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Jan Patočka’s sacrifice: philosophy as dissent

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Abstract

This article attempts to bring together the life, situation, and philosophical work of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka in order to present his conception of philosophy and sacrifice and to understand his action of dissent and his own sacrifice as spokesman for Charter 77 in light of these concepts. Patočka philosophized despite being barred from teaching under the German occupation and under the communist regime, even after he was forced to retire and banned from publication. He also refused the official philosophical categories of communism and, what is more, criticized the very manner in which its ideology allowed it to function. Against the destruction of moral and political life by communist and liberal regimes alike, he outlined the necessity of a “life in the idea” that would be responsive to the notion of sacrifice. Such a position of distance from the things of the world which remains anchored among them is meant to respond to dissatisfaction with the world as it is found and is the very movement of human freedom. Taken together, these three aspects of his philosophical practice made him a dissident, a role he took on more completely when, as part of the Charter 77 movement, he publicly opposed the state, in a course of action that led to his death.

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Notes

  1. I wish to thank my colleagues from various disciplines at the University of Alberta Augustana Campus, who responded to a very early version of this paper, and especially Alexander Carpenter for his contribution to the solidity of the manuscript; Étienne Tassin, for a series of discussions around Patočka over the last several years; as well as the anonymous reviewer from Continental Philosophy Review whose contribution to the factual accuracy and depth of this paper has been invaluable.

  2. Findlay (2002, p. 4).

  3. Findlay (2002, p. 121).

  4. Findlay (2002, p. 56).

  5. Findlay (2002, p. 4).

  6. Tardivel (2007).

  7. Tardivel (2007, p. 454).

  8. Tardivel (2007, p. 447).

  9. Tardivel (2007, p. 453).

  10. Patočka (1989d, p. 196). I anticipate here on the understanding of philosophy that will be explained throughout this article.

  11. For example, McRae (1997) provides numbers for protests in 1988 and 1989 throughout his book, alongside the accounts of speeches and conversations with intellectuals and leaders among the dissidents.

  12. Similar positions can be found for instance in Sunstein (2003) who, like Findlay, defines dissent in solely political terms; and in Larsen (2009), who defines it in solely philosophical terms. Yet the definitions of dissent given by these authors are further limited in the understanding of dissent they are able to provide, as they rest on a simple opposition with agreement and on the ability to disagree or to “say no.” While they might open to a study of dissent as opposed to consent in the context of liberal democracies or ideal speech communities—and might gain to be studied in that context–, they limit it to a matter of opinion and certainly not one of life and death as is the case under totalitarian, post-totalitarian, and authoritarian regimes.

  13. Crépon (2001 pp. 181–182).

  14. Tardivel (2007 note 7, p. 437). Dissent can thus be found alongside the radical notions of revolt, reform, and revolution, as forms of radical opposition to the entire political order which do not have as their primary goal the use of the same institutions and instruments of political powers as are being used by those who currently govern (as exemplified in parliamentary regimes and specifically in the British tradition of “loyal opposition”). However, dissent might be said to differ from these other notions in that it takes place in a regime that does not allow for expressions or actions of any opposition.

  15. Havel (1985, p. 58).

  16. Havel (1985, p. 59).

  17. As Falk (2003, p. 254) notes, for Patočka, “dissent was neither private nor restricted to an isolated group of inner selves, but was extended to the public space of the agora—in the Czech context the many living room seminars, unofficial cultural performances, written and oral debates that comprised the Chartist community.”.

  18. See Sect. 6 below.

  19. Unpublished in English, it is available in French (Patočka 1976).

  20. The account of dissent offered here can only be limited to the study of its relationship to the broader phenomenon of sacrifice. Likewise, the account of some of the events in the history of Czechoslovakia that affected Patočka’s work is indebted in great part to Gordon Skilling’s work (1981, 1989) and to that of his student, Barbara J. Falk (2003, 2011), who also refers to Tucker (2000) and Kohák (1989). The work of understanding the phenomenon of dissent as manifested in Charter 77 remains to be done; as Falk (2011) points out, studies of Eastern European dissent are focused on 1989 and the transition to democracy.

