Jan Patočka on War and History

To read the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, one needs to dispose of concepts and categories and approach philosophy, politics and history anew. It is the phenomenological essence – to transcend the metaphysics of the old and re-approach the idea of being.

Patočka sees modern being as located in technicity and war; that the scope of history, far from being one of progress and “end of history” utopia, is regressive, not in the sense of a Rousseau state of nature (peaceful), but must be located back in pre-history and the fateful day when humans left home and entered the polis (city-state).

Central, therefore, is the need to resurrect the idea of the “good” and for a morality preceding us and proceeding.

Morality and the “Natural World”

Patočka, a signatory of Charter 77, became the Socrates of the twentieth century after his death at the hands of the Police in Czechoslovakia. Asserting that human rights preceded the polis, the state and the totalitarian regime. Similarly, this “care for the soul” is what epitomised Greek thought. Greek thinking was nature bound, at first Dionysian, fixed in its limits. Humans gave up the “care for the soul” in a Faustian pact with “having”. In this Icarian leap, the modern Faust rejected God and stands on the Nietzschean abyss in a constant war against all. Patočka writes: