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Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin
Jedno z nejvýznamnějších Patočkových děl, pocházející z roku 1975, shrnuje v šesti esejích jeho pozdní filosofii dějin i současné dějinné situace, v niž vyústily jeho celoživotní úvahy o problému přirozeného světa lidského života.
164 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
18 people are currently reading
532 people want to read
About the author
Jan Patočka
89 books38 followersJan Patočka (June 1, 1907, Turnov, Bohemia - March 13, 1977, Prague) is considered one of the most important contributors to Czech philosophical phenomenology, as well as one of the most influential central European philosophers of the 20th century. Having studied in Prague, Paris, Berlin and Freiburg, he was one of the last pupils of Edmund Husserl, who is considered the founder of phenomenology, and Martin Heidegger. During his studies in Freiburg he was also tutored by Eugen Fink, a relation which eventually turned into a lifelong philosophical friendship.
His works mainly dealt with the problem of the original, given world (Lebenswelt), its structure and the human position in it. He tried to develop this basically Husserlian concept under the influence of some core Heideggerian themes (e.g. historicity, technicity, etc.) On the other hand, he also criticised Heideggerian philosophy for not dealing sufficiently with the basic structures of being-in-the-world, which are not truth-revealing activities (this led him to an appreciation of the work of Hannah Arendt). From this standpoint he formulated his own original theory of "three movements of human existence": 1) receiving, 2) reproduction, 3) transcendence.
His works mainly dealt with the problem of the original, given world (Lebenswelt), its structure and the human position in it. He tried to develop this basically Husserlian concept under the influence of some core Heideggerian themes (e.g. historicity, technicity, etc.) On the other hand, he also criticised Heideggerian philosophy for not dealing sufficiently with the basic structures of being-in-the-world, which are not truth-revealing activities (this led him to an appreciation of the work of Hannah Arendt). From this standpoint he formulated his own original theory of "three movements of human existence": 1) receiving, 2) reproduction, 3) transcendence.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 14, 2016
This is the final masterwork of a Czech philosopher who was the mentor of Vaclev Havel. He and Havel were arrested together in 1977. Havel survived the interrogation while Patocka was beaten to death. [I had read that he was beaten to death, but that's refuted by a comment below. He was interrogated and he died in a hospital a few days later.]
These six short essays are a real powerhouse. In the first three, he explores the idea of meaning and how we create meaning in our lives. How in prehistory, meaning was naively accepted through myth and religion, but then people rise above subsistence, feel their free time, wander away from the naive belief in the myths they have been given and so history begins and the need to create meaning comes with it. The polis becomes the center-piece of the western solution to the creation of meaning. Meaning and history can only be created by a free people.
The last three essays are a virtuosic review of these concepts of history and meaning as played out across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His analysis of WWI and II in the sixth essay are particularly brilliant.
I'll paste below some quotes that I found particularly edifying:
P44
The point of history is not what can be uprooted or shaken, but rather
the openness to the shaking.
P46
Heidegger's concept is historical... In rejecting the disinterested
spectator as a presupposition of phenomenologizing. Instead, it
focuses on an interest in being as the starting point and the
condition for understanding deep phenomena.
[As in the study of sexuality, one must start from a personal sexual
being. The very idea of having an objective view of sexuality is
absurdist.:]
For Heidegger, phenomenology is not a content but a method, the name
for an investigation which bases all it's claims on direct
manifestation and demonstration.
P 47
That is precisely the meaning of the formula that humans in their
being are concerned with their being. Their own being is given to them
as a responsibility, not as a curiosity. Humans have to carry on their
being, carry it out, and they are depending on whether they accept
this task or seek to ease it, escaping from it and hiding it from
themselves.
P 56
As long as value is understood as an eternal spring of meaningfulness,
Idea, or God as that which bestows meaning on things, human acts, and
events, it remains possible to interpret the experience of the loss of
meaning as a flaw not in that which bestows meaning but of that on
which it is bestowed. That is an advantage which represents a barrier
against the nihilism of meaning.
p 63
Just as in acting politically humans expose themselves to the problematic nature of action whose consequences are unpredictable and whose initiative soon passes into other hands, so in philosophy humans expose themselves to the problematic being and meaning of what there is.
p 65
From the moment that the perishing of the polis had already been decided, philosophy transformed itself into what was to be its image for millennia, transforming itself into metaphysics in Plato and Democritus, into metaphysics in two modes, from above and from below, a metaphysics of the logos and the Idea on the one hand, a metaphysics of things in their sheet thinghood on the other, both pretending to a definitive clarity and a definitive explanation of things, both grounded in that model of clarity represented by the discovery of mathematics, that germ of the future transformation of philosophy into a science.
