Abstract
In “Negative Platonism” Patočka decidedly separates the philosophy of existence from humanism, yet he grounds philosophy in the analysis of existence demonstrating “the experience we are,” or the experience of freedom, as the fundament of metaphysics. According to Patočka, the topics and issues traditionally dealt with metaphysically were not mere pseudo-topics or pseudo-issues insomuch as the experience of freedom, as the experience of “idea,” is not a fiction. I clarify the “idea,” firstly, as reducible to freedom, and, secondly, as the “no-thing” experienced in freedom. I critically evaluate Barbaras’ attempt to read Patočka’s concept as a form of “henology.” Finally, discussing the problem that nothing can be positively said about Idea, I interpret Patočka’s “Negative Platonism” as proposing a transcendental approach, which forsakes the one-sided apotheosis of spirit by highlighting human, or “spiritual,” experience as based on Idea.
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Notes
- 1.
“Negative Platonism” is one of the most discussed texts written by Patočka. Several scholars even consider the concept of negative Platonism as capturing the essence of Patočka’s philosophy. See e.g. Rezek (2010: 86), Ullmann (2011: 71). Broader historical contexts of Patočka’s project are addressed by Arnason (2011). In a sense, Ladislav Hejdánek’s concept of “non-objectival thinking” (see e.g. Hejdánek 2010) can be seen as developing Patočka’s project.
- 2.
The same assumption is made also by “rationalists.” Based on it, rationalists construe metaphysical entities, whereas positivists unveil their fictitious character (Patočka 1989: 189).
- 3.
Tava named his book on Patočka after this very idea (Tava 2015).
- 4.
This possibility of drawing back is discussed by Patočka also in his text on Husserl’s phenomenology from the beginning of the 1950s (cf. Patočka 2016: esp. 255–266).
- 5.
Cf. e.g. the following rhetorical question: “What … was traditional metaphysics if not … a conception of the whole?” (Patočka 1989: 176).
- 6.
- 7.
Idea as an ontologically separated name, the theory of ideas as an insufficiently elaborated logical theory (Patočka 1989: 197).
- 8.
We might speak, on the one hand, of a theoretical and, on the other, of a practical (or moral) way of interpreting the Idea.
- 9.
It is worth noticing that, otherwise, modern interpretations “can preserve and understand everything about the Idea” (Patočka 1989: 198).
- 10.
One might argue that neo-Kantian interpretations (not to mention their non-transcendental successors) misinterpret ideas insomuch as they understand them as objects.
- 11.
As “the power of dissociation from mere givenness” or even as “the power of liberation from the purely objective” (Patočka 1989: 199).
- 12.
Similarly, in the final part of the book on the lifeworld, Patočka interprets, in 1936, human freedom as the precondition of language without basing this freedom on anything transcending it.
- 13.
Reading Patočka’s book-length study The Supercivilisation and Its Internal Conflict from the 1950s, one realizes that the identification of the experience of freedom as the experience of “Idea” is of a great political (and historical) importance for Patočka. In this study, Patočka distinguishes two forms of supercivilization: the moderate one, exemplified by, though irreducible to, liberal societies, and the radical one, exemplified by Soviet bloc countries. Whereas the moderate supercivilization accepts its non-totality, admitting that its rationality can deal only with means and not aims, the radical one denies the very existence of anything transcending the sphere of humanly manageable rationality.
- 14.
Similarly, Pierre Rodrigo sees a twofold radicalization in Patočka’s philosophy, namely “the joint radicalization of Platonism as ‘negative Platonism’ and of Husserlian phenomenology as an ‘asubjective’ phenomenology. In fact, Patočka builds his own thought on one and the same critique aimed against both Plato and Husserl” (Rodrigo 2011: 87).
- 15.
The project of negative Platonism was supposed to include also the explication of inorganic and organic nature. But Patočka’s rather fragmentary analyses of nature (and also of human being) are not based on the Idea as interpreted by Barbaras. Cf. Sladký 2018: esp. 90–100. This is not in contradiction with Patočka’s determined declaration that the human being should serve the Idea.
- 16.
- 17.
As Barbaras does, too, connecting “Negative Platonism” with Patočka’s ideas from the 1970s.
- 18.
It must be mentioned, however, that Patočka still puts emphasis on life: Idea is “the fundamental source from which our life flows” (Patočka 1989: 202). He also states, regarding the question of the whole, that to demand “scientific objectivity in all things, means to sacrifice the autonomy of life and its relation to the whole” (Patočka 1989: 177–178).
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Ritter, M. (2019). Call of Transcendence. 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_6
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