Jan Patočka

Works

• 1936The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem

  Patočka’s habilitation: the pre-scientific world of everyday experience as the ground and problem of philosophy.

• 1975Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History

  History begins with the shaking of accepted meaning in the Greek polis and philosophy; the twentieth century’s wars call for a “solidarity of the shaken”.

Position

Patočka developed phenomenology in his own direction. From Husserl he took the problem of the natural, pre-scientific world, from Heidegger the analysis of existence, but he criticised both: the natural world must be understood through movement, and human life through three movements – anchoring in a world of acceptance, the self-sustaining movement of work, and the movement of breakthrough or truth, in which life questions itself. In the lectures “Plato and Europe” (1973) and in the “Heretical Essays” (1975) he placed the origin of Europe in the Socratic and Platonic care for the soul and read modern technological civilisation as the loss of that care. His Comenius studies and his essays on Masaryk and on Czech history made him a central figure of Czech intellectual life; his apartment seminars shaped a generation of dissidents, and Václav Havel described him as a moral example. Jacques Derrida’s “The Gift of Death” and Paul Ricœur’s preface to the French edition of the “Heretical Essays” (1981) made his late work known abroad. Critics have questioned his account of history as beginning in Greece, which leaves other civilisations as “prehistory”, and the sixth essay on the twentieth century as war, which draws on the front experiences of Ernst Jünger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Life & context

Jan Patočka was born on 1 June 1907 in Turnov in northern Bohemia. He studied Romance and Slavic philology and philosophy in Prague and spent 1928–29 in Paris, where he heard Edmund Husserl’s Paris lectures in 1929. In 1932–33 he studied in Berlin and Freiburg with Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink. In 1934 he helped found the Cercle philosophique de Prague, which invited Husserl to lecture in Prague in November 1935, and in 1936 he habilitated with “The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem”. After the Nazi authorities closed the Czech universities in 1939 he taught at a gymnasium. He returned to Charles University in 1945 but was forced out after the communist takeover of 1948; he then worked in research institutes, from the 1950s on the edition of Comenius’s works. In 1968 he became professor again, and in 1972 he was forced to retire. He held private seminars in apartments and in January 1977 became one of the three spokesmen of Charter 77, with Václav Havel and Jiří Hájek. After repeated, long police interrogations he died in Prague on 13 March 1977.

Further main works

• Aristotle, His Predecessors and Heirs (Aristoteles, jeho předchůdci a dědicové, 1964)
• Body, Community, Language, World (Tělo, společenství, jazyk, svět, lectures 1968–69)
• Plato and Europe (Platón a Evropa, lectures 1973)