[math represents:] the theme of truth seen once and for all time, precisely and by anyone under any circumstances.
p 72
[Science sees in nature:] only an arbitrarily usable reservoir of potencies and powers.
p 87
...the United States was America europeanized while postrevolutionary Europe was Europe americanized.
p 110
The distancing of humans from"nature," which is no longer the locus of being human but rather something from which humanss are separated by their unique unmediated relation, their relation to God, now enables them to percieve this "nature as an "object."
p 111
That capitalism quickly sheds the constraints of its religious impetus and allies itself fundamentally with a superficial modern rationalism, estranged from any personal and moral vocation. It comes to be characterized by an immensely successful mathematical formalism. It's most successful as it focuses on a mastery of nature, of movement, and of force.
p 113
The more modern technoscience asserts itself as the true relation to what-is, the more it draws everything natural and then even everything human into its orbit, the more the ageless traditions of balancing the authentic and the captivating are set aside and condemned as unrealistic, untrustworthy and fantastic, the more cruel will the revenge of the orgiastic fervor be. It makes itself felt already in the "wars of liberation" and the revolutionary crises of the nineteenth century.
p 115
That humans, unlike all other animals, build dwelling, because they are not at home in the world,, because they lean out of the world and for that reason are charged with a calling within and towards it, anchored in deep layers of the past which have not passed as long as they live on in them--all that vanishes in the face of modern voluntary and enforced mobility, the gigantic migrations which by now affect nearly all the continents.
p 121
The shared idea in the background of the first world war was the slowly germinating conviction that there is nothing such as a factual, objective meaning of the world and of things, and tat it is up to strength and power to create such meaning within the realm accessible to humans.
p 124
[The first world war:] demonstrated that the transformation of the world into a laboratory for releasing reserves of energy accumulated over billions of years can be achieved only by means of wars.
p 130
Peace transformed into a will to war could objectify and externalize humans as long as they were ruled by the day, by the hope of everydayness, of a profession, of a career, simply possibilities for which they must fear and which feel threatened.
p 131
[In war:] the topographic character of the landscape changes so that abruptly there is an end to it and the ruins no longer are what they had been, villages and so on, but have become what they can be at the given moment, shelters and reference points, so the landscape of life's fundamental meanings had been transformed, it has acquired an end beyond which there can be nothing further, higher, more desirable.
p 134
How can the "front-line" experience acquire the form which would make it a factor of history?
p 136
To shake the everydayness of the fact-crunchers and routine minds, to make them aware that their place is on the side of the front and not on the side of even the most pleasing slogans of the day, which in reality call to war, whether they invoke the nation, the state, classless society, world unity, or whatever other appeals, discreditable and discredited by the factual ruthlessness of the Force, there may be.
p 144/145
Here it turns out that not only existence but even the form and content of consciousness are determined by something deeper--their social being.
p 148
[Religion and power are:] the source of empires, but not of politics which is possible only with the conception of bestowing meaning on life out of freedom and for it, and that, as Hegel said, cannot be brought about by a solitary one (a ruler, the pharaoh) being "conscious of freedom." Humans can be that only in a community of equals. For that reason, the beginning of history in the strict sense is the polis.
p 159
[Here is a comment by the editor, Kohák, who likes Husserl, Masaryk and Ricoeur.:]
I remain convinced that the categories of good and evil cannot be reduced to categories of mundane and sacred or authentic and ordinary. However I have become convinced that the categories of good and evil--the moral enlightenment of a Comenius crossed with American personalism, Schweitzer's respect for life and Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic--become legitimate once they have fully confronted and transcended the vision of the cosmic night of which the dark romantic philosophers speak.
These six short essays are a real powerhouse. In the first three, he explores the idea of meaning and how we create meaning in our lives. How in prehistory, meaning was naively accepted through myth and religion, but then people rise above subsistence, feel their free time, wander away from the naive belief in the myths they have been given and so history begins and the need to create meaning comes with it. The polis becomes the center-piece of the western solution to the creation of meaning. Meaning and history can only be created by a free people.
The last three essays are a virtuosic review of these concepts of history and meaning as played out across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His analysis of WWI and II in the sixth essay are particularly brilliant.
I'll paste below some quotes that I found particularly edifying:
P44
The point of history is not what can be uprooted or shaken, but rather
the openness to the shaking.
P46
Heidegger's concept is historical... In rejecting the disinterested
spectator as a presupposition of phenomenologizing. Instead, it
focuses on an interest in being as the starting point and the
condition for understanding deep phenomena.
