From care for the soul to the theory of the state in Jan Patočka

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Jan Patočka
• phenomenology
• metaphysics
• politics
• state
• care

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Quoted in Tava, The Risk of Freedom, 123.

2. Jonathan Bolton gives an overview of how the story of Patočka’s death was used and distorted to some extent. In particular in Western accounts its martyrological aspects were exaggerated. While Patočka’s interrogation was definitely exhausting and stressful, it was perhaps less brutal than sometimes implied. Patočka himself mentioned that the interrogations were in the main quite civil. It is without doubt that Patočka was a remarkable philosopher and dissident and that in some ways he was an example of the kind of sacrifice he himself philosophized about, but precisely for this reason one should be careful in the way one treats and uses his story. See Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, 158–59.

3. As will become clear in the following, it is easy to read Patočka’s work as postmodern or relativist. However, some connect it to humanism, universalism and liberalism (Tucker, Philosophy and Politics, 16; Findlay Caring for the Soul, 129), while others see it as politically neutral, stating that we perhaps should not read any particular political program into what is mainly a defense of metaphysical openness (Arnason, “The Idea of Negative Platonism,” 24–5; and Gubser, “Jan Patočka’s Transcendence to the World,” 91).

4. Patočka, Plato and Europe, 116 (henceforth abbreviated as PE).

5. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 61 (henceforth abbreviated as HE).

6. PE, 50.

7. HE, 77.

8. Ibid., 12–26.

9. Patočka, “Europa und Nach-Europa,” 234; HE, 39–40; “Time, Myth Faith,” 8. It seems Patočka got this turn of phrase that in myth answers precede questions from the Czech poet and essayist Otokar Březina (see PE, 51; ‘Time, Myth, Faith,’ 12 note 2).

10. Patočka, “Negative Platonism,” 193 (henceforth abbreviated as NP).

11. PE, 27.

12. Patočka, “Europa und Nach-Europa,” 282.

13. PE, 36.

14. Ibid., 12.

15. HE, 31.

16. Ibid., 104.

17. Patočka, “Europa und Nach-Europa,” 265; PE, 85–86.

18. PE, 120–1.

19. Ritter, Patočka’s Care of the Soul, 246.

20. PE, 92.

21. Ibid., 87.

22. Patočka, “Intellectuals and Opposition,” 12.

23. NP, 204.

24. Ibid., 200.

25. Patočka, “Intellectuals and Opposition,” 10.

26. Tava, The Risk of Freedom, 45.

27. Patočka, “Varna Lecture,” 336.

28. Ibid., 338–9.

29. Interestingly, this means that the modern age which acknowledges no difference in the order of being is the perfect stage for true sacrifices. It is here that all metaphysico-mythological remnants which could make it a sacrifice for something supposedly higher have been lost. See ibid.

30. HE, 129–30.

31. Ibid., 134–35.

32. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, 146.

33. Tucker, Philosophy and Politics, 17.

34. In the late 1930s, for instance, Patočka writes: ‘Here, man may appear to be a creature torn apart by internal fragmentation. He can never know, with absolute intellectual clarity whether or not he has attained a final coherence of meaning, the very bottom of himself. But unity of human effort and all rational legislation of life stand on the belief that it is possible to attain such coherence of meaning, that such coherence, reaching beyond all partial and intellectual understanding, truly exists.’ See Patočka, “European Culture,” 6. This view is also prevalent in his early The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem.

35. HE, 74.

36. Chvatík, “Heretical Conception,” 26; “Jan Patočka and the Possibility of Spiritual Politics,” 35–36.

37. Chvatík, “Heretical Conception,” 26.

38. Kohák, Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 88.

39. HE, 75–76.

40. Kohák, Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, 16.

41. Ibid., 17.

42. Chvatík, “Patočka’s Philosophy of Meaning,” 223–24.

43. Weischedel, Der Gott der Philosophen, 170–73. Weischedel’s argument shows an interesting combination of two important sources of his thought: Heidegger’s phenomenology and Kant’s dialectic. He was a student of the former and editor of the works of the latter.

44. HE, 59.

45. Ibid., 56.

46. Patočka, “Einführung in die Phänomenologie Husserls,” 152–53.

47. Ibid., 155.

48. Patočka, “Weltganzes und Menschenwelt,” 264.

49. HE, 57; see also Chvatík, “Patočka’s Philosophy of Meaning,” 224.

50. Sepp, “On the Border,” 163.

51. HE, 57.

52. NP, 202.

53. Patočka, ‘Prehistory of the Science of Movement,’ 71.

54. NP, 181.

55. HE, 75.

56. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, 105–6.

57. Recently, Martin Koci (in part following Patočka) has denounced this move of interpreting problematicity itself as absolute, because ‘there is a certain adequacy still operative in what he [Patočka] calls inadequacy,’ (‘inadequacy’ more or less being a synonym for problematicity) (Koci, ‘Metaphysical Thinking after Metaphysics,’ 28). Yet, taking problematicity to be absolute does not preclude there being any adequacy, any stable meaning in our lives or the world at all. It merely precludes the existence of a total adequacy that could not, in principle, be overcome by inadequacy, whereas inadequacy could never be fully overcome by adequacy. This reading also puts into question his articulation of Patočka’s interpretation of the Idea in terms of faith. Koci sees faith as ‘the impossibility of thinking the greatest, God, mystery, whatever name we find appropriate’ (Ibid., 28–29), and the ‘questioning and shaking’ of which it consists as a ‘metaphysical stance’ (Ibid., 31). It is faith, the subjective act, which is seen as provisional and inadequate, rather than its ‘object’ (for lack of a better word). Koci’s interpretation thus seems to rely on the weaker interpretation of problematicity that I argue against. To his credit, Koci acknowledges that faith is not exempted from the critique of metaphysics in Patočka (Ibid., 26), yet this seems to leave him with a most peculiar faith. If faith is not faith in something or does not take the form of a hope in things unseen, hope that problematicity in the end does not have the final word, then what remains of it? The link between Patočka’s thought and a notion of faith is not unsubstantiated, but in the end does not seem viable.

58. Patočka, “Europa und Nach-Europa,” 210.

59. Ibid., 281.

60. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, 171.

61. Patočka, “Das Innere und die Welt,” 30.

62. PE, 110–11.

63. Tucker, Philosophy and Politics, 19; and Mensch, Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology.

64. PE, 89.

65. Arendt, “Truth and Politics”; Lefort, “The Question of Democracy.”

66. HE, 117–18; and La surcivilization, 119–20.

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Lorenzo Girardi

Lorenzo Girardi received his PhD from the University of Limerick (Mary Immaculate College) and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His dissertation was on the idea of Europe from the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl and Jan Patočka, and his research connects phenomenology to issues in metaphysics and political philosophy. Among others, his work has been published in the volume ‘Phenomenology and Experience: New Perspectives’ (eds. A. Cimino and C. Leijenhorst) and in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology.