Thinking After Europe

Jan Patocka and Politics

Francesco Tava, Darian Meacham

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783486861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Phénoménologie en philosophie

Jan Pato?ka, perhaps more so than any other philosopher in the twentieth century, managed to combine intense philosophical insight with a farsighted analysis of the idea and challenges facing Europe as a historical, cultural and political signifier. As a political dissident in communist Czechoslovakia he also became a moral and political inspiration to a generation of Czechs, including Václav Havel. He accomplished this in a time of intense political repression when not even the hint of a unified Europe seemed visible by showing in exemplary fashion how concrete thought can be without renouncing in any way its depth. Europe as an idea and a political project is a central issue in contemporary political theory. Pato?ka’s political thought offers many original insights into questions surrounding the European project. Here, for the first time, a group of leading scholars from different disciplines gathers together to discuss the specific political impact of Pato?ka’s philosophy and its lasting significance.

Part I

Intellectuals and Opposition

Chapter 1

Translators’ Preface

The essay presented here, in English translation, has its origins in a conference paper delivered by Jan Patočka on 3 June 1968, at the Evangelic Academy of Hofgeismar in West Germany. The historical context in which this event took place is of particular importance and thus deserves our attention. For Patočka and his entire nation, 1968 represented a moment of hope and rebirth: a season of political reforms had culminated in the election of Alexander Dubček as the new secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party on 5 January, and what followed was a period of political change and liberation which became known as the Prague Spring. Patočka, who had experienced first-hand the harshness of the first years of real socialism in his country, welcomed this new political climate with great expectations. In particular, this gave him a chance to restart his activity as a professor at Charles University, from which he had been banned in 1949, one year after the communist takeover. Moreover, the improved political situation also gave him the chance to recommence travelling on a regular basis to Western Europe, where in 1968 he held a series of public lectures, of which the text we present here is an example.

Looking at the content of these lectures, two distinct lines of thought can be identified. On the one hand, Patočka took the opportunity to present his phenomenological research to an international audience, as he did on the occasion of the lecture ‘Phänomenologie und Metaphysik der Bewegung’.1 On the other hand, he also gave another lecture, titled ‘Czech Philosophy and Its Present Stage’,2 in which he addresses an altogether different topic, namely the cultural and philosophical situation of his country, with clear references to the ongoing political upheaval. Some months later, at a turbulent moment in which the reform movement in Prague was encountering its first serious obstacles, Patočka had another chance to address these topics in the text that we present here. On this occasion, his attention is entirely focused on the figure of the intellectual and on the task that they are asked to fulfil in the present historical situation.

In discussing the problem of the intellectual in society, Patočka does not aim to propose any straightforwardly elitist conception of politics in which a small, closed group of intellectually superior citizens would alone hold the reins of society. Indeed, the conception of the ‘intellectual’ which he advocates is not that of the modern specialist who, thanks to their intellectual skills, aims at becoming ‘the new leading character of human spirituality’, just as the figure of the religious clericus was in the Middle Ages. What Patočka has in mind are rather the young intellectuals – primarily students – who in the late 1960s, in Czechoslovakia as well as in Western Europe and North America, strove to reform the social and political system by entering into an active relationship with all its inner forces. Although it could be objected that even such a conception is nevertheless elitist because it still privileges a small group of society, it should also be noted that Patočka does not focus on the young intellectuals of Western capitalist societies (whom he actually criticizes), but rather those of Eastern socialist societies. Looking beyond the corrupt reality of those societies at the time, at least in principle, the universities in countries such as Czechoslovakia were accessible to all citizens. There were no ‘poor’ people who could not afford to send their children to universities (only ‘enemies of the state’ whose children were blacklisted, but the eradication of such corruption was precisely part of the hope placed in the reform movement). As such, this category of intellectual is something much more open than what we usually associate with the term. Indeed, the Czech term inteligence can mean both the ‘intelligentsia’ and the ‘intellect/intelligence’ as a fundamental human faculty. In this broad sense, then, we could see the ‘intellectual’ to whom Patočka appeals as essentially a member of that group of human beings who utilize their faculty of intelligence, and, in 1968, the clearest manifestation of that phenomenon was to be found in the student movements.

