29 in a world of practical projects, tools, work, and productivity; it is present-oriented and pragmatic. Also, in these movements, ‘the goal and orientation are given by instinct’; persons live their finitude, average anonymity of social roles, and ‘surrender to the power of the earth’.30 The third movement of breaking-through is the movement of existence ‘in the true sense’. This movement shakes the dominance of the ‘earth’ from the previous movements and questions the given meanings and traditions. In this movement, humans confront their finitude qua individuals and, by virtue of this confrontation, philosophy, history, and politics are born. Thus, the movements of anchoring and self-projection versus the movement of breaking-through reflect the difference between politics and the political. There is no politics in the movements of anchoring and self-projection, even if we have here an administrative organization of society, that is, a conventional politics. Politics, as the political, is born in the movement of breaking-through, disrupting the given meanings and traditions. Here, Patočka appropriates Arendt’s account of the human condition – mainly the triad of labour, work, action – in order to critique Heidegger’s exposition from Being and Time predicated on a negative human relation to the world. Drawing on Heidegger and Arendt, Patočka develops his own understanding of human existence as being ‘in/from and of the world’ by connecting, in the three movements, themes of a specific conception of historical being that is ‘shaken’ and ‘problematic’, and by connecting responsibility and freedom.31 Also, we can see that Patočka is in agreement with Arendt in situating the sphere of life-maintenance work, and thus the economic sphere in general, into opposition with political life. For both, the aim of politics is nothing else but freedom, not survival or wellbeing.32 However, the political as emerges from Patočka’s work turns out to be different from the Arendtian associative political. Another Patočkian difference that expresses the distinction of politics versus the political is that between ‘pre-history’ and history. Patočka uses all three movements in interpreting the idea of history. Prehistorical humanity corresponds to the first and the second movements when persons are living ‘just to live’.33 Because freedom is absent, there is no politics in prehistory, even if we have here an administrative organization of society and the keeping of historical records and annals. History starts with and is continued by freedom – freedom to shake all given meanings, to question faith, art, and religion.34 The political, properly speaking, is born in the very move from prehistory to history, which is a rupture: ‘the innermost nature of that rupture – which we ought to define as that which separate the prehistoric epoch from history proper – lies in that shaking of the naïve certainty of meaning which governs the life of humankind up to that specific transformation which

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represents nearly simultaneous – and in a more profound sense really unitary – origin of politics and philosophy’.35 The birth of history, philosophy, and politics are interwoven in this third movement, because all are born, and therefore grounded, in freedom. The difference between politics and the political is also reflected in the distinction between ‘life in balance’ and ‘life in amplitude’, first conceptualized in one of Patočka’s earlier texts. Life in balance ‘comprehends man as being essentially founded harmoniously. Man is called to happiness and balance of all his forces’.36 Although man has not yet found a complete natural balance, he lives as though there will come a time when human life will be so refined that it will function only with certainties and accuracy: ‘Let’s live rationally, i.e. on the basis of deliberation, […] and we will reach the best that man can possible attain: harmony, balance and bliss’.37 This attitude is positive and practical, and presupposes an administrative organization of life and society. Patočka admits that this view corresponds to some kind of fundamental need of humans; nevertheless, in their longing for a life in balance, humans do not see that the contingent grounds and aims ‘become eternal’.38 By contrast, living in amplitude means a ‘test of oneself and a protest’.39 In amplitude, man tests himself by accepting the extreme possibilities that are distant from everyday life, and concomitantly protests against usual and obvious possibilities. Thus, what life in balance attempts to do is to conceal the contingency of grounds and meanings that are considered eternal, given, and fundamental, while life in amplitude attempts to shows this contingency, and so to expand its possibilities. By taking off into amplitude, humans ‘make the potential freedom real’,40 and this amounts to political action as the political. Another similar difference in Patočka’s thought which parallels the distinction between politics and the political is that between an intellectual and a spiritual person. An intellectual is ‘the person with a certain education’ who makes a living through certain use of ideas. When confronted with the problematicity of life and meaning, the intellectual’s attitude is that ‘it is in order’41 (emphases in original), and that it is possible to overcome all disagreements and incongruities. The spiritual person’s life, on the contrary, consists in ‘being exposed to the negative’.42 Spiritual persons ‘do not accept life simply, but rather we accept its problematicity’, which means ‘not ignoring negative experience, but on the contrary settling into them; problematizing the usual; creating a new life possibility from within this open sphere’.43 Unsurprisingly, the spiritual person is political: The spiritual person is not of course a politician and is not political in the usual sense of this word. He is not a party to the disputes that rule this world – but he is political in yet a different way, obviously, and he cannot be apolitical because

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this non-self-evident nature of the reality is precisely what he throws into the face of this society and of everything that he finds around himself.44

What the spiritual person does by throwing into the face of society its nonself-evident nature is to show the groundless nature of society and existence, and this cannot be anything other than a political act, estimates Patočka. The spiritual person shows that society is always in search for an ultimate ground, while it can achieve only a plurality of fleeting and contingent groundings, and this is the very ‘logic’ of the political difference.45 The differences analyzed above allow us to map the difference between politics and the political in Patočka’s writings. Although he does not use the term the political, he invests the term ‘politics’ with the signification that other authors give to the political. In addition, his writings share the thesis on neutralization of the political. His writings on supercivilization, the dangers of technicization and dehumanization of the post-European world46 are to be read as a thesis of the neutralization of the political, but the analysis of the neutralization of the political in Patočka’s writings is beyond the aims of this chapter. Thus, politics as the political is born at a given moment – the movement of breaking-through, the passage from prehistory to history, from a life in balance to a life in amplitude, etc. This birth should not be conflated with a temporal phenomenon as a point in time; it is not a category referring to the ontic level but to the ontological level of the ground. It is an instance in which the very groundless of the ground is displayed and actualized. The first term of difference – prehistory, anchoring, balance, intellectual, or rationalized framework of life – stands as the firm grounds of existence and of the administrative organization of life. The second term of difference, that is, history, life in amplitude, the spiritual person, shows the groundlessness nature and contingency of the first term: ‘The contingent person with his contingent aims has to become eternal’.47 Patočka’s account of politics is thus a move from the existing given grounds to their conditions of possibility, or to the ontological status of grounds. Politics, as envisaged by Patočka’s writings, participates in the action of de-grounding and regrounding society and existence in general. The actions of the spiritual man who throws ‘the non-self-evident nature of the reality’ into the face of society are political, not metaphysical or philosophical. The ‘non-self-evident nature of the reality’ is the ground/foundation which we do not see or experience because we do not have access to ontology as such; we infer it from the ontic practices. This throwing, as well as the actions of breaking-through and permanent questioning, amounts to an act of de-grounding society. De-grounding does not lead to the disappearance of the ground, but to an ‘ontological weakening of grounds’,48 as authors who have

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made the ‘ontological turn’ in political theory argue.49 As a result, foundations are regarded both as ‘fundamental and contestable’.50 What becomes problematic is not the existence of foundations but their ontological status, which is seen now as ‘necessarily contingent’,51 meaning that society is always constituted in the eternal move between attempts at some form of grounding and the failure of such efforts due to the radical contingency underlying all experiences. Similarly, for Patočka, politics steps in as a ground, not one to occupy the vacant place, but as a constant vigilance not to permit a contingent ground to become eternal: ‘Political life as life in an urgent time, in a time to […] this constant vigilance is at the same time a permanent uprootedness, lack of foundation’.52 Thus, the awareness of contingent grounds also displays the ‘political nature of being-qua-being, the political nature – in quasitranscendental terms – of all possible being, and not simply the nature of the “good regime” or a “well-ordered society”’.53 The affirmation ‘everything is political’ – already a cliché – does not literally mean that everything is political, but that the ground of everything is political. This primacy of the political is expressed by Patočka as well, who says that politics brings a renewal of life meanings and has ‘seeds’ of new meanings of other human endeavours: ‘The renewal of life’s meaning in the rise of political life bears within it the seeds of philosophical life as well’.54 Thus, for Patočka, regrounding through politics is a ‘permanent uprootedness’. It functions as ground only to the extent that it keeps the place of the final ground empty not allowing a contingent grounding to occupy the place of the final ground permanently. Politics can perform this function of the groundless ground because it is an exercise of freedom: ‘Political life in its original and primordial form is nothing other than active freedom’,55 affirms Patočka. Freedom proceeds by giving ground and, at the same time, taking and withholding it, standing in a reciprocal conditioning with shaking and problematicity of meaning. This co-substantiality of politics and grounds is the radical core of Patočka’s political philosophy. The word ‘radical’ comes from the Latin radix, meaning ‘roots’, that is, grounds and foundations, and the radicalness of the contemporary political philosophy is usually established by the extent by which it concerns the roots of society and politics. The radicalness of de-grounding and regrounding move in the movement of breaking-through, as an ontological dimension of Patočka’s vision of politics, and does not leave intact the ontic manifestation of politics, urging us to see under the appearances of peace and consensus the inevitable conflictual everyday politics. Politics cannot be carried out otherwise than in conditions of disagreement, dissent, and contestability, and this reveals an agonistic dimension of Patočka’s thought. The aim of the next section is to examine how these two dimensions – radical and agonistic – merge in Patočka’s political theory.

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PATOČKA’S POLITICS: RADICAL OR AGONISTIC? Patočka’s understanding of politics as the political is a rupture and breakingthrough of the established meanings and existing grounds. It is, at the same time, an expression of the human capacity for ‘renewal of life’s meaning’, that is, to open new possibilities and to create new ways of being in the world. This vision of politics is similar to the arguments on radical political theory and radical democracy associated with A. Badiou, R. Wolin, E. Laclau, J. Rancière, S. Žižek, and others, who see true politics and democracy as an event, a moment, or a rupture. For example, for Rancière, politics entails a dis-identification from the roles and identities of the existing ‘police order’ and the production of a new political subject by acting on the assumption of equality. Political action disturbs or subverts the existing ‘order of the sensible’, the order of what is sayable, hearable, or visible, and makes it possible for a new political subject to appear.56 As we can see, there is one main common feature – the rupture – between theories of radical politics/democracy and Patočka’s vision of politics as shaking the given meanings/grounds. For the authors advancing visions of radical democracy, all other moments after disruption are nothing else than the repetition of the ‘police’ or existing administrative orders. For Patočka, the radicalness of the breaking-through is perpetuated in the permanent problematicity of life and meaning that has to guide everyday activities. Thus, Patočka’s political philosophy contains not only elements of radical political theory, but also elements of an agonistic political theory. The three core features that mark the agonistic dimension of a political theory are pluralism, tragedy, and the value of conflict.57 I will describe these here very briefly. These core features are identified in the genealogy of agonism from Greek antiquity to the contemporary agonistic authors like W. Connolly, Ch. Mouffe, J. Tully, B. Honig, and others. Pluralism of agonism is not a fact; it does not refer to differences among groups and individuals, but to the conditions that constitute their identities.58 This is a pluralism at the level of grounds, illustrating that every ethical and political decision is groundless and contingent, that a decision was chosen from a plurality of decisions, and a ground was taken as a ground from a plurality of foundational attempts. Groundlessness, contingency, and openness do not mean relativism – that anything goes – but a constitutive pluralism.59 Tragedy is cosubstantive to agon, meaning conflict or strife, and refers to a world without hope of final redemption from suffering and strife. Agonism sees conflict and suffering as endemic in social and political life and not as a temporary condition on a journey towards reconciliation and redemption. However, this tragic vision is not one of powerlessness in a cosmos of fate. As Honig says, tragedy manifests itself ‘in a call for action’.60 Agonism is an approach concerned

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with the capacity of human agents to challenge the tragic forces that seek to govern their lives and determine their conduct. And this view of tragedy and action can be traced in Nietzsche’s account on the birth of tragedy, but mainly in the Greek concept of agon and in Greek tragedies. Another core feature of contemporary agonism concerns conflict as a value and a political good in itself because it keeps democracy and pluralism alive. As Mouffe argues, in a ‘democratic polity, conflicts and confrontations, far from being a sign of imperfection, indicate that democracy is alive and inhabited by pluralism’.61 Conflict is the crucial topic of agonism since its ancient beginnings; however, modern and postmodern agonism transforms the ancient vision of conflict as striving for distinction and excellence among individuals, to a struggle for realizing political equality in a situation of social inequality and a struggle against social and political exclusion.62 A more extended analysis of the democratic agon is beyond the scope of this chapter, but for our purposes, here, conflict has to be understood as democratic conflict.63 Patočka’s political thought displays these three core features of agonism in a rather original way. We do not find in Patočka’s writings elaborations on pluralism or difference, but pluralism is included in his argument on the problematicity of meaning, which means that no single account of the good can ever gain universal acceptance and the conflict over the ends and goals is inevitable. The meaning of knowable reality is a product of human practice, and human practices are plural: ‘Things have no meaning for themselves, rather, their meaning requires that someone “have a sense” for them: thus meaning is not originally lodged in what is but in that openness, in that understanding for them’.64 Meaning is always on a horizon related necessarily to the previous meanings but also to openness: ‘we are no less open for the meaningful than for meaningless, signifying nothing. What does this mean if not the problematic nature of all meaningfulness?’65 So, the constitutive pluralism comes from the contingency of the meaning: the absolute/final meaning is problematic and this gives room for a plurality of meanings. The tragic vision in Patočka’s thought also comes from the problematicity of meaning. The meaningless is not a temporary condition on a journey towards reconciliation, redemption, meaningfulness, and bliss. Patočka’s assumption that humans have to give up the hope of a directly given meaning and to accept the ‘meaning as a way’ points to the tragic dimension of the world, and at the same time it is a call for action. Humans are called to commit themselves to continuous interrogation and contestation of the contingently formed meanings and grounds. The text ‘The Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War’ is an especially evocative expression of this tragic vision. Here Patočka equates or even subordinates the values of ‘peace’ and the ‘day’ to that of ‘war’ and ‘darkness’. The evocation

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of ‘darkness’ over ‘light’ or ‘day’ is meant to reintroduce the notion of uncertainty and problematicity as an inevitable component of human existence. The preference for light and day, the looking for absolute certainties generates wars. War begins in an attempt to create an illusion of security by naturalizing our meanings and seeing other meanings and possibilities as deviant and dangerous: ‘The most pleasing slogans of the day […] in reality call to war, whether they invoke the nation, the state, classless society, world unity or whatever other appeal’.67 In the longing for a final eschatological peace, conflicts and contingencies are considered barriers that should be eliminated, but for Patočka there is an urgency to accept the darkness and night as consubstantial of our condition: ‘To shake the everydayness of the fact-crunchers and routine minds, to make them aware that their place is on the site of the front’.68 This does not mean to accept tragedy on the front line as a fate – the front line is the condition for acting within the permanent struggle between ‘darkness’ and ‘light.’ Patočka calls the perpetual struggle between light and darkness polemos,69 which is not, for the Czech thinker, only an intrinsic aspect of life, but is also ‘the primordial insight that makes philosophy possible’.70 Polemos is the attempt to embody the groundless ground of society – its ontological dimension – in the everyday functioning of society: ‘To see the world and life as a whole means to see polemos’.71 Polemos is the conceptual form par excellence of expressing the value of conflict, as another core of democratic agonism. Polemos is often understood as war, but for Patočka it is the end of the war, even the only way of ending a war and the main source of cohesion: ‘polemos is not the destructive force of the wild brigand but rather is a creator of unity. The unity it founds is more profound that any ephemeral empathy or coalition of interests’.72 The unity of polemos is a negative one and guarantees that nobody can incarnate the meaning of the whole, that any such pretension will be contested/questioned/debated: ‘Polemos binds together the contending parties, not only because it stands over them but because in it they are at one’.73 Also, polemos could be understood as ‘institutionalization’ of conflict: ‘One cannot be a citizen – polites – except in a community of some against others. […] The conflict gives rise to the tension, the tenor of the life of the polis, the shape of the space of freedom that citizens both offer and deny to each other’.74 The citizens in polemos perform the famous Patočkian ‘solidarity of the shaken’ which is ‘solidarity of those who are capable of understanding what life and death are about, and so what history is about’.75 In other words, the solidarity of the shaken is a negative solidarity of those who understand the problematicity of meaning, who say ‘No’ to mobilization for an ultimate meaning, and whose main reason for being solidary in a society is to protect problematicity and to avoid solidification of meaning and imposition of certainties.

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As we can see, Patočka’s philosophy contains elements of both radical and agonistic political theories. This is a rather specific approach, with a certain advantage over political theories that are only radical, emphasizing rupture, or agonistic, emphasizing conflict. Radical approaches usually do not give an account of what happens after rupture, taking all that happens to be nothing else than repetition of ‘police order’ and perpetuation of the existing administrative order. Similarly, agonistic approaches have a limited account on the very movement of (de)grounding of the society within which agonistic conflict is valued. In Patočka’s political thought, the idea of rupture is commensurate with pluralism, polemos, and conflict. The given meaning/ground/ law is not an incontestable command, which can be resisted and redirected by agonistic politics, but not changed. The given meaning/ground/law can be changed and regrounded in the movement of breaking-through. Thus, in Patočka’s political thinking, the insights of the radical political theory, which accounts mainly for the radicality and singularity of the event, merges with the insights of agonistic political theory, which accounts mainly for disagreement and conflict as a practice. However, the potential of Patočka’s political philosophy is not yet exhausted. This confluence of radical and agonistic elements in Patočka’s political thought contains, as well, an outline of a vision of democracy that is both radical and agonistic, and the next section will briefly trace the elements of this vision of democracy. A DEMOCRATIC THINKING Patočka did not elaborate a political philosophy, but he defined politics in his writings on other topics, and this allows for the mapping of a political theory in his work. But he has never written about democracy. Then, how is it possible to attribute a vision of democracy to someone who did not write/say anything about democracy? Can one express a vision of democracy without intending this? Is a vision of democracy a by-product of other philosophical approaches? All these questions are challenging, but they do not invalidate the attempt to identify a vision of democracy in Patočka’s work. Two quasimethodological aspects have to be mentioned here. First, in order to see the vision of democracy in rather sparse statements on permanent questioning or problematicity of meaning, the standard understanding of democracy as a form of government or an electoral process has to be put in parentheses. The vision of democracy as a permanent questioning becomes pertinent if it is related to the framework of radical and agonistic democracy. Patočka wrote his texts before all of the radical and agonistic authors mentioned above and one can even say that he elaborated on the conditions on agonistic and radical democracy avant la lettre. Nevertheless, the identification of the democratic

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vision in his texts depends on one’s readiness to accept the premises of agonistic and radical theories advanced after Patočka’s elaboration of his philosophy. Second, this section does not look for a full vision of democracy displayed by Patočka’s thought. It maps only two elements of such a vision: one referring to the grounds of democracy and another to democracy as a practice. These two elements reflect obviously the radical and agonistic dimensions of his political thought. The radical dimension of Patočka’s implicit vision of democracy pertains to the foundations of democracy. As argued above, his philosophy shows the contingency of meaning and grounds. But is the assessment of contingent foundations and meanings identical to affirming democracy? The link is not straightforward: one might adopt in political theory both contingency of foundations and a perspective of elites competing to generate more power and control. But this perspective cannot be an effect of Patočka’s thinking of politics, because it will fail to realize the permanent questioning. If in Patočka’s affirmations of politics the world ‘politics’ is substituted with the world ‘democracy’, we will have statements such as ‘Democracy in its original and primordial form is nothing other than active freedom’ or ‘Democracy starts in the moment of shaking the naïve/given meanings’. Could it be otherwise? When we have the absolute certainty of a given meaning, we do not have democracy but we have a politics based on God, or on absolute will of a king, or a totalitarian politics based on meanings cemented by an ideology. The permanent questioning is the shaken ground of democracy, similar to the dissolution of certainties as Lefort famously affirmed (Lefort 1988). Democracy has to accept meaning as a way, as a quest for meaning, that is, it has to accept and institutionalize humans’ perpetual looking for a meaning. Humans might find a meaning – a majority establish a consensus – but other meaning-seeking humans will subvert it looking for other meanings, and democracy must make possible all these searches for meaning. Democracy, with its set of procedures and institutions, has to guarantee the lack of absolute/final meaning or, in other words, the empty ground of society. Therefore, Patočka does not elaborate expressly on a vision of democracy, but democracy in order to be democracy has to accept Patočka’s insight into the problematicity of meaning, otherwise it will look for an absolute meaning, and even try to implement it, and in this way will stop being a democracy, giving place to an ideology that will look to inject certainties and to cement one meaning. So, Patočka’s notion of problematicity can be viewed as instituting democracy, as its groundless ground, and this is the radical element of his implicit view of democracy. The agonistic element of this vision of democracy starts immediately after the (de)grounding move. According to Patočka, in disarticulating/shaking/

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contesting the meaning of the world, we engage in a political activity. Patočka admits that permanent questioning and living in problematicity are not easy tasks and that a conditionality, a certain disposition, is needed in order to make the shaking of the meaning and the permanent questioning possible. The capacity to live with problematicity does not address only our rationality, but also a whole range of attitudes and this disposition can be called ethos. Ethos is the characteristic spirit, prevalent tone, or sentiment of individuals or community, providing an orientation/disposition towards everyday life. The idea of a conditionality of persons for being members of the democratic community, of ‘the people’, is not new; it was expressed by Rousseau, Mill, Dewey, and others. Dewey famously affirmed that ‘to say that democracy is only a form of government is like saying that home is a more or less geometrical arrangement of bricks and mortar’.76 Democracy is first and foremost a way of life, and even the normative and deliberative approaches of democracy assume this. For example, although Habermas affirmed the subjectivity of participants at deliberative democracy retreats into procedure, he admits that ‘even a proceduralized “popular sovereignty” of this sort cannot operate without the support of an accommodating political culture, without the basic attitudes, mediated by tradition and socialization, of a population accustomed to political freedom’.77 An agonistic ethos requiring an endorsement of tragedy and conflict is more demanding. For example, an agonistic ethos of critical responsiveness is advocated by Connolly for whom the cultivation of responsiveness is not pity or charity. The ethos of critical responsiveness is the way of accepting ‘the introduction of a new possibility of being out of old injuries’78 and this produces panic because the recognition of something new, of a new identity of others, requires us to revise our own terms of selfrecognition and a cultivation of a presumptive generosity towards the other. The permanent questioning and living in problematicity advanced by Patočka imply a disposition and a mindset that cannot be otherwise than democratic. The acceptance of questioning and problematicity requires and generates a democratic ethos that is different from the ethos of liberal or deliberative democracy created around democratic procedures. How then is this ethos acquired and expressed? Patočka admits that permanent questioning and living in problematicity are not easy tasks and asks if ‘a metanoesis of historic proportions’,79 which would make man capable of accepting responsibility for the meaninglessness, is possible. The possibility of a metanoesis or conversion of historic proportions depends essentially on the capacity to live with problematicity. But if the permanent questioning and living in problematicity require a ‘conversion’, then, is the democratic ethos a disposition that makes possible ‘conversion’ or, on the contrary, is it the result of ‘conversion’? Ethos can be conceived both as a result and precondition of the ‘conversion’, as an unending hermeneutic circle. A situation that facilitates

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the ‘conversion’ to the ethos of permanent questioning could be the front line described by Patočka. The front line is a limit phenomenon for a normative theory of democracy or for a liberal democratic culture, but for a radical and agonistic theory of democracy it has both the role of a de-grounding move and of a permanent ethos that does not allow the problematicity of meaning to be replaced with a set of certainties. The front line is the experience of contingency and finitude: confronting their finitude on the battlefront, the participants will understand the contingency of their own meanings, the contingency of the beliefs that brought them to the front line: ‘The enemy is no longer the absolute adversary in the way to the will of peace; he is not here only to be eliminated. The adversary is a fellow participant in the same situation, fellow discoverer of absolute freedom with whom agreement is possible in difference’.80 The process of accepting problematicity that happens at the front line is a matter of relating to the other – understanding problematicity means to allow space for the other with his identifications previously considered as ‘darkness’ and ‘night.’ This acceptance is not the acceptance of a new set of values – a new-found meaning or ground – it is the acceptance of the very problematicity of meanings, and this is a democratic transformation. According to Mouffe, the task of democracy is to transform antagonism of enemies into agonism of adversaries: ‘Envisaged from the point of view of “agonistic pluralism”, the aim of democratic politics is to construct the “them” in such a way that it is no longer perceived as an enemy to be destroyed, but an “adversary”, i.e. somebody whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question’.81 Thus, the front line, as described by Patočka, amounts to a conversion to an agonistic and democratic ethos, because everyone who attempts to be a democrat has to learn to contest given meanings and to allow his own meanings to be contested. Therefore, living in problematicity presupposes an agonistic democratic ethos. It is a necessary complement to the radicalness of the groundless grounds of democracy. This agonistic ethos perpetuates the radicalness of the de-grounding move, and is an ontic instantiation in the everyday politics of the ontological dimension of Patočka’s thinking of politics. As we can see, a vision of democracy is not a side effect of Patočka’s philosophical thought, but it is at the core of his philosophy. CONCLUDING REMARKS The framework of radical and agonistic political theory shows that Patočka is not a ‘non-political philosopher’. On the contrary, politics enjoys primacy in his work. Patočka’s political philosophy appears as a first philosophy and his entire work can be read as a ‘philosophy of the political’, insofar the political

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takes the role of the ground as ‘permanent uprootedness.’ Even more, this political philosophy is inevitably a thinking of democracy. The framework that plausibly validates Patočka’s political thought and his vision of democracy is a framework elaborated years, sometimes decades, after Patočka wrote his texts. How legitimate is this retrospective projection of radical and agonistic framework on Patočka’s thought? Retrospective projection might not be the right expression here, especially because there is a common source of Patočka and the most of contemporary continental political philosophy – Heidegger’s philosophy. Most of the authors elaborating versions of radical and agonistic politics – Lefort, Laclau, Mouffe, Badiou, Rancière, Nancy, Agamben – have been described as ‘Left Heideggerians’.82 These ‘theorists in France’,83 with the help of Heidegger, tried both to go beyond structuralism as the most advanced theoretical paradigm of their time, and to rework and direct Heidegger’s thought into a more progressive direction.84 The works of the ‘Left Heideggerianism’ share common features, such as a radicalized notion of the event that denotes the dislocating and disruptive moment in which foundations crumble, an emphasis on freedom and historicity founded precisely on the premise of the absence of a final foundation, an endless play between ground and abyss leading to acknowledgement of division, discord, and antagonism, and an awareness of the contingency of taken decisions. All these features have been traced back conceptually to Heidegger’s work.85 As we have seen, these features can be mapped in the works of Patočka as well. However, could Patočka be plausibly situated in the constellation of Left Heideggerians? As a student, Patočka studied with Husserl and Heidegger, and his phenomenology of the human ‘as being in and of the world’ is a development of what he considered unthought by his masters. By this biographical aspect, he could be closer to ‘Heidegger’s children’, as defined by Richard Wolin, who analyzes the oeuvre and trajectories of Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, and Herbert Marcuse,86 all of them direct pupils of Heidegger. These ‘children’ sought to ‘philosophize with Heidegger against Heidegger’ while trying to ‘cast off their mentor’s long and powerful shadow’.87 However, they were shaped by the same political and cultural transformations that formed Heidegger’s own worldview: ‘all accepted, willy-nilly, a series of deep-seated prejudices concerning the nature of political modernity – democracy, liberalism, individual rights, and so forth – that made it very difficult to articulate a meaningful theoretical standpoint in the postwar world’.88 Patočka, as well, did not embrace liberalism, liberal democracy, and other aspects of political modernity, but if the main feature of ‘Heidegger children’ are the anti-modern and anti-democratic tendencies, then Patočka cannot be plausibly considered one of them. His Heideggerian legacy is reworked in a more radical way, however without becoming ‘leftist’.

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Left Heideggerians took the permanent interrogation of metaphysical figures of foundation – such as totality, universality, essence, and ground – to unmask the many-faceted forms of power, exclusion, and inequality. From the absence of ground no necessary political consequence follows, therefore, to elaborate an explicitly leftist political theory staring form the question of ground is in itself a political decision.89 Patočka did not choose to expose exclusion and inequality through problematicity of life and meaning, and thus he cannot be considered a leftist in the usual sense of the term. The Heideggerian legacy is reactivated in Patočka’s political thinking and action in a way which is not ‘left’ or ‘right’, because ‘left’ or ‘right’ would mean to accept a minimal meaning as ground, while Patočka’s visions of politics perpetuates the very problematicity of meaning in the political stance of dissidence. His involvement in the dissidence movement of Charter 7790 amounts to a political decision resulting concomitantly from the concrete historical circumstances and from his philosophy. Dissidence perpetuates the event of breaking-through and the problematicity of life and meaning in an ongoing everyday confrontation with the ‘non-self-evident nature of reality.’ This ‘spirit’ of dissidence was taken over by other dissidents who defined themselves not as a political avant-garde advancing a positive programme, but as those who ‘shatter the world of appearances and unmask the real nature of power’.91 Thus, dissidence, both as a practice and an idea, is Patočka’s distinctive mark among ‘Heidegger’s Children’ and Left Heideggerians, and ‘embodies’ the radical and agonistic dimensions of his political thought. Therefore, the framework of radical and agonistic political theories validates Patočka’s thinking of politics. Here, the ‘strange mix’ of humanism and radical premises loses its ‘shocking’ effect, the Platonic inspired ‘caring for the soul’ and ‘living in truth’ become commensurate with polemos, the alleged metaphysics of human rights is dissolved in the permanent questioning, and the Heideggerian legacy is reworked in a radical way. Thus, the interference of Patočka’s philosophy and of the framework of radical and agonistic political theory has to be explored further for revealing the coherence, originality, and strength of Patočka’s political thinking.

NOTES 1. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 77. 2. Jan Patočka, ‘The Spiritual Person and the Intellectual’, in Living in Problematicity, ed. E. Manton (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2007), 56. 3. Eric Manton, ‘Political Philosophy of a Non-Political Philosopher’, in Living in Problematicity, 70–9.

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4. Richard Rorty, ‘The Seer of Prague’, The New Republic 205 (1991): 35–40; Petr Lom, ‘East Meets West – Jan Patočka and Richard Rorty on Freedom’, Political Theory 27, 4 (1999): 447–59; Edward L. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Philosophy and Politics in the Thought of Jan Patočka (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002). 5. Aviezier Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). 6. Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence, 48–51. 7. Ivan Chvatik, ‘Introduction: Jan Patočka and the European Heritage’, in Jan Patočka and the European Heritage, ed. Ivan Chvatík, Studia Phaenomenologica, VII (2007): 9–11. 8. Paul Ricouer, ‘Preface’, in Patočka, Heretical Essays, vii–xvi. 9. Rorty, ‘The Seer of Prague’. 10. Findlay, Caring for the Soul. 11. Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory: Political Difference in Nancy, Badiou, Lefort and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2007), 18–25. 12. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990); Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993); The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000); On the Political (London: Verso, 2005); Agonistics (London: Verso, 2013); Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 164–76 13. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 56. 14. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 17. 15. For an in-depth analysis of the difference between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ and what role it plays in post-foundational social and political thought and of the genealogy of this difference, see Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 35–61. 16. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26. 17. Ernst Vollrath, ‘Hannah Arendt: A German-American Jewess Views the United States – and Looks Back to Germany’, in Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (eds.), Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45–60; Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 38–41. 18. The dissociative political is expressed in the political theories of Mouffe, Laclau, and Rancière, and the associative political is restated by theorists such as Wolin, Nancy, and others. 19. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 213–55. 20. Laclau, New Reflections; Ernesto Laclau, ‘Introduction’, in Ernesto Laclau (ed.), The Making of Political Identities (New York; London: Verso, 1994), 1–8. 21. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 101; On the Political, 8–9. 22. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (London: Verso, 2005), 10–26. 23. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Jacques Rancière, ‘A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière’, Paralax 15, 3 (2009): 114–23. 24. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 44.

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25. Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political (London: Routledge, 1997). 26. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 80–108. 27. Rancière, Disagreement, 61–95. 28. Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1998), 155. 29. Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, 150. 30. Ibid., 151. 31. Lubica Učník, ‘Human Existence: Patočka’s Appropriation of Arendt’, in Chang-Chi Yu (ed.), Selected Essays from Asia and Pacific: Phenomenology in Dialogue with East Asian Tradition (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2010), 409–34. 32. Ricœur, ‘Preface’, viii. 33. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 140. 34. Ibid., 140–2. 35. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 61. 36. Patočka, ‘Life in Balance, Life in Amplitude’, in Living in Problematicity, 32. 37. Ibid., 33. 38. Ibid., 38. 39. Ibid., 39. 40. Ibid., 40. 41. Patočka, ‘The Spiritual Person and the Intellectual’, in Living in Problematicity, 54. 42. Ibid., 55. 43. Ibid., 56. 44. Ibid., 63. 45. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory. 46. For Patočka’s approach of supercivilization, the dangers of technicization and dehumanization of the post-European world See Jan Patočka, ‘La Surcivilisation at son conflict interne’ [Supercivilization and its Inner Conflict], in Liberté et sacrifice. Écrits politiques, ed. Erika Abrams (Grenoble: Millon, 1990), 99–180; ‘The Dangers of Technicization in Science According to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger according to M. Heidegger’, in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 327–39; Plato and Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); L’Europe après l’Europe (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2007). 47. Patočka, ‘Life in Balance, Life in Amplitude’, in Living in Problematicity, 38. 48. Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation. The Strength of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6–7. 49. This shift in the analysis from the ‘actually existing’ foundations to their conditions of possibility, that is to say to their ontological status, marks the ‘turn to ontology’ in post-foundational political theory, see White, Sustaining Affirmation, and William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 50. White, Sustaining Affirmation, 6. 51. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 15. 52. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 38.

