Abstract
My paper aims at laying out the main tenets of Patočka’s unusual and highly provocative position with regard to the question of history, drawing essentially on his Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History, while also gathering insights from other works such as Eternity and Historicity and Europe and post-Europe. In the first part, I set in place the overall framework of this analysis, and show that three distinct, yet entwined concepts of history are operative in Patočka’s work: the understanding of history as a specific regime of meaning, as an existential possibility of the human Dasein, and as a “epochal” dynamic. In the second part, I reconstruct the criticism Patočka mounts against the classical philosophies of history and indicate that his rejection of a teleological account of history is compatible with the attempt of establishing an intrinsic correlation between meaning and history. In the final part, I stress the importance acquired by the experience of the “shattering of meaning” for Patočka’s threefold understanding of history and argue for the possibility of crafting a unitary framework which would encompass his analysis.
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Notes
Patočka (2002b, pp. 517–587).
Michalski and Patočka and Michalski (2015, p. 247).
Letter to W. Biemel from July 16, 1975, unpublished. I consulted the manuscript of this letter at the “Jan Patočka Archives” of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna.
Patočka (1996, p. 27).
Patočka (2011a, p. 39). When the reference is, like here, to a text in a language other than English, the English translation is mine.
Patočka (1996, p. 36).
Patočka (1996, pp. 40–41).
Patočka (2011b, p. 115).
Patočka (1996, p. 23).
Patočka and Michalski (2015, pp. 247–248).
Patočka (1996, p. 29, 63). In both these passages Patočka uses the expression “historical epoch,” by which he does not mean a certain “epoch in history,” but rather that history itself is an epoch.
Patočka (2007d, p. 36).
Patočka (1996, p. 83).
For an account of Patočka’s “being-historical” interpretation of the First World War, see Stanciu (2018, pp. 507–524).
Patočka (1996, p. 27).
See Patočka (2007e, p. 205): “History can be neither regression nor progress, neither beginning nor end of time, neither drama of salvation nor fatality and law, neither tradition nor revolution, in short, nothing achieved, nothing that is a result. But, on the contrary, that which makes results possible in a common world, that which founds continuity and tradition, the assumption of freedom and resistance to that which stands in its way.” While Patočka’s criticism of the “teleological” understanding of history can be equally applied to narratives of progress and narratives of decline, he discusses at greater length the first position, which holds that history displays a progressive trajectory, for he considers it characteristic of the contemporary understanding of history. In what follows, I will mainly focus on the criticism he formulates against this particular conception.
Patočka refers, at various moments in the Heretical Essays, to the doctrines of Hegel and Comte.
Löwith (1949, p. 1).
Patočka (2007d, p. 34).
Patočka (1996, p. 147).
For a criticism of this conception convergent with the one mounted by Patočka, see Löwith (1990, p. 311).
In this regard, see Paparusso (2016, pp. 201–216). See also an earlier text of Patočka where he explicitly rejects the idea of an “end of history”: “From our perspective, however, the realization of man is possible at any time, just as, on the other hand, it seems to us impossible to speak of the end of history in general or of the culmination of the historical process” (Patočka (2011a, p. 145)).
Patočka (2011c, p. 124).
Patočka (1996, p. 140).
For a contemporary reappraisal of the distinction between history and pre-history, see de Beaune and Rémi (2021).
Patočka (2007d, p. 15).
Patočka (1996, pp. 70–71).
Patočka (1996, p. 63).
Patočka (1996, p. 63).
Patočka (1996, pp. 39–40).
Patočka (1996, p. 40).
Patočka (1996, p. 141).
Patočka (1996, p. 35).
Patočka (1996, p. 15).
Patočka (1996, p. 21).
Patočka (1996, p. 77).
Patočka (2011c, p. 123).
Patočka (1990, p. 281).
Patočka (2007e, p. 194).
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Funding
This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number: PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-2224, within PNCDI III.
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Stanciu, O. The shattering of meaning. Jan Patočka and his triple concept of history. Cont Philos Rev 55, 177–192 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-021-09557-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-021-09557-6