Abstract
At first, this chapter reconstructs Patočka’s interpretation, in the 1950s, of the present world as that of supercivilization. Indicating Patočka’s reasons for not accepting liberalism, I analyse his idea of the solidarity of the shaken as the way out of the crisis and indicate why it is unable to do justice to what is going on in the world. More concretely, I question Patočka’s emphasis on spirituality, and suggest de-spiritualizing freedom as defining existence. We need to overcome the duality of technology and spirituality implicit in his concept and accept the irreducible technicity of existence. To concretize this approach a bit, I distinguish it from Suzi Adams’ “sociological” reading of Patočka: there is no trans-singular subject of history, yet the concept of the movement of existence allows for analysing the trans-subjective factors conditioning existence.
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Notes
- 1.
The book is available e.g. in a French translation (Patočka 1990b).
- 2.
Cf. above, Chap. 6.
- 3.
Jakub Homolka reconstructs similarities between Patočka and Weber’s ideas in Homolka (2016).
- 4.
- 5.
See also Homolka (2016: 104–108).
- 6.
Patočka’s explications of the essence and the development of the supercivilization are concisely summarised by Homolka (2016: 166–181).
- 7.
My discussion of Patočka’s relation to liberalism draws heavily on a paper written by Michal Zvarík (2016).
- 8.
Comenius himself developed his concept in a critical reaction to Descartes. Cf. Kohák 1989: 66–76.
- 9.
In some texts from the early 1970s, Patočka tends to identify only a mass intelligentsia with the history-making element. Yet, in his very last texts, especially those connected to his engagement in Charter 77, he seems to accept not only the idea of a non-political politics, but also a democratic vision that all people shall perform the spiritual conversion (cf. Homolka 2016: 207–217).
- 10.
Or, perhaps, rather does not admit to having one. It would be interesting to reconstruct the implicit political standpoint Patočka adopts, or the political values this concept presupposes.
- 11.
One might argue that Patočka’s ideas proved their effectivity, after Patočka’s death, through such spiritual politicians as Václav Havel, but it seems hardly possible to me, to mention only one problem in this idea, to identify the revolution of 1989 and the subsequent development with what Patočka had put forward.
- 12.
As demonstrated in the previous chapter, Patočka draws a sharp dividing line between history in the proper sense and between the processes that determine the state of the world yet do not make history proper.
- 13.
See especially Heidegger (1977).
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Ritter, M. (2019). Super-Civilized Existence. In: Into the World: The Movement of Patočka's Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 104. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23657-1_14
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