  21. Masaryk (1969, 1971, 1974).

  22. The above details concerning Masaryk can be found in Kohák (1989, pp. 8–15).

  23. Patočka (2007a).

  24. Patočka (2007a, p. 86).

  25. Patočka (2007a, p. 87).

  26. Patočka (1990a).

  27. Háyek et al. (1981, p. 236). It should be noted that Česká mysl may be better translated as Czech Mind.

  28. Patočka (1990f).

  29. Patočka (1990f, pp. 209–222 and especially 223–225); Kohák (1989, pp 34–35).

  30. For a study focused on the notion of ideology in Patočka, see Manton (2007).

  31. Patočka (2007b, p. 90).

  32. Crépon (2009).

  33. Kohák (1989, p. 44).

  34. Kohák (1989, pp. 53–54).

  35. Kohák (1989, p. 61).

  36. Kohák (1989, p. 53).

  37. Kohák (1989, p. 76). See Patočka (2011).

  38. Patočka (1989d, p. 178).

  39. As Frogneux (2012) points out, Socrates is not a model; rather, because of his own sacrifice, he calls upon us to discover for ourselves that which he has already discovered, that is, being (130).

  40. Patočka (1989d, p. 180).

  41. Patočka (1989d, p. 191).

  42. Patočka (1989d, p. 194).

  43. Patočka (1989d, p. 194).

  44. Patočka (1989d, p. 193).

  45. Patočka (1989d, p. 196). As Frei (2012, pp. 107–108) suggests, transcendence designates a constant theme in Patočka’s philosophy: the aspiration to leave behind everydayness, the non-truth of readily available meaning, and to elevate ourselves beyond the moment in order to progress toward a universal horizon where we may meet the realities with which we are already dealing. Sacrifice is thus the transcendence and relativization of all beings (p. 111), as is the devotion to others (112).

  46. This movement of drawing back corresponds to the phenomenological épochè. On the difference between the épochè which Patočka practices and the phenomenological reduction, see notably Pantano (2007) who points out that the épochè unveils the movement of appearance rather than the appearance of things themselves, that is, it unveils the world as what makes appearance possible, and what makes subjectivity possible.

  47. Patočka (1989d, pp. 198–201). Likewise, Raphaël Gély (2012) suggests that the conquest of freedom implies the articulation of two dimensions that are altogether disconnected (p. 134), and that freedom is to be open to the totality and to the very possibility of meaning (p. 140–141). Sacrifice will thus consist in a detachment from any being and a proximity to totality (p. 142).

  48. Patočka (1989d, p. 201).

  49. Patočka (1995).

  50. Patočka (1995, p. 18): « coïncidence directe du subjectif et de l’objectif » .

  51. Patočka (1995, p. 19): « l’on voit au mouvement la particularité personnelle de celui qui l’accomplit, dont il exprime en même temps les projets de possibilités, les visées et les intentions. » .

  52. Patočka (1995 p. 24).

  53. Patočka (1990e) also suggests that what is proper of philosophy is the capacity to know the world, the totality, rather than singularities. See Barbaras (2012) for an analysis of this text from 1930.

  54. However, Gély (2012, pp. 154–156) limits himself to action.

  55. Kohák (1989, p. 106). Falk (2003, p. 80) defines normalization as “the process after the Soviet-sponsored invasion whereby authoritarian communism was re-established along its originally rigid and Stalinist line. Power was consolidated in the hands of an old communist guard dogmatically loyal in all respects to the dictates of Moscow, and the party was effectively purged of all traces of attempted reform.” Patočka is only one victim: “approximately 327,000 members of the party were expelled; another 150,000 left voluntarily. Membership of the party was cut by one third, although the purge was less intense in Slovakia. About two thirds of Writers’ Union members lost their jobs, 900 university teachers were fired, and 21 academic institutions were closed.” (p. 83).

  56. Kohák (1989, p. 54).

  57. Samizdat writings are a form of unofficial or anti-official publications attempting to circumvent state censorship, passed from person to person through informal networks, much broader than dissident networks and not necessarily tied to dissent. Samizdat was thus a medium both for dissidents and for novelists, poets, and playwrights who were barred from publication. Skilling notes that only in countries “where an organised dissent or human rights movement had come into being, did samizdat assume substantial dimensions.” (Skilling 1989, p. 17) Skilling also quotes the anonymous “Josef Strach”: “It is written only by someone who has something to say… When I take it in my hand, I know that it cost someone a good deal to write it—without an honorarium and at no little risk.” (Skilling 1989, p. 13).

  58. Arendt (1998, 2000).

  59. Patočka (1996, p. 25).

  60. Tucker (2000, pp. 19–58) presents Patočka’s three conceptions of truth: as political/public; as private; and as involuntary.

  61. Patočka (1996, pp. 31–32).

  62. Patočka (1996, p. 42).

  63. Françoise Dastur (2007, p. 233) suggests that Patočka’s three movements of existence cannot offer the basis for a philosophy of history because they amount to a distinction between different degrees of existence and thus create a hierarchy of human lives and cultures. However, she neglects the meaning of the phenomenological difference in Patočka, which differs from the ontological difference in Heidegger. As Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback suggests, the phenomenological difference is not dualistic and takes place through a tension (reminiscent of Patočka’s polemos), “where Being and non-Being meet in their conflictive belonging together as non-otherness” (Sá Cavalcante Schuback 2001, p. 35). I would thus suggest that what we have with these three movements are three dimensions which are always at play, in such a way that the absence of one movement is still a manner for it to be present.

  64. Tassin (2009, p. 346). My translation.

  65. Kohák (1989, p. 115).

  66. Patočka (1996, pp. 119–137).

  67. Patočka (1989a, pp. 332–333).

  68. Tassin (1999, 2003).

  69. In this understanding of sacrifice, I differ from Tucker (2000) who, in interpreting Patočka in close relation to Heidegger, presents (or at least comes very close to presenting) sacrifice as opening a mystical union with Being and as being oriented toward death, rather than toward our being as humans and our already existing, if implicit, relationship to totality (or Being, in more Heideggerian terms): “I think it is obvious that Patočka’s philosophy of life in truth, sacrifice, and eventually mystical union explains his decision to take action and sacrifice himself. His self-sacrifice displayed the highest Heideggerian virtue of anticipatory resoluteness before death. […] For Patočka, this authentic resoluteness meant becoming a human rights activist.” (p. 86).

  70. Patočka (1989a, p. 336).

  71. Patočka (1989a, p. 338).

  72. Patočka (1990b, p. 315). I am translating from the French translation. Patočka also notes that sacrifice is not abstract, as is the categorical imperative; there can then be no Kantian motive to his actions, but rather, a phenomenological motive.

  73. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002).

  74. Crépon (2007, p. 399; p. 403).

  75. Patočka (1989a, p. 339).

  76. Patočka (2009a, p. 157). I translate from the French translation. Edward F. Findlay, based on his reading of the Heretical Essays, without reference to the text I quote here, presents “war against war” (p. 138) quite differently, as a new rule of ideology, as the continuation of war through peace. This difference should lead us to be careful when commenting on works that are not entirely published, and to not put too much emphasis on particular formulations.

  77. Patočka (2009a, p. 159). I am translating from the French translation.

  78. Patočka (1990c, p. 256). I am translating from the French translation.

  79. Patočka (1990b, d, p. 314–315; p. 328–329).

  80. Patočka (1990b, p. 322). I am translating from the French translation.

  81. Skilling (1981, p. 7).

  82. Patočka (1981, p. 206).

  83. Quoted in Skilling (1981, p. 13).

  84. Skilling (1981, p. 14); Thomas (2001, pp. 91–120; pp. 159–194).

  85. Skilling (1981, p. 15).

  86. Löwit (2009, p. 297).

  87. Patočka (1989b, p. 340–341).

  88. See Erika Abrams, translator’s note to Patočka (2009b), p. 168–169).

  89. Patočka (2009b, p. 170). I translate from the French translation.

  90. Erika Abrams, translator’s note to Patočka (2009b, p. 169). My translation.

  91. Patočka (1989b, p. 342).

  92. Patočka (1989b, p. 340).

  93. Patočka (2009c, p. 172). I am preferring Abrams’ translation, which is coherent with her translation of “Ideology and Life in the Idea,” to Kohák’s translation of Patočka (1989c, p. 343): “we ourselves have no assets but our ideals.”.

  94. Patočka (1989c, p. 345).

  95. Patočka (1989c, p. 346).

  96. Skilling (1981, p. 22).

  97. Patočka (1990c).

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    Jérôme Melançon

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Melançon, J. Jan Patočka’s sacrifice: philosophy as dissent. Cont Philos Rev 46, 577–602 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9281-x

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