Abstract
This article aims to elucidate Patočka’s impact on contemporary Czech philosophy. As a preliminary, it presents Patočka’s general conception of the possible impact of philosophy as such. It seems that for Patočka, the clarifying function of philosophy was the most relevant, much more than its possible capacity to stimulate objective or social processes. It then explains what impact Patočka himself expected from his own activity as a philosopher. Here we can see that his main concern was to pass on the great philosophical tradition neglected by Czech intellectuals, primarily ancient philosophy and German Idealism. Finally, it sketches the impact of Patočka’s writings and lectures that can actually be seen today in Czech philosophy—in the study of ancient and Classical German Philosophy, in new philosophical conceptions inspired by him, in phenomenology, and in debates about modern Czech history.
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Notes
Cf. Patočka (1996a, 24): It is mostly in a distorted form that a philosophical conception enters the general awareness.
This dangerous nature is not specific to social impact: for Patočka, the possibility of misunderstanding belongs essentially to philosophy as such, and it starts with the formulation of thoughts which, for Patočka, is already a kind of translation (or “projection”, as he calls it). Patočka obviously accepts and sharpens the Platonic distinction between the name, definition, and image on the one hand, and knowledge itself on the other.
Before Patočka had translated the Phenomenology, there were only two books by Hegel available in the Czech language – an anthology of selected passages on various topics (a very good anthology, admittedly, but nevertheless: an anthology of selected passages), and a short fragment from the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. This means that Patočka was the first to translate a genuine work of Hegel into Czech; consider what it means for a philosophical community to have (or not have) such a work available in its own language.
Outside of philosophy, Patočka’s 1964 book on Aristotle (Patočka 2018) and his articles on early modern science from the late 1950s inspired the historian and astronomer Zdeněk Horský (1929–1988) to his studies on Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe and others. A loose connection may be seen between Patočka and Petr Vopěnka (1935–2015), the author of the alternative set theory: Vopěnka’s theory was inspired inter alios by contemporary research on Bolzano, including Patočka’s studies.
For phenomenology e.g. Ivan Chvatík (born in 1941), Petr Kouba (born in 1953), Miroslav Petříček (born in 1951), Petr Rezek (born in 1948); for ancient philosophy: Petr Rezek again; for German idealism: Milan Sobotka (born in 1927).
For ancient philosophy e.g. F. Karfík, Š. Špinka, K. Boháček; for German idealism e.g. B. Karásek, J. Loužil, J. Chotaš, J. Kuneš.
I mean the OIKOYMENH publishing house, the most productive publishers of philosophical literature in the country. The translation itself is older.
Hejdánek’s philosophy as a whole was inspired – among Czech thinkers – primarily by E. Rádl (1877–1942), but Patočka’s influence is undisputed (and stressed by Hejdánek himself). For the most recent information about Hejdánek’s philosophy see Dostál (2020). For its indebtedness to Patočka’s ‘Negative Platonism’, see Hejdánek (1992, 2003).
For a first information, see the bibliography of secondary literature at the website of the Jan Patočka Archives (www.ajp.cuni.cz).
Most recently Ritter (2019); for earlier studies, see bibliographical references ibidem.
The arguments were triggered by a book written as early as in the 1980s in the underground by P. Pithart, P. Příhoda and M. Otáhal covered by the common pen name Podiven (1991). Recently, on a more popular level, a similar view has been adopted by Hošek (2018). The conception of the two kinds of Czechhood was used critically by Kohák (2008).
Kroupa (2018a). The study was written and published in 2007, but I think that the situation hasn’t changed too much since then.
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Acknowledgements
This article was supported by the Czech Funding Agency (GACR)—project No. 20-26526S, “Czech Philosophical Humanism: An Open Question. Patočka, Masaryk, their Critics and Successors”.
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Frei, J. The hidden teacher: on Patočka’s impact on today’s Czech philosophy. Stud East Eur Thought 73, 239–248 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-020-09404-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-020-09404-z