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53. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 166. 54. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 40. 55. Ibid., 38. 56. Rancière, Disagreement. 57. Mark Wenman, Agonistic Democracy: Constituent Power in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 28–58; Andrew Schaap (ed.), Law and Agonistic Politics (London: Ashgate, 2009). 58. Wenman, Agonistic Democracy, 29. 59. Ibid., 31. 60. Bonnie Honig, ‘Antigone’s Laments. Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership and the Politics of Exception’, Political Theory 37, 1 (2009): 11. 61. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 34. 62. Andreas Kalyvas, ‘The Democratic Narcissus: The Agonism of the Ancients Compared to that of the (Post)Moderns’, in Schaap (ed.), Law and Agonistic Politics, 15–43. 63. For a systematic account of agonistic democracy, its core components, and of leading contemporary proponents of agonism, see Wenman, Agonistic Democracy; on the revival of the Ancient Greek notion of agonism in the radical legal and political theory in order to re-conceptualize the conditions of possibility of freedom and democracy in contemporary society see Schaap, Law and Agonistic Politics; for the ways of institutionalizing agonistic democracy see Ed Wingenbach, Institutionalizing Agnostic Democracy: Post-Foundationalism and Political Liberalism (London: Ashgate, 2011). 64. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 57. 65. Ibid., 57. 66. Ibid., 77. 67. Ibid., 136. 68. Ibid. 69. Patočka makes reference to Heraclitus’ Fragment 53: ‘War is both father and king of all; some he has shown forth as gods and others as men, some he has made slaves and others free’, see Charles H. Khan, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Heidegger offers his own interpretation of Fragment 53, in several of his texts, such as Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ or Introduction to Metaphysics, and thus Patočka’s attempt to rethink polemos might be part of his Heideggerian legacy. For an analysis of Heidegger’s discussion of Fragment 53 in earlier works, see Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 70. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 43. 71. Ibid., 42. 72. Ibid., 43. 73. Ibid., 118. 74. Ibid., 42. 75. Ibid., 43.

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76. John Dewey, ‘The Ethics of Democracy’, in The Early Works: 1882–1898, ed. J. A. Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 240. 77. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Popular Sovereignty as Procedure’, in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 59. 78. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, xv. 79. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 77. 80. Ibid., 131. 81. Mouffe, On the Political, 102. 82. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 2–8. 83. Marchart takes the notion of ‘Heideggerian Left’ from Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), who used the expression la gauche heideggerienne to describe the reception of Heidegger’s thought in France. Janicaud claimed that every French intellectual movement – from existentialism to psychoanalysis – was influenced by Heidegger; see Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 291–300. 84. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 2. 85. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory. 86. Wolin uses as well the expression ‘Left Heideggerianism’ but only to describe Marcuse’s Heideggerian legacy, which, according to Wolin, was present in his antimodern and anti-democratic tendencies, especially in his view on technology; see Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 134–73. 87. Wolin, Heidegger’s Children, 8. 88. Ibid., 8. 89. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 7–8. 90. Jan Patočka, ‘Two Charta 77 Texts’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 340–7. 91. For justification of the idea of dissidence from the perspective of Patočka’s philosophy see Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (London: Hutchinson, 1985), especially Havel’s ‘The Power of the Powerless’, 23–96. For an analysis of the influence of Patočka on Havel’s dissidence see Edward L. Findley, ‘Classical Ethics and Postmodern Critique: Political Philosophy in Vaclav Havel and Jan Patocka’, Review of Politics 61, 3 (1999), 403–38.

Chapter 16

Patočka’s Figures of Political Community* Marion Bernard

Could one describe Jan Patočka as a ‘political philosopher’? There is, in his thought, no political theory as such, nor state theory. Even what we could consider as the most ‘political’ side of the work dives into abyssal depths in search of sources of freedom, history, or Europe, and his texts seem so far from the current emergency of contemporary political developments that they remain enigmatic and appear ‘disconnected’. Despite this, an atmosphere of resistance radiates from his work, to the point that the French translator Erika Abrams chose to subtitle the collection Liberté et sacrifice: ‘Political Writings’. In fact, what is interesting here is that she assumes at the same time that it could have been gathered, as well, under a completely other banner, for example ‘Of The Spirit’.1 Certainly, where the soul and philosophical life are concerned, it is obvious that politics, in one sense or another, is involved. But in what sense? Politics, according to Patočka, refers to an almost ideal reversal of community, intrinsically linked to the historical emergence of philosophy, and at the same time representing the most personal path of all individual existence. And yet, it also remains always more or less missed or already lost, as an unachievable completion of the movement of existence and human history. What Patočka aims at then, in his own words, is politics ‘in its original and primordial form’.2 Because of this ‘original’ approach to political life, his political thought is hard to categorize. It is based on a complex ontology of the common, which makes the definition of politics itself and its borders problematic, referring them to an event that is both anthropological and cosmological, where what is taking place is a new way of being human, that is * Where English translations of Patočka’s texts were not available, I have used my own translations. I would especially like to thank Darian Meacham for his careful re-reading of this text.

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to say a new way of being-in-the-world. The transformation of human life occurring upon discovery of the political is due to the fact that politics represents the ideal achievement of the two fundamental conditions of human life: freedom and community. More precisely, the polis is the place where, for the first time, it becomes possible to face freedom as such, which is only possible if the community comes at the same time to itself. ‘The political is only found where the concept of life as being by and for freedom is given sense. This is not produced, as Hegel affirmed, by one man’s “consciousness of freedom” (the sovereign or the pharaoh). Man can essentially be conscious of freedom only in a community of equals’.3 Like Aristotle, Patočka makes philosophical and political life the eminent achievement of human existence, and he might almost takeover, beyond the scope of the Heideggerian ‘destruction’ of the philosophical tradition, the anthropological assertion that man is a political animal – an animal for which political life is the most prominent, essential and own capacity. However, applying to the community level what he learned from the lessons of Heidegger’s existential analysis, his conception of the common is not developed from the idea of a substantial individual, but rather from the world, that is to say from a cosmology. Because the world is what men have, in proper sense, in common. Politics is then only the reversal of a relationship to the world which is originally (i.e. to say before the emergence of political life) common, and that must be our starting point in grasping its meaning. The world is, for Patočka (referring to Heraclitus), polemical – its unity and individuating power is based on difference and conflict [polemos] between beings – and all forms of community (from family to political or philosophical community and work) are ways to face the polemical power of the world, which makes all being appear and at the same time puts them in danger and makes them disappear. This cosmic power also plays a role in social and historical relations. This means that the socio-historical dimension forms different concentric circles around the individual: the highest and most evident circle would be the political one, but it would be prepared by any community, including the most basic one, a community oriented towards base survival. All forms of community are for Patočka responses to the polemical power of the world. These three concepts, politics, community, polemos, are inseparable in Patočka’s thought, and what I propose here is to try to clarify the links between them. 1. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS: THE GENESIS OF POLITICAL COMMUNITY Human beings are ontologically so dependent upon one another that there is no trace anywhere in Patočka’s work of reflection on the origin of social life or on contractualism. Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology involves, in fact,

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an originally relational conception of existence. The first figure of Patočkian community – referred to as an ontological and phenomenological primacy – is the transcendental being in common of the movement of human existences. In his later work, Patočka develops a conception of three basic movements of human existence, structuring all human world, which at all levels implies the primacy of relational dimension over individual. He speaks first of the movement of anchoring ourselves or sinking roots in the world (childhood dimension), second, of the movement of prolongation of our stay in the world and seeking sustenance (work dimension), and finally of a third movement of self-transcendence, or breakthrough (arts, philosophy, sacrifice). And this theory is not only relational, but off-centric and dramatic, giving primacy to the others over the self, insofar as the ego is only able to individuate from a you who accepts it – as Patočka shows in his later work in his theory of personal space (I-Thou-It),4 but also from others who fight against it or enable it to devote itself to them. He thus breaks with Husserl’s conception of community as intersubjectivity (as neutral and balanced co-involvement of transcendental consciousnesses5), revealing instead a dynamic structure in which the subject is only a relational pole, which can never be taken for granted. Let’s discuss Patočka’s three movements theory in that regard. Instead of a relation of involvement or co-involvement of transcendental subjects, Patočka highlights first a movement of insertion, in which what binds the self to others is a first unbalanced relationship of dependency. In doing so, he takes into account a problem that was eliminated from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, or rather reduced: the question of the birth of new subjects. We are dealing, according to Patočka, not anymore with a constitution – or co-constitution of transcendental egos, but with the insertion of a phenomenal subject within a community – which should be protective, at best supporting the first individual movements and needs, but which also reflects the polemical power of the world, as it can at worst neglect, abandon, or even leave the newborn to die. On the one hand, Patočka offers a positive figure of the first family community, made of love and protective bonds that provide a vault for life, but on the other hand, he points out the absolute precariousness of the infant life, describing its own and specific existential mode as weakness and dependence. The community, first, is a vital need for the vulnerable human being. Now, radical weakness also means absolute domination within the first – and omnipotent – community (in the form of care, neglect, or abuse). For the newborn, the only free possibility on its own is to accept or refuse the assistance of others, which means in practical terms to accept or refuse to live. The first figure of freedom, as a corollary, is a weak or minimal figure – dependent entirely on acceptance (or rejection) by others. It goes hand-in-hand with the spatial character of personal relationships, in which the ego is originally decentred: the subject can only be called and inserted into the community

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if room is made and he or she is encouraged to move. Individuals depend on one another’s actions of inserting into a community. The individuation of individuals within the community depends on the relationships between those who are accepting them (e.g. family bonds that constitute the personal space in which individuation becomes possible). These primordial bonds are neither universal nor neutral: they have a socio-historically determined form. This form is transmitted from one generation to another; individuals can only make room for a new child just as others once made room for them. In the end, these bonds support individuals in the movement from protection to openness, from shelter to risk. Furthermore, acceptance and elementary safety are relative and de facto unequal. ‘In the security of this world that mediates and protects, one acquires the opportunities with which life will operate in the great world of work and struggle as if it was self-evident. [...] This is obviously a relative shelter, a relative protection, according to the circumstances and opportunities realized by our protectors in their adult life.’6 Dependence is not only biological, but also phenomenological, since the phenomenon itself is first opened via others. The phenomenon is not only historicized through epochs, but also socialized, through the different social opportunities of those who introduce us to the world. We find here, at the centre, Patočka’s first of three movements of human existence, the movement of acceptance, in which the relationship to others takes the form of a unilateral and unequally filled need – the germ of a social dialectic of risk and security as unequally supported among individuals or human groups – that continues lifelong throughout the different movements of human existence. The second movement, that is, the movement of ‘reproduction’ or ‘expansion’ of life, centred on work, both balances and increases the original inequality of human community in the organization of cooperation and struggle against the danger inherent in the world’s power. On the one hand, the dependence on adults, turning into reciprocity, is no longer absolute. In work, every individual becomes a means for others: ‘We mediate together the outside we use, we use each other’.7 But, on the other hand, the balance of forces is reversed in a struggle between men themselves, characterized by a principled injustice: the reciprocal possibility of using the other leads to the unilateral possibility of exploiting him, ‘of confining the other, either temporarily or permanently and systematically, in the role of providing for our needs’,8� or even the possibility of killing him for our own interests. If, in the first movement, there is a possibility of acceptance or rejection, in the second one, there is a possibility of exploitation. What goes along with this is consent or resistance to alienation. Domination turns into another figure: it is not absolute anymore (as in the family), but it becomes unjust. Work is ambiguous, it combines struggle against things and against the

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others in a complex tangle,9 as a new and unavoidable mediator of human relations.10 The second form of community is, thus, where inauthenticity takes place more than anywhere: the relationship to the world and to men is there deflected, avoided, mediated, and concealed by the commodification of work and the attempt to discharge its burden. Here again the meaning of the individual is extra-individual, in its social interchangeability. The most striking point in Patočka’s analysis is its cosmological foundation of the tendency to avoidance and social domination, referring it to the deepest world domination in general – to which man is singularly exposed, and that Patočka names as ‘primordial pressure’. The second community – one could call it avoidance community – is rooted in the primordial pressure of polemos on human movement: Community with things, penetration inside of things, appears at the same time as a way of modification and formation of human by themselves. As if the man was the work of the primordial pressure exerted by chaining of life to itself, with the possibility that follows, the use of man by man. As if the joint efforts of the men gave shape to a socio-cultural body more and more complex, a kind of superorganic body that precisely provides the scope of this movement in its present phase.11�

Acknowledging that sociality has its own status as such, Patočka thus departs from the Heideggerian analysis of the ‘they’ and of the chatter of the inauthentic community. This means that he recognizes somehow a form of unsurpassable truth of the ontic, which we cannot escape except by laying the burden upon others. The movement of self-projection is not essentially negative. Certainly, this movement is the place of extreme danger, including the death of man at the hands of other men. But as such, a fundamental struggle is playing out there, from which, only, a fully free conversion becomes possible. In other words, the ‘free’ community of those who achieved an internal conversion does not happen against or apart from the superficial social community – but rather as the reversal of that community, overcoming social everydayness. Unlike for Heidegger, the most inauthentic figure of community has for Patočka a dialectical sense, as it is a necessary phase of the movement of human existence. As for Plato and Arendt, the city for Patočka is not an ideal city, not only because of the free relationship between men but also because of the sharing of needs, the market square, walls, etc. Above all, the polis has several dimensions, so that the second movement of human existence takes part in the constitution and maintenance of the community. Finally, the progressive movements through different relational possibilities allow for an understanding of the question of moving on to a third sense of community: this time not as defence and avoidance, but as polemos and

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openness, within a community of sense, in myth, law, religion, science, art, philosophy, and politics. What leads human movement to this achievement is, via the distance of representation and action, the reversal of the relation to the totality of the world from avoidance into a more or less direct confrontation with it, which constitutes both a recognition of the cosmic power of totality and a distancing that creates place for sense. However, a reversal happens in this last dimension of community. Totality is not only what threatens me, but also what justifies and gives meaning to me, enabling me to use the primordial pressure of polemos to the benefit of the human world. The political commons accesses itself here, beyond avoidance, joining the common of the world which ontologically founds it. To some extent, the third figure of community just acts in the opposite way of the other two, since what binds people together, ultimately, is the openness to the world as totality against which they had to defend themselves in the first movements. And this is the deepest way of binding people together as a community. The third movement is therefore dynamically both the last and the first: from the beginning, even in a more or less mediate way, it is driving the other two and gives them concrete form. The true common is then not a sphere apart from other spheres, but a way to give meaning to all aspects of human being-in-common. In other words, as Patočka says himself, ‘society’ turns here into ‘community’ in the true sense: ‘There is not only struggle but also solidarity, there is not only society, but also community, and community has other bonds besides a common enemy’.12 Here, we come to the political problem. Openness to totality is the place of power: in mythical terms, the place of the sacred centre, which conceals, founds, protects, and, at the same time, threatens the existence of any human community. However Patočka does not confuse ‘power’ and ‘politics’: on the contrary he considers politics as an unprecedented form of power, emerging with the Greek polis and philosophy together as ‘history’, a form of openness where a community of equals is not based on anything other than itself. Instead of just relaying cosmic power, like sacred power does, political power happens by way of the shaking of power itself, facing the overpower freely and unsheltered – it is a reversal wherein security has to be found in risk, immortality in death, wisdom in astonishment. 2. THE NEGATIVE IDEAL OF POLITICAL COMMUNITY: ‘FREEDOM OF THE UNDAUNTED’ AND ‘SOLIDARITY OF THE SHAKEN’ Politics thus emerges as a specific historical way of openness to the world, but, at the same time, it constitutes an ideal form of openness. This tension

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is constantly present in Patočka and he does not elucidate the consequences. Two senses of community have then to be distinguished: the one that protects from the world, the other that opens to the world. As has been shown, in the third movement of human existence, the community is no longer opposed to the primordial pressure (by attempting to deviate it) – on the contrary it reflects it and receives its unconcealment, but this reflection can take two fundamental and opposing forms: one that is receptive and sensing, the form of the protective myth, or one that is seeing and acting, the form of the immanent freedom of historical – that is to say, philosophical and political – existence.13 ‘We can speak of history where life becomes free and whole, where it consciously builds room for an equally free life, not exhausted by mere acceptance, where […] humans dare undertake new attempts at bestowing meaning on themselves in the light of the way the being of the world into which they have been set manifests itself to them’.14 Even if Patočka criticizes progressive visions of history, he always tends to raise the historical-political community ‘above’ the other forms, as an authentic face-to-face with totality. And although he denies it,15 he can undoubtedly not avoid a form of Eurocentric idealization of the couple formed by philosophy and politics, which excludes all ‘non-historical’ humanities, and is supposed to describe both the source of Europe – he speaks of ‘original politics’16 – and the telos of any community: with the Greek polis ‘is born not only the Western world and its spirits but, perhaps, world history as such’.17 This idealization clearly differentiates Patočka from Arendt for several reasons. First, he thinks with and at the same time against Plato, the possibility of a true conversion, which would be both political and philosophical. In Arendt, the political sphere is far from being the keystone of any metaphysics of the common that would raise it as the ideal of true and authentic community. It is, on the contrary, characterized by unavoidable ambiguity and blindness. Arendt understands the very obscurity of politics, and radically criticizes the formal confusion, from Plato, between freedom and truth, or philosophy and politics. In addition, the telos of life in truth leads, according to Patočka, to a historical idealization which has been clearly rejected by Arendt. She, in fact, refuses the speculative exercise of any reconstruction of the history of humanity with the Greek city both as its beginning and summit. Contrary to Arendt, we could say that for Patočka political community in the strict sense is an ideal: it is what the community might be, what it came close to in Greece before deviating immediately out of authentic politics. In Patočka’s interpretation of history, European history opens and closes with two not only ideal but also elusive figures: the ‘freedom of the undaunted’ Greek warriors echoes the ‘solidarity of the shaken’ of the front of the First World War. Two parallel figures of a renewed link between men: wonder against shaking and undaunted freedom against courageous solidarity. Like

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for Heidegger, existence maintains itself in the first instance and for the most part inauthentically, we could say in a similar way that for Patočka the community is in the first instance and for the most part apolitical; anxiety in Heidegger, as individual unconcealment breaking everydayness, echoes in Patočka the risky and unsheltered life of warriors, as common unconcealment instantiates breaking the care for the security of prehistorical worlds. It is the conquest of this original and intangible politics, as impossible, which generates the ongoing dynamics of history. How can we explain the proper Patočkian idealization of the political community? It is rooted in cosmology, since what is happening here is a transmutation of existence, ‘a new way of being human’ as Patočka says in the Heretical Essays, through a form of return and coupling to the depth of cosmic polemos transcending any individuation: Polemos is not the destructive passion of a wild brigand but is, rather, the creator of unity. The unity it founds is more profound than any ephemeral sympathy or coalition of interests; adversaries meet in the shaking of a given meaning, and so create a new way of being human – perhaps the only mode that offers hope amid the storm of the world : the unity of the shaken but undaunted.18

In the context of another text devoted to the problem of space, Patočka uses the term ‘sacred transubstantiation’19 to describe the relation between the periphery and the world’s sacred centre through which it appears to men: now, here, we have a similar transfer, but this time to the direct unity of men themselves, without going through the mediation of sacred centrality. Like in Arendt, it is a matter of the public sphere: politics is the singular space of a direct relation between people and from that a direct affirmation of humanity, or rather one humanity, as community. We might as well use the expression ‘transubstantiation of shaken existences’, to talk about a kind of teleology of common individuation. A parallel with the thought of Gilbert Simondon, an extraordinary thinker of individuation, is productive here, although Simondon is starting from very different methodological assumptions, to understand the use of the word ‘transubstantiation’. Let’s try to clarify this relation. One could say that for Patočka, as for Simondon, the real achievement of the individuation of beings-in-the-world is not the individual as isolated, but the process leading to a higher level of individuation, a ‘transindividual’20 level, as Simondon clearly identifies. In Patočka, this existential transubstantiation has an ethical-political sense, because it ultimately happens through people’s dedication to each other, or ‘sacrifice’. Sacrifice in fact implies overcoming the fear of death (disappearance of my individuated being), and defending the common which binds us to others. As Simondon also argues, this self-divestment implies going through a form of disindividuation to achieve a higher unity.21 Sacrifice does not mean

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giving up oneself or praising death, but an access to a deeper dimension of life, of a more authentic self, which is the life in the community. It means regaining the world in us, that is to say, in Patočka’s words, the ‘supraindividual’: ‘In the relation between the you and the I takes place [...] the whole emptiness of heart, which is not only oriented towards singularities, but towards totality, towards supra-individual, towards omni-encompassing content’.22 Therefore, this community of solidarity offers a possibility of true immortality for finite existences, where the individual reaches a dimension beyond life and death.23 As in Simondon, the transindividual happens as an overcoming of individual individuation towards a higher individuation, which is ‘the collective’ for Simondon, or the ‘solidarity’ and the ‘community’ for Patočka. In both cases, one could say that this way of understanding politics is rooted in a sort of post-humanism, since what is at the heart of each individual is the depth of being, of the world as a whole, and the telos of human individuation is the common or collective. However, the form of this ‘supraindividuation’ in Patočka’s work is not the same as in Simondon’s. Simondon understands it as a broader individuation of the collective in general, as a place of meaning constitution where politics is only one among other modes, while Patočka reduces it to a historical and originary event, with which politics tends to fuse. The parallel stops here, as politics takes for Patočka an outstanding prominent status: first, granting it an unequalled dignity, he fuses it (in combination with philosophy) with the supra-individual turnaround, and then gives it the status of a quasi-ideal, unreachable peak. To further understand the status of political community, we will then look to the internal consistency of Patočka’s phenomenology. If Patočka understands politics as the eminent form of human community, the reason is finally that the phenomenology he develops is a polemical one, raising conflict as a constitutive and impassable ontological principle – whether cosmologically, existentially, or historically. Indeed, what culminates in politics is not only the community, but also the conflict consubstantial to it, since the cosmic power in which human freedom roots is none other than polemos. Thus, the conflict working in the first two movements of existence does not disappear here; on the contrary, it grows in the reversal of the third movement and of history – this time in a glorious way. The praise of the political sphere and of Greek city draws, ultimately, on the Heraclitean source, as Patočka thematizes supra-individuality not as merely a dissolution in the community, but, again and again, as a struggle. Politics is indeed not eminent because of the harmony of its constitution, but because it is an irreducible but fruitful conflict, generating acting power. For Patočka, like Arendt, rethinking politics seriously goes hand in hand with a shift in the analytical perspective, bringing back the individual not to a homogeneous unit, but to plurality and to the battle.

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For one, the genesis of the polis is not a process that can be precisely localized, attributed to these or those individuals; anonymous assumptions, contingencies of particular situations play a role here that cannot be quantified. […] Yet precisely the circumstance that the polis arises and sustains itself amid internal and external struggles, that it is inter arma that it finds its meaning and that long-sought word of Hellenic life, is characteristic for this new formation and new form of life. […] The spirit of the polis is a spirit of unity in conflict, in battle. One cannot be a citizen – polites – except in a community of some against others, and the conflict itself gives rise to the tension, the tenor of the life of the polis, the shape of freedom that citizens both offer and deny each other – offering themselves in seeking support and overcoming resistance.24

While Arendt rejects any historical teleology, and affirms the independence of the sphere of human plurality from any idealistic theory, Patočka praises the conflict in a complete opposed and original way that he developed from the 1950s in the theory of ‘negative Platonism’, by joining together conflict and ideal as negative drivers of history. He assumes, thus, in a new way, the idea of a sense of history, even if he considers this sense problematic. In other words, while renouncing any positive schematic, Patočka gradually develops a historical teleology of what Arendt, far for her part from any teleology, categorizes as darkness, unascribability, and unpredictability of action. By doing so, Patočka takes a heretical way between the classical historical evolutionism, Plato’s idealism, and Arendt’s thought of politics: playing off, so to speak, Arendt against Heidegger and Plato, but also, finally, Plato against Arendt and Heidegger, idealizing in a new way the political modality of community. On the one hand, he reaffirms with Plato the unity of the body politic, since individuals are actually subsumed under a common law or power. ‘Polemos is what is common. Polemos binds together the contending parties, not only because it stands over them but because in it they are at one. In it there arises the one, unitary power and will from which alone all laws and constitutions derive, however different they may be’.25 Now, this unity is that of polemos, that is, of the dissonant irreducibility of conflict, and not an individuality that overshadows the others. On the other hand, therefore, he thinks of the political unity against Plato, not as an overcoming of conflict, but as an encounter in the heart of the conflict itself, because the spark occurs only in opposition. That is why solidarity and war are essentially linked. Patočka identifies two inseparable meanings of polemos: one as opposition, the other as unification, intertwining them in this strange wording: ‘One can not be a citizen – polites – except in a community of some against others’.26 True community emerges in the confrontation; it is only there that the tension that creates unity lies. At the individual level, it could look like dislocation or dispersal. But at the common level, this tension actually opens space for human freedom.

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The conflict itself gives rise to the tension, the tenor of the life of the polis, the shape of the space of freedom that citizens both offer and deny each other – offering themselves in seeking support and overcoming resistance. Action itself, however, is in turn basically nothing but struggle, defence against others and attack whenever an opportunity arises.27

This new dimension of community is quite unique because it is negative and oppositional: men join together not in evidence, but through the impossibility of absolute evidence – through the shaking of the shared, common world – the ‘natural’ world in phenomenological parlance. Patočka chooses therefore the ‘solidarity of the shaken’ as the contemporary form of this community, where such paradoxical phenomena as prayer for the enemy occur. In this case, men are united across the gap between them, and it is precisely this gap that brings them together on the front lines, even though they share no common ground. Far from being an obstacle, the front as a limit is the key to transcendence, making it possible for men to form a new and whole kind of community: not on the basis of their positive identities, but instead from the distance between them fissuring their particular world, that is, from problematicity. The emergence of politics comes finally from an unresolved fragmentation of the different natural worlds, each claiming for the whole, ending the reign of evidence. This polemical mode of unity is both specific to the human soul and to the city, according to the famous analogy that Patočka takes to Plato: The soul is not ‘composed of parts’ like things. The division of the soul is of a quite different nature. The soul is divided in itself as a kingdom with different factions, with conflicts and quarrels. The soul is divided without losing its unity. It seeks to be the whole in every part, and the torment of its division is that its double self always speaks a language that the other party refuses and will not hear.28�

The drama of Europe is that this division was considered as a problem that must be overcome. Patočka tries to reverse the perspective – by making the division itself (from democratic factions, soul, front) a creator of unity both practical and theoretical. Because what emerges from this tension, impossible to appropriate by anyone in particular, is the ‘phronesis, understanding, [which] by the very nature of thing, cannot but be at once common and conflicted’.29 Highlighting the phenomenal fecundity of the plurality of perspectives, Patočka comes closest to Arendt and Habermas, except that he gives it a cosmological foundation. His position is ambiguous, as he recognizes on the one hand a form of definitive problematicity of history and politics, but grants Europe on the other a privilege of light, and finally a new and supreme kind of phenomenalizing power.

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3. CRITIQUE OF PATOČKA’S HIERARCHY OF COMMUNITIES The weakness of the Patočkian model is that it considers the supra-individual turnaround as a European privilege. By doing so, Patočka reveals the implicit dualism of his idealization of Greek politics, but also, more generally, of the ideal of uprooting oneself from the given. When the political community turns around towards the world itself, it implies actually something against which it turns away, or claims to overcome. Despite all precautions, the idealization of political community means, in parallel, the devaluation of other communities that Patočka confuses with the fact of ‘living just to live’,30 and among which we can identify two distinct categories: the so-called ‘mythical’ communities, outside Europe, and the economic or private communities, within Europe itself. It must be said that for a familiar reader of feminist and postcolonial studies, Patočka’s texts are not free from a kind of haughty and reductive attitude towards so-called ‘primitive’ humanities, and also implicitly towards vital activities related to household care, that is, to life. More precisely, the concept of political and philosophical freedom in Patočka’s thought actually requires both setting aside and pushing back these two ‘primitive’ – not to say inferior – modes of being human, while at the same time being supported by them. This means that the supra-individual community of the shaken, no matter how uniting, is still opposed to others, and aimed at annexing them. Indeed, according to Plato’s model, politics does not only replace traditional mythical or family links by a pure community of free warriors, it ensures its hierarchical superiority by imposing its new logic on the whole life. As a result, the emergence of a new political sphere transforms the pre-existing relationship between war and the safety of home. In pre-political life, as Patočka describes it, war surely exists, but serves the mere life: the warrior is supposed to fight to defend his safety – his home and family. Patočka opposes the circle of the interested struggle of ‘life for life’, the sacrifice or free risk – uprooted, without foundation – of new warriors whose ‘purpose is in free life as such, that of the others just like their own’.31 Paradoxically, risking life ‘for nothing’ brings one to a higher level of security: the struggle for security turns into a struggle which provides security in itself, a ‘securing’ struggle. In the polis, rootedness serves as a foundation for rootlessness, home serves for war and free risk. Patočka therefore grants the Greek city the exclusive invention of the struggle for struggle. For sure, this privilege remains more than questionable, and at least ethnologically unjustified. It is as if Patočka needed to make a caricature of the mere life in vital chains in order to seize the political ideal in its pure form. This idealization of the freedom of Greek warriors goes together with an offensive conception of the relationship between the different modes of existence. Politics would be indeed impossible without home, but it still

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uproots from it and puts it in its service: ‘With the emergence of politics, economy gets a new meaning, as auxiliary.’32 The economy is auxiliary and opponent at the same time, or even auxiliary as opponent, since according to Patočka it is as if freedom doubly needed the safety of home – not only for its security, but as an opponent to fight: This new mode is protected from the unfreedom of natural cyclicity by the domestic security offered by the oikos, the household that provides for life’s needs; as protection against its own inner trend to rest, routine, and relaxation it has the stimulus of the public openness which not only offers opportunities but also ever lies in wait to seize them.33

Patočka highlights, here, that the needs of the ‘household’ means, at the same time, the fight against its ‘inner trend to routine’. But he seems to ignore the fact that the ‘household’ consists of concrete interpersonal relationships and is based on the social division of vital and existential functions. The opposition of warriors and household repeats then, but in a contemporaneous way, the Eurocentric opposition between myth and history – obliterating the slavery and sexist origin of this division.34 Yet Patočka’s views on vital security are not only negative. Indeed, depending on whether it comes to the protection of life, or to the liberation of existence, he alternately resorts to two different models of community: the one as sheltering, and the other as unsheltering. One the one hand, in the texts devoted to the first movement of existence, there is a beautiful praise of the protective vault formed by love between two human beings and sheltering the child, a praise of mutual support of people, of home, and of the quiet life of first communities that function as large ‘households’. Describing love, Patočka writes: ‘This mutual support, building a vault over exposure to freezing cold of the alien, creates a sheltered area through which the world, the “other” that I am not, responds to the call of my deepest misery, of my state of complete necessity’.35 Far from being merely subordinate, the ‘protective’ community then has its own ideal as well. However, we must acknowledge that the metaphor of the ‘vault’ is the very opposite of that of the ‘unsheltering’ in which shaken existences can join. Yet between vault and shaking, Patočka ultimately chooses to value the shaking, and bonds of mortality and uprootedness then finally take precedence over those of natality: Political life as life in an urgent time, in a time to […], this constant vigilance is at the same time a permanent uprootedness, lack of foundation. Here, life does not stand on the firm ground of generative continuity, it is not backed by the dark earth, but only by darkness, that is, it is ever confronted by its finitude and the permanent precariousness of life.36

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As a consequence of this division, the profound unity of the supra-individual community encounters a limit, which constitutes, strictly speaking, the problem of the natural world qua problem of the opposition between life in the security of evidence and life in problematicity, between mythical and historical communities, or also between household and public sphere. So this is the ultimate division of humanity that we face, and which may be more or less considered as a blind spot to Patočka, depending on how it is interpreted. According to Hubert Faes for example,37� this historical dualism would lead Patočka paradoxically to consider primitive communities as humanities ‘without world’, since there is for him, in the beginning of history, the crossing of a border opening for the first time a true and free relationship to the world as such. Although this interpretation may be tough, it points out at least an inconsistency in Patočka’s thought, which maintains in human history something from Plato’s elitism of souls, leading to an elitism of communities. What remains problematic is the idea of an authentic common as a privilege, joining together elected people, whose souls would have passed through the experience of the shaking; this idea nonetheless orients Patočka’s entire theory of the movements of human existence and of history. The difficulty lies clearly in Patočka’s Eurocentrism, but also affects the coherence of his thought, since this historical elitism seems to contradict the recognition of the definitive problematicity of history; and, furthermore, according to the negative reinterpretation of Platonism by Patočka,38 it seems to be without theoretical foundation. How is it possible at the same time to assume that the common is only something negative, and to reserve this privilege to some specific historical humanity? The truth is that Patočka himself writes: A source of possibilities is to be found that is common to both the prehistoric and the historic man, civilized as well as primitive, in high as well as primitive cultures. The issue is to reveal the foundation in which all these possibilities have their source. As long as this foundation, common to all forms of humanity, however diverse, is not rescued from oblivion, no effective dialogue between ‘cultures’ and ‘humanities’ is possible, since the ‘exchange’ will never start from the common, but every time from a specific and a particular which we would try to pose as the universal.39�

Therefore, the issue of the common should necessarily concern all forms of humanity, however diverse.40 Nevertheless, by interpreting the problem of the natural world as the opposition of the ‘problematic character of historical humanity’ to ‘the naïve, absolute certitude of the humanity of prehistory’,41 as Paul Ricœur puts it in his preface to the French edition of the Heretical Essays, Patočka opens a radical question and at the same time barely

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sketches the issue of the common meeting ground between mythical and historical humanities, even if he agrees with Lévi-Strauss to say that ‘man had no greater experience of himself’42 than in this historic encounter after the discovery of the New World at the end of the fifteenth century. On one side, men can be united by nothing but the world itself (common of all commons), on the other, Patočka seems to attribute to Europe the privilege to provoke and lead the encounter with others. Now, there is, here, a theoretical difficulty that Patočka does not pursue, although he points it out: ‘The “natural man” in the modern sense is always merely a schema, a schema of the problem of humanity’.43 Now how could the encounter be unilaterally guided by Europe? And how could it have been possible if mythical communities – as well as communities of work or family – were not also facing a possibility of radical uprooting from the given – that is to say if they were not themselves fully in relation to the world as such? Thus, Patočka’s theory on different forms of community is both a goldmine and a place of serious pitfalls for the contemporary reader. It decisively overtakes any individualistic approach in favour of a relational approach of human existence, whether in vital rooting, work, or freedom as such, wherein political analysis can be introduced without discontinuity. Finally, by posing the problem of the natural world from a post-European perspective and developing a ‘negative universalism’ where the achievement of history paradoxically merges with problematicity, Patočka comes close to the great contemporary issue in which the new generation of researchers of subaltern, postcolonial, or decolonial studies will be engulfed, imposing a further deconstruction of the ‘neutral’ unity of political community and European privilege. Meanwhile, Patočka has both the merit of not avoiding the issue and the weakness of thematizing it in a way that remains Eurocentric, hence missing the potential of his own redefinition of community. There is no doubt he would have fruitfully pursued these reflections, started in the 1970s, had he not died prematurely after a long and exhaustive interrogation by the Czechoslovak police, precisely at a time when his thinking on history was both new, prolific, and still unfinished. Let his heirs therefore follow in his footsteps.

