International Phenomenological Society

Jan PatockaAuthor(s): Ludwig LandgrebeReviewed work(s):Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Dec., 1977), pp. 287-290Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2107183 .Accessed: 22/02/2012 17:08

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JAN PATOCKA

Jan Patocka died in Prague on March 13, 1977. He had become the spokesman of the Czech Civil Rights Movement in January of 1977. From then on, like other signatories of the program of this movement, "Charta 77," he was exposed to numerous interrogations and intimida- tions by the police. When the Dutch Foreign Minister stayed in Prague for a visit at the beginning of March, Patocka sought him out in order to inform the western world about the goal of the Civil Rights Move- ment through a conversation with him: the Czechoslovakian govern- ment should be reminded by Charta 77 that with the ratification of the agreements of the Helsinki Conference it had obliged itself to realize human rights also in its own country. The consequences of Patocka's visit were 7-9 hour interrogations that took place recently and in which he suffered a heart attack. Several days later he suc- cumbed to a cerebral stroke in the hospital. He was well aware of the risk which he took upon himself with his public support for the real- ization of human rights. But he deemed it as a duty of the philosopher to fight for the realization of what is recognized by him as truth: "Philosophy is the attempt to live with the truth." Thus he said short- ly before his death that through these persecutions it had become clear to many people for the first time that there are ideas for which it is worthwhile to live and to suffer. He could appeal for this to Kant's idea that all moral duties of man rest upon that which one can call the duty of man unto himself. This duty includes, among other things, that he has to defend himself unconditionally against every injustice. Thus the most peaceful of men turned into a death-defying fighter.

Patocka was one of the last personal students of Edmund Husserl. After the conclusion of his study in the Czech University in Prague and a residency in Paris and Berlin as a student, he came to Husserl in Freiburg in the summer semester of 1933. He was introduced to the final development of Husserl's thought by Husserl himself and, above all, by Eugen Fink.* Two years later he took a decisive part in having Husserl invited by the Cercle philosophique de Prague for lectures at the German and the Czech University in Prague. There Husserl had

* Ed. Note: Jan Patocka was a research fellow with Husserl during 1932/33 in Freiburg, and was again a research fellow with Professor Landgrebe at the Husserl Archives in Cologne during 1967/68.

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developed the fundamental ideas from which his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences, emerged. Patocka describes his impression of Husserl's lectures in his "Recollections of Husserl": "Here a voice has called us to a reversal, a voice which brought the tidings of philosophy to mankind in a state of utmost danger." In his lectures Husserl had drawn attention to the responsibility of Europe in the crisis of the modern world. The philosophy, and with it the idea of human rights had its origin in European history. At the time of a threat by dictator- ship, it is the special duty of the Europeans to stand up for freedom and self-determination of thought, for autonomous morality. Czech thinkers, above all, Jan Amos Komensky and Thomas Garrigue Masar- yk have significantly contributed to this tradition. Thus Patocka, a Czech who thinks as a European, was aware of his special obligation to fight in his country for the idea of the moral law which binds all men. "Morality is not made by man, but it first makes man into man."

Husserl had found the roots of the crisis of the modern world in the "leaping-over," i.e., in forgetting the life-world. Patocka chose this problem for the theme of his inaugural dissertation, "The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem," with which he qualified for in- auguration as a university lecturer at the Czech University in Prague in 1936. The book had appeared only in the Czech language and thus was only accessible for a small circle of readers. Only in 1976 was it possible for it to appear in a French translation as Volume 68 of Phaenomenologica. Despite the almost boundless literature published on the problem of life-world in Husserl, the book lost nothing of its actuality. All of the problems concerning the concept of the life-world which are discussed today are already anticipated there and in part are solved in a more convincing way than it was possible elsewhere. But for Patocka this book was only a beginning which contained at the same time, a program for further work.

Patocka's teaching career in Prague lasted only three years, when Hitler let all Czech universities be closed in 1939. In 1945 he was able to take up his career again, it was, however, again only for three years. In 1948 the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia and he was dismissed from the university. Near the end of the fifties, the pres- sure of the Communist party had slackened. Although Patocka was not allowed to return to the university, he still received an appoint- ment at the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Prague. He cooperated on the critical edition of the "Pansophie" of Komensky, the most important Czech humanist. Patocka wrote a lengthy afterword for the work, which is, at the same time, an out-

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line of the Bohemian intellectual history. Patocka was the best expert on it. In addition to numerous lectures in Germany, he gave guest lectures at the universities of Cologne and Mainz in 1967-68, about the significance of Prague in European intellectual history. He also started translating the works of Hegel into Czech. The Aesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit appeared in the sixties in Prague. His book, Aristotle, His Predecessors and His Successors, was published in the Czech language in the publication series of the Academy. In the center of this book is the Aristotelean problem of perceptual motion, its prehistory and its transformation up to Hegel. Patocka seeks to show how the problems which lead up to phenomenology are prepared in this line of development. In the Philosophical Institute Patocka's young co-workers became his students. Karel Kozik was the most im- portant among them. His Dialectic of the Concrete (translated into English and German) was, so to speak, the program book of the "Prague Youth," which, however, found its end already in August of 1968 with the arrival of the Russians. Under the regime of Dubcek, Patocka had finally received a professorship at the University of Prague. In spite of many intimidations, he could maintain his position at the university until 1971; then he was dismissed with a small pen- sion. The authorities clearly had too much anxiety in the face of the philosopher who had stood up for the freedom of thought. He was declared an enemy of the party and was given a prohibition on speech and writing. The mention of his name was no longer allowed. How- ever, he was still free to publish in foreign countries. His passport for trips to the West was taken away,even though he was a member of the Institut International de Philosophie in Paris since 1938 and was for many years a Czech representative in the Federation International de Societes Philosophiques. In 1972 the Faculty of Philosophy of the Technical University of Aachen decided to confer an honorary Ph.D. on Patocka, but he did not receive permission to travel to Aachen for the acceptance of this title. Only after painstaking diplomatic nego- tiations could it take place in the residence of the German ambassa- dor.

The pressure under which Patocka lived in these years since 1968 did not diminish his productivity, but intensified it still more. With a group of young people, he held in his tiny dwelling a strictly private weekly colloquium on the problems of phenomenology and the philo- sophy of history and religion and general lectures on the writings of Plato and Aristotle. In the years between 1970 and 1976, numerous

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essays and treatises by him on the philosophy of history and the philosophy of religion appeared in German journals and collected volumes on the problems of phenomenology. A few of his last writings could only be circulated with the typewritten texts of the Civil Rights Movements. Up until the end of 1976, he still had huge plans for furth- er work. But the increasing pressures on certain authors and artists and the ever stricter suppressions of the free expression of certain opinion reminded him of the duty of the philosopher not to remain silent about injustice. He became a spokesman for the Civil Rights Movement, because only a philosopher was in a position to adequately clarify the meaning of the demands of Charta 77. In his address to the public and in his interrogations, he sought to make clear that the action of the Civil Rights Movement has nothing to do with politics, but that it is a demand of unconditionally universal validity on the conscience of each individual, equally valid whether he is communist or not, whether he is in a position of leadership or is a simple citizen of the state. It is the demand of the moral law which is valid for all, and only through the acknowledgment of it is a free society without lies and hypocrisy possible. Thus Patocka has chosen a fate, for which Socrates was the great model. In the beginning of philosophy Par- menides spoke of the signs which stand on the difficult path to truth. Patocka's death has placed one such sign.*

LUDWIG LANDGREBE. UNIVERSITY OF KOLN. * Translated by Professor Kah-Kyung Cho.