Abstract
The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, one of Edmund Husserl’s last students, is not widely known among Anglo-American philosophers. If known at all, he is mostly regarded as an expositor of Husserl. In 1995, the publication of the English translation of Jacques Derrida’s book Gift of Death brought Patočka a broader philosophical audience. Nonetheless, the idiosyncrasy of Derrida’s commentary has masked the true nature and importance of Patočka’s philosophy. In this paper, I present a reading of Patočka’s work dealing with the existential crisis of today’s society. For Patočka, this crisis and the recurrence of wars disguised as peace are two sides of the same problem. They are the outcome of nature’s transformation into a standing reserve of energy for humans to use as they see fit. Stripped of unpredictable and contingent elements, nature becomes a formal system written in mathematical symbols that can be potentially understood by anyone, anywhere, at any time. However, if the book of nature is written, as Galileo believed, in the characters of geometry, the idea of responsibility for nature as that in which we live becomes unclear. How are we to reflect on responsibility for triangles and circles? To think nature in such a way seems to absolve humans from any responsibility for it. Yet not everything in the world is open to such calculative transformation. For Patočka, the phenomenon of the sacrificial victim and our own death are examples of the impossibility of calculus and, hence, of prediction which is the sine qua non of modern scientific knowledge. Patočka’s exposition offers a way to confront understanding based on calculus alone. The phenomenon of sacrifice can initiate a challenge to our techno-scientific understanding of the world by showing the futility of attempts to simply use objective — i.e., formal — knowledge to account for the world we live in: the natural world.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées: Notes on Religion and Other Subjects (London and New York: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1960), ed. L. Lafuma, transl. J. Warrington, no. 391.
- 2.
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, transl. D. Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 48.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 49.
- 4.
Edward F. Findlay, “Secrets of European Responsibility: Jacques Derrida on Responsibility in the Philosophy of Jan Patočka,” in Philosophy Today, Vol. 46, no. 1, Spring 2002, p. 17. See Findlay’s critique of Derrida’s misrepresentation of Patočka as a Christian thinker.
- 5.
Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 4.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 5.
- 7.
Jan Patočka, “Author’s Glosses,” in Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. J. Dodd, transl. E. Kohák (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1996), pp. 139–140.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 139.
- 9.
Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 118.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Jan Patočka, “Author’s Glosses,” op. cit., p. 147.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
See, for example, the analysis of Plato’s Apology in Jan Patočka, Sokrates. Přednáška z letního semestru 1947 [Socrates. Lectures from the Summer Semester 1947] (Praha: samizdat, 1977).
- 14.
Plato, “Apology,” transl. G. M. A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997), 18a–35e, esp. 20d.
- 15.
Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 118.
- 16.
Cf. Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, transl. P. Lom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 43.
- 17.
Erazim Kohák, “Translator’s Notes” in Jan Patočka, Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. and transl. E. Kohák (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 339: “Patočka takes advantage of the fact that in both Czech and German the same word (oběť, Opfer) is used to speak of a victim (as of an earthquake) and of a sacrifice (as a religious sacrifice). This enables him to claim that technicization claims many victims/sacrifices. I have tried to suggest this by resorting to the term sacrificial victim. However, Patočka’s point does not depend on the pun but rather on the fact that even in the technological age so many people experience their own victimization as a sacrifice and the victimization of others as their ‘being sacrificed on the altar of progress.’ As long as that is so, nihilism has not prevailed.”
- 18.
Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 132.
- 19.
See ibid. For Heidegger’s discussion of Gestell, see Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, transl. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 3–35.
- 20.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, transl. D. Carr (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1970), § 2 [p. 7].
- 21.
Jan Patočka, “The ‘Natural’ World and Phenomenology” [1967], in Philosophy and Selected Writings, op. cit., p. 239. See, for example, Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical [1897], transl. C. M. Williams and S. Waterlow (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), especially Chapter One: “Introductory Remarks: Anti-Metaphysical.”
- 22.
Jan Patočka, “‘Přirozený svět’ v meditaci svého autora po třiatřiceti letech,” in Přirozený svět jako filosofický problém (Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1992), p. 208; [see German translation: “Nachwort des Autors zur tschechischen Neuausgabe (1970),” in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem. Phänomenologische Schriften I, ed. K. Nellen and J. Němec, transl. E. and R. Melville (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990), p. 222].
- 23.
Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 95.
- 24.
Jan Patočka, “‘Přirozený svět’ v meditaci…,” op. cit., p. 207; [“Nachwort des Autors…,” op. cit., p. 221].
- 25.
Jan Patočka, Přirozený svět jako…, op. cit., p. 9; [Die natürliche Welt als…, op. cit., p. 25]. See also Jan Patočka, Úvod do fenomenologické filosofie [Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (lecture course, 1969/1970)] (Praha: Oikoymenh, 1993), p. 75.
- 26.
Jan Patočka, “‘Přirozený svět’ v meditaci…,” op. cit., p. 207; [“Nachwort des Autors…,” op. cit., p. 221]. Husserl formulates the critique of this split in understanding nature by way of a question. He asks, if “every psychological judgment involves the existential positing of physical nature, whether expressly or not,” then “how is natural science to be comprehensible in absolutely every case, to the extent that it pretends at every step to posit and to know a nature that is in itself – in itself in opposition to the subjective flow of consciousness?” (Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, transl. Q. Lauer [New York: Harper & Row, 1965], pp. 86, 88.)
- 27.
Jan Patočka, “The ‘Natural’ World…,” op. cit., p. 240.
- 28.
Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 70.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Jan Patočka, “Cartesianism and Phenomenology,” in Philosophy and Selected Writings, op. cit., p. 292.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 286.
- 32.
Jan Patočka, “‘Přirozený svět’ v meditaci…,” op. cit., p. 207; [“Nachwort des Autors…,” op. cit., p. 221].
- 33.
Jan Patočka, “The Dangers of Technicization in Science according to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger according to M. Heidegger” (1st version, 1973), in Philosophy and Selected Writings, op. cit., pp. 337–338.
- 34.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences…, op. cit., § 2 [pp. 5–6].
- 35.
Jan Patočka, “Author’s Glosses,” op. cit., p. 152.
- 36.
Jan Patočka, “The Dangers of Technicization…,” op. cit., p. 331.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
As Patočka notes in the working manuscript “Evropa pramenem dějin” [Europe the Wellspring of History] (Sebrané spisy, sv. 3, op. cit., pp. 474–475): “The true nature of modern society … is not industrial, but rather decadent…. Europe has not mastered the problem raised by the end of the Roman Empire and the emergence of a new social structure of laboring moral subjects – free workers mean the predominance of technology, leveling, the development of a technical rationality exhaustive of the drab everyday; this, along with the enormous energy potential it generates, accumulates dynamite which has done its work in the shattering course of events in the twentieth century, leaving today’s Europe in a state of hedonistic disintegration.”
- 39.
Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, op. cit., p. 62.
- 40.
Jan Patočka, “Cartesianism…,” op. cit., p. 288.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 287. Husserl’s critique of naturalism expresses the same insight: “Thus the naturalist … sees only nature, and primarily physical nature. Whatever-is is either physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature, or it is in fact psychical, but then merely as a variable dependent on the physical, at best a secondary ‘parallel accompaniment.’ Whatever-is belongs to psychophysical nature, which is to say that it is universally determined by rigid laws.” (Cf. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” op. cit., p. 79).
- 42.
Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees, transl. L. Bogan and E. Mayer (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2000), p. 95.
- 43.
Cf. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 121.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 122.
- 45.
Ibid., pp. 113–114.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 120.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 129.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Citing Ernst Jünger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who fought in the war.
- 50.
Jan Patočka, “Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin,” in Sebrané spisy, sv. 3, Péče o duši III, ed. I. Chvatík and P. Kouba (Praha: Oikoymenh, 2002) p. 125; Heretical Essays, op. cit., p. 130.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
Ibid., pp. 125–126/129–130 (Czech/English).
- 53.
Ibid., p. 126/130 (Czech/English): “This absolute freedom is the understanding that here something has already been achieved, something that is not the means to anything else, a stepping stone to …, but rather something above and beyond which there can be nothing. This is the culmination, this self-surrender which can call humans away from their vocations, talents, possibilities, their future. To be capable of that, to be chosen and called for it in a world that uses conflict to mobilize force so that it comes to appear as a totally objectified and objectifying cauldron of energy, also means to overcome force. The motives of the day which had evoked the will to war are consumed in the furnace of the front line, if that experience is intense enough not to yield again to the forces of day. 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 they feel threatened. Now, however, comes upheaval, shaking that peace and its planning, its programs and its ideas of progress indifferent to mortality.”
- 54.
Ernst Jünger, Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918, transl. anon. (New York: Howard Fertig, Inc., 2003), pp. 199, 198.
- 55.
Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 133.
- 56.
See note 38 above.
- 57.
Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 133.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 74.
- 59.
See, for example, John Vidal, “Farmer Commits Suicide at Protests,” in The Guardian, September 11, 2003; Christine Ahn, “Death at the WTO,” in Common Dreams.org, September 12, 2003; David Redmon, “Privatization Is Suicide,” in Consumers, Commodities and Consumption, Vol. 5, no. 1, December 2003.
- 60.
Jan Patočka, “The Dangers of Technicization…,” op. cit., pp. 335–339.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 337.
- 62.
Jan Patočka, “Poznámky o antické humanitě. Boj a smír” [Notes on Ancient Humanity. Strife and Reconciliation], in Sebrané spisy, sv. 5, Umění a čas II, ed. D. Vojtěch and I. Chvatík (Praha: Oikoymenh, 2004), p. 13.
- 63.
Plato, op. cit., 38a.
- 64.
Jan Patočka, “Poznámky o…,” op. cit., p. 13.
- 65.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Existentialism and the Philosophy of Existence,” in Heidegger’s Ways, transl. J. W. Stanley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 5.
- 66.
Jan Patočka, “‘Přirozený svět’ v meditaci…,” op. cit., p. 249; [“Nachwort des Autors…,” op. cit., p. 265].
- 67.
Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 105.
- 68.
Jan Patočka, “Poznámky o…,” op. cit., p. 13.
- 69.
The Charter 77 manifesto was released in January 1977. It was a call to the government of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which had recently signed the Helsinki Agreement, to uphold its commitment to this treaty, stipulating the citizens’ fundamental human rights. See Jan Patočka, “The Obligation to Resist Injustice,” in Philosophy and Selected Writings, op. cit., p. 341.
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
Ibid., pp. 342–343.
- 72.
Ludwig Landgrebe, “An Obituary,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 38, no. 2, December 1977, p. 290.
- 73.
Ibid.
- 74.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), p. 253.
- 75.
Jan Patočka, “The Obligation…,” op. cit., p. 340.
- 76.
For Patočka, polemos is strife, and not – as Paul Ricœur and Jacques Derrida claim – war. For Ricœur’s claim, see his “Preface to the French Edition of Jan Patočka’s Heretical Essays” (in Heretical Essays…, op. cit., pp. vii–xvi). For Derrida’s reading, see The Gift of Death (op. cit., pp. 16–17). For a critique of their readings, see Edward F. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patočka (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 142–144. As Patočka writes (Heretical Essays…, op. cit., p. 42): “Heraclitus speaks of that which is ‘common to all,’ which ‘nourishes’ all ‘human law,’ that is, the polis in its general functioning and particular decisions. What though is this divine law? ‘We must know that polemos is what is common, and that strife is justice (dikē = eris), and that all things come into being through eris and its impulsion.’ … Yet the power generated from strife is no blind force. The power that arises from strife is a power that knows and sees: only in this invigorating strife is there life that truly sees into the nature of things – to phronein. Thus phronēsis, understanding, by the very nature of things, cannot but be at once common and conflicted. To see the world and life as a whole means to see polemos, eris, as that which is common; ξυνόν ἐστι πᾶσι τὸ φρονέειν: ‘insight is common to all.’”
- 77.
Ibid., p. 43: “Thus polemos is at the same time that which constitutes the polis and the primordial insight that makes philosophy possible. Polemos is not the destructive passion of a fierce raider but, rather, the creator of unity. The unity it founds is more profound than any ephemeral sympathy or coalition of interests; adversaries meet in the shaking of the given meaning, and so create a new way of being human – perhaps the only mode that offers hope amid the storm of the world: the unity of the shaken but undaunted. Thus Heraclitus sees the unity and the common origin of philosophy and the polis.”
- 78.
Ibid.: “Therewith the question of the origin of history seems decided. History arises and can arise only insofar as aretē, the excellence of humans who no longer live simply to live, builds a space in which to assert itself, insofar as it sees within the nature of things and acts in accordance – building a polis on the basis of the law of the world which is polemos, and uttering what it sees as disclosing itself to a free, exposed yet undaunted human being (philosophy).”
- 79.
For a similar analysis, see Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. J. Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), pp. 165–168.
- 80.
For yet another similar analysis, see also Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement. Politics and Philosophy, transl. J. Rose (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Učník, Ľ. (2011). Patočka on Techno-Power and the Sacrificial Victim (Obět’). In: Abrams, E., Chvatík, I. (eds) Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 61. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9124-6_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9124-6_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9123-9
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9124-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)