NOTES 1. See Abrams’s foreword to her translation: Jan Patočka, Liberté et sacrifice. Écrits politiques (Grenoble: Millon, 1990), 5. 2. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohak (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 142. 3. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 142.

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4. See Jan Patočka, ‘L’espace et sa problématique’ [Space and its Problematic], in Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie?, ed. and trans. Erica Abrams (Grenoble: Millon 1988), 49. 5. Husserl, in his writings on intersubjectivity, describes coexistence as an intentional involvement: ‘I, as transcendental, am absolutely and I am my absolute being, in which is that I am as I am for me and am included in the constitution of a universe of transcendantal co-I. I cannot be who I am without the others who are so for me, the others can not be without me. The intentional involvement is necessity of transcendental coexistence’. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil, Hua. XV, ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973), 370. All translations from German and French are my own. 6. Jan Patočka, ‘Méditation sur “Le Monde naturel comme problème philosophique”’ [The ‘Natural World’ in Meditations by the Author Thirty-Three Years Later], in Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 109. 7. Ibid., 116. 8. Ibid. 9. Patočka explains the entanglement of the struggle against things and against the men in the following lines: ‘The organized figure of the movement of selfprojection is shared between work and struggle. Work and struggle are essentially different principles: in work man faces things, in struggle he faces men as virtually enslaved or enslavers. In practice, the two are combined: the organization of man for the purpose of work is the result of a struggle and is a struggle itself’. Ibid. 10. Regarding work’s mediation of the relation to the world, Patočka writes: ‘We are mutually related to each other, and to things, by an intricately mediate and generally unequal link. The most important is the medium term – the mediator between needs and things, the outside: it is the primary work’. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 117. 12. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 149. 13. Ibid., 42. 14. Ibid., 40–1. 15. Actually, his reserve is mainly due to the Platonic nature of this idealization. As he writes: ‘These reflections should not be understood as an idealization of the Greek polis, as if it arose from the spirit of selfless devotion to “the common good”, analogous to the perspective of the guardians, as it is postulated – not described – in Plato’s Republic’. Ibid., 41. The idealization of politics is not in question in itself, but in its positive conception, as harmonious. 16. Ibid., 143. 17. Ibid., 41 (for an alternate take on the role of telos in Patočka’s thought see Riccardo Paparusso’s contribution to this volume – ed.). 18. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 43. 19. Patočka, ‘L’espace et sa problématique’, in Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie?, 67. 20. See Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective, à la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 19.

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21. This dis-individuation appears in Simondon through the figure of individual anguish. The individual must, so to speak, die to himself, to go through a further and higher individuation. In anguish the subject feels as if he was a problem to himself, he feels his own division between preindividual nature and individuated being – and precisely the only resolution of this conflict is the transition to the transindividual level (Simondon, L’Individuation psychique et collective, 111). 22. Patočka, ‘L’espace et sa problématique’, in Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie?, 56. 23. See the very fine text ‘Phénoménologie de la vie après la mort’ [Phenomenology of Life after Death] (1967), in Jan Patočka, Papiers phénoménologiques, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Grenoble: Millon, 1995), 145–56. 24. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 41–2. 25. Ibid., 42 26. Ibid., 41–2. 27. Ibid., 42. 28. Jan Patočka, Platon et l’Europe, ed. Erika Abrams and Jiří Němec (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1983), 309. 29. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 42. 30. Ibid., 141. Significantly, Patočka uses the same expression of ‘life for life’ to describe the Mitsein of the they in Heidegger (See Jan Patočka, ‘Note de travail: 17d. La sphère noématique et l’ouvert’ [Note: 17d], in Papiers phénoménologiques, 270). That is, ‘primitive’ humanities are here associated with an inauthentic mode of historicity. 31. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 21. 32. Ibid., 148. 33. Ibid., 38. 34. See on this issue the analogous critique that Françoise Collin addresses to Arendt (Françoise Collin, ‘Agir et donné’, in Anne-Marie Roviello and Maurice Weyembergh (eds.), Hannah Arendt et la modernité (Paris: Vrin, 1992), 44. 35. Patočka, ‘Méditation sur “Le Monde naturel comme problème philosophique”’, in Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine, 113. 36. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 39. 37. See the paper that Hubert Faes writes about Arendt and Patočka: Hubert Faes, ‘Naturalité, artificialité, historicité du monde commun. Hannah Arendt et Jan Patočka’, in Natalie Frogneux (ed.), Jan Patočka, Liberté, existence et monde commun (Argenteuil: Le Cercle Herméneutique, 2012), 31–42. Faes, in this article, makes ‘world’ and ‘history’ fully coincide in Patočka. As if the natural world, a-historic or prehistoric, was not strictly speaking a ‘world’, insofar as it does not manifest itself as such, and as if we could only speak of the ‘world’, paradoxically, when the event of history and free existence occurs. By doing so, Patočka would miss the world as such. According to him, only ‘historic’ humanity would then be in relation to the world, which seems to me, surely, to caricature Patočka’s thought, but nevertheless is undeniably and at the same time a logical consequence of his assertions about history. See also the critical review of this article: Marion Bernard, ‘Etude critique de J. Patočka. Liberté, existence et monde commun, dir. Nathalie Frogneux’, Revue philosophique de Louvain 112, 3 (2014): 573–86.

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38. See the theory of negative Platonism, Jan Patočka, ‘Negative Platonism: Reflections concerning the Rise, the Scope, and the Demise of Metaphysics – and Whether Philosophy Can Survive It’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka, Philosophy and Selected Writings, 175–206. 39. Jan Patočka, ‘Réflexion sur l’Europe’ [The Self-Reflection of Europe], in Liberté et sacrifice, 212. 40. Patočka develops the idea of a deepening of the meaning of universalism by a method of ‘variative’ grasping of the common: ‘The task of grasping the “natural” world is identified with grasping that about man that is independent of the historical contingencies of his development, that about him that can be abstracted from its variations by retaining what is common to all the modalities of human life.’ Patočka, ‘The “Natural” World and Phenomenology’, in Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. Kohák, 249. 41. Paul Ricœur, ‘Preface to the French edition of Jan Patočka’s Heretical Essays’, in Patočka, Heretical Essays, ix. 42. Patočka, ‘The “Natural” World and Phenomenology’, in Kohák, Philosophy and Selected Writings, 250 43. Ibid.

Chapter 17

This is a Mathematical Certainty Patočka and the Neoliberal Ideology Ľubica Učník

A spiral of ‘technicization of politics’ emerges between the new visibility of ‘the facts’ and the imperative of increased technical expertise to gather and interpret them. […] Numbers are part of the techniques of objectivity that establish what it is for a decision to be ‘disinterested’.1

In this chapter, I will reflect on our present age in an attempt to understand the shift in our political consciousness; a time in which, according to many commentators, homo politicus has been reduced to homo oeconomicus, when accounting has replaced politics,2 and when many social advancements achieved in the 1960s are gradually being eroded. What kind of society do we live in now? Today, the state has become the extended hand of corporations; outsourcing health and community services, prisons, immigration, detention centres, and education to moneymaking private businesses. At the same time, humans are configured either as nothing more than a bundle of needs and desires that the market is thought sufficient to fulfil; or must become ruthless entrepreneurs of their own ‘human capital’ interested only in ‘a series of investments’3 in competition with everyone. Given that the beginning of the modern era was marked by the rise of science based on mathematical, precise reasoning – proclaiming a challenge to the superstitions and unquestioned traditions of previous ages in order to put humans in charge of a better-imagined future – how did this state of affairs come about? How could humans, posited as rational agents by the new mode of thinking, end up reduced to clients or consumers eschewing their rights as citizens of the state, in a sphere where decisions that are nominally political are made only in the service of materialist advancement? This turn is now called neoliberal ideology, ‘a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms, quietly undoing basic elements of democracy’,4 whereby rational citizens become economic players 277

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in the marketplace, concerned only with their private lives. The questions that I will address here concern why we accept these changes in our everyday lives and why we do not question this commercialization of our culture. Quite frequently, to defend the commercialization, economization, and managerialism of the state, explanations are offered relating to the changes in the constitution of mass society – which, supposedly, needs to be ‘managed’ impartially and uniformly – by presenting information in a form such that every rational person can understand the presented facts. Public knowledge is equated with objectivity, stripped of any elitist remnants and offered as an impartial account of the public facts. These facts pertain to economic considerations only, which the market alone can balance. In opposition to this kind of argument, I will claim that this ‘impartiality’, presented as objectivity in the form (mostly) of statistics, leads to the transformation of all social aspects of existence to economics. This reduction is what the neoliberal ideology presents as the new common sense. In order to refute the claim that today, in the name of economic imperatives, the state must responsibly act as a good manager instead of taking ‘unprofitable’ actions such as providing support for the most vulnerable members of society, I simply point out that equating the state with the managerial function can only be done when political reasoning has already been replaced by economic reasoning. In order words, when the state is already reconfigured as one corporation among many others, with its proper function reduced to the fiscal management of its domain, economics can then be spoken of as the only way to understand society.5 Here, I will argue that this type of understanding of the social order has its beginning, if not yet instantiation, at the inception of mass society. I will examine specific texts in order to understand the shift in language that now slowly and insidiously structures how we come to think about events, ourselves, and others around us. The point of this chapter is to show that the thinkers who grappled with the emerging mass society were like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of a tradition to which they had become blind.6 Using Jan Patočka’s reflections, I will take a historical approach to the emerging forms of formalization, mathematization, and objectivity that are today used to characterize and describe society. I will stress that the quantitative configuration of society is an extension of the project of modern science, which started with Galileo.7 I. INTRODUCTION According to Patočka, people of the modern period are like the chariot in Phaedrus, pulled by two horses of very different stock.8 One horse is circling



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among heavenly bodies, as in a manège, directing our gaze up to see and behold ideas, while the other is dragging us down, speedily falling down a bottomless cataract.9 One horse stands for rational engagement with the world around us; the other signifies the expression of our bodily needs and desires. According to Plato, neither one nor the other can exist alone. We must balance our reason and desires; otherwise, we will forever be slaves to our passions, which will rule our lives. In a certain way, this is what the new society has decreed for all of us – desires are the only aim to aspire to. All our desires and needs – including those we are not even aware of – can be fulfilled by the market, which has no other function but to cater to these needs. But is this vision really what is happening around us? Why did we substitute the Kantian call for the autonomy of our thinking – sapere aude, dare to think10 – with the managerial lexicon that has cluttered the language of reason with that of ‘economic prosperity’, whereby ‘television [has turned] citizens into consumers, living rooms into salesrooms, and advertising into the prevailing vernacular of public address’?11 Why we do not question the transformation of society into one ruled by managerialism, neoliberalism, and finance capital? Obviously, each of these questions requires separate treatment and substantiation. Here, I want to look only at the structural changes in language that transpired between the beginnings of mass society and the present. I will claim that neoliberal discourses – presenting public goods as inefficient and in need of business to ‘save them’; the market as something ‘eternal and unchanging’;12 and people as ‘greedy, self-centred, and self-absorbed’ – are not entirely new. As noted already, this type of language was present in a nascent form in the early writings of thinkers who grappled with the emerging mass society. Those expressions clearly changed and with them our common sense, too. People no longer think about themselves as ‘selfish’,13 as Edward Filene describes them. Instead, in line with present-day, self-entrepreneurial logic, F. Diane Barth, a psychotherapist, teacher, and author in private practice in New York City, coaches us: ‘A certain amount of selfishness is healthy’.14 People have become entrepreneurs, investing in their own human capital by taking every opportunity to advance their portfolios to be able to present themselves favourably in the market, while moving ‘strategically in a world rife with risk’.15 My claim here is that with these discursive changes, our understanding of ourselves changed as well. To trace these mutations in our language, I will look at three thinkers who theorized about mass society at its inception. I want to show how the elements of objectification, universalization, mathematization – now under the banner of economizing discourses that litter our language – were beginning to formulate. These thinkers can be seen as three separate pillars that constitute the basis on which modern neoliberal society was eventually erected: Frederick W. Taylor, the inventor of modern scientific management; Edward Filene,

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discoverer of the concept of ‘buying power’ amid the birth-pangs of the new mass society;16 and Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda and the gravedigger for rational citizenry.17 However, as alluded to above, in taking into account Patočka’s historical analyses of supercivilization, it becomes evident that the ideas that were able to be disseminated to the masses with the rise of mass production and consumption were prefigured much earlier. So, before analysing the texts of these three thinkers, I will consider Patočka’s concept of supercivilization, which he began to develop in the early 1950s, to argue that these mathematizing and formalizing tendencies can be traced back to the beginning of the modern age. These tendencies originate in the domain of natural science; however, they are mutated when used in the sphere of society. For Patočka, if we ignore this unreflected transplantation of mathematical reasoning into the unquantifiable spheres of human affairs, we unwittingly reduce human meaning to formulaic knowledge. The Enlightenment thinkers dreamt of the rational organization of society, imagining that the successful methods of science, based on mathematical reasoning, could be transplanted into the social sphere to build a perfect society and secure perpetual peace. Instead, in this dreamt-up, formulaic vision of society, active rational people are reduced to exchangeable and substitutable points, intersecting with each other at the virtual nodes in the system. Participation in the public sphere, the discussion of people’s futures and the nature of the public good are passed on to the managers of the state and reconfigured as fiscal considerations only. Concomitant with these changes was the intrusion of numbers into public life. Numbers, especially in the form of statistics, were seen as the markers of objectivity and impartiality, and a sign of good government. ‘The discipline of science – of facts – was to be a forge of morality and character’.18 The science of government was the art of statistics, the art of numbers. As William B. Washburn said in 1871 – when addressing the causes of poverty – the focus of industrial reforms ‘should be to deal with statistics, to keep back nothing, to present no onesided picture, but as far as possible to collect all the facts, and leave them to speak for themselves’.19 A similar sentiment was expressed by Carroll D. Wright, a founder and later head of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics, who said that to serve ‘the public faithfully and honestly’ we must be ‘content to collect and publish facts without regard to individual bias or individual political sentiments’.20 Numbers were an unbiased description of facts that could be judged as if they were presented without any personal investment on the part of a government or a corporation. Through this technique, as Theodore Porter notes, the ideal of mechanical objectivity has by now been internalized by many practitioners of the method, who would like to see decisions made according to



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‘a routine that, once set in motion […] would – like the universe of the deists – run its course without further interference from the top’. This, the ideal of economists, originated as a form of political and bureaucratic culture.21

It is this vision of society that Patočka tries to think through. For him, the ‘ideal of mechanical objectivity’, creating models and routines to set the running of society on automatic pilot cannot be based on the notion of ‘the universe of the deists’. According to his analyses, the idea of the physical universe running by itself like well-oiled clockwork, without need of a deity to steer it, dates from the beginning of the modern period.

II. SUPERCIVILIZATION: OBJECTIVITY AND DISCIPLINE An objective statement is one that any other informed person would make about the same subject matter. [Here] at least two different senses of objectivity [are conflated]: following rules, and reaching truth.22

For Patočka, the present society – defined by him as supercivilization – is the outcome of a historical development that has utilized the objective character of the formal reasoning used in natural science to use and control not only nature but humans as well. He suggests that supercivilization came into being when the Galilean, formalized models of the new science created the new idea of universal reasoning, detached from the world of our living. As Porter also observes, ‘Nineteenth-century statisticians liked to boast [that] their science averaged away everything contingent, accidental, inexplicable, or personal, and left only large-scale regularities’. In the new culture, ‘in intellectual exchange, as in properly economic transactions, numbers are the medium through which dissimilar desires, needs, and expectations are somehow made commensurable’.23 According to Patočka, the most efficient area of rationalization of this type was capitalist production, with its work ethics, objectification of the world, and rationalization of all human relations, leading mathematics to become, as Jane Gleeson-White puts it, ‘the lingua franca of Europe’, steering in ‘a new era: the Age of Science’.24 Today, more than ever, the ‘language of quantification […] aims to supplant local cultures with systematic and rational methods’.25 The language of mathematics became the universal language that, today, spans the globe. Porter notes that ‘quantification is a technology of distance. The language of mathematics is highly structured and rule-bound. It exacts a severe discipline from its users, a discipline that is very nearly uniform over most of the globe. […] In public and scientific uses, […] mathematics

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(even more, perhaps, than law) has long been almost synonymous with rigor and universality’.26 In Patočka’s study, prior to the modern age, no civilization could achieve universality of this kind, because the centre of power was a combination of the human and the divine, derived from non-rational powers that ruled over people’s lives. This ingrained human relationship to the divine (in different forms) provided the meaningful justification, based on faith, not only of how to live a good life, but also why to live it. For humans living in these civilizations, meaning was secured by their relation to divinity; fortifying the meaningfulness of human life with an ultimate purpose and secured place in the world. For better or worse, human meaning was defined and decreed by a transcendent deity surpassing finite human life and perishable nature. The place of humans was clearly delineated. Early civilizations were built on this difference between ‘human and divine; supra-rational and rational; rulers and the ruled’.27 In the everyday world of hardship and toil, the human and divine regions ‘penetrated and influenced’ each other. The divine was immediately present to humans.28 Humans knew their place within the divine and worldly scheme of things. As Patočka remarks, in a different context, ‘Christianity remains […] an unsurpassed but also un-thought human upswing that enabled humans to struggle against decadence’.29 God anchored relative human meaning with eternal, safe, unchanging divine meaning in the world, which can never be secure, except in the promise of God. This interpenetration and distinction between human and divine realms was eliminated in the new universal civilization, which Patočka calls supercivilization. Science, the foundation of this new civilization, reformulated humans’ understanding of nature and their place in the world. Under the influence of the new, mathematized science, the difference between heavenly and earthly regions collapsed. The world had become one physical universe ruled by natural laws, without God. Under the new scientific understanding, God was relegated to the margins, before being declared dead. The old metaphysical system was replaced by the new, mathematized science30 and its redefined search for knowledge under the sign of certitude. Nature ceased to be the creation of an omnipotent God and ‘was laid out before us as obvious in its quantifiable meaninglessness’,31 whereby all understanding was reduced ‘to the monotonous model of applied mathematics’.32 Here, nature becomes a self-running machine without telos, purpose, or meaning. But while this lack of a telos at first allowed science to not claim a final truth, to examine the physical world with an ‘open mind’, if you will, science’s subsequent mechanization of nature has now spread to all areas of life. It has extended to the sphere of economics and the world market, which have also been conceived on the mechanistic model.33



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Patočka speaks of three main directions that demarcate this modern supercivilization. The spiritual sphere is defined by the idea of the universality of science, which Husserl considered irreversible; the economic sphere is demarcated by the rationalization, mechanization, and division of labour and the creation of the global market; while the last sphere, the social sphere, is reduced to the mechanizing and rationalizing of all social relations. Defined by these three tendencies, the movement of absolute rationalization into every sphere of human endeavour is followed with a persistence and perseverance that no other civilization has known.34 This new, rationalized and mechanized idea of the world became ‘animated by a spirit and a mode of knowing wholly different from its predecessors’.35 Francis Bacon marks the beginning of the transformation in the sphere of knowledge with his announcement that knowledge is power. Modern knowledge concentrates on how the world works rather than why the world is as it is. In short, only useful knowledge becomes important.36 The Ancient concern with the qualitative aspects of the world was replaced by the new spirit of ‘a formalizing universality’, whereby quality was transfigured into quantity, stressing ‘mastery rather than understanding’.37 Knowing the mechanics of natural processes let us improve our lives in the practical sphere; by understanding the forces of nature we could master and use them to our advantage. In the process, the new science eliminated everything that it could not quantify. The quantification of nature brought about many improvements in our lives, but when this quantification was transplanted into society, its meaning changed. Human meaning, related to multifaceted characteristics of human existence, was lost in this formalizing process. The only process left was the process of ‘means towards the end’, because means can be transformed into a quantified, rational method.38 Instrumental rationality seems to be the only rationality left. These rationalizing tendencies were strengthened by Enlightenment thinkers, who extended the idea of scientific rationality to society. The drive to understand the functioning of society, and to ‘master’ unpredictable human beings by the use of scientific approaches to create a perfect society – at least in thought – is best exemplified by Thomas Hobbes, who, at the beginning of the modern age, proposed to construct a society where all renounce most of their freedoms for a security guaranteed by an artificial God.39 Hobbes, impressed by Galileo’s reasoning, applied the new method to human conduct in his imagined state of nature. As Douglas Michael Jesseph writes, ‘Hobbes took away from his encounter with Galileo […] the fundamental idea that the world is a mechanical system in which everything can be understood in terms of mathematically-specifiable laws of motion’.40 So, Hobbes carves up society into its smallest constituents – imagined as atoms that are driven by self-preservation to survive in the state of nature, where ‘the life of man [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.41 Once he dissolves society into

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its smallest atoms, he then reassembles those atoms in the particular form of a society that would reveal its mechanics. Yet, with this gesture, all the various multifaceted human interactions are reduced to the one action he deems to be the driving force of his new, mechanized society: self-centred singular atoms pursuing their own interests. From then on, nature as well as society is explained on mechanistic models based on mathematical reckonings; reduced to instrumental relations only. Moreover, as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer note, for Hobbes, the ‘force of geometrical inference’ leads to knowledge free of ‘the belief, opinion or judgment of any one individual’.42 Patočka suggests that by objectifying everything and reducing nature and society to mathematical equations, ‘the basis of the supercivilisation is [situated] outside of man’. This objectification derives its justification from ‘a dehumanized [and] decentralized thinking’.43 Similar claim is advanced by Porter: ‘Whenever a reasoning process can be made computable, we can be confident that we are dealing with something that has been universalized, with knowledge effectively detached from the individuality of its makers’.44 This type of objectified, formalized thinking obfuscates its own source: who ‘thinks’ this objectification? From where did this objectification spring? The logic of mathematics, the logic of formalization, is supposedly universal, ‘outside’ of humans; yet, originally, it was formalized by humans.45 Once invented, it takes on a life of its own, quantifying all and sundry, creating these various mechanized systems. The formalized, scientific logic of mathematics is now taken as if it were independent of humans, conceptualizing the world into the functions of regular mechanical processes only. Human meaning and freedom are impediments to the mechanical functioning of society. According to Patočka, many historical happenings led to this new supercivilization with its triumphant, material conception of life. In its prevailing final design, a new system of classification was erected, whereby unquantifiable existential themes are either ignored, reduced to technological fixes, or relegated to economic calculations. Human meaning is leveraged to the regulatory, mundane reality of everyday rule of anonymous forces and the public anonym.46 III. MODERATE AND RADICAL SUPERCIVILIZATION Patočka further argues that there are two versions of the supercivilization: moderate and radical. Moderate supercivilization is derived from modern science and retains its non-totalizing qualities when it comes to the rule of people. It refrains from applying a final telos to human systems, and it does



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not aspire to define the totality of human life. Moderate supercivilization is defined by tolerance towards other features inherited from the previous civilizations, if they do not interfere with its drive towards rationalizations of nature. It only manages means, never aiming towards the final purpose – the total control of society – based on scientific laws. This version of supercivilization balances and incorporates non-rational remnants of previous civilizations, such as religion, recognizing their importance to human life. The moderate supercivilization tolerates a variety of interests, adjudicating between them to balance all by reason. Reason is not a ruler, but a judge only. It is not dogmatic, as it is by necessity in radical supercivilization. Reason always keeps its distance from totalizing tendencies. Two important aspects define this moderate supercivilization: scientific truth and the value of human freedom based on the idea of human equality.47 In moderate supercivilization, ‘objectivity as impersonality’ is not ‘conflated with objectivity as truth’.48 The radical supercivilization, by contrast, is driven towards absolute rational rule over all aspects of human life and society. Here, objectivity becomes the social imperative to ‘follow rules’ and reach truth.49 The radical supercivilization strives to solve all spiritual problems by reducing them to mechanistic explanations based on formalization and objectivity. It claims, for example, that spiritual problems are based on ignorance of human biological origins, which can be resolved by better rational understanding of the science of biology, or that the alienation of members of society is simply an outcome of unresolved evolutionary problems of societal development. Spiritual approaches to life which are by definition unquantifiable are re-explained and reduced to physicalist, quantifiable explanations. Radical supercivilization drives to implement the rule of absolute rationality, the rule of human absoluteness, without any metaphysical remnants; since everything spiritual and qualitative that is hard to transpose into quantities is understood as an enemy to its rational progress. This type of radicalism has many historical forms, which cannot be linked to any particular social, philosophical, or political creed. Patočka provides some historical examples of these radical rational tendencies, such as Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, or some British radicals, utilitarian thinkers Jeremy Bentham and James Mill.50 Radical supercivilization wants to rationalize every aspect of life by forming a new centre of power, based on the rule of absolute instrumental rationality, in order to finally replace the old divine centre; which, in previous civilizations, was formed around human and divine non-rational powers that bestowed meaning to human lives. Radical supercivilization aims to bring all aspects of life under the rule of radical rationalization.51 Radical supercivilization forgets that all human meaning is always historical, particular, perspectival, and finite. Radicalism has an ambition to master

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everything: to reduce all meaning, without any residuum, to the rule of formal reason, by building a monumental, rational structure of total meaning. Its system must then, by necessity, clash with science, which has, in fact, never pretended to be totalizing.52 In this context, Porter’s explanation is instructive. In the first place, as in moderate supercivilization, ‘cost accounting, for example, was impossible until manufactured products, as well as machinery and the workers, were highly standardized. At the same time, sophisticated accounts were indispensable to the creation of economies of mass production’.53 Only with advanced manufacturing, world markets, technologies, and the standardization imposed on human society does the moderate supercivilization mutate into the radical. As Patočka remarks, the seeds of radical supercivilization are already present in its moderate version. Once the quantification and standardization is extended into the domain of people, the radical supercivilization takes over. Porter explains that ‘quantification has also been a crucial agency for managing people and nature’54 because ‘quantification is simultaneously a means of planning and of prediction. Accounting systems and production processes are mutually dependent’.55 According to Patočka, in the moderate version, technology is geared to rule over matter, over things: ‘machines, tools, appliances’. In the radical supercivilization, the aim of technology is to rule ‘people, individuals and social groups. It is social and political engineering’.56 The problem is, as Patočka points out, that ‘social engineering […] the technique of the organisation of objective social forces’ is incapable of addressing the crisis in society, because ‘the question of social decadence […] does not coincide with the rational mastery of forces that are available to society’: no social engineering can resolve the crisis in the final instance. On the contrary, ‘the bigger, better the organisation of social power, the greater the tendency to mechanise the whole of life’. It is this mechanization, with its concomitant denial of spiritual and existential aspects of human life, that strengthens further ‘the tendency to decline’.57 The crisis is the outcome of the impossibility of quantifying human existence. IV. THE BEGINNING OF MASS SOCIETY Mathematized, formalized reasoning is taken unquestioningly to account for human affairs. This reduction of the qualitative aspect of human conduct into quantitative models to account for it is the main concern that Patočka makes clear in ‘Supercivilization and Its Inner Conflict’. The drive towards scientific method in the space of society can only lead to the dream of perfect control over humans.



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a. The Task of Scientific Management: Training the ‘Stupid’ A scientific method to increase efficiency ad infinitum by quantifying each minute movement of the worker’s tasks, as well as the movements of his body needed to perform them, was devised by Frederick W. Taylor in 1911. Today, this idea defines not only production processes but all aspects of our lives. Taylor proposed his scientific approach to the new mass production in order to make it more efficient. He claimed that it is possible not only to manage the material used in production, but also men. According to him, ‘the scientific selection of the men’58 would lead to a more efficient process, one that could be planned – hence predicted. Patočka’s description of the radical supercivilization is made real in Taylor’s vision. ‘In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first’.59 This stress on the system would ensure the scientific management of men. The dream of controlling everything from nature to people – which Patočka identifies as a defining feature of radical supercivilization – is proposed by Taylor. Only by utilizing scientific method can we search ‘for more competent men, from the presidents of our great companies down to our household servants’.60 According to Taylor, efficient men are in demand but the supply is meagre.61 Hence, Taylor ‘divines’ the system by which we can evaluate those with appropriate characteristics, train them with rigour and increase their supply. Yet, as Taylor unequivocally makes clear, those who need to be managed are ‘so stupid that […] [they] must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than [themselves] into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before [they] can be successful’.62 b. Leisure and the Masses in the Machine Age By contrast, Edward Filene, the American businessman and founder of the Co-operative League, envisioned a new future for humans through ‘furthering progressive measures for the public good’. In 1921, he renamed the Co-operative League the Twentieth Century Fund and provided an endowment to promote and fund his vision of creating a space for ‘the greatest minds in the nation as a means of changing the world’.63 He also wrote books to advance his vision for the new mass society that was taking shape in his lifetime. In his writing, he argues for raising the wages of workers, reducing their working hours and freeing more time for leisure activities; advancing the new mass production by providing workers with the spending power that will enable them to buy the new, mass-produced commodities. Despite a language that seems to agree with Patočka’s description of the moderate supercivilization, Filene’s aim is, however, different. His language betrays the aims of the radical supercivilization – the drive to control humans

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according to the scientific aims of business. As he makes clear, ‘Mass Production […] changes the whole social order. It necessitates the abandonment of all class thinking, and the substitution of fact-finding for tradition, not only by business men but by all who wish to live successfully in the Machine Age’.64 This ‘fact-finding’ will lead to the replacement of hard traditional work with ‘machine production’,65 so that people can ‘give their attention to more distinctly human problems’.66 It turns out that these distinctly human problems can be attended to by spending on goods, thereby advancing culture and good living for the masses, while ‘mass production … yields the greatest total profits’ for business.67 In the name of mass consumption, Filene challenges the idea of a traditional labour base by pointing out that in the new mass society, the understanding of society along class lines will become redundant. In opposition to the Marxist theory of labour power, he muses, ‘it was universally supposed, for instance, that labor was a commodity. Nevertheless, labor could not and did not act like a commodity. It acted like human beings’.68 The new power is buying power allowing us all to buy on the market ‘those physical comforts and luxuries which almost everybody has learned to want’.69 The issue is not production of goods, although this is important. More important is ‘to attend to the necessary work of producing and distributing buying power’,70 empowering us to buy more. Once there is buying power, there is also booming business. ‘The consumer’s dollar has been discovered; and unless that dollar is defended and protected on every front, nobody’s dollar is safe’.71 In Filene’s new machine age, businesses ‘need not bother with the rights of humanity, but they must bother with its buying power’.72 Once mass production is seen as ‘bringing numberless opportunities to the masses’,73 the way towards business taking the rule of society into its own hands is cleared.74 The time has come when business leaders are more visionaries than politicians: they can save humanity, as long as they accept their responsibility to use their ‘selfish business reasons’75 to implement the ‘social planning’76 by which they will lead this new army of consuming masses. As Filene notes, his analysis ‘is not theorizing. It is a mathematical certainty. Mass production, having been discovered, can not be abandoned’.77 c. Crystallizing Public Opinion The third visionary of the new mass society is Edward Bernays, a selfacknowledged expert ‘in molding public opinion’: a skill that he scientifically devised to influence people by appealing to ‘the psychological raw materials’, which are, according to him, ‘self-preservation, ambition, pride, hunger, love of family and children, patriotism, imitativeness, the desire to be a leader, love of play’.78 His concern is similar to that of Filene: to manage the new



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army of consumers and their role in the structure of society. How could we channel their spending dollars to advance the interests of business? How could we keep check on those in charge of the new consumer dollars? In short, how could we control the masses and organize their spending habits? Writing in 1923, Bernays sees his intervention in the production of public opinion as being based on the scientific model. In naming the book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, as Stuart Ewen reminds us, Bernays drew upon the language of science. ‘Crystallization’, in the field of physical chemistry, describes the process by which an amorphous entity – a gas or suspension in fluid form – is transformed into a solid coherent mass. For Bernays, ‘crystallizing public opinion’ was about taking an ‘ill-defined, mercurial and changeable group of individual judgments’ and transforming them into a cohesive and manageable form.79

Accordingly, in 1947 Bernays claimed that we ‘have been able to accomplish purposefully and scientifically what we have termed “the engineering of consent”’,80 to keep under control this vast army of new consumers. At first glance, Bernays speaks in terms of democracy: ‘The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest’. Unsurprisingly, he reformulates the usual idea of freedom of expression into ‘the freedom to persuade and suggest’. Once this innocent substitution is made, it seamlessly follows that the ‘average American adult’ cannot deal with ‘pressing crises and decisions to be faced’. To help people to decide, those in charge should learn the rules of the ‘engineering of consent’, which are ‘based theoretically and practically on the complete understanding of those whom it attempts to win over’. ‘Democratic leaders’, he says, ‘frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding’ of the issues at hand. Hence, these democratic leaders must bypass the people and decide ‘socially constructive goals and values’ for them. ‘This role naturally imposes upon them the obligation to use educational processes, as well as other available techniques, to bring about as complete an understanding as possible’.81 On this model of objectified society, people are uniform and politics and economics are interchangeable. Bernays, starting from Freudian psychoanalysis, takes it upon himself to change the habits of people to advance the interests of businesses. This imperative is already present in Filene’s thinking. Yet, their understanding of what means should be used to achieve this end are very different. For Filene, ‘mass production … must engage in social planning’,82 to fulfil the needs of the new mass consumers by creating spaces of leisure to generate new needs. For Bernays, these needs must be artificially created by the manufacturing of social or public consent.

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This rational manufacturing of public consent has all the hallmarks that Patočka described in his analysis of radical supercivilization. It is an attempt to rule people by manipulating public opinion by available rational means. And it seems to work. However, if we follow Patočka’s advice, we might perhaps say that the current crisis of democracy – the replacement of public discussions with economic logic, and the concomitant withdrawal of people from the public decision-making space into corporately redefined private spaces encouraged and manufactured by the engineers of consent – might not be an eternally accomplished state of affairs. As Patočka would advise in the 1950s, ‘Decline is not a state that we could prevent by the application of generally valid principles of morality’. Formalization and objectification are the roots of decline and not its prevention.83 d. The Neoliberal Crisis and Human Capital The tendency to objectify and formalize every sphere of human endeavour in order to control all is a defining characteristic of the present age. Humans are supposedly utility maximizers, transfigured only so far as to maintain, configure, and optimize their interaction in the market. Public and political spaces are reduced to market exchanges. The linguistic terms proliferating in the corporatized political space, such as human capital, profit, efficiency, and consumption are ultimately based on the entrepreneurial model. All wideranging human interests are reduced to procurement and enlargement of one’s own ‘life’ portfolio:84 in other words, chasing nothing else but money. On this model, humans are objectified; stripped of all human characteristics except those that are essential to this race after money. The individual, the marionette of this system, is ‘a utility computer into which we feed a sequence of market prices and from whom we obtain a corresponding sequence of “solutions” in the form of specified optimum positions’.85 The neoliberal model of the efficient market is of ‘a powerful information processor’,86 running on its own, and aiming to eliminate those who are not sufficiently prepared to perform their roles as entrepreneurs. This model is also extended to the sphere of politics, which is now defined by microeconomics; citizens become clients of more and more fragmented government services. The state becomes a facilitator and defender of market forces. ‘The citizen [is] nothing more than a consumer’, while ‘the language of profit, efficiency, and consumption [has] replaced that of citizenship, solidarity, and service’.87 Yet, the spaces of consumers are also disappearing into the bottomless market. Consumers become the nameless components of the market order, while corporations delimit offers through advertising, while at the same time monitoring all through new surveillance technologies to redefine choices that



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no one has. Social, community, and family values are rearranged into various elements, suddenly becoming goods on the market among other goods, offered to the highest bidder. ‘The neoliberal citizen is calculating rather than rule abiding, a Benthamite rather than a Hobbesian. The state is one of many sites framing the calculations leading to social behaviors that keep costs low and productivity high’.88 The space for the collective action of citizens disappears. They become clients paying for ever-diminishing state services. The government ceases to be for the people and by the people. Instead, the government becomes a defender of the logic of the market, as big business and corporations pour money into election campaigns, securing the support of politicians through the lobbying process, with large sums of money. In Filene’s work, as I have already noted, we find an attempt to rethink the concept of labour power, by replacing it with the idea of buying power. Once again, an innocent substitution can be seen as the starting point for a re-conceptualization of humans on the model of human capital.89 The ideas that are part and parcel of neoliberal ideology have been long in the making, but it is important to learn when this new common sense began to germinate. For Gary Becker, inventor of the human capital theory, ‘the average earner is made a prime mover of development through the investment in himself’.90 The idea that there is a separation between workers and owners, or between labour and its product, is eliminated. Now consumers are also producers. The idea of equality is redefined: ‘Persons with higher earnings would simply have more ability than others, and skewed distribution of earnings would imply a skewed distribution of abilities’.91 Becker approvingly cites R. H. Tawney: ‘Equality meant … equal opportunities of becoming unequal.’92 Investment in one’s own human capital is necessary to succeed in the market place, but it is not sufficient. Market conditions, reading the signs of investment opportunities, and taking risk, all contribute to a person’s favourable position in the labour market. Yet, in the end, the market knows best and there is nothing one can do. Israel Kirzner argues that winners and losers are determined by the market alone.93 The idea of equality ends here. Risk-taking entrepreneurs are winning in this market society, while the cautious or faint-hearted are left behind. In this new world, ‘social and economic inequality [is] necessary as a motor for social and economic progress’.94 CONCLUSION Our world is governed by numbers generated by the accounts of nations and corporations. And yet these numbers are arbitrary, illusory. So how did we come to depend on these fallible beacons to

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direct our policies, institutions, economies, societies? Where did these false prophets, these numbers and accounts, come from?95

In this chapter, I have revisited Patočka’s analysis of the supercivilization, which he wrote in the 1950s. I have argued that the modern society, as Patočka defines it, is ruled by impersonal, scientific, instrumental reasoning that has led to a social as well as a human existential crisis. By analysing the texts of Taylor, Filene, and Bernays, I have drawn parallels that suggest that Patočka’s analysis can, indeed, give us some direction on how to confront today’s reduction of all aspects of life to economic patterns, based on seemingly formal, impersonal reasoning. In Donald Patinkin’s model, for example, humans are conceived on the mechanized model of a computer, with no freedom remaining. They can be fed information and we can gauge ‘the individual’s excess demand functions’,96 but in this beautifully functioning machine age, there is no place for public reasoning or public responsibility. We are moving into the sphere of the radical supercivilization, where the idea that we are all equal, rational human beings in charge of our own future has been substituted by the ideas of self-interested entrepreneurs, interested only in chasing money, while being reduced to formalized nodes in the economic modelling. Unless we start paying attention to the discourses that shape public opinion, we might become the faceless, immoral destroyers of culture – an inherited culture of long tradition. We might also become oblivious to the destruction of the world – the only world we have. In short, it seems that we are becoming marionettes in a world where common sense has become steeped in ‘the new economics of everything’,97 eliminating all concerns about the public and social goods. Yet, we all seem to accept this. We need to start challenging the explanation of everything in quantitative and economic terms, which are presented to us as the only ‘natural’ way to understand ourselves, others, and the world around us. This is not the only option we have. In 1978, Václav Havel wrote the essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless. To the Memory of Jan Patočka’, to argue that power over people stays powerful only insofar as people accept its force.98 Their silent acceptance keeps it going. Here, I suggest that this power is not the power of a socialist government, as was the case for Havel. It is the power of the mathematized, formalized way of thinking that reduces us all to cogs in its ever-grinding machine. NOTES 1. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 199.



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2. See, for example, Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); Steven C. Ward, Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education, Routledge Advances in Sociology (New York: Routledge, 2012); Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, ed. Kindle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3. John B. Davis, The Theory of the Individual in Economics: Identity and Value, Advances in Social Economics (London: Routledge, 2003), 57. 4. Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, 17. 5. See, for example, Milton Friedman’s analysis of ‘social responsibility’, which is now accepted for the state as well: ‘the social objective of reducing poverty’ simply means that ‘the corporate executive would be spending someone else’s money for a general social interest’ (Milton Friedman, ‘Appendix A: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits’, trans., in Business Ethics Now [New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012], 212.) 6. For a discussion of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, see Brian Stock, ‘Antiqui and Moderni as “Giants” and “Dwarfs”: A Reflection of Popular Culture?’, Modern Philology 76, 4 (1979): 370–4, and Pierre Riché and Jacques Verger, Učitelé a žáci ve středověku, trans. Irena and Bořek Neškudlovi (Prague: Vyšehrad, 2011). 7. For a similar starting point but formulating a different argument, see Michel Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson (London; New York: Continuum, 2012). 8. Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 246a–48. 9. See Jan Patočka, ‘Duchovní základy života v naší době’ [The Spiritual Foundation of Life in the Present], in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 2: Péče o duši II (Prague: Oikoymenh, 1999 [1970]), 18. 10. Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ trans. Lewis White Beck, in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment? (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1997 [1784]). See also Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 11. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 1. 12. Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Crisis (London; New York: Verso, 2013), 55. 13. Edward A. Filene, Successful Living in this Machine Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), 11–12. 14. F. Diane Barth, ‘4 Ways to Deal With Selfish People’, Sussex Publishers, LLC | HealthProfs.com, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-couch/201403/4-waysdeal-selfish-people. 15. Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 96. 16. Edward A. Filene, ‘Buying Power’, in Successful Living in this Machine Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931). 17. Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

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18. Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 151. 19. Washburn cited in William R. Brock, Investigation and Responsibility: Public responsibility in the United States, 1865–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 153. 20. Wright cited in ibid., 154; Wright cited in Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, 152. 21. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, 189. 22. Ibid., 95. 23. Ibid., 85. 24. Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance (New York: WW Norton & Co, 2013), 35. Gleeson-White claims that the new invention of ‘double entry’, used by the merchants of Florence and Venice in the XIV century (ibid., 20.), elevated mathematics from obscurity and transplanted it into the world of commerce. She suggests that ‘the merging of two streams of mathematics which had been split since the sixth century BC: the philosophicalspeculative mathematics of Pythagoras and his successors, and the commercial arithmetic used by merchants […] would prove epoch-changing’; leading mathematics to become ‘the lingua franca of Europe’ and steering in ‘a new era: the Age of Science’ (ibid., 34–5.). 25. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 77. 26. Ibid., ix. 27. Jan Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’ [The Supercivilization and its Inner Conflict], in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 1: Péče o duši I (Prague: Oikoymenh, 1996), 246. 28. Ibid., 291. 29. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 108. 30. Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’, in Péče o duši I, 299. 31. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 116. 32. Ibid., 117. 33. Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’, in Péče o duši I, 248. 34. Ibid. 35. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 85. 36. On this point, see also Jan Patočka, ‘Filosofie výchovy’ [Philosophy of Education], in Péče o duši I, 436 (from a series of lectures on the philosophy of education held by Patočka in the winter semester of 1938–1939). 37. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 86. 38. Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’, in Péče o duši I, 247–8. 39. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968 [1651]). 40. Douglas M. Jesseph, ‘Galileo, Hobbes, and the Book of Nature’, Perspectives on Science 12, 2 (2004): 191.



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41. Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 13 [186]. 42. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 101. 43. Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’, in Péče o duši I, 253. 44. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 85–6. 45. See Jan Patočka, ‘On the Prehistory of the Science of Movement: World, Earth, Heaven and the Movement of Human Life’, trans. Erika Abrams, in Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Tora Lane (eds.), Dis-Orientations: Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 65–6. 46. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 112. 47. Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’, in Péče o duši I, 259–60. 48. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, 74. 49. Ibid., 95. 50. Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’, in Péče o duši I, 250–1. 51. Ibid., 253. 52. Ibid., 260. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway discuss the possible turn in this direction in their book, Merchants of Doubt, explaining how ‘various groups and individuals began to challenge scientific evidence that threatened their commercial interests or ideological beliefs’ (Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming [London: Bloomsbury, 2012], 34–5.). 53. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, 43–4. 54. Ibid., 50. 55. Ibid., 43. 56. Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’, in Péče o duši I, 261. 57. Ibid., 295. 58. Frederick W. Taylor, The Principle of Scientific Management (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998 [1911]), 29–30. 59. Ibid., iv. 60. Ibid., iii. 61. Ibid., iii–iv. 62. Ibid., 28. 63. Beverly Goldberg, ‘Our Founder: Edward A. Filene (1860–1937)’, The Century Foundation, http://www.tcf.org/about_us/founder. 64. Filene, Successful Living in this Machine Age, 1, italics deleted. 65. Ibid., 9. 66. Ibid., 1, italics deleted. 67. Ibid., 85. 68. Ibid., 20. 69. Ibid., 188. 70. Ibid., 21.

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71. Ibid., 38. 72. Ibid., 269. 73. Ibid., 14. 74. Ibid., 273–4. 75. Ibid., 1, italics deleted. 76. Ibid., 273. 77. Ibid., 38. 78. Edward L. Bernays, ‘Molding Public Opinion’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 179 (1935): 83. 79. Stuart Ewen, ‘Introduction’, in Crystallizing Public Opinion (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2011), 12. 80. Edward L. Bernays, ‘The Engineering of Consent’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250 (1947): 114. 81. Ibid. 82. Filene, Successful Living in this Machine Age, 271. 83. Patočka, ‘Nadcivilizace a její vnitřní konflikt’, in Péče o duši I, 291, italics in original. 84. For ‘managerial’ language, see Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (Sydney: A Knopf Book; Random House Australia, 2003); Don Watson, Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words: Contemporary Clichés, Cant & Management Jargon (Sydney: A Knopf Book, Random House Australia, 2004). 85. Donald Patinkin cited in Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 222. 86. Ibid., 238. 87. Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 344. 88. Wendy Brown, ‘Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’, in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 43. 89. For this theory, see Gary S. Becker, ‘Investment in Human Capital: A Theoretical Analysis’, Journal of Political Economy 70, 5 (1962): 9–49; Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education, 3rd revised ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Gary S. Becker, ‘Human Capital’, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2008), http:// www.econlib.org/library/Enc/HumanCapital.html. 90. Becker, Human Capital, 97. 91. Ibid., 98. 92. R. H. Tawney, Equality (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1965 [1931]), 105; cited in Becker, Human Capital, 144, note 45. 93. Israel M. Kirzner, How Markets Work: Disequilibrium, Entrepreneurship and Discovery, IEA Hobart Paper 133 (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1997), 37. 94. Jones, Masters of the Universe, 9.



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95. Gleeson-White, Double Entry, 5. 96. Donald Patinkin cited in Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 222. 97. Tim Harford, The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything (London: Little, Brown, 2008). 98. Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless. To the Memory of Jan Patočka’, trans. Paul Wilson, in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 23–96.

Part VI

EUROPE AND POST-EUROPE

Chapter 18

Europe, Post-Europe, and Eurocentrism1 Karel Novotný

It has been argued that Jan Patočka’s texts on the philosophy of history run the risk of a dangerous Eurocentrism. Indeed, in central passages from his last book, Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History (1975),2 Patočka employs a certain kind of language to express views that seem to reflect an absolute Eurocentrism. The passages in question concern Patočka’s utilization of Husserlian and Heideggerian thoughts on the nature of history. Despite important differences between Husserl and Heidegger, they share the following fundamental axiom: history emerges, rises, and falls in step with the philosophical spirit, carried essentially by Occidental Europe. Patočka argues – in various places that seem to reflect this same ­sentiment – that there is no other history than European history.3 Such a conception of ­history (and its corresponding philosophy of history) appears quite naïve and, moreover, dangerously Eurocentric. In what follows, I will take on these two points, namely the naïveté and the reputed dangerousness of Patočka’s philosophy of history, by way of his reflections on what he calls ‘Post-Europe’.4 According to Patočka, we are living in an era subsequent to the conclusion of European-influenced history, that is, a period of history that no longer pivots around ‘Europe’. Indeed, it is important to underscore that Patočka’s supposed ‘Eurocentricity’ crystallizes precisely when he recognizes Europe’s de facto end and, thus, implements accordingly a strategy to deal with this new, undefined context. The following observations may thus appear as a somewhat paradoxical juxtaposition: Patočka claims, there is only European history, but, according to his reflections on post-Europe, since at least the 1960s, we have been living in a post-European era of history. In other words, History goes on. It should, however, have run its course given Europe’s failure in its battle for world domination or, at the very least, its political primacy in the world. 301

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A question remains: What exactly is meant by ‘history’? What makes history history? Patočka’s answer, which evolves fluidly throughout his corpus, is based on the following hypothesis: history has to be understood as the establishment of the spiritual foundations of human existence. It is through the establishment of spiritual foundations that Life gains a certain self-clarity and self-awareness and can thus be properly called historical. What Patočka means by ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual existence’ will be clarified in what follows. From there, if we accept Patočka’s hypothesis that historicity is anchored in man’s spiritual existence through which human existence rises up from his fallen state (assuming, as Patočka does, a general tendency towards decline), then the question arises: What exactly does Europe have to offer spiritually in our new situation? Is such a so-called post-Europe even capable of bearing history? From which framework should we analyze the continuities and discontinuities between the Old and New in a context where, despite the loss of its centrality, Europe remains the primary determiner of our selfunderstanding as inheritors of its spirit and history? Patočka’s ideas from the beginning of the 1970s – for example in his writings regarding a ‘post-European’ historical era, which he only partially published, but whose influence can been felt in his last works, like the Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History – provide the opportunity to analyze this constellation, where these two opposing theories were developed. This chapter comprises three sections. First, I will examine the new element that defines ‘post-Europe’. Second, (in Sections 2 and 3) I present in two steps the dual approach in which Patočka addresses Europe constructively while, at the same time, distancing himself from the old Europe, producing its historical destruction. Lastly, Patočka’s positive answer to the challenge of the post-European era will be sketched out in reference to his later writings. 1. THE CONCEPT ‘POST-EUROPE’ It is obvious that ‘Post-Europe’ is related to the end of Europe. Indeed, Europe’s end is taken as a historical fact: by the end of the Second World War, Europe lost its position as the world power. Patočka proceeds from this point in Europe’s historical downfall and provides a description of the new, impending world that has arisen, like a phoenix, from the ashes of Europe. Of course, Patočka is concerned not with a geographical Europe, but rather with a historical phenomenon, ‘Europe’ or more specifically ‘Post-Europe’, which can also be said to have risen and fallen. What determines our situation as ‘new’ is the globalizing shift towards a techno-rational civilization, which emerged from Europe and operates in accordance with clear universalist aspirations. Europe conceived such a



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civilization as a prerequisite of a universal humanity, but no longer possesses the political power to serve as its figurehead. The universalizing dynamic is of course historically connected with Europe, however, through the catastrophes of both world wars, it has decisively lost its place as the centre of world history. What is new about this situation? What is it that forces Patočka to speak in terms of a radical break? In his historically oriented work, Patočka always assumes that history has ‘spiritual foundations’ and can only thus be understood in their light. He also advocates for this position in his later works; one can find passages from his writings in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, all the way up through the 1970s, which reflect this conviction. It grew increasingly clear, from the 1930s onwards, that the concepts of ‘history’, ‘spirit’ [Geist], and ‘foundation’ were becoming problematic. What appears as new in Patočka’s work during the 1970s, more precisely in his essay ‘The Spiritual Foundations of Life in Our Time’, does not consist in the fact that he reflects on the problematic character of these concepts. He had already done so earlier without repudiating them. Even now he will not reject these concepts, nor will he substitute them with newer ones. Rather he tries to confront the new ‘Zeitgeist’ of universal humanity, which seems to govern today’s techno-rational civilization, in the context of these concepts. There is a picture of the new world to which Patočka consistently refers in these texts. It’s a picture according to which the replacement of European ‘spiritual hopelessness’ – the ‘decadent culture of subjectivism’ – is replaced by the non-European nations’ energetic will to live. European ‘spiritual hopelessness’, thus, begins to recede into the background and become globally irrelevant.5 Against attempts to connect the technical achievements of science with this will to live, Patočka reminds readers that even in a ‘positive’, apparently ‘post-metaphysical’ zeitgeist that would emerge out of this connection, a certain attitude towards reality is involved. Patočka views this connection very sceptically since the rationalist attitude towards reality cannot fulfil the role of the spiritual foundation he seeks. The global, universal body of technological civilization, according to Patočka, seems not to possess a different spirit from instrumental Ratio, that is, the scientific-technological rationality. Since he thinks that Western Ratio, due to its dampening and nivelizing effects, does not permit the sought-after spirituality [Geistigkeit], Patočka wonders whether the technical attitude of modern science towards reality in fact overcomes the Old Spirit of Europe, namely, subjectivism. Furthermore, can it positively establish a new distinct era of humanity? His answer is clear: he regards the worldwide spreading of science and technology as the absolutization of reason in terms of an exclusive reduction to that which Kant called ‘Understanding’ [Verstand]. This

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attitude of the calculating mind emerges from a practice that presupposes an absoluteness of the subject, and this technical attitude that encompasses the entire world would be only an extension of the ‘modern’ subjectivist Europe. Patočka characterizes this fundamental error as ‘self-withdrawal via absolutisation’.6 However, if the present situation is indeed new, and Patočka ­operates under the assumption that the it is in a radical discontinuity with the ­European-influenced nineteenth century, then the new post-European era ­cannot, therefore, be founded on this same spiritually empty [geistlos] attitude as it is based only on a means-end rationality. So, for Patočka, the problem concerns precisely how, and through what means, the spiritual void of a global humanity connected only by technological civilization can be broken, and what will fill this void. Of course Patočka does not want to solve this problem in the place of a future humanity. They must ultimately decide their own path, a path that cannot yet be determined. However, Patočka nonetheless proposes a formal condition of spirituality as such, which he designates as an ‘open soul’. Humanity, in the post-European era, must remain that which it was if it is to be capable of spirituality: ‘an existing being, which does not close itself up but rather whose openness is its strength’.7 Patočka is concerned with formulating a transcendental condition for the possibility of humanity’s spirituality, or rather a spiritual existence. Thus, he seeks to save this dimension of openness from the reductionism of techno-scientistic rationality. However, everything we have examined hitherto can also be found in Patočka’s early work. There, one encounters his persistent commitment to the continuity of spiritual existence, which has its kernel in an individual’s resurgence towards authenticity [Eigentlichkeit]. Patočka first ‘breaks new ground’ in his essay ‘The Spiritual Foundations of Life in Our Time’. The post-European era comprises a pluralism of varying historical entities no longer dominated by ‘Europe’, although it draws partly on the European heritage to further some of its ends. The ‘discovery of any pluralism of spiritual sources’8 he writes, can ‘have a much more sweeping and deeper meaning than we recognize today’.9 Here, the meaning of reflection on the particularity and narrowness of the European tradition becomes quite clear. There emerges, then, the following contradiction: rationality requires a unified God’s Eye View, a homogenization. However, this is contradicted by various sources currently alive in non-European cultures. We face the danger of a devastating conflict in which these different cultures occlude themselves and ideologize their positions.10 Patočka did not avoid justifying this approach, to wit, such a general historical reflection must explicitly erect a framework in which the European, the non-European, and post-European can all relate to and differentiate from one another. Patočka was fully aware that he must endorse a hypothesis, with



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the risk that his framework might be too narrow, too formal, and, ipso facto, too broad. As the fundamental, defining framework, he again proposes Spirit [Geist] as the ‘all-determining essence and form of reality’. In order to establish more concretely his hypothesis, he goes beyond the description of the zeitgeist of a particular era to the more general claim that every zeitgeist ‘is grounded on a certain conception of spirit, its nature and its fundamental purpose’.11 The conclusions reached by Patočka’s analysis should, as such, be reconceived in light of that choice, that is, a hypothesis about the fundamental framework, since Patočka’s description and analysis both proceed from a provisional and then an increasingly defined idea ‘about Spirit, its essence and its fundamental purpose’. Incrementally, but in a predetermined perspective, he wants to justify his hypothesis as the general methodological framework in which he develops his thesis about the continuity and discontinuity in history, which according to him evolves from the European into the Universal. 2. DEEPER FOUNDATIONS OF RATIONALITY Taking seriously the evidence of irreducible plurality, Patočka asks whether the de facto loss of Europe’s central role does not also entail overcoming certain principles that have historically contributed to the particular form of Europe. It is such an overcoming that Patočka had in mind in his famous attempt contrasting Cartesian subjectivism, as a source of techno-scientism, with an asubjective phenomenology based on an ontology of being-in-theworld as a movement. This complex systematic approach – which combines Husserl’s programme of a ‘deeper foundation of rationality’ through the phenomenological study of constitution and ultimately transcendental subjectivity, and Heidegger’s idea of ontological difference between beings (things) and Being in a verbal sense – corresponds to an original project to conceive world and life as correlative movements.12 Patočka endorses a transcendental approach that inquires into the possibility-conditions of a foundation [Boden] upon which the solution to the problem of a post-European humanity could be constructed, one whose birth lies on the tracks towards globalization. It is a task to be actively achieved ‘to create a ground for the denizens of postEuropean history’, which could perhaps be achieved via the disintegration of Europe. ‘The post-European era is marked by a great possibility for the humanity, one that could lead of into a future, not only of technical understanding [Verstand], but also that of self-reflecting reason itself [sich verstehenden Vernunft]’.13 The disposition to build on unity-forming rationality is connected with Husserl’s transcendental approach of ‘deeper fundamental rationality’,

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something Patočka never renounced. The only way to avoid the dissolution of post-European humanity, this inner and outer tension, is to pose ‘the ground of rationality, when it is achieved in the Europe of the European historical era’.14 Edmund Husserl designed this approach in connection with the so-called Crisis text, one of his last works. In a study called ‘Life historicity’, he sums up his conviction: ‘The man as a subject is in his various activities and dispositions to act an animal rationale. He is living according to reason [vernünftig]. He, as a mature man, has a developed disposition of reason, and his actual life and life events are therefore braught into subjection of a self criticism and of a social criticism and of a critical correction. Unreason is a negative modus of reason. The man has in the reason a disposition being able [Vermögen] of the truth; the truth is an ideal formation from out of the own activity that proves the truth’.15 The purely theoretical rationality, which historically was firstly conceived in Greece, distinguishes itself from this pre-scientific rationality of life. This narrower concept of reason, which determines both European spirituality and historicity, is connected with the newly awakened theoretical interest, which spreads out throughout the universe. This is a reason [Vernunft], understood as a theoretical ‘being capable of’ [Vermögen], which was originally founded by the ‘Greek philosophy as universal Science’.16 The project of the ‘deeper grounding of rationality’ is thus connected with a tendency towards Eurocentrism despite its explicit self-critical potential. That is why Patočka tried to radicalize the critical moment that puts in question the reason itself as a principle dominating human history. He did it from the start of his philosophical writings with explicit references to authors like Nietzsche, Klages, and others, but the main source of inspiration became Heidegger.17 One can find in Patočka a number of conceptions where he articulated in his own way the critical potential of Heidegger’s central idea of the so-called ontological difference. One of these conceptions was articulated by an opposition of ideology and life within the idea that at the same time makes it possible to establish a close connection to the Husserlian idea of reason as evidence and the Platonic idea of a life from the insight in the Idea. This will become Patočka’s version of the ontological difference.18 In the 1950s, this philosophy of distinction was articulated as ‘Negative Platonism’. The distinction at stake is between what is given and can be grasped in a positive, objective way, and what exceeds these objectifications, similar, for example, to Kant’s distinction between objects of the understanding (objective knowledge) and the ideas of reason, but radicalized as a distinction between beings (things) and what is in other way than empirical being, like, for Kant, the ideas of a God, the freedom of the soul, or the idea of the world itself.



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Later on, from the end of the 1960s, he proposes another conception where he speaks about the ‘open soul’, based on a capacity of openness to what ­Heidegger called the open [das Offene], a capacity which is enacted only by and from this open itself and not from the subject. The transcendence of the open can be characterized only through its difference to every determinacy, in parallel to the Idea as conceived in his earlier ‘Negative Platonism’. In this later conception, connected with the idea of the ‘open soul’, and also stemming from his work on Plato, he proposes, however, that this openness – instead of being evidence of reason, even a critical one – is rather a relation to the mystery, which is lived differently in every spiritual tradition.19 Patočka’s late reflections on the soul as a spiritual principle of Europe are an express reference to the deepest dimension of care for the soul that, qua mystery, unsettles any fixed shape of spirit: ‘Spirit is being un-settled’.20 Just as in ‘Negative Platonism’, this proposal is conceived as a defence against metaphysics, which discards everything that cannot be objectively grasped. Against this enforcement and homogenization of the world Patočka recalls the experience of transcendence, which must, however, remain negative – it cannot be positively grasped – thus subordinating objective knowledge. 3. THE INNER DANGER OF EUROCENTRISM AND CRITICAL SELF-REFLECTION OF EUROPE If the conception of ‘open soul’ is understood as an active distancing from the aggressive reach of technology’s pursuit of world domination, it would be interpreted in this new context of the post-European era as a signal of E ­ uropean self-criticism of its relationship to the Other. However, in this active distance of the ‘open soul’, one glimpses the internal danger of ­Eurocentrism. This should not be underestimated. Patočka opposes his conception to the spirit of the previous eras of Europe, which as he says, enacted the entrance of a universal consciousness of humanity, a terrible and cynical denial of the human. According to him, the ‘open soul’ of the Europeans should engender the new world’s spiritual attitude. However, if the attitude of the ‘open soul’ is interpreted as the search for the transcendental ground of post-European humanity, there remains an internal risk of Eurocentrism, as the attitude of the spiritual supremacy of Europe would be perpetuated, against which non-European societies subsequently construct a defence and thereby distinguish the new state of affairs. In other words, it is questionable whether we Europeans, equipped with the attitude of an ‘open soul’, that is, through the transcendental concept of openness towards the undetermined transcendent and in contact with other spiritual traditions, exhibit less spiritual supremacy in relation to the Other

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than we would if we still presented ourselves with a very specific c­ onception, namely, negation of the transcendent. The danger of Eurocentrism in this context appears to lie in the fact that we push onto the rest of the world the task of openness to the mystery of things, which as rationalists we also impose on ourselves alongside our reductive, technical reasoning that we have also forced upon the rest of the world. However, the question is whether this reflects accurately what Patočka was doing with his proposal for the ‘open soul’. Other passages make it clear that he was consciously aware of the internal threat of Eurocentrism and that his project for the open soul was, therefore, not conceived and developed in a transcendentalist optic. The notion of European reflection is ‘not intended to render non-European reflection superfluous’, rather, the meaning of European self-determination consists in ‘first actually introducing’ the non-European reflection and ‘permitting’ it to ‘bear fruit’. Patočka’s proposal to create ‘a necessary openness for the spiritual problems of tomorrow’ and his conception of existence as an ‘open soul’ implies no restrictions, indeed no proposals for the other; rather, more than anything, it implies a more radically critical European. We should understand this as a reflective, critical turn towards Europe’s own tradition, which does not stop merely at the modern absolute subject, but progresses back to the beginnings of Europe. It should be understood as a destruction of European metaphysics of spirit.21 The historical destruction of Europe emerges as the birthing ground for the central spiritual principle that Patočka always had in mind, namely, the principle of care for the soul. It is well known that this principle evolved into a central theme of his various historico-philosophical texts, where it has an ambiguous role. It is the GrecoChristian principle of old Europe, which, as differentiated in itself, was, according to Patočka, not thought through to its end in terms of its authenticity. It is also a principle, however, that serves as the criterion or, at the very least, the navigational compass for the spirituality of future eras of history, at least for us Europeans. The concept of caring for the soul has at least two sides: it leads both to the expansion of rationality over all domains of life, as well as critical self-examination and self-renunciation. For Patočka, Europe’s uniqueness lies in its tendency towards universality, which stems from its conception of reason [Logos]. The ‘general understanding [Allgemein-Verständlich], and rationality, “striving to extend their domain over anything and everything”, “leave nothing from its onward march”, and “subject the entirety of life to reflection […] [this life which] is riddled with transparency and comprehensibility’.22 Rationality thus conceived, according to Patočka, is what the Greeks called logos, ‘an eminent element of history’ insofar as it is ‘an active force’.23 Patočka concludes that the ‘uniqueness of European history’ lies in the fact ‘that it was here that the realization of a particular conception of rationality [Logos] as spiritual power and authority was



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attempted, and this conception of humanity shaped its attendant activities, traditions and institutions and ipso facto became historical reality’. For internal reasons, this reality disintegrated, but even in this dissolution, Patočka detects in its continued influence ‘the possibility of a unified humanity in one world, a world that is no longer merely one particular Lifeworld’.24 This principle, however, was and continues to be a contradiction of particularity that desires universality. In this desire, however, it encounters not only a logical, but a factual contradiction. At precisely this point it sputters out. Thus, we can no longer orient ourselves in accordance with this principle. At the same time, however, Patočka wants to positively build on this active principle, so that spirit might also achieve authority and power in postEurope, where once the possibility emerged in Greece. The spirit that Patočka has in mind in a post-European context is the solidarity of the unsettled or, as it is usually translated, ‘the shaken’. Spirit’s meaning no longer emerges from the isolated battle of the soul but, rather, as a spirit that proceeds from the nothingness of individual meaning and, in this precise way, breaks with this naïve activism. This requirement of distancing oneself from one’s own spiritual tradition is particularly important here where reflection on the spiritual foundations should provide the framework of a philosophy of history, as is the case for Patočka. The critical destruction of the European tradition, as I’ve explored in this text, culminates on the following insight. According to Patočka, the common denominator of this tradition and the modern European conception of superiority that follows from it rest on the idea of an immanent teleology of history by which European Man defined himself, with an air of naïve obviousness, as incarnating this telos. This conviction has coloured Europe’s encounters with other humanities, and these encounters have always concluded in war, which Patočka characterizes as a ‘battle of ownership and existence, one for the soul, a battle within the European Spirit itself’.25 He distances himself from this tradition. He writes, ‘in this struggle, displaced European humanity has generally emerged victorious, although the outcome of large portions of the planetary front remains uncertain. Europe as the world’s dominant power has perished, and in this death, its metaphysics was proven inadequate. With a new humanity comes a principle revision of the question of meaning, and this question must today be posed anew’.26 4. THE NEW GROUND OF EUROPE Patočka’s late works, particularly his Heretical Essays, address precisely this fundamental revision. We can once again find the problematic character of

