Abstract
In the last weeks of his life, Jan Patočka published a few short texts on Charter 77 which can be read as a kind of political testament. The audience was not just the usual academe, but the entire body of his fellow citizens, and he addressed them in his characteristic manner: as a truly Socratic philosopher. Having reread Patočka’s arguments now that thirty years have gone by, I contend that the concept of human rights articulated here – somewhat disconnected from our contemporary legal and/or political discourse, emerging rather from his own lifelong philosophical inquiries – has lost none of its significance and spiritual power. On the contrary, it seems to me that, politically speaking, it has become even more relevant today than it was when it came into existence, tested against the odd and painful political realities of communist Czechoslovakia of the 1970s. I focus on three questions: First, I attempt to clarify the precise part played by the human rights argument in Patočka’s own political philosophy and its place in the overall context of his philosophical investigations, inspired first and foremost by Husserl’s phenomenology. Second, I examine the connection between Patočka’s Socratic action within the Charter 77 dissident movement and his “Czech national philosophy”: his interpretation of the political existence of a small nation “in the heart of Europe” in the framework of modern history of Western civilization. Third, I address the possible relevance of Patočka’s concept of human rights in the context of contemporary political thought and jurisprudence, the message his Socratic death can convey to those who live now, in the open world of the beginning of the twenty-first century.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted from the English version of the “Manifesto of Charter 77” conserved in the Library of Congress (http://rs6.loc.gov/frd/cs/czechoslovakia/cs_appnd.html).
- 2.
The “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights” and the “International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.”
- 3.
“Manifesto…,” op. cit.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Parmenides, in Hermann Diels (ed.), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, B 1, 2–3 and 27.
- 6.
M. Tullius Cicero, Tusculanarum disputationum libri quinque, ed. C. F. W. Müller (Leipzig: Freytag, 1904), Lib. V, § 10: “Socrates autem primus philosophiam devocavit e cælo et in urbibus conlocavit et in domus etiam introduxit et coegit de vita et moribus rebusque bonis et malis quærere.”
- 7.
Jan Patočka, “Čím je a čím není Charta 77,” in Sebrané spisy, sv. 12, Češi I, ed. K. Palek and I. Chvatík (Praha: Oikoymenh, 2006), p. 429; quoted from the English translation: “The Obligation to Resist Injustice,” in Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. and transl. E. Kohák (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 341.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Socrates did nothing, according to his own words reproduced by Plato, but to go about persuading Athenians, young and old, not to take thought for their persons and properties, “but firstly and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul.” Plato, Apology of Socrates, 30a8–30b1, transl. B. Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive (www.classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html).
- 10.
Jan Patočka, “Mají dějiny smysl?” in Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin, Sebrané spisy, sv. 3, Péče o duši III, ed. I. Chvatík and P. Kouba (Praha: Oikoymenh, 2002), p. 80; quoted from the English translation: “Third Essay: Does History Have a Meaning?” in Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. J. Dodd, transl. E. Kohák (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1996), p. 75.
- 11.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Sämtliche Werke, ed. H. Glockner, Bd. 18: Vorlesungen über der Geschichte der Philosophie, Zweiter Band (Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1959), p. 47.
- 12.
Plato, op. cit., 31d1.
- 13.
Jan Patočka, “Negativní platonismus. O vzniku, problematice, zániku metafyziky a otázce, zda filosofie může žít i po ní,” in Sebrané spisy, sv. 1, Péče o duši I, ed. I. Chvatík and P. Kouba (Praha: Oikoymenh, 1996), pp. 303–336; “Negative Platonism: Reflections concerning the Rise, the Scope, and the Demise of Metaphysics – and Whether Philosophy Can Survive It,” in Philosophy and Selected Writings, op. cit., pp. 175–206.
- 14.
Jan Patočka, “Kapitoly ze současné filosofie” [Chapters from Contemporary Philosophy] in Sebrané spisy, sv. 1, op. cit., p. 98.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 92.
- 17.
Jan Patočka, “Negativní platonismus …,” op. cit., p. 308; “Negative Platonism…,” op. cit., p. 180.
- 18.
Jan Patočka, “Věčnost a dějinnost” [Eternity and Historicity], in Sebrané spisy, sv. 1, op. cit., p. 143.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 144.
- 21.
Ibid., pp. 146–147.
- 22.
Plato, op. cit., 23a6.
- 23.
Jan Patočka, “Věčnost a…,” op. cit., p. 214.
- 24.
Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus” (radio interview of Hannah Arendt with Günter Gaus, 1964), in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. J. Kohn (New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 2.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1926–1969, ed. L. Kohler and H. Saner (München and Zürich: Pieper Verlag, 1985), p. 203.
- 27.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. ix.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Cf. Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains?…,” op. cit., pp. 10–11: “First of all, the generally political became a personal fate when one emigrated. Second … friends collaborated or got in line. The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did.”
- 30.
Ibid., p. 1: “My profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory.”
- 31.
Cf., for instance, the following passages from The Suppliant Maidens by Aeschylus: Pelasgos, the king of Argos: “I cannot aid you without risk of scathe / Nor scorn your prayers – unmerciful it were / Perplexed, distraught I stand and fear alike / the twofold chance, to do or not to do” (376–380); “A deep saving counsel here there needs / An eye that like a diver to the depth / Of dark perplexity can pass and see / Undizzied, unconfused…” (407–409), transl. E. D. A. Morshead. (An excellent interpretation of this passage can be found in Eric Voegelin, Collected Works, Vol. 15, Order and History II: The World of Polis, ed. A. Moulakis [Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000], pp. 321–327).
- 32.
Cf. what Eric Voegelin said in his review of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism about the emergence of totalitarian mass movements in the twentieth century: “The putrefaction of Western civilization, as it were, has released a cadaveric poison spreading its infection through the body of humanity. What no religious founder, no philosopher, no imperial conqueror of the past has achieved – to create a community of mankind by creating a common concern for all men – has now been realized through the community of suffering under the earthwide expansion of Western foulness.” (Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” in Collected Works, Vol. 11, Published Essays 1953–1965, ed. E. Sandoz [Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000], p. 15).
- 33.
Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in Essays…, op. cit., p. 308.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 323.
- 36.
I borrow this term from the founder of American pragmatism, William James (Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking [New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907]). Quoted from The Writings of William James, A Comprehensive Edition, ed. J. J. McDermott (New York: Modern Library, 1968).
- 37.
See note 10 above.
- 38.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 7. See also Jan Patočka, Kacířské eseje…, op. cit., p. 51; Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 40.
- 39.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1095b–1096.
- 40.
Published in Jan Patočka, Sebrané spisy, sv. 3, op. cit., pp. 147–514.
- 41.
Jan Patočka, Kacířské eseje…, op. cit., p. 52; Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 41.
- 42.
The concept of a “parallel polis” comes from Václav Benda, whose seminal essay on this topic, written in 1978, initiated an important and rich discussion in dissident circles. Benda’s essay “The Parallel Polis” and other contributions to this debate (including my own text “Jan Patočka versus Václav Benda,” which I am developing in the present essay) have been published in H. Gordon Skilling and Paul Wilson (eds.), Civic Freedom in Central Europe: Voices from Czechoslovakia (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1991).
- 43.
Cf. Hannah Arendt’s Preface to the collection of essays Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961), p. 3. She starts here with her understanding of the gap dividing the past and the future, and quotes in this context “perhaps the strangest of the strangely abrupt aphorisms into which René Char, French poet and writer, compressed the gist of what four years in the résistance had come to mean to a whole generation of European writers and men of letters,” i.e., “notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament – ‘our inheritance was left to us by no testament.’”
- 44.
Jan Patočka, “Čím je a čím není…,” op. cit., p. 429; “The Obligation…,” op. cit., p. 341.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 429/342 (Czech/English).
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 429/341 (Czech/English).
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Jan Patočka, “Co můžeme očekávat od Charty 77?” in: Sebrané spisy, sv. 12, op. cit., p. 443; quoted from the English translation: “What We Can [and Cannot] Expect from Charter 77,” in Philosophy and Selected Writings, op. cit., p. 346.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Plato, op. cit., 24c–25c.
- 54.
Cf. Pericles’ Funeral Oration, in Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.41: “In short, I say that as a city we are the school of Hellas.”
- 55.
Jan Patočka, “Čím je a čím není…,” op. cit., p. 430; “The Obligation…,” op. cit., p. 342.
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Palouš, M. (2011). Jan Patočka’s Socratic Message for the Twenty-First Century. In: Abrams, E., Chvatík, I. (eds) Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 61. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9124-6_13
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