[As in the study of sexuality, one must start from a personal sexual
being. The very idea of having an objective view of sexuality is
absurdist.:]
For Heidegger, phenomenology is not a content but a method, the name
for an investigation which bases all it's claims on direct
manifestation and demonstration.
P 47
That is precisely the meaning of the formula that humans in their
being are concerned with their being. Their own being is given to them
as a responsibility, not as a curiosity. Humans have to carry on their
being, carry it out, and they are depending on whether they accept
this task or seek to ease it, escaping from it and hiding it from
themselves.
P 56
As long as value is understood as an eternal spring of meaningfulness,
Idea, or God as that which bestows meaning on things, human acts, and
events, it remains possible to interpret the experience of the loss of
meaning as a flaw not in that which bestows meaning but of that on
which it is bestowed. That is an advantage which represents a barrier
against the nihilism of meaning.
p 63
Just as in acting politically humans expose themselves to the problematic nature of action whose consequences are unpredictable and whose initiative soon passes into other hands, so in philosophy humans expose themselves to the problematic being and meaning of what there is.
p 65
From the moment that the perishing of the polis had already been decided, philosophy transformed itself into what was to be its image for millennia, transforming itself into metaphysics in Plato and Democritus, into metaphysics in two modes, from above and from below, a metaphysics of the logos and the Idea on the one hand, a metaphysics of things in their sheet thinghood on the other, both pretending to a definitive clarity and a definitive explanation of things, both grounded in that model of clarity represented by the discovery of mathematics, that germ of the future transformation of philosophy into a science.
[math represents:] the theme of truth seen once and for all time, precisely and by anyone under any circumstances.
p 72
[Science sees in nature:] only an arbitrarily usable reservoir of potencies and powers.
p 87
...the United States was America europeanized while postrevolutionary Europe was Europe americanized.
p 110
The distancing of humans from"nature," which is no longer the locus of being human but rather something from which humanss are separated by their unique unmediated relation, their relation to God, now enables them to percieve this "nature as an "object."
p 111
That capitalism quickly sheds the constraints of its religious impetus and allies itself fundamentally with a superficial modern rationalism, estranged from any personal and moral vocation. It comes to be characterized by an immensely successful mathematical formalism. It's most successful as it focuses on a mastery of nature, of movement, and of force.
p 113
The more modern technoscience asserts itself as the true relation to what-is, the more it draws everything natural and then even everything human into its orbit, the more the ageless traditions of balancing the authentic and the captivating are set aside and condemned as unrealistic, untrustworthy and fantastic, the more cruel will the revenge of the orgiastic fervor be. It makes itself felt already in the "wars of liberation" and the revolutionary crises of the nineteenth century.
p 115
That humans, unlike all other animals, build dwelling, because they are not at home in the world,, because they lean out of the world and for that reason are charged with a calling within and towards it, anchored in deep layers of the past which have not passed as long as they live on in them--all that vanishes in the face of modern voluntary and enforced mobility, the gigantic migrations which by now affect nearly all the continents.
p 121
The shared idea in the background of the first world war was the slowly germinating conviction that there is nothing such as a factual, objective meaning of the world and of things, and tat it is up to strength and power to create such meaning within the realm accessible to humans.
p 124
[The first world war:] demonstrated that the transformation of the world into a laboratory for releasing reserves of energy accumulated over billions of years can be achieved only by means of wars.
p 130
Peace transformed into a will to war could objectify and externalize humans as long as they were ruled by the day, by the hope of everydayness, of a profession, of a career, simply possibilities for which they must fear and which feel threatened.
p 131
[In war:] the topographic character of the landscape changes so that abruptly there is an end to it and the ruins no longer are what they had been, villages and so on, but have become what they can be at the given moment, shelters and reference points, so the landscape of life's fundamental meanings had been transformed, it has acquired an end beyond which there can be nothing further, higher, more desirable.
p 134
How can the "front-line" experience acquire the form which would make it a factor of history?
p 136
To shake the everydayness of the fact-crunchers and routine minds, to make them aware that their place is on the side of the front and not on the side of even the most pleasing slogans of the day, which in reality call to war, whether they invoke the nation, the state, classless society, world unity, or whatever other appeals, discreditable and discredited by the factual ruthlessness of the Force, there may be.
p 144/145
Here it turns out that not only existence but even the form and content of consciousness are determined by something deeper--their social being.
p 148
[Religion and power are:] the source of empires, but not of politics which is possible only with the conception of bestowing meaning on life out of freedom and for it, and that, as Hegel said, cannot be brought about by a solitary one (a ruler, the pharaoh) being "conscious of freedom." Humans can be that only in a community of equals. For that reason, the beginning of history in the strict sense is the polis.
p 159
[Here is a comment by the editor, Kohák, who likes Husserl, Masaryk and Ricoeur.:]
I remain convinced that the categories of good and evil cannot be reduced to categories of mundane and sacred or authentic and ordinary. However I have become convinced that the categories of good and evil--the moral enlightenment of a Comenius crossed with American personalism, Schweitzer's respect for life and Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic--become legitimate once they have fully confronted and transcended the vision of the cosmic night of which the dark romantic philosophers speak.