Patočka’s emphasis on the figure of the intellectual acquires a specific meaning if we take into account the role that intellectuals had played in Czechoslovakia during the years leading up to the Prague Spring. In that particular context, because of the total lack of a legitimized political elite, or of any other social group that could have been able to usefully represent the majority of the population, the voice of the intellectuals acquired a peculiar power and their action started to be seen as a reference point and as an example.3 It is not by chance that one of the fundamental events which set the tone for the Prague Spring was the Fourth Congress of Czech Writers that took place between 27 and 29 June 1967 in Prague, and to which Patočka referred one year later in his lecture.4

The issue of the role of the intellectuals before, during, and after the Prague Spring cannot be further developed here. What we would like to do is simply to look more closely at this particular text of Patočka, whose editorial history can reveal better than any other description the author’s complex relationship with his country and his times. Two different versions of ‘Intellectuals and Opposition’ exist: the first one – partly readable here in the Appendix – which corresponds to the conference paper, and which was written in German, was in fact extensively reshaped by the author when he decided to translate it into Czech. In particular, the new version presents a different and more extended conclusion, in which Patočka directly tackles Marxist thought in a critical but also constructive way, revealing his growing interest in the inner reform of Marxism, which was developing in Czechoslovakia in those years. Patočka’s interest becomes particularly visible in the last paragraph of the final version of the essay, in which he directly refers to the Prague Spring, arguing that ‘the significance of Czechoslovak events in 1968 consists in the fact that for the first time the possibility takes shape of a new free society, based on the transformation of the working class – within socialism itself – into a class which has intellectuals at its core, as a core which is capable of introducing society to a new productive and historical era’.5 The tragic end of the Prague Spring, and the beginning of normalization, severely dampened Patočka’s enthusiasm, indelibly marking the further development of his political and philosophical reflection. This change is visible in his decision to cut the aforementioned excerpt from the second edition of the text, published in 1969, in a collection of essays entitled On the Meaning of Today, in which Patočka lucidly analyzed the failure of the Czech national programme from Masaryk to its definite collapse after the end of the Prague Spring.6 The passage between this essay, in which the hopes for a social and political renewal are still perceivable, and the following works from the 1970s is decisive. Nevertheless, even in the sixth of his Heretical Essays from the mid-1970s, where he is arguably at his darkest and most despairing, we still find Patočka holding out hope for the ‘technical intelligentsia’ as an agent of social renewal. At the close of the essay, when he discusses how the ‘solidarity of the shaken’ could become a historical factor, he states that it is necessary that this ‘component of the spirit, the “technical intelligentsia,” primarily researchers and those who apply research, inventors and engineers, would feel a waft of this solidarity and would act accordingly’.7 As such, the centrality of the intellectuals in Patočka’s political vision seems to have persevered even throughout the disappointments and despair of the 1970s. And it is precisely in the following essay that we find the role of the intellectual for Patočka most clearly spelled out.

f.t. and d.l.

notes

1. Lecture originally given in German as ‘Phänomenologie und Metaphysik der Bewegung’ on 6/2/1968 at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg.

2. Lecture originally given in German as ‘Die tschechiche Philosophie und ihre gegenwärtige Phase’ on 6/2/1968, at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg.

3. The classic account is Vladimir V. Kusin’s The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring: The Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 1956–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

4. See infra, 9.

5. See infra, 20.

6. Published in Czech as O smysl dneška. Devět kapitol o problémech světových i českých. Afterword by Josef Zumr, Praha (Mladá fronta) 1969.

7. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essay in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), 136.

Chapter 2

Intellectuals and Opposition*

Jan Patocˇ ka

Translated from Czech by Francesco Tava and Daniel Leufer

In an age that prides itself on how man’s rational will has subjected history itself to organization and anticipatory management, we are again, surprisingly, witnesses to unexpected and unheard-of things. Analyses do indeed still emerge which teach us how to comprehend what is happening, and prove that for those capable of deeper insight things are not incomprehensible. Yet, in matters of history, our deeper insight still lags behind reality. There were some events in the post-war age that I think surprised the world, at least for the scale of their impact, if not for the fact that they happened at all. Foremost was the disintegration of the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union, which occurred without any external pressure, but rather, through an imperceptible internal process, opaque in respect of its innumerable causes. This was despite the fact that the structure of this system seemed to be guaranteed by an enormous centralization probably unparalleled in history. An imponderable element also played a role, the shaking of the Stalin legend; an element whose intellectual nature gives it a particular relevance for our topic. When, some years later, what is known as the Cultural Revolution broke out – initiated by Mao and then led by his followers – most people saw something completely incomprehensible in it, some kind of Oriental barbarism, with no possible equivalent in the rational Western world. Nowadays, similar and yet more spontaneous movements have brought the most stable societies and states in Western Europe to the edge of destruction. Rightly or wrongly, these movements tend to have Mao’s name on their lips. There is no doubt that the recent resolutions by President Johnson, and particularly his decision to stop the air strikes over North Vietnam, were also influenced by intellectual elements, especially by the students protests in the United States, which exacerbated the mood of opposition towards American policy in Vietnam. Anyone with some knowledge of West Germany noticed how the entire political and spiritual atmosphere changed over the last two years, due for the most part to student action and student organizations. In our country, too, we have seen how one of the less glorious repercussions of the Stalinist era – Novotný’s regime – ended up the same way. This regime, which survived by resorting to all kinds of sly manipulations and still had plenty of power in its hands despite its long-time term lack of popularity, entered its final phase through clashes with writers and students.

We could ask ourselves whether we have not put two disparate issues under one heading; indeed, what do the end of Stalinism or Mao’s Cultural Revolution have in common with intellectual opposition? Here, I would like to point out what Isaac Deutscher highlighted in his studies about the post-Stalinist era1: the replacement of Stalinism in the Soviet Union is connected with a new educational system and a change in the standard of living. Moreover, Mao’s Cultural Revolution was recently defended in the German left-wing press as being oriented against a bureaucratic establishment that is a traditional threat in the Chinese context, and against which an intellectual opposition is indispensable. It seems that Mao very quickly became aware of something that was overlooked elsewhere, namely the mass nature of the contemporary student body and hence the possibility to appeal to the students as a mass. Since then, however, the rest of the world has also been paying attention to the wild intellectual opposition spreading from one country to another, altering its activities, learning and adapting its tactics to the circumstances, and developing a long-term strategy. At the same time, it emerges that this opposition is related to phenomena which did now show up before and were hence not necessary to take into account. Until recently, intellectuals were an isolated or dispersed element that constituted a relatively negligible factor in public life due to their lack of numbers and dependence on decisive forces – for example, the power of the capitalist classes or the size of the relevant masses. In Western consumer society, conceived as a ‘lonely crowd’,2 the only possibility left open to intellectuals was to observe, orient themselves, and keep themselves informed, with absolutely no chance for action. We cannot, of course, assert today that intellectuals have achieved the social influence that would ensure that the whole of society realizes how, on the basis of consultation, something positive can be undertaken to confront the spread of harmful phenomena.3 Yet, intellectuals are no longer powerless, at least not if they form groups and factions. That the intellectual workers, mostly students, take to the streets, organizing street riots or occupation strikes as only labourers did before; that writers’ congresses have become events of major importance in which political changes are invisibly attained – of these phenomena, in the past, there were rumours, but no real instances.4 A new element is emerging in society, a force that will have to be reckoned with from now on, a force that will be regretted by any politician who fails to use it. The students – those f...