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his philosophy of history in a reading of ‘The Schema of History’. In this text, Patočka repeats his summary of the design [Konstruktive] of the philosophy of history, which may now nourish a historical reflection on the present. This thesis claims, on the one hand, that we are at the end, that is, the end of a history formed by European, Western metaphysics. ‘Our philosophy’, writes Patočka, from which ‘the central possibilities of our historical existence emerge’ is completely ‘inadequate for historical humanity’.27 Philosophy is possible for historical humanity, Patočka thinks, ‘only as a reification of the living’.28 The failure of previously elaborated European spirituality – the fact that it has run its course, and that rational civilization seems incapable of illuminating new possibilities and going beyond its own borders even once it becomes aware of them – prompts Patočka’s question regarding post-­ European humanity: is it ‘capable of living historically?’ But, he employs the old concept of historicity as a clearly defined spiritual principle, which prompts the continuation of the passage: ‘Here, reflection is at stake, which has to be performed not by those who enter the historical arena, but by ­Europeans in the broader sense. Spiritually speaking, what is alive on Earth? What could support the belief or, better, the hope in a life above the biological level?’29 Despite the justified scepticism regarding prior European spirituality, Patočka appears nonetheless to advance on its path since he maintains the opposition of life and spirit wherein he seems to deny this difference to nonEuropeans. It is as if the Europeans have jurisdiction concerning matters of what is alive and what is not, in the spiritual sense. At this point, concerning the distinction between Life and Being already developed in the third essay in the Heretical Essays, the question of history, as Patočka words it, again fails to escape a certain Eurocentrism. The ‘Socratic’ care for the soul, characterized in ‘Europe and Post-Europe’ in terms of ‘moral insight’ is the positive element that Patočka reclaims for the future from the European heritage. With regard to moral insight, he claims that it constitutes the core of European humanity, ‘immune to catastrophes and disasters and always capable of generating new, comprehensive and “formal” forms of unity’. Catastrophes would not spell the definitive ‘failure’ of European humanity, ‘if reasonable, comprehensive frameworks were present for a new formation of humanity’. Patočka, therefore, has consciously appropriated the danger of the expanding rationality.30 Patočka has a very specific conception of what spiritual vitality and spiritual existence mean – namely, the struggle with the meaninglessness of existence and the fight against decay. He considers these to be necessary conditions of life itself. When it comes to the ability to resist and break with the universalization of means-end rationality, which is inherent to life, and to liberate human kind from the exclusive restriction of life to this rationality,



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which Patočka attempts to think most radically with the concept of ‘victim’ – one of the most extreme oppositions of Being and Life – it appears to me nonEuropean cultures are better prepared for such a liberation than the thinkers of the ontological difference. Because, for Patočka, this difference is the only one that counts, not a sacrifice for the sake of an existing purpose. Life is such a purpose. Spiritual vitality as a renewal of authentic or proper historicity exists only in the unsettling of life. The end of history, for Patočka, would be a definitive self-occlusion of Life, of the ontic in itself. This is the danger, which he foresees emerging out of the new, post-European world and against which he wants to mobilize Spirit. Thus, he departs from the European heritage in such a way that he calls for a new, less naïve Socratism. I will end by quoting a lengthy passage from the third essay in Heretical Essays: ‘Does History Have a Meaning?’ It exhibits quite clearly Patočka’s point of contact towards a new, modified post-European Socratism: Indeed, man cannot truly live without meaning, without absolute and allencompassing meaning: he cannot live in the comfort of a vanitas vanitatum. But does that mean he cannot spend his life in tentative and uncertain meaning? In meaning that emerges as the fruit of an insurmountable, objectively-justified darkness expanding at the very bottom of the cosmos itself, which cannot be eradicated but which enables a search that constitutes and satisfies meaning, meaning that is, admittedly, profoundly transformed, where positivity and unfettered naivety prevail no more? Where man does not simply shy away from darkness, uncertainties, contradictions, neither turns a blind eye to anathematize or eradicate them, but faces up to them and tries to endure them? Where, as a result, fraternity and solidarity beyond conflicts and contradictions among those who have been shaken in their naivety become not only possible but also necessarily required? Where, even if only gradually, battles of world-pictures can be overcome without resulting in banal and indifferent tolerance rooted in a general possibility and tedium? A new, extended, much less naïve Socratism would then be required, a new asceticism and an entirely new courage cultivated from the battles, the labour and the blood of the most abominable time of war, to escape the threat of meaninglessness. At the bottom this would be the very same meaning historical mankind has always been striving for by breaking away from the twilight of the prehistoric acquiescence of meaning and embarking on an adventure where infinitely much could be lost but where enough could be gained so that it was worth the effort: the life in truth, the life of spirit31

CONCLUSION Patočka has a reply to the challenge of the post-European era of history, a response that calls for a new form of spirituality which would offer a common, transcendental, deeper foundation to humanity as such. This call seems

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to carry an intrinsic risk of Eurocentrism because this new form of spirituality brings no solid ground but, on the contrary, shakes all given meaning as the basis of moral insight, a care for the soul, and, therefore, a risk. One could defend Patočka from the charge of Eurocentrism by saying that the ‘open soul’ and ‘care for the soul’ are a way in which Europeans can deal with the loss of meaning which they encounter in today’s world, as well as the previous generations did. On the other hand, one could also argue that this is not the only means at the disposal of Europeans for living with the soul or for living spiritually. Even less can this way be considered a form aimed at universalizing spirituality. In this way, one would fall into the repetition of a ‘self-closure through absolutization’ [‘Sichverschliessen durch Verabsolutierung’], which Patočka has identified as Europe’s fundamental mistake. I think, though, that Patočka’s analysis of European history can be read as an examination of one’s own tradition; an examination that can help us to open ourselves to the other, insofar as we can better understand ourselves in a critical way. NOTES 1. Translated from German to English by Ryan Mullins and revised by Nicolas Cuneen thanks to financial support by the The Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports – Institutional Support for Longterm Development of Research Organizations – Charles University, Faculty of Humanities, PRVOUK P 18 (Charles Univ, Fac Human 2014). 2. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996). 3. See Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe (Lectures held in 1973) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 211. 4. The only text on this topic which was published during Patočka’s life is the essay ‘Duchovní základy života v naší době ’ [The Spiritual Foundations of Life in the Present], in Sebrané Spisy, vol. 2: Péče o duši II (Prague: Oikoymenh, 1999), 9–28. The theme of ‘Post-Europe’, which is formulated here for the first time, is further developed in a series of manuscripts in German, which remained unpublished, like ‘Europa und Nach-Europa’ [Europe and Post-Europe] or ‘Das Geschichtsschema’ [The Scheme of History], that were published in Ketzerische Essais zur Philosophie der Geschichte und ergänzende Schriften (Klett-Cotta: Stuttgart, 1988), 183–203, 207–87. Another text ‘Die nach-europäische Epoche und ihre geistigen Probleme’ [The Post-European Epoch and its Spiritual Problems] will be here quoted from the Czech translation ‘Doba poevropská a její duchovní problémy’, published in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 2: Péče o duši II (Prague: Oikoymenh, 1999), 29–44. 5. Patočka refers to the optimism that, according to him, appears to signify Geoffrey Barraclough’s analysis of the ‘postmodern’ era. See Geoffrey Barraclough,



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An Introduction to Contemporary History (London: C.A. Watts & Co., 1964); Patočka, ‘Duchovní základy života v naší době ’, in Péče o duši II, 10; ‘Europa und Nach-Europa’, in Ketzerische Essais, 207ff. 6. Patočka, ‘Doba poevropská’, in Péče o duši II, 43. 7. Patočka, ‘Duchovní základy života v naší době ’, in Péče o duši II, 28. 8. Ibid., 16. 9. Ibid. 10. Patočka, ‘Doba poevropská’, in Péče o duši II, 40. 11. Patočka, ‘Duchovní základy života v naší době ’, in Péče o duši II, 10. 12. See, in this regard, the works of Renaud Barbaras, Le mouvement de l’existence (Chatou: Editions de la Transparence, 2007), and L‘ouverture du monde (Chatou: Editions de la Transparence, 2011). And also Karel Novotný, La génèse d’une hérésie (Paris: Vrin, 2012). 13. Patočka, ‘Europa und Nach-Europa’, in Ketzerische Essais, 220. 14. Patočka, ‘Doba poevropská’, in Péče o duši II, 41. 15. See Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937 (The Hague: Kluwer, 2000), Hua XXIX, 7 (‘Der Mensch als Subjekt ist in seinen mannigfaltigen Aktivitäten und Aktvermögen animal rationale. Er ist vernünftig lebend. Er hat als reifer Mensch das ausgebildete Vermögen der Vernunft, und demnach sind sein aktuelles Leben und seine Lebensergebnisse der Selbstkritik und Gemeinschaftskritik und der kritischen Korrektur unterworfen. Unvernunft ist der negative Modus der Vernunft. Der Mensch hat in der Vernunft das Vermögen der Wahrheit; Wahrheit ist ein ideales Gebilde aus einer eigenen, der vernünftig bewährenden Aktivität’.) In this regard, see Hans Rainer Sepp, ‘Verendlichung als Tiefenstruktur der Krisis’, in Krise der Wissenschaften – Wissenschaft der Krisis?, ed. Helmut Vetter (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000), 128–41. 16. Husserl, Krisis, 12. 17. See the chapter ‘Freedom and Historicity’ of my book La genèse d’une hérésie, 103–37. 18. See Patočka, ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’ (1946), Studia Phaenomenologica VII (2007): 89ff. 19. See Jan Patočka, ‘Die Selbstbesinnung Europas’ [The Self-Reflection of Europe] (early 1970s), in Perspektiven der Philosophie: Neues Jahrbuch 20 (1994): 241–74 (in particular, 256). See also Patočka, ‘Duchovní základy života v naší době ’, in Péče o duši II, 28. 20. ‘The spirit is neither a spirit of the serious heaviness, a camel, nor a genius who has wings. The spirit is a be-shaken’, Jan Patočka, ‘Cesta k vybřednutí z války’ [A Way to Get out of the War], in Patočka, Sebrané spisy, Vol. 3: Péče o duši III (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2002), 490. Manuscript referring to the last essay in Heretical Essays, ‘Wars of the 20th Century and the 20th Century as War’. 21. A fragment, which ties into the text ‘The Post-European Epoch and its Spiritual Problems’ begins with the following sentence: ‘One cannot advance to make progress on the sketched problems of today’s historical epoch without undertaking the attempt of a very radical distancing from the traditional, European ways of viewing

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world history’. Jan Patočka, ‘Poznámky k ‘doběpoevropské’ [Notes on ‘PostEuropean Epoch’], in Péče o duši III, 770. With regards to this idea of destruction, see the following passage of the same manuscript: ‘The history of metaphysics hitherto is a specific European metaphysics of spirit, which is connected with European philosophy as metaphysics in general. Its revision is, thus, a revision of this metaphysics in general, apparently its destruction’, ibid., 778. 22. Ibid., 774. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 774. 25. Ibid., 778. 26. Ibid. 27. J. Patočka, ‘Das Geschichtsschema’, published under the title ‘Die Epochen der Geschicte (Skizze)’, in Patočka, Ketzerische Essais, 202. 28. Ibid., 203. 29. Ibid. 30. Patočka, ‘Europa und Nach-Europa’, in Ketzerische Essais, 232. 31. Patočka, Péče o duši III, 584–5. This quotation is taken from the partial German translation of the Heretical Essays that Patočka himself realized. The quoted passage replaced the conclusion of the original version of the third essay in Heretical Essays.

Chapter 19

Europe and the Oblivion of the World From Husserl to Patočka Ovidiu Stanciu

At the beginning of August 1934, while spending his holidays in the Black Forest, Husserl received an invitation from the Prague-based Cercle philosophique pour les recherches sur l’entendement humain to contribute to the International Philosophical Congress that was to be held a month later in the capital of Czechoslovakia with a paper addressing the question of ‘the present task of philosophy’. Husserl responded favourably to this request and submitted a paper on 30 August 1934. However, numerous typing mistakes as well as a certain dissatisfaction with regard to the content – ‘Das Ganze ist unfertig’ [the whole is unfinished], as he puts it in an letter from 13 September – led him to ask Patočka, who was one of the organizers of the conference, to send him back the paper in order to revisit it.1 Although he initially planned to send a revised version of his text back to Prague, the difficulties he encountered in providing a sufficient foundation for his insights resulted in an interminable reworking of the manuscript. The exploration of the paths that these reflections uncovered provided the source for the 1935 Vienna conference, which inaugurated the Krisis work. What at first glance seemed to be an occasional writing, a mere concession made to the topics of the day – the general theme of the Prague Congress was ‘The crisis of democracy’ – turned out to be for the old master of phenomenology a forceful impetus to take up once more the task of spelling out the goals, achievements, and inner architecture of transcendental phenomenology, this time considered in a historical perspective, as the final term of a teleological movement initiated at the dawn of Greek philosophy. It is undeniable that a note of urgency provides the immediate subtext for the positions Husserl expresses in the Vienna and Prague conferences as well as in the Krisis, which can thus appear as reactions to the growing disarray in Europe. Endorsing the rights of reason against the rising irrationalism and 315

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affirming a European ‘We’2 – according to the formula used in the Vienna conference – in a time of parochialist upsurge make him unmistakably, as Gérard Granel puts it, ‘one of those who saved the honour of Europe’ [‘l’un de ceux qui ont sauvé l’honneur de l’Europe’].3 However, the immediate meaning – political, in a broader sense – of this undertaking should not prevent us from measuring its properly philosophical achievements, be it in order to perpetuate its underlying gesture or to exhibit its shortcomings. For Husserl himself thought of his enterprise of diagnosing the crisis that affects European humanity and of proposing a remedy to it not as a work of edification or as a mere ‘cultural’ reflection, but rather as a piece of philosophical inquiry, the profound reason for this being his conviction that – as the text from the Prague conference asserts – ‘the genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between the philosophies’.4 It is into this philosophical arena that Husserl thrusts himself while writing the Krisis, attempting to fight back not the symptoms, but the profound (and remote) causes of the European dismay: scepticism and objectivism. It will thus not be inappropriate to separate the text from the context and to treat it in itself. Patočka was one of the first to grasp the novelty of the approach sketched in the Krisis and devoted his Habiltionsschrift from 1936 to the exploration of the field it uncovers.5 However, when in his old age the Czech philosopher addresses the question that constitutes the core of the Krisis anew, his admiration for his master’s endeavours is tempered by a sense of discontent with regard to its accomplishments. Indeed, one has to admit that ‘alone among the philosophers of his time, Husserl tried to renew the vital nerve of modern Europe by reassessing the principle of scientific evidence that constitutes its foundation’.6 Nevertheless, the outcomes of this enterprise should by no means be taken for granted and one should thus engage in ‘a debate with the great undertaking the last Husserl attempted in the Krisis, a debate of a crucial importance for the problems of a post-European humanity’.7 For ‘we are forced to admit that the so-called phenomenological metaphysics which Husserl puts forth as the result and the basis of his analytic description of the natural world is in the end disappointing’.8 In effect, we might ask, following Patočka, whether the account Husserl provides of the lifeworld – whereby he identifies it with a soil, a ground in which all the idealizing procedures of science are rooted – is radical enough. Does it allow us to grasp the world itself beyond its significance for reason or does it rather reduce the world to a function within a conceptual device, namely that of providing a basis for scientific accomplishments? Does his characterization of European humanity as the only one that managed to extract itself from the chains of nature and therefore the only one that was able to give an account of the world as such resist all criticism? It is to the task of casting light on the strategy Patočka



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takes on in order both to critically assume and to surpass Husserl’s undertaking that this chapter is devoted. In order to grasp the position Patočka defends, it is important to point out what dimensions of the Husserlian insight may appear as ‘disappointing’. This requires, in return, rendering Husserl’s position in all its complexity and subtlety. In the sixth paragraph of the Krisis, Husserl bemoans that an engherzige Vernunft9 [‘a narrow-minded reason’, or literally a ‘small-hearted reason’] has established a monopoly over the meaning of reason as such, reducing it to a technique whose achievements are identified with its practical efficacy and ability to lead the humanity that lives according to it (i.e. the European humanity) into drastic dismay. The cure to such a predicament does not lie in the relinquishment of reason as such, but rather in the re-enactment of a großherzige Vernunft, of a reason capable not only of progressing from one discursive sequence to another, but also equally able to give an account of its own emergence and therefore capable of lodging itself into the whole of human existence. Husserl is thus led to question the appearance of reason as such, as well as its ambiguous relation to the lifeworld from which it proceeds and to which it always necessarily belongs. The way Husserl conceives the overcoming of the ‘technical’ (engherzige) meaning of reason is through a Rückfrage10 [question-in-return, reflection-back], which aims to grasp and, therefore, to reactualize the emergence of reason out of a world that does not include it. On this account, the European crisis is a crisis of its own reason, an illness of reason that can be cured only through reason so that a reflective return to its origins appears to be the only way out. The crisis of sciences that Husserl points to is thus by no means a mere foundational crisis and cannot therefore be related to the numerous debates, frequent in his time, regarding the foundations of mathematics or to the discussions in physics that opposed the supporters of relativist theory to that of quanta theory. For it does not concern the capacity scientists have to provide rigorous propositional foundations for their undertakings, axiomatical grounds that resist all criticism, but rather the ability of science, as such, to provide a more general and deeper meaning. In the attempt to forge a broader meaning, the scientific project encounters a double obstacle. The path it tries to carve must simultaneously avoid the dangers represented by ‘positivism, that decapitates philosophy’11 and mysticism (or, according to another formula ‘the so much vaunted irrationalism’12). Although these two symmetrically situated opponents share an identical presupposition – namely, the reduction of reason to its technical sense – it is important to acknowledge that one (irrationalism) is the consequence of the other (positivism). The horror stirred up by irrationalism and, above all, by its practical consequences should not impede us from admitting that its true source and its genuine cause lie in the ‘positivistic restriction of the idea of science’.13 But positivism

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(or ‘objectivism’ or ‘naturalism’ as Husserl sometimes refers to it) is not exterior to the scientific project, but rather a result of its accomplishment. Through a more genuine understanding of reason as such and through rejecting the positivistic understanding of science, one does more than putting science back on its genuine track: it also deprives irrationalism of any ground whatsoever. Were we to fully endorse the Husserlian diagnosis according to which the ‘positivistic restriction of the idea of science’ endangers the very possibility of science to offer a meaning for life, thus giving rise to irrationalism, in what way could this crisis internal to the scientific inquiry count as a crisis of ­European humanity? The step that allows Husserl to make this claim lies in the thesis that ‘the primal establishment of the new philosophy is […] the primal establishment of modern European humanity itself. […] Thus the ­crisis of philosophy implies the crisis of all modern sciences as members of the philosophical universe: at first a latent, then a more and more prominent crisis of European humanity itself in respect to the total meaningfulness of its cultural life, its total Existenz’.14 The destiny of European humanity appears thus to rest, in its genesis as well as in its development, entirely on the emergence and unfolding of philosophy. It is important to note that this thesis contains more than the common assumption according to which the depth and the identity of a cultural community is given by a set of symbolic procedures. It is not a certain and peculiar philosophical idea that constitutes ‘the spiritual shape of Europe’,15 but rather philosophy as such, namely the inquiry where reason comes to itself for the first time. Yet, no particular community can pretend to have a monopoly on reason as such. Thus, on Husserl’s account, what specifies Europe is not a particular feature, situated on the same level as the distinctive characteristics of other cultural communities, but precisely the fact of not being a culture among others: the peculiarity of Europe is to be universal. It is therefore of the highest importance that when Husserl enumerates the geographical territories that can be said to belong to Europe he does not restrict them to the ‘geographical Europe’, but includes also the spaces where Europe has exerted a cultural influence, so that ‘in the spiritual sense the English Dominions, the United States, etc. clearly belong to Europe’.16 The ‘etc.’ placed at the end of this enumeration possesses a decisive meaning: it doesn’t merely stand for the de facto incompleteness of the enumeration, but it is there to highlight that a restrictive ‘geographical’ definition of Europe is de jure self-contradicting. If reason is what makes the peculiarity of Europe, then an ‘etc.’ must necessarily be added to any extensional determination of it. If de facto and at a certain moment of its history Europe excludes other spaces and cultural communities from its sphere, it is its inner vocation to be able to include them.17 Husserl’s position can thus be characterized by a double orientation: while implicitly rejecting any alleged superiority of a particular Volk – for no



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particular community can pretend to be universal – he is explicitly asserting the universality of the ‘spiritual Europe’, to which everyone could belong, or even – we could add in a Husserlian vein – should belong inasmuch as one does not content oneself with living a mere ‘natural life’. While at a first glance Husserl seems merely to replace a naturalistic privilege (that of a certain community) with a spiritual one (that of Europe), because the universality he is after can be acquired only through belonging to a (de jure non-restrictive, but still particular) community, a closer look to his developments will challenge this assumption. If the privilege Europe enjoys rests on the room it leaves for reason to unfold, it is important to emphasize that reason is not a solid rock that once acquired can never be lost, but rather a movement to which the possibility of failure necessarily belongs. Not only is the crisis internal to reason as such, but if we are to draw radical conclusions from Husserl’s account, we must acknowledge that crisis does not represent a provisional moment or a temporary stance, but is rather coextensive with the development of reason as such. As soon as reason emerges, the crisis is already there, for it points to the gap between the infinite tasks reason ascribes to itself and the effective achievements, which can always obliterate these tasks.18 Therefore, the price Europe has to pay for its privilege is that of being in a constant (be it latent or manifest) crisis. Moreover, the privilege Europe enjoys is merely a putative one, one that has not yet fully established its rights, and – what is for Husserl of the highest importance – one that can fail to do so through joining the ‘sceptical deluge’ which will draw it back to a mere ‘natural humanity’. In effect, as we can read in the Prague conference, to bring latent reason to the understanding of its own possibilities and thus to bring to insight the possibility of metaphysics as a true possibility – this is the only way to put metaphysics or universal philosophy on the strenuous road to realization. It is the only way to decide whether the telos which was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy – that of humanity which seeks to exist, and is only possible, through philosophical reason, moving endlessly from latent to manifest reason and forever seeking its own norms through this, its truth and genuine human nature – whether this telos, then, is merely a factual, historical delusion, the accidental acquisition of merely one among many other civilizations and histories, or whether Greek humanity was not rather the first breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such, its entelechy.19

The universality Europe alleges for itself is by no means an established truth, which can be derived from the primal, Greek, establishment [Ur-stiftung] of philosophy, but rather one that depends on inflicting a final defeat to scepticism, by attaining the final establishment [End-stiftung] of a universal

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philosophy. Only then, that is, when a recognized metaphysics is established, could we proclaim that the Greek telos represents, in fact, a breakthrough to the essence of humanity as such. Until then, it is no more than a claim, certainly a guiding one, but still lacking full and genuine justification. The grandeur and the immensity Husserl ascribes to his undertaking thus appear more clearly. He is not merely reassessing a truth independent of its enterprise, but the claim he is issuing with regard to the European humanity rests entirely on the success of his endeavours. Therefore, the opposition against the realization of the transcendental project appears to be, at the same time, a threat to European humanity: objectivism does not simply endanger the possibility of a true philosophy, but threatens equally the universality of European humanity. How does Husserl proceed in order both to secure the rights of an enlarged reason and to provide a final foundation for the universality of European humanity? His strategy consists in pointing out the twofold oblivion necessarily inherent to objectivism: oblivion of the soil in which all ideality is rooted and oblivion of the Leistung [the activity, the act] through which the ideality was forged. Thus, the final accomplishment transcendental phenomenology aims at depends on its capacity to retrieve a sense of the origin forgotten by and within objectivism: it is to this particular task that the strategy of a Rückfrage is devoted. More precisely, Husserl imputes to objectivism that the ‘world’ it conceives is not a prior but a posterius, namely the result of high-levelled idealizing procedures which necessarily loses sight of the real world. In ­Husserl’s words, what objectivism operates is ‘the surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable – our everyday life-world’.20 Instead of determining a pre-existing world, objectivism constructs one and takes the result of his construction for the real world. What facilitates this identification is the fact that objectivism under-determines the subjective operation [Leistung], understanding it as a mere reflection of what is out there. Or in his analysis of Galileo, Husserl shows precisely in what sense objectivism represents a project determined by a certain conception of what knowledge is, and therefore a construction of what should count as real, rather than a mere reflection of it. Objectivism thus necessarily forgets not only what is prior to it – that is, the Lebenswelt, the world not yet determined by its scientific idealities – but also what initiated and constantly sustains its procedures, what opens up the field in which it can evolve – the Urstiftung. Lebenswelt and Urstiftung certainly represent the most decisive concepts of the Krisis work, the two terms that the Rückfrage must retrieve. A großherzige Vernunft is one that is able, through historical and critical reflection, to grasp the primal establishment [Urstiftung] of reason as such and, in doing so, to understand the leap it has operated with regard to



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the prior lifeworld [Lebenswelt]. As long as it conceals to itself the bedrock on which it stands, objectivism is not merely an incomplete theory, but also, in Husserl’s words, an ‘irresponsible’ one, for it can never give a full account of what it is actually doing. As Patočka will point it out: ‘Husserl’s undertakings rests entirely on the idea of the self-responsibility of knowledge.’21 This idea, according to which science must be an instance of self-responsibility, and, correlatively, that self-responsibility can accomplish itself only in and as science, is what constitutes both the glory and the limit of Husserl’s attempt. It is this precise aspect of Husserl’s position that will be the target of Patočka’s criticism: ‘The Husserlian project that aims to deepen the ground of European rationality, is it able to put the humanity on a new path and to overcome the fundamental crisis testified by the two world wars?’22 Patočka is not questioning the Husserlian diagnosis, according to which the profound reason of the crisis lies in the predominance of a ‘technical’ (engherzige) sense of reason, but is rather challenging the solution Husserl puts forth, his project of overcoming the crisis by appealing to another stance, be it enlarged (großherzige), of reason. Patočka will first argue that a meaningful life, a life lived in self-responsibility, one that is determined by ‘the care for the soul’, is grasped only one-sidedly when characterized as a life of reason. Second, if reason is the final term of the Husserlian project, then the whole investigation of the ‘life-world’ he unfolds is nothing more – as Ricœur puts it, in a way convergent to Patočka’s position – than ‘a moment in the process to which reason comes to itself, beyond the limitations of objectivism’.23 To put it in another way, this time in Patočka’s words: The Lebenswelt in Husserl’s sense remains an abstraction determined by a special function of science, thus the Lebenswelt is not a world in a proper sense; the Husserlian conception conceals, forgets the world as a purely phenomenal field. In short, the Lebenswelt calls for the same critique Husserl addresses to the ‘real world’ of the natural sciences, to which he reproaches to have forgotten its ground.24

Patočka is thus pointing out the twofold reduction which Husserl accomplishes: that of human existence to reason and that of the world to a moment in the self-elucidation of reason. His attempt to amplify the Husserlian perspective will result in a triple conceptual manoeuvre. First, he will try to provide a more comprehensive account of the Lebenwelt, so that its description would not be pre-oriented by the task of offering a ground for the accomplishments [Leistungen] of reason. Second, he will attempt to grasp a pathway from this deeper concept of the Lebenwelt to the Welt, to the world as such. Not only should the lifeworld not be reduced to a function within the process of selfelucidation of reason, but also the world should not be considered merely

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as the ‘world of the humans’, or ‘the world of human existence’. Finally, Patočka will draw the conclusion that this double widening of the Husserlian perspective imposes: to his account, we may well establish Europe’s specificity but in no way assess its privilege. The first insufficiency stressed by Patočka concerns Husserl’s description of the lifeworld, the world that is already there, before the theory begins. For Patočka, Husserl fails to give an account of its independence, for the Lebenswelt is not just prior to the emergence of theoretical reason, but also structured in a different way: We might first ask whether, in considering it in its role of the forgotten foundation of scientific rationality, we are grasping the natural world in its primordial givenness or whether, on the contrary, in giving preference to this viewpoint, we are not seeing it one-sidedly. Our lifeworld is, after all, primordially a world of human practice, a world where people eat and work and devote themselves to tasks which they carry out by relying on that ever available yet ever overlooked resource of our physical, corporeal existence. Does not this world open itself more to my ‘I can’ than to my ‘I perceive’ or my ‘I observe’? Is not the primordial givenness of our life-world initially an originality of an active order, and is it not objects at which we aim when we let ourselves be guided by its contours from one moment of our tasks to another? So considered, the natural world would not be so much a world of intuitions as one utilizing intuitions as an avenue to its most primordial functions.25

But if the lifeworld is a world of praxis, and is therefore opened by an ‘I can’ and not an ‘I observe’, this implies that reason, even in an enlarged sense, cannot pretend to encompass it. Patočka points to the restriction inherent to the Husserlian perspective: what is external to reason is reduced either to an anticipation of it, or to a material that reason will have to inform. Establishing the autonomy of the lifeworld allows Patočka to sustain that reason can best be acknowledged as a particular form of praxis. To every form of praxis belongs a specific disclosure of the world. It follows that no privilege can be drawn from the pre-eminence of reason within a certain cultural community. This criticism will not leave Husserl without a reply. Indeed, praxis had always had as its correlate a particular lifeworld: the lifeworld of a certain community. Yet, what emerges through reason is the very possibility of setting a task that has its horizon in the infinite, that is, beyond any particular lifeworld. Pythagoras’s theorem was formulated at a particular moment in a particular context and, as with every cultural production [Erzeugung], was rooted in a peculiar lifeworld. But, inasmuch as it is an ideality, its meaning cannot be confined to the significance it had for the community that first adopted it. It is a constitutive dimension of meaning to be still valuable [gelten] when this community no longer exists. In other words, as soon as the



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infinite becomes a theme of inquiry, the correlate of this inquiry is no longer a certain lifeworld but the world itself. As Husserl puts it in the Vienna conference, ‘All this lies within the world-horizon; but special motives are required when one who is gripped in this world-life reorients himself and somehow comes to make the world itself thematic, to take up a lasting interest in it’.26 Thus, the privilege Europe enjoys does not simply lie in reason – as a particular form of praxis – but rather in the capacity it had first brought to light, to relate itself to the world as a whole. It is only through the infinity of reason that the inexhaustible and infinite character of the world becomes apparent. While acknowledging that therein lies the profound motivation of H ­ usserl’s adherence to rationalism, Patočka dismisses the claims on which it rests. On the one hand, he maintains that, liberated from the constraints of the understanding, reason, envisaged in a broader sense, cannot be said to be strictly European. On the other hand, he sustains that the infinite project, launched by the scientific humanity, entails the danger of concealing the depth and the infinity of the world, inasmuch as it can fall prey to a form of constant selfreference, taking the infinite task it has projected to be the exact and unique transposition of the infinity of the world. As we have seen, the insufficiency of the Husserlian enterprise amounts to the lack of radicalism inherent to his concept of the lifeworld. This concept is meant to provide a firm grounding to the procedures and accomplishments pertaining to science. The ‘technical’ reason is criticized inasmuch as it has distanced itself from its origin, from what supplies it with a solid basis, but this doesn’t mean that Husserl takes into consideration the possibility of a different kind of unveiling of the lifeworld other than the one science, as an instrument of the ratio, proposes. Science preserves all its privileges, although in order to claim them, it needs to consider its accomplishments no longer in the perspective of efficiency and domination, but rather in that of self-responsibility. But, if this is the case, we might legitimately ask whether this ‘enlarged concept of reason’ still possesses a European rooting. As Patočka notes, The common concept of reason, determined by the identification of the ratio to the understanding (Verstand), which is proper to science and technique, is insufficient for the understanding of the historical spirituality. As long as we widen this concept to reason (Vernunft) so as to encompass the ethical life, the poetry, the art, the religion, there is no ground whatsoever that traditions other that our own could integrate rational elements, in the sense of the understanding, in order to form a unified vision of life, that could be qualified as rational in the sense of Vernunft.27

However, Patočka’s aim is not simply to blur the line of demarcation between the European humanity and the non-European traditions, by showing that

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reason, in its enlarged sense, represents their common belonging. Faithful, in a heretical way, to the spirit of his master, the Czech philosopher maintains that we can indeed highlight what specifies Europe, but we can by no means assess its privilege. In Patočka’s words: It is precisely this hedge that characterizes the European spirit, which three hundred years ago embarked on the project of conquering the world, of this spirit that wishes to understand and to dominate things on the basis of things, that is in the absence of the world. In this regard, it can be distinguished from all human civilizations. We can thus indicate the specificity of Europe but, on this ground, we cannot prove its supremacy.28

On Patočka’s account, Europe is thus specified with regard to the other traditions not by an ‘addition’, but rather through a ‘subtraction’; its distinctive feature lies in a ‘less’, or rather is a ‘loss’, the lost of the world inherent to its establishment of an infinite project. The distinctive feature of Europe amounts to the infinite project it launches which necessarily loses track of the Ur-doxa, the primal commitment to the world as such and to the mystery of its appearing. The loss of contact with the hyper-doxa and the replacement of the hyper-doxa with a rational hegemonic project results in the oblivion of the world, as the soil prior to all human praxis. Patočka formulates these theses in a straightforward way: What does the Husserlian life-world lack? Nothing ‘positive’, but rather the world itself, in its primordial project, which is hidden beneath the doxa. Husserl can of course argue for the existence of an essential structure that maintains itself, identical, in every surrounding world, but as a matter of fact there is no natural world, no life-world. From a historical perspective, there are only lifeworlds and each and every one of these contains an ungraspable dimension, which is not a mere doxa, one that can be called, if we consider it from the standpoint of doxa, a hyper-doxa. This ungraspable dimension is the mystery of the world which, as such, encompasses and penetrates all historical worlds and also determines our technical-scientific world. The ‘primitive’ cultures, or, if we prefer, their ‘worlds’ give to this mystery the shape of a myth that we interpret, according to our empiricist perspective, […] as an ‘anthropological phantasmagoria’. […] These strange worlds, as ‘primitive’ as they may seem, have kept alive something against which we constantly fight, transforming it into a presence.29

This profound and difficult passage can be read as an answer to the following question: What gets lost when an endless space is open, when an infinite project is launched? The answer is radical: the consequence of such an enterprise is nothing less than the ‘lost of the world’. In order to grasp the full scope of



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Patočka’s position, it is necessary to unpack the different layers of meaning present in this text. The fragment rests on the assumption that Husserl has gathered and expressed in the most profound way the insight that lies at the very core of European humanity. Therefore, criticizing Husserl amounts to pointing out the deadlock to which the path taken by the European humanity leads. The main thesis Patočka formulates is that the central tenet of the world – precisely its ‘ungraspable dimension’, its ‘mystery’ – remains hidden to reason, even in its enlarged stance, and it is accessible only to the myth. This contention implies the rehabilitation of the myth as a way of relating to the totality. As the Czech philosopher writes in a text from the same period, ‘In the rituals, dances, ceremonies, initiations, sacrifices, the man does not relate himself to singularities. […] He relates himself to the totality of all possibilities through which the world is calling him’.30 Yet, even if we admit that myths are perennial (‘Myths do not die, contrary to what rationalists and their followers believed’31) and that they entail a different way of relating to the world as totality than that proper to reason, how can we make sense of the claim that they are not just irreducible to reason, but also more adequate than reason for unveiling the ‘mystery of the world’? By resorting to the mythical knowledge in order to counter Husserl’s persistent rationalism, isn’t Patočka falling into the trap of ‘irrationalism’ or ‘mysticism’? Before exposing the role Patočka assigned to the myth in the unveiling of the world, we should consider the prior claim according to which the E ­ uropean project brought about ‘the general depletion of the mystery of the world’, ‘the lost of the world’.32 In this respect, it is important to acknowledge that Patočka’s reading of the Krisis stands in an immediate correlation with his appropriation of the Heideggerian concept of Gestell, as the 1973 Varna Conference testifies.33 The terminal point of the European project can thus be said to reside in an age of universal commutability, where every being is converted into a resource and integrated into a one-dimensional plan. The product of this fundamental levelling of all that exists, the result of the framing of every being as a ‘standing-reserve’ is what the technical science considers to be the ‘world’. Or, according to Patočka, the world is not acknowledged in its full scope as long we consider it as the mere correlate of a world project. In doing so, we are ‘transforming it into a presence’, thereby setting aside and casting away its inner articulation, each time the peculiar and therefore ‘ungrasping’ way in which things and words, humans and gods, the symbolic and the real, are joined together and kept apart. What is ‘mysterious’ in a world is precisely the way it joints and bonds together these different layers and regions of being. Such a ‘jointure’ comes to light in the ‘hyper-doxa’, in this primal commitment to a peculiar world which enables us to know our way and to get along in this world. It is precisely this kind of ‘knowledge’, untranslatable in the terms of reason – even considered in its enlarged stance – that the myth is

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expressing. Patočka formulates this conviction in a contemporary text, where he refers to what he previously termed the ‘ungrasping dimension’ or the ‘mystery of the world’ with the expression the ‘heart of the world’: ‘The heart of the world is not something that can be the object of philosophical knowledge, but rather something all our being relates to, something that we tell. […] The myth is not something different than that. Philosophy and sciences do not displace myths in it’.34 Expressing a knowledge that is not entirely transparent to itself, the myth gives voice to this asubjective, prehuman articulation of the world: ‘The myth is a question that humans address to humans, but its roots are to be found in a depth prior to logos. It is not we that are asking this radical question, but rather we are put into question by it’.35 Thus, reason, even in its enlarged sense, cannot but transform the world into a field of full presence, thereby pushing back its ‘ungrasping dimension’ that the hyper-doxa contains. The rational project, even conducted in full self-responsibility, cannot but go against this primal naivety that binds us to the world. Yet, the world gets lost when it is deprived of its nocturnal dimension, the absence around which all the present beings revolve. The world springs and it is kept alive precisely when it is not from the very start submitted to a rational schematism. We may then conclude, against Husserl and following the path carved by Patočka, that ‘natural humanities’ hold a truth that cannot be captured by the project launched by the European humanity. This radical and critical diagnosis of modern Europe is tempered, in Patočka’s writings from the same period, by a more nuanced account. One might even argue that the criticism Patočka addresses to Husserl’s idea of Europe doesn’t lead him to reject the very idea of Europe. Quite the contrary: ‘Europe has drawn two paths towards the opening of our planet: the exterior path of conquest and of universal hegemony, which has led to its wreck as a historical reality; but also the interior path of the opening of the world, of becoming-world of the different Lebenwelten. The latter path needs to be today rediscovered and followed up to its end’.36 Two residual questions remain: What is the status of the ‘care for the soul’, which, on Patočka’s account, constitutes the core of the Platonic tradition? Can it be said to represent a careful and precise translation of this proto-doxa that supposedly lies at the heart of the European world? Or does it rather represent a rational – and thus infinite project – but one that is not threatened by a fall in objectivism? Secondly, how can we understand Patočka’s own developments pertaining to a ‘philosophy of history’ where he seems to endorse a somewhat modified but still Husserlian perspective, inasmuch as the breakthrough of ‘problematicity’ in the Greek philosophical questioning and the political practice represents a decisive – and positive – moment for the humanity as a whole? For only the emergence of this attitude with regard to the world, one of no mere acceptance or sustenance but of transcendence,



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gives the possibility for the world itself to appear. It is into this maze of problems that Patočka’s conception of Europe forces us to enter. NOTES 1. For the details regarding this issue, see Ronald Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink. Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938 (New Heaven; London: Yale University Press, 2004), 56–8, as well as Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), Hua. XXVII, ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), ‘Einleitung der Herausgeber’, xxv–xix. According to Patočka, Heidegger was also invited to attend to this conference, but did not receive the permission to travel to Prague. See Jan Patočka, ‘Questions et réponses sur Réponses et questions’ [Excerpts from the Discussion on Heidegger’s Interview], in Liberté et sacrifice, ed. and trans. E. Abrams (Grenoble: Millon, 1990), 348. 2. Edmund Husserl, Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1950), 325: ‘fur uns, Europäer’; Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 279. 3. Gérard Granel, ‘Métaphysique et politique: L’Europe selon Husserl’, in Écrits logiques et politiques (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 136. 4. Husserl, Krisis, 13; English translation, 15. 5. Cf. Jan Patočka, ‘Prirozený svet jako filosofický problém’ [The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem], in Sebrané spisy, Vol. 6 : Fenomenologické spisy I: Prirozený svět, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Jan Frei (Prague: Oikoymenh, 2008), 127–261. I have consulted the French translation by Jaromir Danek and Henri Declève, Le monde naturel comme problème philosophique (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1976). 6. I’m following here the argument that Patočka developed in a manuscript published in French under the title ‘Réflexions sur l’Europe’ [The Self-Reflection of Europe], in Jan Patočka, Liberté et sacrifice, 181–212. 7. Ibid., 181. 8. J. Patočka, ‘Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy of the Crisis of Sciences and His conception of a Phenomenology of the “Life-World,’’’ in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 233. 9. Husserl, Krisis, 14; English translation, 16. 10. Cf. Paul Ricœur, ‘L’originaire et la question-en-retour dans la Krisis de Husserl’, in À l’école de la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 287ff. 11. Husserl, Krisis, 7; English translation, 9. 12. Ibid., 14, 16. 13. Ibid., 5, 7. 14. Ibid., 10, 12. 15. Ibid., 274, 319. 16. Ibid., 273, 319.

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17. I admit that, in order to render Husserl’s position more coherent, I am overinterpreting this passage. The ‘historical Husserl’ has defined Europe not only through the openness that characterizes the ‘etc.’, but also in a restrictive way, by excluding from it ‘the Eskimos or Indians presented as curiosities at fairs, or the Gypsies, who constantly wander about Europe’ (Husserl, Krisis, 319–20; English translation, 273). Still, it might be argued that it is only a de facto exclusion, inasmuch as Husserl admits the possibility for them to ‘Europeanize themselves’ (Husserl, Krisis, 320; English translation, 275). 18. This point appears more prominently in the appendix of the Krisis titled The Origin of Geometry. Cf. also Paul Ricœur, ‘Husserl et le sens de l’histoire’, in À l’école de la phénoménologie, 38: ‘La conscience de la crise nous assure que l’idée infinie peut être enfouie, oubliée, et même se dégrader. Toute l’histoire de la philosophie est un combat entre une compréhension de la tâche comme infinie et sa réduction naturaliste, ou comme le dira la Krisis, entre le transcendantalisme et l’objectivisme. […] Le drame naît de ce que toute réalisation de la tâche est la menace d’une perte de la tâche elle-même. Ainsi tout succès est ambigu: Galilée sera le grand témoin de cette victoire-défaite – Galilée: celui qui a recouvert l’Idée en découvrant la nature comme mathématique incarnée.’ 19. Husserl, Krisis, 13; English translation, 15. 20. Ibid., 49, 48–9. 21. Patočka, ‘Réflexions sur l’Europe’, in Liberté et sacrifice, 188. 22. Ibid., 181. 23. Ricœur, ‘L’originaire et la question-en-retour dans la Krisis de Husserl’, in À l’école de la phénoménologie, 292. 24. Patočka, ‘Réflexions sur l’Europe’, in Liberté et sacrifice, 212. 25. Jan Patočka, ‘Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy of the Crisis of Sciences and His Conception of a Phenomenology of the “Life-World”’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 234. 26. Husserl, Krisis, 327; English translation, 281. 27. Patočka, ‘Réflexions sur l’Europe’, in Liberté et sacrifice, 210. 28. Ibid., 210–11. 29. Ibid., 186. 30. Jan Patočka, ‘La vérité du mythe dans les drames de Sophocle sur les Labdacides’ [The Truth of Myth in Sophocles’ Dramas on the Labdacides], in L’écrivain, son ‘objet’, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Paris: P.O.L., 1990), 32. 31. Jan Patočka, ‘Le sens du mythe du pacte avec le diable. Méditation sur les variantes de la légende de Faust’ [The Meaning of the Myth on the Pact with the Devil. A Reflection on the Variants of Faust’s Legend], in L’écrivain, son ‘objet’, 128. 32. Patočka, ‘Réflexions sur l’Europe’, in Liberté et sacrifice, 197, 210. 33. Jan Patočka, ‘Die Gefahren der Technisierung in der Wissenschaft bei Edmund Husserl und das Wesen der Technik als Gefahr bei Martin Heidegger’, in Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz, ed. Klaus Nellen and Jiří Němec (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1991), 330–53.



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34. Patočka, ‘Le sens du mythe du pacte avec le diable’, in L’écrivain, son ‘objet’, 128. 35. Ibid. 36. Jan Patočka, L’Europe après l’Europe [Europe and Post-Europe] (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2007), 43.

Chapter 20

Europe’s Twentieth Century History of Wars and War as History Ludger Hagedorn

INTRODUCTION The best-known and most often quoted work by Jan Patočka are still his Heretical Essays. Written towards the end of his life, these essays bring together the main topics of his life and thought: the vocation of phenomenology as a philosophical, political, historical movement and the phenomenology of vocation, that is, the insistence on philosophy’s existential meaning in the sense of leading to a conversion or metanoia – the breakthrough to a deeper sense of life. The shortest formula for this programme is Patočka’s recapturing of the Socratic ‘care for the soul’ [epimeleia tés psychés].1 ‘Care for the soul means that truth is something not given once and for all, nor merely a matter of observing and acknowledging the observed, but rather a life-long inquiry, a self-controlling, self-unifying intellectual and vital practice’.2 Care for the soul is the shaking of naïve certainty, both in the realm of the political by questioning any pregiven order as well as philosophically by asking for the meaning of life without having the (mythical) answer right at hand. Care for the soul is the vocation of philosophy, the innermost core of what philosophical existence means, but it is also the evocation of philosophy, namely, making philosophy itself possible, calling it into being. Historically, Patočka dates this birth of philosophy to the fifth century BC, that is, (politically) the blossoming of the Greek polis and (philosophically) the time of the life and ministry of Socrates. Both these aspects entail important consequences: First, it should not be underestimated that despite his frequent references to the pre-Socratics (and at the end to Heraclitus especially), the core of Patočka’s philosophizing, the overall axis of his thought, is Platonic-Socratic. In the third of the Heretical Essays he states: 331

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In accepting responsibility for themselves and others, humans implicitly pose the question of meaning in a new and different way. They are no longer content with the bondage of life itself, with subsistence as life’s content and service in the sweat of their brow as the lot of beings fated to episodicity and subordination. Thus the result of the primordial shaking of accepted meaning is not a fall into meaninglessness but, on the contrary, the discovery of the possibility of achieving a freer, more demanding meaningfulness.3

It is difficult to imagine a more explicit and more dedicated articulation of the vocation of philosophy as an instance of freedom and self-determination as well as the manifest striving and upward movement of the soul entailed in that. This repeatedly employed (and in some instances almost pathetic) reference to philosophy as a liberating care for the soul is what clearly differentiates Patočka’s approach from Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s. In spite of all references to both of them, in spite of obvious similarities and metaphorical concurrences (such as Patočka’s affection to the ‘night’) and also in spite of some commentators who see a ‘fatal’ closeness to Heidegger and Nietzsche, one has to clearly emphasize that it is this positioning of philosophy itself that determines their intellectual undertakings. Philosophy as an existential quest inspired by Socrates is fundamentally different from Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics as oblivion of Being [Seinsvergessenheit] or from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy with its verdict on Socrates as the destroyer of tragic wisdom. THE ‘BIRTH’ OF POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY AMID WAR It is precisely the absence of any positive programme, almost notoriously emphasized by Socrates in the Platonic dialogues, that – according to Patočka – gives rise to philosophy: Meaning can arise only in an activity which stems from a searching lack of meaning, as the vanishing point of being problematic, as an indirect epiphany. If we are not mistaken, then this discovering of meaning in the seeking which flows from its absence, as a new project of life, is the meaning of Socrates’s existence.4

Negativity, the lack of meaning at first, is a necessary precondition for this new discovery.5 Care for the soul is a curative process that might first seem to exacerbate the crisis – a phenomenon that is prominent in the Platonic dialogues when Socrates’s interlocutors seem to know nothing anymore. But then, Socrates always takes over the role that he ascribes to himself in the Theaetetus: the midwife of philosophy;6 he helps his interlocutors give birth to new wisdom. This comparison is significant because it makes clear that the birth-giving comes from within every individual.7 Nevertheless, there is an



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outside power that forces people to suffer the pain of confronting themselves: Socrates also is – as another famous comparison says – the gadfly, stinging other people out of their complacency. This aspect is crucial for the realm of the political. The fifth century BC to Patočka is not only the time of the origin of philosophy but also of politics. He speaks of their ‘simultaneous’ birth out of a ‘shaking of the naïve certainty of meaning’.8 Politics and philosophy are of the same origin or they are the same origin.9 The Greek polis is an experiment as daring as philosophy. It is the attempt to form a political entity ruled by its body of citizens (‘democracy’ was only one of its forms, but maybe the most radical and brave).10 Admittedly, it is by no means original that Patočka ascribes this crucial importance to the classical age. Quite the contrary, this serves as an almost stereotypical founding myth of ‘European civilization’. Still there is something that is unique and provocative about his approach, when he explains what, in his view, should be taken as the core of the polis: ‘The spirit of the polis is a spirit of unity in conflict, in battle. One cannot be a citizen – polites – except in a community of some against others, and the conflict itself gives rise to the tension, the tenor of the life of the polis, the shape of the space of freedom that citizens both offer and deny each other’.11 What is characteristic here is not an idealization of the Greek polis, as if it were arising from a spirit of selfless devotion to the ‘common good’, but the ever repeated assurance that the rise of the polis coincides with the omnipresence of war and conflict. The sixth and last of Patočka’s Heretical Essays is entitled ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War’. This final essay clearly underlines the crucial importance of war for this specific approach to the philosophy of history. It is by no means only a peripheral reference caused by the omnipresence of war at the time when these essays were conceived (the twentieth century as the culmination of modern warfare and war fever). So far, it has been fully overlooked that even the ‘birth’ of politics and philosophy (equivalent to the ‘birth of Europe’) in Patočka’s account is one that is fully overshadowed by war. Indeed, the fifth century BC was another ‘century of war’, a time that was dominated by the Persian wars (499–449) and the Peloponnesian war (431–404). The upswing of politics and philosophy, adjured in Patočka’s essays, therefore takes place amid internal and external struggles: Until the Persian wars, for instance, the Athenian polis is something that crystallizes gradually in conflicts with its neighbors, as well as in struggles of the political parties in which tyrannis, opposed to the spirit of the polis, plays anything but a minor role. Yet precisely the circumstance that the polis arises and

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sustains itself amid internal and external struggles, that it is inter arma that it finds its meaning and that long-sought word of Hellenic life, is characteristic for this new formation and new form of life.12

It is not in spite of war and conflict that politics and philosophy came into being and it is not in spite of war and conflict that there is real history, that is, history proper (not mere annalistic bookkeeping); it is because of war and conflict that a new meaning of life, a life in search for meaning, became possible. Paul Ricœur calls this the ‘frankly shocking’ message of Patočka’s essays.13 Its full meaning, however, will only become clear, when speaking about the twentieth century: European history was not only born in a century of war, but it also comes to an end (or at least a possible end) in another century of war. A. History of Wars Already the first and the last words within the pithy title ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War’ indicate a significant tension that is characteristic of the overall thesis of Patočka’s essay: its basic claim is that the twentieth century is war, one single and uninterrupted war that continues unabatedly even throughout the periods of so-called peace. ‘The fundamental phenomenon of the twentieth century’ is that it must be understood as ‘an epoch of the night, of war, and of death’.14 Twentieth century is the ‘age of total mobilization’, and war is the essential, the frank and unrestricted articulation of that state of being. This is what could be called the ontological thesis. Nevertheless, there is also the ‘ontic’ level of history and politics, that is, our historiography that is used to speak about a First and Second World War, about the interwar period, or the decades of the Cold War, etc. Patočka builds it into his title by using the plural ‘wars’. Also, the beginning of the essay itself is somewhat dedicated to a plurality of wars. The First World War is introduced in two sentences, with the main message that it was an event transcending all categories and carrying a ‘cosmic’ sense. What this cosmic sense might be, is left for later consideration and is a core issue of the whole essay. In this sense, the First World War is omnipresent throughout the whole text. It is discussed in a double way: first on the ‘ontic’ level of analysing the developments that led to the war, speaking about the interests of the conflicting parties, the causes of war, war tactics and strategies, etc. Second, and much more so, it is discussed in relation to the ‘heretical’ thesis that war itself is a sense-bestowing event, maybe even the sense-bestowing factor in the history of the twentieth century. Ernst Jünger and Teilhard de Chardin are called in as witnesses for this thesis, thereby once again focusing the discussion on the First World War, if not to say, restricting it to this



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first European war of the twentieth century exclusively. This strategy reflects the overarching historical assumption of the essay, given only later, namely that ‘the first world war is the decisive event in the history of the twentieth century’.15 Very different is the involvement with the Second World War. The introductory remarks deal with it in three (!) sentences and can be brought down to the two following and interdependent statements: (1) The Second World War is not over yet but it has mutated into something peculiar that looks neither quite like war nor quite like peace. The so-called Cold War is not mentioned but clearly denoted by this description. Writing this in the mid-1970s, Patočka can hold that we are still amid that peculiar war-like state and therefore don’t have the distance to really reflect upon it as a whole. (2) The Second World War hasn’t provoked any good explanations comparable to those dealing with the First World War. A minor reason for this might be the fact that the causes and the course of it were seemingly, as Patočka says, ‘only too clear’ and therefore did not call for a deeper analysis. But, much more so, it is the uninterrupted perpetuation of a state of war within times of so-called peace that makes it impossible to speak about the substance of this war. The peculiar state of war did ‘not let anyone catch their breath’, and in a bewildering, Heideggerian-like leap back to the pre-Socratics, Patočka adds that it has therefore been impossible to speak the word which would ‘define each thing according to its essence’.16 This in fact is all that Patočka has to say about the Second World War. There is not a single reference to it in the later course of the essay.17 His reference to Heraclitus, leaping over two and a half millennia, is like the ultimate proof of his own attempt to ‘catch his breath’ and set up the largest possible distance but it is also a slap in the face of all contemporary sociological, political, historical, economic, and other analyses and attempts to grasp the Second World War. Seemingly, they all miss the point because of their being caught up in the Gestell [enframing] of total mobilization and the perpetuation of the state of war. What to think about an essay that claims to speak about the wars of the twentieth century but then has so very little (or nothing?) to say about the unprecedented culmination point of this development, that is, about the mass murder on the battlefields, the unbounded bombing of cities, and the genocide in concentration camps of the Second World War? Is it sheer ignorance that lets Patočka pass over this war as if it were a minor little detail in the history of twentieth century? Is it a gnawing suspicion – maybe even political compliance – which exculpates Nazi ideology by holding that the Second World War as just a consequence, a continuation of what had already started in the First World War? Fortunately, although he sees the First World War indeed as the decisive event in twentieth century, his view is uncompromized

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by any concessions to the totalitarian ideology of Nazism. Patočka is very clear about its dehumanizing character; not only did he suffer personally as a forced labourer under Nazi occupation towards the end of the war but he is also as clear as possible in his outspoken criticism of the political development in Germany (and Europe) in the 1930s. After having read the final pages of his long treatise ‘What are the Czechs?’,18 one can hardly ever forget his ardent plea for the First Czechoslovakian Republic. It was the only democracy in the region surrounded by authoritarian states, and its doom is for him one of the most lamentable historical incidents. A firmer response by Czechoslovakia to the Nazi occupation might, according to Patočka, have changed the whole history of the twentieth century. But instead of standing up against the Nazis (and thereby keeping in high esteem the democratic and republican heritage of the state founder Tomáš G. Masaryk), his successor as president, Edvard Beneš, forsaken by France and Great Britain, first let the occupation of the Sudentenland happen and then, under Nazi pressure, resigned as state president. Patočka does not stop criticizing him as a coward philistine and compares the destiny of the Czech lands to Hegel’s famous master-and-slave chapter: ‘One cannot dictate something to a weaker one who is willing to defend himself, it is his choice, whether he wants to suffer and die for his freedom or not’.19 So, if it is neither a secret consent to Nazi ideology nor the shamefaced silence and unwillingness to criticize, what then may be the reason for Patočka’s ostensible ignorance about the Second World War and the unprecedented atrocities committed therein? In 1949, Adorno wrote the famous sentence that it ‘is an act of barbarism to write a poem after Auschwitz’.20 The sentence may allow for a variety of interpretations (is it impossible to write any poetry? Or just poetry about Auschwitz? Does the ban include any kind of literature, also art and music? Was it meant as a mere provocation? Etc.) Many people severely criticized the dictum; Adorno himself revised it several times later on. One can surely agree with Paul Celan, the writer of the Deathfugue (1944/1945), that the sentence makes us wonder about Adorno’s understanding of poetry (Paul Celan remarked that for Adorno poetry seemingly had to be spoken out of a ‘nightingale and song thrush-perspective’21). One can also comprehend the criticism of the Jewish-Austrian writer Jean Améry who accused Adorno of philosophically exploiting and capitalizing Auschwitz for some ‘dialectical exercitation’.22 All this may be a valid criticism, including as well the all too patronizing tone of Adorno’s dictum. Nevertheless, I would hold that it was not only one of the most debated statements about literature in twentieth century but it was also an attempt – a successful one – to do exactly what, according to Patočka, was impossible: namely, to philosophically speak about the time of the Second World War – even if in the somewhat absurd form of saying that it was impossible to speak about it in certain



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traditional ways. At least the controversial debate generated by this was a way of philosophically coming to terms with it. Also, is it really true, as Patočka holds, that there are no explanations or attempts to philosophically deal with the Second World War? Speaking about Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) comes to mind.23 While its main focus is on the repressive tendencies of modern civilization in general, it was certainly the confrontation with Fascism/ National Socialism that for Marcuse was of key importance in regard to his writing. And when he speaks about the socio-pathological dynamics of modern societies (their suppression of Eros and the pleasure principle, enabling the destructive reign of Thanatos), it is all too obvious that war and mass murder are the most striking expressions of this modern destructivity. Once again, Marcuse can and should be criticized for his simplifying approach. It is a Freudo-Marxian perspective that to a certain extent vulgarizes both of them, Freud as well as Marx. Still, it might provide at least some explanatory power for what Patočka is most interested in: war. Certainly, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism should also be mentioned in this context. The origins that Arendt examines are especially ideological ones: What were the ideational elements that lead to anti-Semitism, racism, imperialism, and finally to National Socialism? In this sense, one could hold that her approach precisely gives an explanation of the Second World War, although her interest is not prima facie in the war as such but in totalitarian ideologies. It is for sure that this book should be of crucial importance to what the twentieth century as war could mean. Its negligence by Patočka is even more puzzling, when taking into account that Hannah Arendt is one of his favourite partners in philosophical dialogue and that the first two of the Heretical Essays have manifold references especially to The Human Condition. It cannot be the aim here to give a full account of all the philosophical works dealing with the Second World War in some sense or the other. However, it seems to be obvious that there are many more than Patočka seems to suggest; it also seems to be obvious that the uprooting that the war caused to individuals and societies did heavily influence post-war philosophy (not just literature). French existentialism could in this sense be seen as closely related to the war. It was both, a reaction on the existential shaking experienced during the war as well as a new home for the intellectuals uprooted by the war, a home in revolt and absurdity. Patočka knew all of the authors mentioned, and he knew them well. He refers to many of them often in his work, not only to Arendt. Even Marcuse is discussed in his long essay on ‘Europe and Post-Europe’ that was also written during the 1970s.24 French existentialism is heavily referenced and examined in his writing of the immediate post-war time, not only in published

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articles but also in his diaries and unpublished manuscripts of that time. So if the sixth Heretical Essay makes the baffling statement that no philosophical treatment of the Second World War has been written, we can say for sure that this statement is not made out of ignorance or negligence, nor is it due to Patočka’s disrespect for other philosophers. But what else could it be? One could say that Patočka, to a certain degree, is quite right: maybe there is no philosophical dealing with the Second World War, at least not in the sense that he is advocating and that has to do with the war as war, with war as the ultimate manifestation of power and total mobilization (the ‘purity of war’, to use an indeed monstrous expression). Secondly, one should also not forget that Patočka himself gives the very best keyword – heretic – for the reading of his approach already in the title of his essays: a heretic says painful things, a heretic often reduces his message to these things, a heretic doesn’t pay attention to authority and tradition, a heretic says things out of conviction and a feeling of responsibility, a heretic is also endangered of falling prey to his own heroic undertaking. B. War as History Patočka’s approach in the last of his Heretical Essays is obviously not to offer a philosophical reflection or analysis of the history of wars. Not only are historiographical facts and developments almost fully absent from the description (with the exception of a few details such as the ‘total absence of imagination’ in the German military strategy or the ‘rotting’ of trench warfare in the First World War), even his philosophy of history, that is, the focus on some assumed ‘core’ or ‘essence’ of the whole development, is blatantly reductive and selective. Patočka, the gifted and scrupulous historian of ideas who dedicated hundreds of pages to the Aristotelian concept of movement, to the new achievements of modern science, and to Renaissance art or to the development of Hegel’s aesthetical theory (to mention but a few examples), firmly turns away from the history of ideas in the sense of a sober devotion to the change of intellectual patterns and a general accountability. One of the most famous anecdotes about Hegel tells that when being confronted with the apparent discrepancies between his system and reality his answer was: ‘All the worse for reality’. Husserlian phenomenology, on the contrary, once started off with the slogan ‘to the things themselves!’ As a self-proclaimed phenomenologist of history, Patočka is somewhat caught in the gap between speculation and descriptive aesthesia. An unfriendly reading of his Heretical Essays could easily hold that his history of wars is a speculative enterprise that just wants to see what fits the concept. Put differently, the philosopher of the existential shaking holds fast to his own



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historical concept, unshakenly and unshakably so that explicit reference and descriptive analyses of historical events such as the unique atrocities of the Second World War lose relevance, in the same way as the actual shape of the world did to Hegel. But it is also clear that the reproach entailed in this statement is somewhat misdirected. Declaredly so, Patočka does not want to deal with the history of wars in the sense of their cause, development, or concrete political implications. He does also not really speak about the origins of war, as Arendt does in her analysis of anti-Semitism, racism, nationalism, and imperialism. These aspects play into Patočka’s account, but more as accompanying factors and not as the core issue. His essay is not about the origins of war but about war as an origin, war as a unique and most overwhelming manifestation of a general tendency, war as something that makes or constitutes history. The goal of the following considerations will be an attempt to make sense of the claim that ‘war itself has the power of bestowing meaning’. To my understanding, at least two layers of this claim can be discerned: the first could be called war as the manifestation of a deeper crisis, the second one, more intense and for sure carrying more of a heretical impact, is the understanding of war as the breakthrough to a new freedom. i) War as the Manifestation of a Deeper Crisis The full title of Patočka’s study is Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. The sixth and last essay on the wars of twentieth century therein is the culmination point of a reflection in the philosophy of history that indeed wants to cover the whole of European civilization as a Sinngestalt [a form entailing a certain meaning]. The idea of a culmination point makes reference to the Latin culmen [summit], but, for Patočka, the wars of the twentieth century are the point of culmination in an inverted or negative sense. The beginnings of European history as a Sinngestalt have been described with the help of the Socratic-Platonic motive of epimeleia tés psychés [care for the soul]. For Patočka, this motive came into a severe crisis with the rise of the modern worldview. From the inception of his own philosophical undertaking he was heavily influenced by Husserl’s late book on the Crisis of European ­Sciences. His first published work The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem (1936) was already a variation of the same theme. But where ­Husserl restricts himself to the problem of the lifeworld [Lebenswelt] that is allegedly being overlooked in the mathematized natural sciences, Patočka’s diagnosis from its very beginning has a broader scope, including the whole history of philosophy, politics, economics, religion, art, etc. In the Heretical Essays we get a somewhat condensed version of his life-long inquiries into the history of ideas, when he holds:

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The great turning point in the life of Western Europe appears to be the sixteenth century. From that time on another motif comes to the fore, opposing the motif of the care of the soul and coming to dominate one area after another, politics, economics, faith, and science, transforming them in a new style. Not a care for the soul, the care to be, but rather the care to have, care for the external world and its conquest, becomes the dominant concern. […] The simultaneous organization of economic life along modern capitalist lines is part and parcel of the same style in principle. From that time on the expanding western Europe lacks any universal bond, any universal idea which could be embodied in a concrete and effective bonding institution and authority: the primacy of having over being excludes unity and universality while the attempts to replace them with power prove vain.25

It is not the place here to go into a more elaborate account of this historical reflection. But the core issue of Patočka’s analysis can be narrowed down to the fact that the period of Europe’s greatest and most visible success, the time of the rise of modern sciences and technique, which is also the time of Europe’s expansion into the world, is precisely an indicator for its crisis. In one of his longer studies, also written in the 1970s and bearing the telling title ‘Europe and Post-Europe’,26 Patočka clearly sees this as the end of Europe. Interestingly, it is not so much the end of Europe as a world political power that is of crucial importance here. Much more so and despite appearances to the contrary, it is the unrestricted expansion of Europe which is seen as fatal and the beginning of its ‘end’. It is more than remarkable that Patočka already in the 1950s expresses a similar line of thought in the context of an abundant critique of colonialism and imperialism, guided by an awareness for extra-European cultures and perspectives that is outstanding in the context of its time (in this sense, his reflections are ‘untimely’ in the best sense of the word). In the Heretical Essays, only short references can be found, such as in the fourth essay: Unquestionably, the expansion of Europe beyond its original bounds, an expansion that replaced mere holding of the competing non-European world at bay, contained within itself the seed of a new life pernicious to the older principle. Eastward, this European expansion did not bring about a transformation of the principles of European life; that change takes place amid the westward suppression of Islam, leading to discoveries beyond the seas and to a sudden wild scramble for the riches of the world, especially of the New World, left at the mercies of Europe’s ingenious military organization, weapons and skills.27

It is within this much broader view of European history where, for Patočka, the deeper meaning of the wars of the twentieth century is located. These wars are only the outward manifestation and demonstration ad oculos that



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Europe indeed has come to an end. Its decline is not brought about by outward powers but out of its inner principles and the care to have. The wars as the ultimate demonstration of these principles are the point of culmination of a long historical development beginning in the sixteenth century. An interesting side aspect to this is the fact that indeed the concept ‘world war’ [Weltkrieg] is much older than one would suppose. According to the Grimm dictionary, the word can be verified as early as 1599, and then much more widely in the Napoleonic wars. That it is nowadays only used for the two wars of the twentieth century might also have to do with the French journalist Charles à Court Repington who, in 1920, started speaking about the ‘First’ World War (in Germany the poet Stefan George used it first in 1922). The numeral ‘first’ might be an indicator for the view that something new, something unprecedented happened in this war that demands a name of its own, like stating that there might be a Second or Third World War, but we will never forget that this was the First, the definite revelation of something revolutionary, a break with the course of history. Tomáš G. Masaryk, first president of Czechoslovakia, much admired by Patočka as a politician and clear-sighted writer, published his memories of the First World War in 1925 under the title World Revolution.28 If we take these hints seriously, one might indeed hold that a revolutionary break happened with the First World War.29 In this sense (and only in this sense), could one agree to Patočka’s interpretation of the First World War as the ‘decisive event’ in the history of twentieth century, an event that indeed determined its ‘whole character’.30 But what then is the ‘revelation’ entailed in the war, what is the ‘truth’ that it gives to know? It was this war [the First World War] that demonstrated that the transformation of the world into a laboratory for releasing reserves of energy accumulated over billions of years can be achieved only by means of war. Thus it represented a definitive breakthrough of the conception of being that was born in the sixteenth century with the rise of mechanical natural science. Now it swept aside all the ‘conventions’ that inhibited this release of energy – a transvaluation of all values under the sign of power.31

One could call this an ontological interpretation of the war: war as an event that allows a historical insight into the essence of being as accumulation of power (or Gestell, to use the Heideggerian term). Also, the reference to Nietzsche’s ‘transvaluation of all values’ is indicative: for Patočka, whose paramount reading of Nietzsche is that of the prophet of nihilism (less so a reading of Nietzsche as the overcomer of nihilism), the world war indeed is the clearest manifestation of nihilism: ‘All that humans hold most precious is ruthlessly torn to shreds. The only meaning is that of a proof that a world

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capable of producing something like that must disappear.’32 War is the ‘visible proof’ that the world is ripe for perishing. Patočka’s final word, however, is exactly not that of a passive confrontation with nihilism or of composure and Heideggerian Gelassenheit [often translated as ‘releasement’]. ii) War as the Breakthrough to a ‘New Meaning’ The most controversial part of this description of war, however, might reside in the attempt to give a positive meaning to war itself. The depiction of this is broadly based on Teilhard de Chardin’s Écrits du temps de la guerre and Ernst Jünger’s Totale Mobilmachung. In their recollections of the front experience, both independently point to a moment of being overwhelmed by an almost mystical experience of transindividuality. This motif of a conversion, metanoia, the gaining of a new meaning amid utter meaninglessness is a favourite theme of Patočka’s. Sometimes, he relates it closely to religious, especially Christian experiences (the motif of ‘emptying’ – ‘why hast thou forsaken me?’, the lack of meaning, and the inability to hold fast to something), sometimes he points at it in literature (Dostoevsky being the most frequent point of reference, especially the novel Dream of a Ridiculous Man), and sometimes it is laid bare as the philosophical and phenomenological mode of life (care for the soul as the core-motif of European history of ­philosophy with the epoché understood as an existential upheaval). But rarely in Patočka is it so closely related to the realm of the political as in the Heretical Essays and the discussions with his students preceding and following its publication. Specifically, these discussions prove that Patočka by no means wanted to restrict this experience to war alone, he explicitly mentions, for example, the dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s in the same context. It would therefore be short-sighted to accuse him of any fondness or preference for the martial character of life. Quite the contrary, the taking up arms is maybe one of the best illustrations for the vain effort to avoid what Patočka calls the confrontation with the ‘night’, that is, the effort of self-sustenance and self-prolongation, the avoidance of any possible shaking and upheaval of one’s own existence. It is precisely the strength of his approach that, with reference to the front line experience, the ‘shaking’ becomes related to a sphere of life that is so utterly bare of any sentimentality or sensitivity for ‘experiences’. The Heretical Essays, however, do refer to war (and to the front) as the core of life in the twentieth century, because of the radical, revolutionary rupture with tradition that is brought about by the First World War. The idea of a war for something becomes obsolete: not only is there no idea in the background for which the war is fought, all attempts to set up such an idea – be it the ideas of a war for peace, a war for a better future, a war



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for justice, etc. – are unmasked according to Patočka as mere cover for the perpetuation of the state of war or a life of total mobilization, as depicted by Ernst Jünger. There are certain aspects of this total mobilization (full rationalization and standardization of life) that Jünger himself regards critically because they are in conflict with his heroic reading of war and the ‘nobility’ of warfare and life in general. In general, however, Jünger is far from complaining about total mobilization: he sees it as the utmost articulation of the tendencies of his time, brought about by a certain historical logic and beauty. Bearing this in mind, it is hard to think of an approach that at the same time is so close to the descriptions proffered by Jünger and so distant from its consequences as Patočka’s. His essay is full of references to becoming a ‘different person’, to a ‘fundamental transformation of human existence’, to a ‘grandiose, profound experience’, etc. But what does is all lead to for him? The front line experience, once it has unmasked the ‘aims of the day’ as a mere perpetuation of warfare, will ‘say “no” to the measures of mobilisation which make the state of war permanent’.33 This ‘no’ as a resistance to mobilization is spoken from an ‘absolute freedom’, where one cannot be mobilized against the other, where the other (the enemy!) becomes a ‘fellow discoverer’, a ‘fellow participant in the upheaval of the day’.34 The idea of an authentic ‘transindividuality’ related to this motif of a co-suffering became famous under the slogan of a ‘solidarity of the shaken’, which is understood not as a solidarity of those who share a certain identity or positive programme but as a solidarity of those who are confronted with the same abyss of meaninglessness, a solidarity ‘built up in persecution and uncertainty’, and a solidarity despite contradiction and conflict.35 It is Patočka’s answer to the wars of the twentieth century, and, in the end, it is also an answer that might entail a somewhat desperate hope for the overcoming of war. If the solidarity of the shaken had an effect on history, it was the regaining of history itself: history that once began amid a century of war does not necessarily end in another century of war. NOTES 1. Are you, says Socrates in his Apology, ‘not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? And if the person with whom I am arguing, says: Yes, but I do care; then I do not leave him or let him go at once; but I proceed to interrogate and examine and cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue in him, but only says that he has, I reproach him with undervaluing the greater, and overvaluing the less.’ (Apology 29d/e, translation by B. Jowett).