January 12, 2018
I read this book because Jacques Derrida discussed it at length in The Gift of Death. I enjoyed it very much, both because of the intellectual stretch it was and because of the spirit of the author I sensed behind the text. You can read about his work in general on Wikipedia, so I'll just share what I found meaningful. Patočka writes: "Christianity understands the Good differently than Plato--as a self-forgetting goodness and a self-denying love" (106)...In the final analysis, the soul is not a relation to an object, however noble (like the Platonic Good) but rather to a Person who sees into the soul without being itself accessible to view (107)." Patočka (and after him Derrida) asserts that Christianity has not yet lived into its central insights about being and being human.
Another thought I appreciated was the idea that once someone moves into an understanding of Good as a Person clothed in mystery, revealing the "problem of divine love and of the God-Human who takes our transgressions into godself," changing the notion of transgression into "an offense against divine love" which presents the human with personal responsibility in relation to the divine. A phrase I value is "the community of the shaken," which refers to those whose partial understandings have been shaken and demolished but who have faith in this Good Person beyond understanding so that they can move into yet another understanding that they know to be partial even while they retain unshaken faith.
Another thought I appreciated was the idea that once someone moves into an understanding of Good as a Person clothed in mystery, revealing the "problem of divine love and of the God-Human who takes our transgressions into godself," changing the notion of transgression into "an offense against divine love" which presents the human with personal responsibility in relation to the divine. A phrase I value is "the community of the shaken," which refers to those whose partial understandings have been shaken and demolished but who have faith in this Good Person beyond understanding so that they can move into yet another understanding that they know to be partial even while they retain unshaken faith.
May 22, 2025
I am providing an in-depth overview of this entire work in a series of articles which you can find here: https://hopelesscourage.substack.com/
This is an indispensable work for those interested in phenomenology, the philosophy of history, or philosophy in general. I hope to help it find a wider audience.
This is an indispensable work for those interested in phenomenology, the philosophy of history, or philosophy in general. I hope to help it find a wider audience.
May 2, 2020
Philosophically speaking very bad and outdatet. Full of non-sequitors and contradictions - and a lot of fantastical postulations about humanity's "inner core" and "very being" contra "decadence" and "enstrangement" and so on.
February 16, 2008
So, I bought the French edition of this book because the Egnlish version is $150. I read French enough to get through it, but will probably take some extra help from an actual French speaker. Oh well... still a phenomenal book.
August 2, 2017
Čtení Patočkových textů mě uklidňuje. Není to čtení užitečné, výnosné, ale přesto, jako bych na gauči s knížkou v klíně, uprostřed tohoto města, nacházel najednou svoje souřadnice. Patočkovo filosofování přináší, zdánlivě paradoxně, chuť do života a snad i optimismus, což je svého druhu odvaha. To je asi ona péče o duši. Za obzvláštní zmínku stojí pátý a šestý esej "Je technická civilizace úpadková, a proč?", respektive "Války 20. století a 20. století jako válka", které jsou úžasně podnětné z hlediska promýšlení současnosti. V poslední době se mi totiž zdá, že se Evropa (Západ? Svět?) po jakémsi intermezzu vrací zpět do kolejí 20. století. Jen jestli se umíme poučit.
January 5, 2023
Srdeční záležitost. Pokud se dostanete přes prvních cca 20-30 stran a zvládnete udržet soustředěnou pozornost, dočtení knihy Vás naplní nepopsatelnou euforií :D.
December 21, 2024
tellement decevant
December 25, 2023
Trvalo mi to dočítať viac ako rok...
Nie je to Finnegan's Wake, ale asi si to budem musieť prečítať znova. Zodvakrát. 🤷🏻
April 9, 2017
It's easy to be an ignorant. And as the bible says: the one eyed man is king in the land of the blind. This guy can understand technology to the level that he can barely use it. And at the same time he can use a crystal ball to evaluate the humanity even before writing. Leading to another observation: stupidity does not bring pain. And Patocka is not ashamed to be a boastful ignorant. After all he read philosophy and he has seen that other people, equally ignorant, can raise good money through publishing.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews