Abstract
This article investigates the political potentialities of Jan Patočka’s philosophy. It begins by situating Patočka’s philosophy in the context of the history of Czechoslovakia, and poses the question of whether Patočka’s late Kantianism and involvement with the Charter 77 initiative constitutes the sole political potentiality of his philosophy. It then argues that Patočka’s status as a political thinker is best understood by demarcating his pre-political philosophical core from its possible political applications. By sketching the essence of his philosophy as a conception of ‘ontological wounding’, the article then investigates how this core of his philosophy can be politicized in certain circumstances. Ultimately, it argues that Patočka should not be considered a political thinker per se, but that his philosophy nevertheless has political potentialities.
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09 May 2018
When the author wrote this article, he was working as part of the ERC project The Great War and Modern Philosophy. It has come to his attention that the article should have included the following acknowledgement:
Notes
In Czech the title is Duchovní člověk a intelektuál. The terms duch and its cognates correspond to the German Geist, and hence carrying a meaning which encompasses both the English ‘spiritual’ but also ‘of the mind’ or ‘intellectual’. In this particular essay, Patočka contrasts the ‘duchovní’ person to the intellectual.
For a nuanced legal analysis of exactly what the Helsinki Final Act and the ratification of the Covenants committed the government to, see Robertson 1977.
Of course, this touches on a deeper question of the extent to which we can speak of Patočka having a unified, consistent philosophy. This question is, of course, far too broad to be answered here.
Patočka elsewhere refers to Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn as ‘heroes of our time,’ along with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger (see ‘Les héros de notre temps’ in Patočka 1990).
My translation is directly from the Czech original.
The article is published in French, all quotations are my own translations.
This is not, of course, to say that Patočka never refers to Kant throughout his career. Kant is a regular interlocutor for Patočka, but when it comes to morality, Patočka typically accuses Kant of a failure to grasp human historicity (see the previously quote passages from Patočka 1990, for example).
See, for example, p. 114 of the Fifth Essay and p. 125 of the Sixth Essay (Patočka 1996). As I will show later, in another text Patočka shows that he is keenly aware of the difference between the two societal forms and of the precise role of human rights within each.
The influence of Ernst Jünger on Patočka’ thinking here is decisive. As I have pointed out in a previous article, Patočka runs a distinct danger here of what Lukács would describe as reification (Verdinglichung). In reading the catastrophes of the twentieth century as the results of some abstract ontology, one can clearly argue that Patočka, following Jünger, mystifies their actual origin as the results of concrete human action, making them appear as inevitable instead of as humanly avoidable. See (Lukács 1990), and my article on Patočka’s Heretical Essays and the danger of reification: Leufer 2016).
An account of the movements of existence can be found in the Heretical Essays and many other works from Patočka’s later period. The clearest account of his idea of a radicalised epochē is to be found in his text Epochē and Reduction: Some Observations (Patočka 2015).
The implication here is evidently that Patočka ascribes to a fundamentally Heideggerian position. More specifically, I would claim that he accepts the idea of the ontological difference as a starting point for philosophising, but that he does not thereby ascribe to the manner in which Heidegger develops his philosophy beyond this central idea. The complex question also arises here of when Patočka made the ‘turn’ from Husserl to Heidegger. Although it has been claimed that Patočka only properly accepted Heidegger’s philosophy in the late 1940s (see Tardivel 2011), Karel Novotný has convincingly shown that Patočka had in fact not settled on either of his great teachers in his early years, and that while his first book, The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, may well be seen as Husserlian, he was simultaneously writing texts which were evidently Heideggerian (see Novotný 2012). This is not to say, of course, that Patočka was always essentially Heideggerian. Rather, I would claim that at a certain point Patočka takes this basic Heideggerian understanding of man’s relation to being as a cornerstone for his philosophical efforts, even though he diverges from Heidegger beyond this basic idea.
The original text is in French; all quotations are my own translations.
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Leufer, D. The wound which will not close: Jan Patočka’s philosophy and the conditions of politicization. Stud East Eur Thought 69, 29–44 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-017-9273-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-017-9273-1