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2020, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology
This article sheds light on the relation between care for the soul and the political thought of Jan Patočka. Patočka often sketches a connection between care for the soul and a theory of the state, but he rarely elaborates this. The biographical fact of Patočka’s own political dissidence and his interpretation of care for the soul as a distancing from traditional structures of society have caused many to look at Patočka’s political thought mainly through the lens of political resistance. Such interpretations are definitely warranted, but can overlook the moments in his work that point towards a theory of the state. While these are only indications, this article presents a way to develop these moments. It will do so on the basis of the idea that the theory of the state should not be based directly on care for the soul itself, but on its founding principle of problematicity. The stronger, perhaps more metaphysical, interpretation of problematicity that is argued for here both opens the space of the political and sets strict boundaries to it and as such should be the founding principle of any state that wishes to uphold this space.
Ethics & Bioethics
The ethical in Jan Patočka’s thought: Sacrifice and care for the soulIn his two works from the 1970s, Patočka proposes a very personal way that the spiritual crisis, which manifests itself as a techno-scientific reality of Gestell, can be overcome. Patočka argues that the only way to escape spiritual decline is through sacrifice. This study examines how the ethical is represented in Patočka’s philosophy. It focuses on his two main concepts of sacrifice and care for the soul and explores the relationship between them. Through a close reading of Plato and Europe (1973), ‘Four Seminars’ (1973), and his essay ‘The dangers of technicization’ (1973), this study reveals how Patočka proposes that the ethical can be implemented within the realm of the political. Drawing a parallel between Socrates’ and Patočka’s lives and fates, this study points to the significance of ethics in political life – both in the ancient Greek polis of Socrates’ time and in communist Czechoslovakia in Patočka’s time. This approach highlights the influence that the philosophy of Soc...
META. Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy
Politics, Morality and Nothingness: On the Coherence of Jan Patočka's Reflections on Sacrifice2024 •
One of the most perplexing notions in Jan Patočka’s philosophy is “sacrifice for nothing”, a form of self-sacrifice with no positive content that transcends every particular thing, object, goal or ideal. This concept is puzzling since Patočka was a dissident and one of the spokespersons of Charta 77 movement, providing philosophical and ethical substance to dissidents’ actions. In his “Charta 77 texts” and other overtly political texts, Patočka formulated an ethico-political conception of sacrifice, arguing that authentic politics is defined by a strong commitment to unconditional moral principles, such as justice, freedom and human rights, and that these principles are things for which it is “worthwhile to suffer”. However, in his mature phenomenological reflections on sacrifice and war Patočka appears to distance himself from ethical and political considerations, moving into the Heideggerian territory of nothingness, Being and confrontation with one’s finitude. What is the relationship between Patočka’s ethico-political and existential-ontological reflections on sacrifice? In this paper, I argue that they are internally consistent, the latter serving as an indispensable philosophical grounding of the former. The unifying element of these diverse explorations of sacrifice is Patočka’s comprehensive critique of modernity and technoscience.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
The risk of freedom: ethics, phenomenology and politics in Jan Patočka2016 •
Studies in East European Thought
Epoché and institution: the fundamental tension in Jan Patočka’s phenomenology2020 •
This article examines the relation between two key, but seemingly opposed concepts in Jan Patočka’s thought: epoché and the concrete institutional polis. In doing so it attempts to elucidate the inextricable relation between phenomenology and politics in the work of the Czech philosopher, and illustrate more broadly the possibilities for approaching the political from a phenomenological perspective. The article provides a phenomenological interpretation of “care for the soul” as closely linked to Patočka’s reformulation of the core phenomenological notion of epoché. It argues that in Patočka’s work, the epoché, traditionally conceived as a radical stepping back from the world must be rendered differently, not only as a negative freedom, but as the foundation of positive politics. Thus, the authors argue that there is a thematic and conceptual continuity between Patočka’s phenomenological studies and his political work.
2017 •
Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory
Religious Life after Religion. Jan Patocka's Care for the Soul and its Relation to Religion2018 •
It is the purpose of this article, therefore, to offer some reconsiderations of religion and its relation to myth and Enlightenment. These reconsiderations will be guided by the phenomenology of Jan Patočka. The main thesis of this text will be that his phenomenological philosophy can lead us beyond myth, Enlightenment and religion, all three, without just leaving them behind, i.e., by taking them up in a new way. In Patočka's approach, myth, Enlightenment and religion are entangled with each other, in what he calls "living in truth" or "the care of the soul." Patočka's renewed elaboration of this Platonic conception can very well be sketched as a sort of secular form of religious life. Like all forms of secularization in Western culture, Patočka's philosophy can be taken as a transformation of important aspects of the Christian heritage in a post-Christian framework.
2018 •
The question arising from this article regards the meaning of sacrifice within the frame of Jan Patočka’s philosophy. Is human sacrifice aimed at reinforcing an institution or state of things as in the case of the Unknown Soldier narrative, or is it rather – as Patočka maintained – an essentially destabilizing deed, which has the power to shatter people’s knowledge and existence? In order to answer this question, I contrast Patočka’s standpoint with those of Émile Durkheim and of the main representatives of the so-called “sacred sociology”: Roger Caillois, Georges Bataille and other members of the Collège de sociologie. In conclusion, I show how Patočka’s approach to the theme of sacrifice helps to understand whether and how a “proper sacrifice” can actually become an instrument of political dissent within human societies.
The Yearbook on History and Interpretation of Phenomenology 2016: Vocations, Social Identities, Spirituality: Phenomenological Perspectives
The Decline of Freedom. Jan Patočka’s Phenomenological Critique of Liberalism.The article aims to present Patočka's critical position towards liberalism. In Heretical Essays he suggests that liberalism is not able to tackle the problem of individuality with the depth it deserves, especially in relation to responsibility. This is due to the fact that liberalism, as an exponent of technological civilization, tends to overlook the fact of human transcendence towards Being. In the following part of the article the author argues that Patočka's opinion is a result of long-term reflections. Already in the 1950s, in the unfinished essay Supercivilization and Its Inner Conflict, he characterizes liberalism as a movement claiming freedom for the individual, which was originally grounded in awareness of human transcendence expressed in newly born technological science and religion. However, the later form of liberal individualism, where a human being is primarily reduced to a social " atom " , is inherently decadent. Thus, a paradox is present in the liberalistic movement: on the one hand, freedom is ascribed to individuality due to its ability to transcend, and on the other hand, in being merely an atom s/he is stripped of this metaphysical privilege. For this reason the atomistic account appears as purposeless and nihilistic. It is suggested in the conclusion of this article that Patočka's critique of liberalism does not fall into enmity. Because the claim still persists in the principle of freedom that the individual is capable of free, responsible initiative, there is the possibility of renewal in rediscovering the fact of transcendence as a basis for ethical commitment.
Forum Philosophicum
Forms and Movements of Life: Existential and Metaphysical Responsibility in the Work of Jan Patočka2020 •
Based on an analysis of the theory of the movement of existence, this the paper answers the following question: Where can one see the most important connections of philosophical and religious language in the most re-thought part of Jan Patočkaʼs thinking? The third movement of life is seen as a form of the true philosophical life, but also as a form with metaphysical responsibility. The movement of breakthrough, or actual self-comprehension, is the most important because it leads to care for the soul—and, according to Patočkaʼs analyses of interpretations of the Faust legend, it leads to care for the true immortality of the soul. In the third movement of life, one lives an unsheltered life in openness to all which is not given and cannot be given, which is beyond all objective identification, and yet determines this world. In response to the mission in time (kairos), on the way to “asubjective” openness of the soul, in a dialogue that searches for truth and resists temptation, one can still find metaphysical responsibility and freedom.
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