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2. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák, ed. James Dodd (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 82. 3. Heretical Essays, 62ff. 4. Heretical Essays, 60ff. (Emphasis mine). 5. It is quite telling that Patočka interprets phenomenology itself especially in the sense of this searching and the passing through negativity: Phenomenology is the ‘attempt to bring modernity face to face with a way of searching’ (this is the final sentence of his long article ‘Was ist Phänomenologie?’ [What is Phenomenology?]: ‘Das Bestreben […] der Moderne einen suchenden Weg entgegenzustellen, das ist Phänomenologie’. (In Jan Patočka, Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991], 452). In a similar sense, the Husserlian concept of epoché is above all considered to be a mode of radical suspension and breaking free: ‘The epoché is something more negative than negation which is always also a thesis: in the epoché nothing is posited’. (Heretical Essays, 151) More than Husserl however, he stresses the epoché’s existential dimension and relates it to politics and history, following the insight that ‘history is not a perception but a responsibility’. (ibid., 49) 6. ‘My art of midwifery’, says Socrates, ‘is in general like theirs [real midwives]; the only difference is that […] my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth’. (Theaetetus, 150 b, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford). 7. Socrates states this explicitly: ‘I am so far like the midwife that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom, and the common reproach is true, that, though I question others, I can myself bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me. […] Those who frequent my company at first appear, some of them, quite unintelligent, but, as we go further with our discussions, all who are favored by heaven make progress at a rate that seems surprising to others as well as to themselves, although it is clear that they have never learned anything from me. The many admirable truths they bring to birth have been discovered by themselves from within’. (ibid.) 8. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 61. 9. In the German version of the Heretical Essays this is expressed by the word ‘Gleichursprünglichkeit’ (cf. Ketzerische Essais zur Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. Klaus Nellen and Jiří Němec [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984], 65ff). Patočka hereby wants to indicate that politics, philosophy, and history proper are not subordinate to each other (in whatever direction) nor ‘fettered’ by any causal relation, but that they all originate in the ‘shaking of life as simply accepted’ (Heretical Essays, 41). The remarks on ‘Gleichursprünglichkeit’ were only added to the German version of his Heretical Essays. In the process of translating his own essays from Czech, Patočka reformulated several passages and made new insertions. These are not included in the English translation of the Czech original. 10. ‘It is not only individual life which, if it passes through the experience of loss of meaning and if it derives from it the possibility and need for a wholly different self-relation to all that is, comes to a point of global “conversion”. […] Questioning, however, presupposes the experience of mystery, of problematic being and this experience, which prehistoric humankind avoids, from which it takes refuge in the most profound, truth-laden myths, unfolds in the form of philosophy. Just as in acting politically humans expose themselves to the problematic nature of action whose



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consequences are unpredictable and whose initiative soon passes into other hands, so in philosophy humans expose themselves to the problematic being and meaning of what there is’. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 61/63. 11. Ibid., 41ff. 12. Ibid., 41. 13. In his foreword to the French edition of the Heretical Essays, published in 1981, Ricœur depicts his impressions of first reading these essays: ‘As long as readers hold fast to the golden thread of the underlying unity that joins together politics, history, and philosophy, they do not feel at a loss. […] Yet when they reach the strange, frankly shocking passages about the dominance of war, of darkness and the demonic at the very heart of the most rational projects of the promotion of peace […] they find themselves suddenly placed in another horizon of thought, brought about by Patočka’s bold reading of contemporary political reality in terms of the Night and the rehabilitation of Heraclitus’s dictum “Polemos is the father of all”’. (Quoted from the English translation: Patočka, Heretical Essays, ix). 14. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 120. 15. Ibid., 124. 16. Both references: Patočka, Heretical Essays, 119. 17. Interestingly, it is immediately after the Second World War in his 1946(!) article on ‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’ where Patočka expounds a much more differentiated view of the two world wars, stating for example on the Second World war that ‘differing from the First World War, which was not so radical, everything down to the naked, physical roots was engaged in this war. It was no longer a war only bound within the limits of a clear political plan and budget; it also was not a war that would compromise only the old ideologies which had more or less become antiquated thus leaving people a certain intellectual reserve untouched by the fight. Everything was cast into the struggle. The phrase promoted in Germany was victory “at any price,” i.e., at the price of any kind of use or abuse of Man’. (‘Ideology and Life in the Idea’, Studia Phaenomenologica 7 [2007]: 92). Generally, here, the Second World War is seen much more as the decisive historical break within the twentieth century, because it brings about the end of all ‘humanistic solutions’ such as socialism or the belief in a peaceful future. 18. The title intentionally has the interrogative particle ‘what’, that is, the philosophical question for the essence of a thing. The treatise was written in German in the early 1970s and hasn’t been translated into English yet (cfr. ‘Was sind die Tschechen?’ [What Are the Czechs], in Schriften zur tschechischen Kultur und Geschichte, ed. Klaus Nellen et al. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), 29–106. 19. Ibid., 105 (trans. LH). 20. ‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10.1 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 30. 21. ‘Was wird hier als Vorstellung von Gedicht unterstellt? Der Dünkel dessen, der sich untersteht hypothetisch-spekulativerweise Auschwitz aus der Nachtigallen- oder Singdrossel-Perspektive zu betrachten oder zu berichten’. Paul Celan, Mikrolithen sind’s, Steinchen: Die Prosa aus dem Nachlass, ed. Barbara Wiedemann and Bertrand Badiou (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), 122.

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22. ‘[D]ass wieder einmal Auschwitz herhalten muss, um ein dialektisches Exerzitium zu inspirieren’. Cf. Jean Améry, ‘Jargon der Dialektik’ (1967), in Werke, Bd. 6: Aufsätze zur Philosophie, ed. Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004), 289. 23. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 24. A new German edition of this crucial text in: Jan Patočka, Europa und NachEuropa. Zur Phänomenologie einer Idee, ed. Ludger Hagedorn and Klaus Nellen (Freiburg: Alber, 2016). 25. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 83ff. 26. See above (footnote 23). 27. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 83ff. 28. Tomáš G. Masaryk, Světová revoluce [World revolution] (Prague: Čin a Orbis, 1925); English translation: The Making of a State, trans. H. W. Steed (New York: H. Ferlig, 1969). 29. Very much in the sense of Walter Benjamin who, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, mentions the standstill of time as the overwhelming feeling in times of revolution and fundamental change (‘to make the continuum of history explode’, cf. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books, 1969), 261. 30. Heretical Essays, 124. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 126. 33. Ibid., 135. 34. Ibid., 131. 35. Ibid., 135.

Bibliography

In order to provide the English reader with a complete overview of the bibliographic material which has been used in this book, we have divided this bibliography into four fundamental parts. In the first one, we have noted the cited collections of works by Patočka in Czech, divided into the samizdat files, available until 1989, and the Collected Works, published from 1996. In the second part, we have provided details of key translations of Patočka’s works into English, French, and German. In the third part, the reader will be able to find the individual works by Patočka which have been quoted in this book, along with references to their original edition, and to their various translations. The titles in square brackets refer to works still unavailable in English. A list of the secondary literature can be found in the final part. 1. CITED WORKS BY PATOČKA 1.1. Czech Editions —Archivní soubor: the Archive Collection of typewritten samizdat volumes, illegally reproduced after Patočka’s death, until 1989. Umění a filosofie, Vol. 1 [Art and Philosoph. Volume 1]. Edited by Jiří Němec and Petr Rezek. Prague: Samizdat, 1977. Reprint, Prague: Samizdat, 1978 (Ed. Expedice, vol. 45). New corrected edition, edited by Ivan Chvatík, Prague: samizdat 1986. Přirozený svět a pohyb lidské existence, Vol. 1 [The Natural World and the Movement of Human Existence. Volume 1]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík. Prague: Samizdat, 1980. Přirozený svět a pohyb lidské existence, Vol. 2 [The Natural World and the Movement of Human Existence. Volume 2]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík. Prague: Samizdat, 1980. 347

348 Bibliography

Přirozený svět a pohyb lidské existence, Vol. 3 [The Natural World and the Movement of Human Existence. Volume 3]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík. Prague: Samizdat, 1980. Přirozený svět a pohyb lidské existence, Vol. 4 [The Natural World and the Movement of Human Existence. Volume 4]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík, Jiří Polívka, and Miroslav Petříček jr. Prague: Samizdat, 1983. Second edition, Tělo, společenství, jazyk, svět [Body, Community, Language, World]. Prague: Oikoymenh, 1995. Péče o duši, Vol. 1: Soubor statí, přednášek a poznámek k problematice postavení člověka ve světě a v dějinách [Care for the Soul. Volume 1: Collection of Articles, Lectures and Considerations on the Problem of Human Position in the World and in History]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba. Prague: Samizdat, 1987. Péče o duši, Vol. 2: Negativní platonismus [Care for the Soul. Volume 2: Negative Platonism]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba. Prague: Samizdat, 1987. Péče o duši, Vol. 3: O smysl dneška [Care for the Soul. Volume 3: On the Meaning of Today]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba. Prague: Samizdat, 1988. Co jsou Češi? Soubor textů k českým dějinám a české filosofii [What are the Czechs? Collection of Texts on Czech History and Philosophy]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Jan Vít. Prague: Samizdat, 1989.

—Sebrané spisy: Collected Works of Jan Patočka edited by the Jan Patočka Archive, Prague. Sebrané spisy, Vol. 1: Péče o duši I [Collected Works. Volume 1, Care for the Soul I]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba. Prague: Oikoymenh, 1996. Sebrané spisy, Vol. 2: Péče o duši II [Collected Works. Volume 2, Care for the Soul II]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba. Prague: Oikoymenh, 1999. Sebrané spisy, Vol. 3: Péče o duši III [Collected Works. Volume 3, Care for the Soul III]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba. Prague: Oikoymenh, 2002. Sebrané spisy, Vol. 4: Umění a čas I [Collected Works. Volume 4, Art and Time I]. Edited by Daniel Vojtěch and Ivan Chvatík. Prague: Oikoymenh, 2004. Sebrané spisy, Vol. 6: Fenomenologické spisy I: Přirozený svět [Collected Works. Volume 6, Phenomenological Writings I: The Natural World]. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Jan Frei. Prague: Oikoymenh, 2008. Sebrané spisy, Vol. 7: Fenomenologické spisy II: Co je existence [Collected Works, Volume 7, Phenomenological Writings II: What is Existence]. Edited by Pavel Kouba and Ondřej Švec. Prague: Oikoymenh, 2010. Sebrané spisy, Vol. 12: Češi I [Collected Works, Volume 12, The Czechs I]. Edited by Karel Palek and Ivan Chvatík. Prague: Oikoymenh, 2006.

1.2. Key Translations English Kohák, Erazim. Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Bibliography

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Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Edited by James Dodd, translated by Erazim Kohák, with a preface by Paul Ricœur. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996. Body, Community, Language, World. Edited by James Dodd, translated by Erazim Kohák. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1998. Plato and Europe. Translated by Petr Lom. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Living in Problematicity. Edited by Eric Manton, translated by Eric Manton and Erazim Kohák. Prague: Oikoymenh, 2007.

French Le monde naturel comme problème philosophique. Translated by Jaromir Danek and Henri Declève. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1976. Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire. Edited and translated by Erika Abrams, with a preface by Paul Ricœur, and a postface by Roman Jakobson. Lagrasse: Verdier, 1981. Platon et l’Europe. Edited by Erika Abrams and Jiří Němec, translated by Erika Abrams, with a preface by Marc Richir. Lagrasse: Verdier, 1983. La crise du sens, vol. 1, Compte, Husserl, Masaryk. Edited by Erika Abrams and Henri Declève, translated by Erika Abrams. Bruxelles: Ousia, 1985. La crise du sens, vol. 2, Masaryk et l’action. Edited by Erika Abrams and Henri Declève, translated by Erika Abrams. Bruxelles: Ousia, 1986. Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine. Edited and translated by Erika Abrams, with a preface by Henri Declève. Dondrecht: Kluwer, 1988. Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie? Edited and translated by Erika Abrams, with a preface by Marc Richir. Grenoble: Millon, 1988; second edition, 2002. Liberté et sacrifice. Edited and translated by Erika Abrams, with a postface by AnneMarie Roviello. Grenoble: Millon, 1990. L’idée d’Europe en Bohême. Edited and translated by Erika Abrams, with a postface by Zdeněk Vašíček. Grenoble: Millon, 1991. L’écrivain, son ‘objet’. Edited and translated by Erika Abrams. Paris: P.O.L, 1990; Presses Pocket, 1992. Papier phénoménologiques. Edited and translated by Erika Abrams. Grenoble: Millon, 1995. L’Europe après l’Europe. Edited by Erika Abrams, translated by Erika Abrams e Marc de Launay, with a postface by Marc Crépon. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2007. Eternité et historicité. Edited and translated by Erika Abrams. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2011. Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs. Edited and translated by Erika Abrams. Paris: Vrin, 2011.

German Kunst und Zeit. Kulturphilosophischen Schriften. Edited by Klaus Nellen e Ilja Šrubař, with an introduction of Walter Biemel. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987. (Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 1).

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1.3. Individual Works [Aristotle, His Predecessors and His Successors. Study on the History of Philosophy from Aristotle to Hegel]. Original Czech version: Aristoteles, jeho předchůdci a dědicové. Studie z dějin filosofie od Aristotela k Hegelovi. Prague: ČSAV, 1964; French: Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs. [Aristotle’s Conception of Movement: Philosophical Meaning and Historical Researches]. Original Czech version: ‘O filosofickém významu Aristotelova pojetí pohybu a historických vyzkumů věnovaných jeho vývoji’. In Přirozený svět a pohyb lidské existence, Vol. 1; French: ‘La conception aristotélicienne du mouvement: signification philosophique et recherches historiques’. In Papier phénoménologiques, 127–38. Body, Community, Language, World. Original Czech version: ‘Tělo, společenství, jazyk, svět’. In Přirozený svět a pohyb lidské existence, Vol. 4, 4.1; second edition: Tělo, společenství, jazyk, svět. Edited by Jiří Polívka. Prague: Oikoymenh, 1995, 9–125. [Body, Possibilities, World, Field of Appearance]. Original Czech version: ‘Tělo, možnosti, svět, pole zjevování’. In Přirozený svět a pohyb lidské existence, Vol. 3; French: ‘Corps, possibilités, monde, champ d’apparition’. In Papier phénoménologiques, 117–29; German: ‘Leib, Möglichkeiten, Welt, Erscheinungsfeld’. In Vom Erscheinen als solchem, 87–100.

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Index

Abrams, Erika, 55n16, 71n8, 72n8, 10, 12, 17, 93n6, 178n7, 199n26, 234n22, 259, 273n1 acceptance [akceptace]. See movements of human existence action, 8–10, 30, 58, 59, 63–70, 71n5, 78, 83–85, 87, 96, 119, 120, 124–26, 130n36, 131n60, 161, 172, 177, 179n12, 190, 202, 203, 207, 211, 222, 224, 228, 230, 232, 239, 241–43, 245, 246, 253, 264, 268, 269 Adams, Suzi, xix, 114n35, 235n50 Adorno, Theodor, 336, 337, 345n20 Agamben, Giorgio, 206, 213n16, 252 alienation, 17, 18, 53, 99, 170, 184, 262, 285 Al-Rawi, Farouk N. H., 159n55 Améry, Jean, 336, 346n22 amplitude [amplituda], 238, 242, 243 anarchy, 141 Anaximander, 143, 157n28 anchoring [zakotvení]. See movements of human existence Ancient Greece, 135, 136, 217, 219, 220 Angst, 155, 159n61 anthropology, 16, 109, 112n6, 225 anti-semitism, 337 Arendt, Hannah, 31, 32, 39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 49, 54n9, 55n22, 63, 81,

83, 96, 112n6, 113n7, 179n12, 206, 209, 213n21, 228, 240, 241, 252, 254n17, 263, 265–69, 275n34, 37, 337, 339, 346n29 Aristotle, xv, xxiiin25, 34, 118–20, 127n9, 128n9–16, 19, 23, 129nn28, 29, 225–29, 231, 232, 235n51, 236n68, 260 Arnason, Johann P., 223–25, 229, 233, 234n22, 23, 25, 31–33, 235n64, 236n65 Aron, Raymond, xxiiin26, 204, 212n2 asubjective phenomenology. See phenomenology Auschwitz, 336, 345n21, 346n22 authenticity, xv, xvi, 16, 67, 69, 192, 304 authoritarianism / authoritarian, 39, 49, 79, 339 autonomy, 18, 100, 105, 123, 172, 218–22, 227, 231, 232, 239, 279 biological autonomy, 231 Axial Age, 146, 225, 229 Bacon, Francis, 12, 283 Badiou, Alain, 237, 240, 245, 252, 254n22, 345n21 balance of power, 67, 141 balance [rovnováha], 238, 242, 243

369

370 Index

Barbaras, Renaud, xxin1, 71n8, 72n8, 129n29, 229, 236n65, 313n12 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 312n5 Barth, F. Diane, 279, 293n14 Becker, Gary S., 291, 296n89, 90, 92 being-in-the-world. See world being-towards-death. See death Bělohradský, Václav, 71n4 Benjamin, Walter, 346n29 Bentham, Jeremy, 50, 56n36, 285, 291 Bergson, Henri, 228 Bernard, Marion, xx, 275n37 Bernays, Edward, 280, 288, 289, 292, 296n78, 80 biology, 95, 96, 98, 100, 103, 108, 110, 199n21, 285 biologism, xix, 95, 96–98, 103, 104, 107, 108, 110–12, 112n3, 116n45 biopolitics, 115n31 Blumenberg, Hans, 138, 157n9, 158n47 body, 64, 112, 118, 120, 122, 128n23, 130, 144, 148, 153, 163, 209, 228, 263, 287, 333, 344n6 corporeity, 208, 228, 229, 231, 240 embodiment, 144 political body / body politic, x, 25, 268, 333 social body, 48, 263 student body, 8, 9 Boethius, 161 Bolton, Jonathan, 180n45 Boss, Medard, 126 Bottéro, Jean, 158n36, 38, 41, 159n52, 57, 58 breakthrough. See movements of human existence Breton, André, 204, 212n2 Brock, William R., 294n19 Brown, Wendy, 293n2, 4, 296n88 Bruzina, Ronald, 327n1 Buddhism, 146 bureaucracy, 18, 49 Burke, Edmund, 46, 49

businness / businnessman, 14, 124, 277, 279, 287–89, 291, 293n5 Byrne, David, 52, 56n43 Canguilhem, Georges, xix, 98, 104, 108–10, 112, 115n38, 44, 116n46 Čapek, Jakub, 178n1 capitalism / capitalist, 4, 8, 15, 18, 23, 79, 104, 141, 170–72, 176, 177, 191, 193, 218, 221, 281, 340 Caraus, Tamara, xx, 115n35 care for the soul [Péče o duši]. See soul Castoriadis, Cornelius, xix, 217–22, 225–27, 229–33, 233n5, 10, 12, 234n16–19, 35, 235n37–40, 48, 50, 51, 52, 236n66, 68, 69 Celan, Paul, 336, 245n21 Charta / Charter 77, ix, xviii, xix, 29, 30, 58, 65, 77–80, 84, 91, 92, 92n1, 93n9, 127, 161, 180n45, 218, 238, 253 China, 49, 97, 203 Chomsky, Noam, 51 Chorismos [separation], 64, 73n18, 223 Christianity / Christian, 24, 34, 35, 60, 62, 104, 117, 149, 159n51, 180n46, 205, 207, 208, 282, 308, 342 Christ, 151 Christian activism, xiv Christian humanism, 57, 58 Christian theology, xxi Chvatík, Ivan, xviii, xxiiin30, xxv, 38n18, 55n16, 71n8, 72n8, 12, 17, 93n6, 178n7, 199n26, 234n22, 254n7 civilization, 40, 41, 43–46, 52, 61, 98, 101, 103, 109, 162, 164, 165, 168, 179n15, 185–87, 200n39, 203, 208, 219, 224, 225, 229, 282, 285, 303, 319, 324, 333, 337, 339 end of civilization, 41

Index

Far Eastern civilizations / Asian civilizations, 13, 206 industrial civilization, 104 Near Eastern civilizations, 136, 139, 140, 145 rational civilization, xix, 95, 98, 102, 104, 107, 302, 303, 310 supercivilization [Nadcivilizace], xxin2, xxiiin27, 101, 104, 105, 107, 115n31, 218, 219, 243, 255n46, 280–87, 292 moderate supercivilization, 105, 197n8, 219 radical supercivilization, 101, 104, 105, 108, 183, 186, 197n8, 197n9, 219, 290, 292 technical / technological civilization, 39, 44, 52, 78, 98, 113n7, 162–65, 178n4, 302–4 class struggle. See struggle, class struggle von Clausewitz, Carl, 43, 55n17, 167, 179n24 Club of Rome, 140, 142 collective (the), 267 anonymous collective, 221, 230 collective will, 41, 42, 46 Collin, Françoise, 275n34 communism, 41, 62, 67, 68, 172, 176, 218 community, xiii, xix, 17, 18, 41, 44–47, 52, 62, 95, 107, 124, 147, 153, 174, 206, 231, 239, 247, 250, 260–73, 277, 291, 318, 319, 322, 333 Compte, Auguste, 196 Conche, Marcel, 157n26, 29 Congress of Vienna, 141 Connolly, William, 237, 245, 250, 255n49, 257n78 conservatism, 40, 45 constitution (sense-formation), 103, 111, 129n27, 224, 230, 261, 267, 274n5, 305 Conway, Erik M., 295n52 corporeity. See body

371

counter-conduct, 57, 59 crisis, x, xii, xiii, xvii, xviii, xxiin4, 10, 18, 60, 70, 98–100, 102–4, 107, 111, 114n27, 28, 135, 184, 185, 193, 286, 290, 292, 316–19, 321, 332, 339, 340 crisis of the intelligentsia, 24, 26 European crisis, x, xii, xiii, xvii, xviii, 39–42, 60, 98–100, 102, 103, 104, 107, 114n27, 316, 318, 319, 321 Croce, Caterina, 71n3 culture, 11, 232, 272, 281, 304, 318, 324 Czech culture, xiv, xv Czechoslovakia, x, xiv, 4, 135, 161, 168, 172, 174 184, 185, 192, 218, 315, 336, 341 Czech history. See history Czech national programme, xv, xxi, 5 Dastur, Françoise, xxin1, 158n30 Davis, John B., 293n3 Deacy, Susan, 157n6 death, 16, 37, 49, 51, 52, 60, 61–64, 72n12, 85, 113n10, 119, 137, 139, 144, 145, 148–52, 154–56, 165, 169, 173–76, 179n27, 180n30, 210, 247, 263, 264, 266, 267 being-towards-death, 36, 151, 155, 156 death of God. See God immortality / deathlessness, 60, 117, 143, 144, 148, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 264, 267 mortality, 52, 137, 145, 147–49, 152, 154, 155, 159n52, 271 decadence, 14, 162–64, 168, 200n39, 224, 282, 286 decline, xi, xii, 13, 16, 19, 32, 33, 40, 53, 92, 119, 138, 139, 143–46, 149, 152, 154, 156, 185, 196, 286, 290, 302, 341

372 Index

defence [obrana]. See movements of human existence democracy, 25, 40 62, 70, 184, 217, 219–21, 226, 227, 239, 246, 248–52, 289, 290, 333 agonistic democracy, xx, 237, 248, 256n63, 277 deliberative democracy, 240, 250 direct democracy, 220, 221 liberal democracy, 176, 252 radical democracy, 218, 245, 248 Democritus, xxi, 34, 277 Derrida, Jacques, 35, 37n17, 62, 71n5, 72n16, 157n28, 212n2 Dewey, John, 250, 257n76 dialectics, 11, 16, 18, 108, 185–88, 190–92, 194, 196, 197, 198n10 Dickinson, G. Lowes, 141, 142 dissent / dissidence / dissident, xix, 39, 41–43, 45, 46, 49–54, 57–59, 64, 65, 67–70, 77, 79, 92n1, 105, 112, 161, 177, 185, 186, 218, 219, 237, 238, 244, 253, 257n91, 342 division of labour. See labour / labourer Dodd, James, xix, 55n16, 72n12, 94n21, 181n47 Dostoevksy, Fyodor, 180n46, 342 Doxa [opinion], 63, 227, 324–26. Duicu, Dragoș, xxiiin25 Durkheim, Émile, 224 economy, 18, 42, 43, 90, 91, 96, 97, 104, 110, 271 education, 8, 242, 289 elitism, 164, 272 embodiment. See body Energeia [actuality; functioning], 118–20 Engels, Friedrich, 187, 189, 198n14, 199n22 enhancement, xiv, 185, 191 enlightenment, 184, 218, 280, 283 epic, 136, 140, 152 epoché, xvi–xviii, 143, 342, 344n5

equilibrium, 139–2 Eribon, Didier, 55n27, 30, 56n38–40 Esposito, Roberto, 115n31 eternity, xxi, 114n23, 117, 135, 142–45, 151, 212 Europe, x–xiii, xvii–xxi, xxiin4, 41, 60, 61, 96–100, 102–7, 114n27, 117, 135–42, 144, 145, 149, 151, 155, 156, 164, 165, 167, 168, 203, 211, 259, 265, 269, 273, 301–12, 315–27, 328n17, 333, 339–41 Central Europe, xiii–xiv, 41, 59, 65, 77, 204, 218 Eastern Europe, 26, 59, 65, 186, 187, 218 Eurocentrism, xx, 272, 301, 306–8, 310, 312 European crisis. See crisis European history, x–xiii, 63, 89, 137, 165, 201, 211, 265, 301, 308, 312, 318, 334, 339, 340, 342 European humanity, xii, 98–100, 102, 107, 136, 316, 319, 320, 323, 325, 326 Europeanisation, 211, 328n17 European philosophy, xiv European society, 39, 42, 168, 305–7, 309–11, 316–21, 323, 325, 326 European Union, 141, 168 Post-Europe [Nach-Europa; poevropská doba], x, xiii, xviii, xxi, xxiin13, 95, 97, 98, 140, 243, 255n46, 273, 301, 302, 304–7, 309–11 Western Europe, 3, 4, 7 everyday / everydayness, 60, 64, 65–67, 70, 126, 173, 176, 192–96, 247, 250, 263, 266, 282, 284 evil, 58, 66, 68, 70, 91, 165, 239 Evink, Eddo, 72n17 Ewen, Stuart, 289, 293n11, 17, 296n79 existentialism, 192, 257n83, 337 political existentialism, 39, 41, 54

Index

existential revolution, 41–43, 50, 54, 69, 70 exploitation,184–86, 262 Faes, Hubert, 272, 275n37 Fascism, 104, 337 Filene, Edward A., 279, 287–89, 291, 292, 293n13, 16, 295n63, 64, 296n82 Findlay, Edward E., 55n20, 73n17, 93n5, 218, 233n1, 234n20, 238, 254n4 Fink, Eugen, 135, 156, 188 First World War. See war formalization, 99, 107, 278, 284, 285, 290 Forti, Simona, xix, 71n1, 113n10, 198n13 Foucault, Michel, 39, 44, 47–53, 55n18, 29, 31, 56n44, 57–61, 63–65, 67, 69, 71n2, 5, 6, 72n14, 115n31, 212n2, 293n10 freedom, xx, 10, 13, 18, 19, 29, 31–33, 37, 43, 45–47, 49, 51, 52, 67, 69, 70, 73n28, 85, 90, 96, 97, 105, 107, 124–26, 131n60, 135, 143–46, 149, 157n28, 164, 165, 173, 174, 178n12, 184, 185, 188, 189, 194, 196, 189n10, 202, 203, 205, 211, 218, 220, 223, 224, 227, 232, 234n20, 241, 242, 244, 247, 249, 251, 252, 256n63, 259, 260, 261, 264, 265, 267, 268–71, 273, 283, 284, 285, 289, 292, 306, 332, 333, 336, 339, 343 political freedom, 126, 184, 220, 229, 250 socratic freedom, 63, 64 Freud, Sigmund, 289, 337 Fried, Gregory, 94n21, 256n69 Friedman, Milton, 293n5 friend / enemy, 156, 239, 240 Frogneux, Natalie, 275n37 Fronterlebnis [experience of the front line], 162, 173

373

Galileo, 278, 283, 320 George, Andrew R., 159n55 George, Stefan, 341 Gestell [enframing], xvi, xvii, 208–10, 325, 355, 341 Gilgamesh, xix, 135, 150–56, 159n52, 58, 206 Gleeson-White, Jane, 281, 294n24, 297n95 globalization, 49, 97, 305 God, 21n14, 35, 70, 82, 117, 137, 139, 140, 143–50, 153–56, 158n37, 205, 220, 225, 239, 249, 256n69, 282, 283, 304, 306, 325 death of God, 47, 148 Goldberg, Beverly, 295n63 Granel, Gerard, 316, 327n3 Greece, 131n60, 135, 136, 164, 217, 219, 220, 265, 306, 309 Greek philosophy, xv, 34, 60, 117, 144, 164, 165, 178n4, 306, 315, 319, 326 Gubser, Michael D., 198n20 Habermas, Jürgen, xxiin13, 42, 115n32, 230, 236n66, 240, 250, 257n77, 269 Hagedorn, Ludger, xx, xxiin17, 94n21, 113n9, 181n46, 197n3, 233 Harford, Tim, 297n97 Havel, Václav, xix, 20n4, 29, 39–45, 50, 52, 53, 54n1, 2, 4, 10, 55n12, 14, 56n37, 45, 57, 58, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73n23, 26, 29, 74n35, 38, 198n13, 257n91, 292, 297n98 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13, 15, 16, 21n14, 52, 187, 188, 196, 202–5, 212, 212n2, 213n8, 260, 336, 338, 339 Heidegger, Martin, xvi–xviii, 31, 36, 40, 44, 63, 64, 70, 74n38, 86–88, 92n5, 93n5, 94n21, 22,

374 Index

112n3, 126, 137, 142, 143, 155, 157n23, 27, 28, 159n61, 161, 163, 171, 172, 178n7, 8, 180n29, 35, 181n46, 192, 199n26, 204, 208, 209, 222, 228, 229, 238, 239, 241, 252, 253, 255n46, 256n69, 257n83, 86, 87, 260, 263, 266, 268, 275n30, 301, 305–7, 325, 327n1, 328n33, 332, 335, 341, 342 Helsinki Accords, 77, 85, 89, 91 Hentsch, Thierry, 156n2 Heraclitus, xiii, 60, 62, 80, 86–88, 93n19, 94n21, 259n69, 260, 267, 331, 335, 345n13 Heresy / heretic, 13, 14, 60, 63, 91, 92, 194, 195, 268, 324, 334, 338, 339 Herf, Jeffrey, 178n2, 179n19 hermeneutics, 57, 223, 224, 230, 232, 250 heroism / heroic, 65, 152–55, 338, 343 history, xv, xvi, xix, xxin1, xxiiin27, 7, 14–16, 23, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 41, 44, 47, 51, 52, 62, 70, 81, 82, 85, 90, 92, 98, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 115n45, 139, 140, 164–66, 168, 175, 179, 183, 185–90, 192–98, 200n39, 44, 201–3, 205–9, 217, 220, 221, 224, 227–29, 231, 232, 238, 239, 241–43, 247, 259, 264–69, 271–73, 275n37, 301–3, 305, 306, 308–11, 314, 334–36, 338, 339, 341, 342, 344, 346n29 beginning of history, 85, 88, 89, 227, 272 Czech history, x, xv, xxin3, xxiiin22, 20, 53, 135, 161, 168, 185, 199n32, 336, 341 end of history, 91, 201, 201–3, 205, 208, 211, 212, 311 European history. See Europe historiography, 228, 334, 338

post-history, xix, 202, 203, 210 prehistory, xv, 31, 85, 136, 151, 179, 205, 206, 208, 228, 238, 241, 243 world history, 33, 219, 265, 314 Hodder, Ian, 158n45 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 163 Homer, 136, 143 Homo faber, 146 Homo oeconomicus, 277 Honig, Bonny, 245, 256n60 household [domácnost], 32, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153, 270–72, 287 Howard, Dick, 321, humanity, xi, xii, 20, 31, 40, 42, 44, 51, 52, 78, 81, 85, 89, 90, 91, 121, 136, 142, 145, 162, 168, 172, 176, 178n12, 188, 189, 191, 194–96, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211, 228, 241, 265, 266, 272, 273, 275n37, 288, 303–7, 309–11, 316–21, 323, 325, 326 European humanity. See Europe human capital, 277, 279, 290, 291 human rights. See rights von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 101 Husserl, Edmund, x, xvi–xx, xiin20, xxiiin28, 31, 99–104, 107, 111, 112, 113n16, 114n20–22, 26–28, 117, 135, 136, 161, 188, 195, 198n20, 200n44, 222, 228–30, 252, 261, 274n5, 283, 301, 305, 306, 313n15, 16, 315–26, 327n1, 2, 4, 9, 11, 328n17, 19, 26, 338, 339, 344 idealism, 40, 44–46, 188, 268 ideology, 19, 41, 49, 50, 53, 66, 100, 102, 104, 107–12, 115n45, 116, 184, 186, 187, 198n16, 230, 249, 306, 335, 336 neoliberal ideology. See neoliberalism scientific ideology, xix, 98, 104, 108–12 imagination, 227, 338

Index

immanence, 139, 142, 149, 151, 153 immortality. See death imperialism, 96, 337, 339, 340 individuation, 86, 262, 266, 267, 275 disindividuation, 266, 275n21 supraindividuation / higher individuation, 267, 275n2 injustice. See justice institution, xiii, 25, 49–51, 54, 58, 60, 65, 99, 149, 158n38, 217, 218, 220–23, 229–32, 239, 240, 247, 249, 256n63, 292, 309, 340 (primal) institution / establishment [Urstiftung], 99, 102, 107, 111, 115n31, 319, 320 final establisment [Endstiftung], 319 meta-institution, 224 self-institution, 218, 221, 224 social institution, 222 intellectual (the), xiv, xxin3, 4, 5, 7–15, 17, 19, 20, 21n8, 10, 23–25, 50, 53, 57, 64, 65, 70, 71n5, 79, 92n1, 164, 191, 192, 198n13, 129n29, 238, 242, 337 intellectualism, 143 intersubjectivity. See subject Jakobsen, Thorkild, 146, 147, 152, 158n39 Janicaud, Dominique, 257n83 Jervolino, Domenico, 72n8 Jesseph, Douglas M., 283, 294n40 Jonas, Hans, 252 Jones, Daniel S., 296n87, 94 Jünger, Ernest, 43, 162, 165–68, 173, 174, 177, 178n2, 179n19, 334, 342, 343 justice, ix, xx, 12, 29, 44, 51, 53, 79, 191, 222, 227, 343 injustice, 50, 78, 91, 262 Kalyvas, Andreas, 256n62 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 117, 178n1, 196, 279, 293n10, 303, 306 Keane, John, 73n23

375

Kerenyi, Karl, 157n6 Khan, Charles H., 256n69 kinesis. See movement / motion Kippenberg, Katherina, 151, 158n49, 159n50 Kirzner, Israel M., 291, 296n93 Kitsch, 65, 67–69 Klages, Ludwig, 306 Kohák, Erazim, xxiiin22, 72n10, 17, 73n18, 92n2, 4, 93n7–9, 11, 18, 94n29, 32, 34, 114n28, 131n65, 65, 179n15, 181n47, 199n26, 32, 234n24, 255n46, 257n90, 276n38, 40, 42, 327n8, 328n25 Kojève, Alexandre, xix, 113n11, 201–4, 210–12, 212n1–3, 213n11, 29, 31 Kołakowski, Leszek, xiv, 198n13, 15 Kosík, Karel, 20n4, 183, 192–94, 199n33, 200n36, 40 Kouba, Pavel, 36, 38n20 Kundera, Milan, xiv, xxiin19, 20n4, 67–70, 73n29, 74n30, 33, 34, Kusin, Vladimir, 6n3, 92n1 labour / labourer, 9, 14, 15, 17, 20n7, 21n14, 23, 47, 50, 70, 78, 96, 108, 122, 125, 147, 148, 171, 188, 228, 241, 283, 288, 291, 311, 336 Lacan, Jacques, 67, 204, 212n2 Laclau, Ernesto, 237, 240, 245, 252, 254n12, 18, 20 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 255n25 Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra, 92n1 Lambert, Wilfred G., 158n37 Landgrebe, Ludwig, 183, 188–90, 192, 199n23 law, xxi, 12, 25, 29, 42, 43, 46–49, 51, 77, 78, 80, 87, 117, 119, 157n28, 171, 189, 190, 198n17, 220, 222, 226, 227, 248, 264, 268, 282, 283, 285, 287 Lefort, Claude, 237, 240, 249, 252, 254n14, 19

376 Index

legitimacy, xvii, 42, 49, 53 Lehmann, Sandra, 94n21, 179n15 Leistung [Operation], 320, 321 Levinas, Emmanuel, 130n36 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 273 life, xv, xix, xx, 12, 15–17, 30, 31–33, 36, 37, 39, 40–49, 52–54, 55n11, 57, 60–71, 72n12, 81–89, 95–100, 103–6, 108, 110–12, 112n6, 113n10, 114n23, 115n31, 120, 122–26, 130n36, 131n61, 61, 137–40, 143–55, 162, 163, 166, 169–71, 173–75, 176, 177, 191, 193, 196, 202, 205–12, 218–20, 222–24, 231, 232, 239–45, 247, 250, 253, 259–63, 267, 270–72, 275n30, 282, 284–86, 302, 305, 306, 308, 310, 311, 318, 319, 321, 323, 331–34, 340, 342, 343, 344n9, 10 life in amplitude. See amplitude life in balance. See balance living in truth [život v pravdě]. See truth living within a lie. See lying / lie unsheltered life [nekryký život], 32, 88, 264, 266 lifeworld [Lebenswelt; přirozený svět], xvii, xviii, xxiiin31, 58, 98–100, 102, 104, 107, 111, 114n27, 150, 153, 218, 228, 309, 316, 317, 320–24, 339 logos, 60, 86, 87, 205, 210, 308, 326 Lom, Petr, 254n4 Löwith, Karl, 252 Lukács, György, 170–72, 180n32, 37, 38 lying / lie, 43, 49, 58, 65, 66–68, 186, 187 living within a lie, 53, 67, 198n13 Lyotard, Jean-François, 104 machine production. See production management, 7, 221, 278, 279, 287

Marchart, Olivier, 254n11–13, 15, 17, 24, 255n45, 51, 256n53, 257n82, 83–85, 89 Marcuse, Herbert, 252, 257n86, 337, 346n23 market, 40, 106, 109, 115n32, 277–79, 282, 283, 286, 288, 290, 291 Marx, Karl, xix, 15–18, 108, 109, 111, 183, 184, 187–91, 194, 195, 198n14, 16, 17, 199n22, 200n44, 218, 221, 337 Marxism / Marxist thought, xix, 5, 15, 23, 24, 48, 51, 53, 98, 107–9, 110, 113n12, 115n45, 164, 170–72, 177, 180n31, 183, 186, 188, 190–92, 194, 195, 197n6, 198n14, 16, 199n21, 288 Marxist humanism, 197n6 Masaryk, Tomáš G., xiv, xv, xxiin3, 5, 40, 93n5, 139, 142, 157n18, 336, 341, 346n28 mass, 8, 9, 11, 17–19, 24, 34, 40, 96, 164, 170, 286–88, 289 mass murder, 335, 337 mass society. See society materialism / materialist, 15, 187, 188, 194, 198, 227 dialectical materialism, 18, 107, 110, 115n45, 116n45, 186, 190, 191, 195, 198n14 historical materialism, 115n45, 183, 187, 194 materialist conception of history, 183, 186, 187, 189, 194, 198n14, 17 mathematics, 281, 282, 284, 294n24, 317 mathematisation, 278, 279 Meacham, Darian, xix, 115n30 mechanisation, 283, 286 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, xxiiin28, 16, 204, 212n2, 222, 230, 236n65 Merlier, Philippe S., 73n17 Merta, Vladimír, 43

Index

Mesopotamia, 13, 135, 139, 140, 146, 147, 149–51, 153 Metanoia [conversion], 62, 331, 342 metaphor, 82, 85, 136, 137, 144, 150 metaphysics / metaphysical, xx, xxi, 16, 33, 35, 45, 51, 53, 54, 57, 63, 64, 96, 98, 105, 107, 114n21, 115n45, 136, 140, 142, 143, 158n31, 162, 167, 172, 186, 198n10, 208, 221–23, 225, 226, 238, 243, 253, 282, 285, 303, 307–11, 314n21, 316, 319, 320, 332 Middle Ages, 4, 11, 14, 24, 90 Mill, James, 285 Mill, John S. 25, 250 Miłosz, Czesław, 65, 73n21, 22 Mirowski, Philip, 296n85, 297n96 mobilization, xxiin17, 41, 45, 97, 165–68, 170–77, 334, 335, 338, 343 modernity, xvii, 13, 52, 162, 164, 173, 185, 218–20, 239, 252, 344n5 morality, 15, 19, 91, 92, 126, 127, 198n17, 239, 280, 290 moral decision, 126 Moran, William L., 158n49 mortality. See death Mouffe, Chantal, 237, 240, 245, 246, 251, 252, 254n12, 18, 21, 255n26, 256n61, 257n81 movement / motion [kinesis], xv, 120, 129n27, 28, 207, 228 movements of human existence, xv, 31, 60, 81, 82, 93n11, 121–23, 127, 129n30, 35, 130n54, 138, 145, 151, 178, 223, 228, 229, 232, 238, 240, 241, 259, 261–64, 267, 271, 272 first movement (anchoring [zakotvení] / rootedness [zakořenění] / acceptance [akceptace; přijetí]), 81, 122, 123, 130n36, 52, 138, 238, 240, 261, 262, 264

377

second movement (selfprolongation, self-extension [sebeprodlužování], selfprojection [sebeprojekce], defence [obrana], reproduction [reprodukce]), 81, 122, 123, 130n54, 138, 238, 240, 261–64, 274n9 third movement (breakthrough [průlom] / self-transcendence [sebepřekračování; sebepřesah] / selfcomprehension [sebepochopení] / truth [pravda] / self-finding [sebenalezení] / selfachievement [sebezískání]), xv, 31, 81, 123, 124, 130n54, 138, 139, 224, 228, 238, 240, 241, 243, 244, 261, 262, 264, 265, 267 myth / mythology, xvi, xx, xxi, 31, 32, 34, 47, 60, 81–85, 88, 93n14, 137, 144, 147, 149–51, 156, 158n42, 164, 168, 176, 179n15, 206, 207, 209, 210, 264, 265, 270–73, 324–26, 328n30, 31, 331, 333, 344n10 Naddaf, Gerald, 157n24 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 240, 252, 254n18, 255n25 Napoleon, 108, 202, 203, 341 nation, 3, 41, 46–48, 54, 140, 141, 153, 247, 291, 303 Czech national programme. See Czechoslovakia nationalism, 141, 339 nation state, 41, 46, 47, 140, 141 nature [physis], 41, 86, 100, 113n7, 16, 114n28, 138, 143, 145, 149, 150, 152, 153, 189, 201, 202, 209–12, 220, 225, 282–87, 316 naturalism, 100, 145, 146, 318 natural sciences. See science

378 Index

Nazism / national socialism, 178n2, 336, 337 neoliberalism, xx, 197n9, 277–79, 290, 291 Neumayr, Fran, 42, 55n13 neutralization, 240, 243 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35, 36, 47, 63, 246, 306, 332, 341 norm, 44, 48, 49, 51, 64, 66, 68, 69, 70, 100, 105, 109, 110, 220, 222, 227, 319 normalization, x, xviii, xxi, 53, 77, 172, 194 Novotný, Antonín, 8 Novotný, Karel, xx, 103, 113n14, 229, 235n63, 236n65, 313n12 nuclear power, 45, 49, 91, 92, 113n7, 170 numinous, 146–47 objectivity, xv, 16, 64, 100, 103, 172, 277, 278, 280, 281, 285 objectivism, 318, 320, 321, 326, 328n18 oblivion, 136, 272, 320, 324, 332 Oikos [home], 31, 32, 271 ontological difference, xvii, xviii, 239, 305, 306, 311 openness, xv, 25, 31, 32, 81–83, 87, 111, 137, 224, 229, 231, 245, 246, 262, 264, 271, 304, 307, 308, 328n17 opposition, xiv, 8, 9, 13, 14–16, 23, 24, 39, 47, 58, 68, 69, 81, 96, 174, 175, 180n45, 186, 195, 224, 241, 268, 269, 271, 272, 306, 310, 311 Orbán, Viktor, 41, 54n6 Oreskes, Naomi, 195n52 Osborne, Robin, 225 other / otherness, 58, 126, 147, 153, 155, 156, 189–91, 193, 221 outreach / upswing / reaching forth [vzmach], 30–33, 36, 37, 84, 89, 282, 333

paganism, 139, 140, 145 Paparusso, Riccardo, xix, 113n11, 200n45, 213n28, 274n17 Parrhesia, 57, 59, 64, 65 Patinkin, Donald, 292, 296n85, 297n96 Paul the Apostle, 34 peace, 43, 44, 45, 48, 54, 61, 62, 72n12, 88, 91, 92, 141, 162, 165, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173–76, 210, 244, 246, 247, 251, 280, 334, 335, 342, 345, 136n65, 315 Peck, Jamie, 293n2 phenomenology, ix, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, xiiin26, 28, 16, 42, 98–100, 102, 104, 108, 110–12, 127n6, 161, 188, 192, 199n21, 224, 229, 267, 331, 338, 344 asubjective phenomenology, xv, 60, 71n8, 127n6, 223, 228, 229, 231, 260, 305 transcendental phenomenology, 98, 99, 103, 111, 117, 118, 261, 315, 320 philosophy of history, xix, xx, xxi, 31, 84, 156, 164, 175, 194, 201, 203, 207, 212, 229, 301, 309, 310, 326, 333, 338, 339 Physis. See nature Picq, Jean, 73n23 Pithart, Petr, 93n6 Plato, xv, xx, xxi, 31, 34, 60, 62, 63, 88, 144, 158n31, 179, 219, 222, 223, 225–27, 238, 263, 265, 268, 269, 270, 272, 274n15, 279, 293n8, 307 negative Platonism, 31, 63, 73n17, 181n47, 307 Platonic dialogues, 63, 332 Platonism, Platonic, xvi, 35, 36, 57, 60, 63, 117, 158n31, 222–26, 238, 253, 268, 272, 274n15, 276n38, 306, 326, 331, 339 polemos [conflict, strife, war], xiii, xix, 60, 80, 84, 85–89, 92, 94n21,

Index

156, 224, 238, 239, 247, 248, 251, 256n69, 260, 263, 264, 266–68, 345n13 Polis [city], xii, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, 32, 33, 36, 81, 83, 85, 87, 88, 96, 137, 176, 179n12, 196, 206, 217–25, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 247, 260, 263–65, 268–70, 274n15, 331, 333 political (the), ix, x, xix, xxi, 24, 30, 65 79, 81, 83, 96, 142, 176, 221, 224, 231, 238–43, 245, 251, 260, 331, 333, 342 political existentialism. See existentialism political ontology, 221 political theory, 110, 237–39, 244, 245, 248, 249, 253, 259 Porter, Theodore M., 280, 281, 284, 286, 294n18, 21, 25, 25, 295n44, 48, 53 positivism, 114, 317 Post-Europe. See Europe postmodernism / postmodern, 238, 246, 312n5 post-totalitarianism. See totalitarianism power, xi, 4, 9, 13, 14, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36, 48, 51, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 66–70, 80, 82, 83, 86, 90, 97, 102, 104, 107, 113, 115n31, 135, 141, 146–48, 150, 151, 156, 166, 167, 171, 175–77, 178n4, 8, 180n45, 184, 185, 187, 190, 197n8, 206, 209, 210, 218, 220, 221, 230, 241, 249, 253, 260–62, 264, 267, 268, 269, 280, 282, 283, 285–88, 291, 302, 303, 308, 309, 333, 337, 338–41 biopower. See biopolitics microphysics of power, 53, 54, 58 powerless, 8, 10, 39, 40–46, 49, 52, 54, 139, 193, 245, 292

379

Prague Spring, x, xiv, xv, xxiin3, 3–5, 20n4, 67, 77, 135, 172, 185, 190, 192, 194, 199n31, 218 Praxis, 23, 24, 63, 194, 195, 200n40, 218, 221, 322–24 prehistory. See history pre-Socratic, 60, 142, 143, 151, 331, 335 Přibáň, Jiří, xix, 56n48 problematicity, 30, 84, 85, 175, 210, 218, 222, 224, 228, 231, 232, 237–39, 242, 244–51, 253, 269, 272, 273, 326 problematisation, 93n14, 124, 125 production, 10, 15–20, 23, 89, 96, 166, 171, 178n4, 189, 191, 194, 198n17, 280, 281, 286–89, 322 profane, 224 progress / progression, xii, 14–17, 44, 51, 61, 89, 96, 115n45, 120, 163, 166, 167, 173, 186, 187, 189, 190, 193–95, 203, 207, 210, 212, 252, 263, 265, 285, 287, 291, 308, 313n21, 344n5 proletariat / proletarian, 15, 17, 18, 23, 53, 109, 164, 170, 177, 191 prolongation [sebeprodlužování]. See movements of human existence protest, 8, 10, 11, 78, 135, 138, 174, 242 Prozorov, Sergei, 71n3 psychoanalysis, 257n83, 289 Pythagoras, 294n24, 322 Queneau, Raymond, 204, 212 racism, 47–49, 337, 339 radicalism, 40, 45, 97, 136, 198, 245, 285, 323 Rádl, Emanuel, xiv, xxii, 14, 18, 21n12, 199n21, 29 Rancière, Jacques, 237, 240, 245, 252, 254n18, 23, 255n27, 256n56

380 Index

rationality, 10, 17, 29, 45, 99, 102, 103, 106, 111, 112, 239, 240, 250, 283, 285, 303–6, 308, 310, 321, 322 ratio, 103, 104, 195, 200n44, 303, 323 rational civilisation. See civilisation rationalization, 10, 53, 104, 105, 107, 281, 283, 285, 343 reaching forth [vzmach]. See outreach reform, x, xxiin13, 3–6, 45, 183, 199n32, 218, 280 religion, 34, 35, 81, 105, 109, 144, 146, 147, 150, 162, 172, 178, 180n46, 198n17, 208, 224, 225, 241, 264, 285, 323, 339 Repington, Charles à Court, 341 resistance, xvi, xx, 43, 46, 50–54, 59, 64, 66, 89, 91, 135–37, 139, 143, 145, 152, 156, 157n28, 161, 189, 259, 262, 268, 269, 343 responsibility, xiii, 44, 58, 62, 78, 85, 96, 97, 107, 124–26, 136, 151, 164, 168, 193, 196, 205–8, 222, 224, 240, 241, 250, 288, 292, 293n5, 321, 323, 326, 332, 338, 344n5 Ricard, François, 74n34 Riché, Pierre, 293n6 Richir, Marc, xxin1, 71n7, 212n5 Ricœur, Paul, 71n8, 73n20, 162, 178n3, 222, 227, 228, 230, 235n53, 236n67, 238, 255n32, 272, 276n41, 321, 327n10, 328n18, 23, 334, 345n13 rights, xxi, 46, 47, 50, 52, 54, 78, 109, 252, 315, 319, 320 civil rights, ix, 41, 47, 49, 51, 277 human rights, ix, xix, 19, 30, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 54n8, 77, 78, 84, 91, 115n35, 126, 127, 129n29, 161, 238, 253, 288 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 151, 158n49,159n50

risk, 11, 17, 24, 30, 36, 41, 66, 67, 77–79, 83–85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 138, 173–75, 187, 188, 190, 208, 212, 262, 264, 266, 270, 279, 291, 307, 312 Robespierre, 203 Rodrigo, Pierre, 129n29 Roman Empire, 34, 35, 117, 137 rootedness, sinking roots [zakotvení]. See movements of human existence Rorty, Richard, 238, 254n4, 9 Rose, Nikolas, 292n1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 52, 250 Roviello, Anne-Marie, 275n34 Rückfrage [question-in-return; reflection-back], 107, 112, 317, 320 Russia, 166, 168, 203, 204 sacred, 78, 82, 127, 145–49, 158n38, 220, 224, 264, 268 sacrifice [oběť], xvi, 24, 29, 30, 43, 45, 48, 59, 62, 65, 111, 127, 148, 150, 161, 162, 169, 173–77, 190, 194, 199n26, 207, 210, 261, 266, 270, 311, 325 Satterwhite, James H., 197n6 scepticism, 316, 319 Schaffer, Simon, 284, 295n42 Scheler, Max, 101, 114n21, 139, 142, 157n19, 21 Schmidt, James, 200n40 Schmidt, Klaus, 148, 149, 158n44 Schmitt, Carl, 239, 240, 254n16 Schuback, Marcia Sá Cavalcante, 178n7, 199n26 science, xviii, xxi, 19, 36, 42, 49, 78, 90, 97, 99–104, 107–12, 114n21, 23, 27, 198n17, 199n21, 204, 264, 277, 278, 280–87, 289, 303, 306, 316–18, 321, 323, 325, 326, 338, 340 European sciences, xvii–xix, 99, 100, 102, 103, 114n27

Index

human sciences, 47, 111 natural sciences, xvi, 16, 96, 99–102, 107, 210, 280, 281, 321, 339, 341 social sciences, xiii, xix Second World War. See war, Second World War self-transcendence. See movements of human existence Sepp, Hans Rainer, 313n15 shaking [otřesení], 33, 88, 89, 124, 151, 155, 173, 177, 194–96, 219, 220, 237, 241, 244, 245, 245, 250, 264–66, 269, 271, 272, 331–33, 337, 338, 342, 344 Shapin, Steven, 284, 295n42 sheltering / unsheltering, 81, 89, 123, 262, 264, 271 unsheltered life. See life Simondon, Gilbert, 266, 267, 274n20, 275n21 socialism, x, 3, 5, 20, 25, 62, 65, 66, 68, 104, 109, 115n45, 116n45, 184, 186, 187, 193, 197n8, 198n13, 199n32, 218, 345n17 social theory, 52, 110 society, xiv, 4, 5, 8–11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23–25, 30, 34, 39–45, 47–49, 50, 52–54, 63, 70, 78, 84, 99, 102–6, 109, 114n27, 115n35, 127, 147, 149, 162–64, 168, 171, 177, 178n6, 185, 186, 188, 191, 211, 218, 220–22, 224, 227, 230, 239–44, 247–49, 256n63, 264, 277–81, 283–86, 288, 289, 292 consumer society, 8, 39, 289 global society, 39, 41, 49, 53 mass society, 9, 25, 278–80, 287, 288 Socrates, xxi, 31, 33, 44, 63, 64, 72n9, 125, 144, 151, 158n31, 32, 161, 165, 176, 177, 222–25, 238, 331–33, 343n1, 344n6, 7 Socratic dialogues, 36, 63 Socratic freedom. See freedom

381

Socratism, 65, 311 solidarity, xiii, xvi, xx, 10, 37, 50, 51, 88, 91, 92, 95, 141, 149, 155, 156, 264, 267, 268, 290, 311 solidarity of the shaken [solidarita otřesených], 5, 36, 39, 43, 44, 47, 50–52, 62, 91, 95, 155, 156, 162, 164, 174–77, 180n45, 247, 264, 265, 269, 309, 343 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 65, 73n24, 198 Sorge [care], 126 soul, xi, 35, 36, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 71n2, 72n12, 73n20, 117–20, 124, 125, 128n23, 144, 145, 151, 152, 158n38, 169, 175, 229, 259, 269, 272, 306, 307, 309, 312, 332, 343n1, 344n6 care for the soul [Péče o duši], xi, xv, xvi–xx, 11, 31, 34–36, 57, 60, 63, 65, 67, 96, 117, 124–27, 144, 145, 164, 177, 178n4, 219, 222–24, 231, 253, 308, 310, 312, 321, 326, 331, 332, 339, 340, 342 open soul, 304, 307, 308, 312 Soviet Union, 7, 8, 50, 59, 97, 168, 176 Špiritovás, Marketa, 159n50 spirituality, 4, 14, 21n10, 24, 174, 176, 180n46, 303, 304, 306, 308, 310–12, 323 spiritual life, 31, 125, 131n63, 176, 177 spiritual man / person / people [duchovní člověk], 30, 31, 34, 36, 47, 52, 62, 64, 180n46, 238, 242, 243 Srubar, Ilja, 197n1, 198n16 Stalinism / Stalinist, 7, 8, 168, 185 Stanciu, Ovidiu, xx, xxiiin25, 113n14 Staudigl, Michael, xxiin15, 94n21, 180n39, 197n3 Stedman Jones, Daniel, 296n87 Stern, August, 56n39 Stern, Mikhail, 50

382 Index

Stock, Brian, 293n6 Strauss, Leo, 100, 101, 113n15, 19, 114n25, 26 struggle, xv, xxi, 14, 19, 24, 25, 29, 32, 37, 42–45, 48, 51, 53, 59, 68, 79, 97, 103, 123, 138, 159n52, 190, 196, 197n3, 232, 246, 247, 262–64, 267–70, 274n9, 282, 309, 310, 316, 333, 334, 345n17 class struggle, 48, 51, 109 subject, xv, xvi, 16, 18, 47, 57–59, 62, 64, 67, 100, 101, 106, 108, 111, 112, 117, 118, 121, 127n6, 8, 230, 245, 261, 275n21, 304, 306–8 asubjectivity. See phenomenology, asubjective phenomenology intersubjectivity, xvi, 107, 159, 229, 230–32, 261, 274n5 subjectivism, xvii, 303–5 subjectivity, xv, 58, 99, 107, 111, 112, 194, 228, 230, 250, 305 trans-subjectivity, 223, 229, 230–32 supercivilisation. See civilization supraindividuation. See individuation Szakolczai, Árpad, 58, 71n3 Tassin, Etienne, 71n7, 212n5 Tava, Francesco, xxiin18, 71n4, 73n17, 113n12, 115n38, 159n61, 179n15, 181n47 Tawney, R.H., 291, 296n92 Taylor, Frederick W., 279, 287, 292, 295n58 technique / technical / technician, xvi, 5, 10, 12, 17, 18, 20n7, 43, 44, 49, 52, 53, 100, 163, 185, 277, 280, 286, 289, 303–5, 308, 317, 321, 323–25, 340, psychotechnique, 13, 20n7 technization / technicization, xvii, 243, 255n46, 277 technology, xvii, xviii, 17, 19, 42, 49, 70, 90, 102, 162, 165, 171, 208, 209, 257n86, 281, 286, 303, 307

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 43, 173, 334, 342 Telos / teleology, xii, 16, 195, 200n45, 203, 205, 207, 208, 212, 221, 227, 265–68, 274n17, 282, 284, 309, 315, 319, 320 temporality, 44, 230, 232 supra-temporality, 99, 101 Tökés, Rudolf, 92n1 totalitarianism / totalitarian, 29, 41, 45–47, 49, 66, 69, 176, 177, 179n19, 249, 336, 337 post-totalitarianism / post-totalitarian, 40, 53, 55n11, 61, 69 totality, 33, 42–45, 52, 54, 64, 103, 223, 224, 253, 264, 265, 267, 285, 325 tragedy / tragic, xii, xiv, xv, v, 65, 68–70, 139, 140, 142, 151, 154, 172, 185, 245, 247, 250 birth of tragedy, 246, 332 tragic wisdom, 155, 332 transcendence, xxi, 14, 15, 18, 23, 24, 34, 63, 64, 73n28, 139, 142, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153, 158n37, 191, 192, 223, 228, 269, 307, 326 horizontal / vertical transcendence, 15, 16, 18, 23, 24, 191 transubstantiation, 266 truth, xvi, xvii, 9, 12, 14, 50, 51, 59, 60, 62, 63–68, 78, 81–83, 96, 99, 101, 108, 110, 114n28, 117, 118, 136, 150, 152, 192, 202, 222–24, 232, 240, 263, 265, 272, 281, 282, 285, 306, 319, 320, 326, 331, 341, 343n1, 344n7, 10 living in truth, 23, 25, 42–44, 53, 57, 59, 63, 67, 69, 144, 198n11, 253, 265, 311 movement of truth. See movements of existence Tucker, Aviezer, 93n5, 254n5, 6 Tully, James, 245

Index

Učník, Ľubica, xx, xxiiin30, 197n9, 199n26, 255n31 Ullmann, Tamás, 72n17 undaunted, 88, 91, 220, 264, 266 United States of America, 8, 49, 50, 97, 104, 176, 318 unsheltered life. See sheltering / unsheltering upswing [vzmach]. See outreach U.S.S.R. See Soviet Union value, 12, 44, 45, 51, 61, 62, 72n12, 79, 84, 89, 99, 102, 103, 105, 114n23, 122, 159n58, 167, 169, 173, 174, 210, 217, 220, 221, 245–48, 251, 285, 289, 291, 341 Varela, Francesco, 231 Verger, Jacques, 293n6 Vernay, Pascal, 235n38, 40 Versailles (Treaty of), 168 Villing, Alexandra, 157n6 violence, xi, 51, 53, 61, 65, 80, 85, 88, 148, 163, 172, 174, 185 Vishnu Spaak, Claude, xxiiin25 vocation, 96, 318, 331, 332 Vollrath, Ernst, 254n17 Wagner, Peter, 234n33, war, x, xiii, xvii, xix, xx, 10, 33, 43–45, 48, 52, 60, 61, 66, 87–92, 95–98, 152, 156, 162, 165–70, 172, 174–77, 185, 193, 209, 210, 238, 246, 247, 268, 270, 309, 311, 332–43, 345n13 Cold War, 45, 57, 135, 174, 334, 335 First World War, xi, xxiin17, 97, 104, 139, 140–42, 162, 166, 167, 170, 172–74, 180n30, 184, 197n3, 203, 209, 210, 218, 265, 303, 321, 333–35, 338, 341, 342, 345n17

383

Interwar period, 166, 168, 179n19, 334 Post-war period, 7, 9, 97, 166–68, 185, 252, 337 Second World War, xi, 97, 104, 139, 172, 184, 185, 197n3, 203, 218, 302, 303, 321, 335–39, 341, 345n17 war [polemos]. See polemos warfare, xiii, 333, 338, 343 Ward, Steven C., 293n2 de Warren, Nicolas, xix, xxiin15, 94n21, 159n51, 180n39, 181n46, 197n3 Washburn, William D., 280, 294n19 Watson, Don, 296n84 Weber, Max, 53, 230 Weischedel, Wolfgang, 35, 37 Weltanschauung / Weltanschauungsphilosophie [Worldview, worldview philosophy], 100–104, 106, 107, 110, 114n23 Wenman, Mark, 256n57, 58, 63 Weyembergh, Maurice, 275n34 White, Stephen K., 255n48 Williams, Anita, xxiiin30 Wingenbach, Ed, 256n63 Wolin, Richard, 179n18, 245, 252, 254n18, 257n86, 87 work, 15, 40, 41, 96, 118, 119, 122, 123, 125, 146–49, 151, 153, 179, 206, 228, 241, 261–63, 273, 274n9, 10, 281, 288 worker / Working class, 5, 8, 15, 19, 20, 23, 66, 69, 109, 167, 171, 221, 286, 287, 291, world, worldliness, xi, xv–xviii, xx, xxi, 14–18, 35, 44, 50, 81–83, 86, 88, 91, 92, 100, 112, 117, 122, 123, 125, 126, 130n36, 135–37, 140–47, 149–55, 177, 191, 218, 222–24, 230–32, 240, 241, 246, 247, 260–67,

384 Index

269–73, 275n37, 276n40, 279, 281–84, 291, 292, 301, 305–9, 320–27 being-in-the-world, 245, 252, 260, 266, 305

world secret [Weltgeheimnis], 195 Wright, Carroll D., 280 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 158n49 Žižek, Slavoj, 74n37