Patočka’s Heretical Solidarity of the Shaken
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 01 June 2025 is the 118th anniversary of the birth of Jan Patočka (01 June 1907 – 13 March 1977), who was born in Turnov, Bohemia, on this date in 1907.
Patočka signed the Charter 77 (Charta 77) document, named for the year in which it appeared, which called for the Czech communist government to respect the human rights accords to which it was a signatory. The communist government reacted badly to this initiative, mobilizing its secret police to harass the signers of Charter 77. Patočka ultimately became a spokesman for Charter 77 and, as a spokesman for Charter 77, Patočka was taken in for questioning by the Czech regime’s secret police, dying a few days after his interrogation at the age of 69.
Patočka had already been banned from teaching except for a brief period from 1968 to 1972. He gave lectures for what was called the underground university, which was an attempt to put into practice what Vaclav Havel had called the parallel polis—a parallel infrastructure intended as an alternative to the corrupt public institutions of officialdom. Few of Patočka’s works were published in his country during his lifetime. His books were circulated in manuscript among his students. He was, in a sense, a samizdat philosopher.
Patočka was influenced by phenomenology and wrote An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology (Úvod do Husserlovy fenomenologie, 1965; English translation 1996). Like J. Glenn Gray, whom I discussed in my previous episode, Patočka was also influenced by Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, so his phenomenology veers off in the existential direction. His first book, The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem (Přirozený svět jako filosofický problem; 1936), pursues a direction similar to that of American philosopher Marvin Farber, who studied with Husserl and also made an effort at rapprochement between phenomenology and naturalism. As a phenomenologist, Patočka’s work on philosophy of history continues the development of several themes of Husserl. In several episodes I have discussed Husserl and his influence in philosophy of history. Voegelin reacted against Husserl, while others such as Ludwig Landgrebe and David Carr, like Patočka, carried on the phenomenological philosophy of history of Husserl, each taking the phenomenological method in their own direction.
Patočka’s major work on philosophy of history was his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin, 1990; English translation 1996). This consists of six essays: First Essay: Reflections on Prehistory, Second Essay: The Beginning of History, Third Essay: Does History Have a Meaning?, Fourth Essay: Europe and the European Heritage until the End of the Nineteenth Century, Fifth Essay: Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why?, and Sixth Essay: Wars of the Twenfieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War. But this isn’t the whole of Patočka’s thought on history. There is also a collection of Patočka’s papers, The Selected Writings of Jan Patočka: Care for the Soul, which includes five papers on philosophy of history—one from 1935 and four from the 70s. His early book on Husserl, while not focused on history, does take up historical themes near the end, as did Husserl himself at the end of his work. This is arguably the book that is most closely aligned with Husserl’s conception of history, and in it we find Patočka writing the following:
“Even though the passivity of the natural world always remains the basis of all the conceptual arsenal, the fact is that in history there emerged, under certain circumstances, a new goal, a new idea, and with it a new possibility—the possibility of humans actually taking over their conceptual universe and accepting responsibility for it, that is, to subject all its meaningful relations to radical testing. That is a new level of clarity and rationality, which does presuppose clarity, transparence already in the preceding world, though one that is not sufficient unto itself and calls for a further, deeper, specifically a universal clarity.” (Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, pp. 164-165)
This is very much in the spirit of Husserl’s posthumously published The Crisis of European Sciences, one of the sources of which was a lecture he prepared for Prague in 1935, but which he ultimately didn’t deliver. The themes of universality and humanity taking responsibility for itself are continuous from Husserl. Universality, rationality, and responsibility were the edifying themes that were the thrust of Husserl’s vision for the future of humanity, but this aspirational vision stood out against a background of the crisis of European sciences, which, even as they pointed the way to greater things, were themselves beleaguered in the present. Husserl late in his life wrote in a manuscript that was included as an appendix to The Crisis of European Sciences in which he began: “PHILOSOPHY AS SCIENCE, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous, science—the dream is over.” Is this an admission of defeat? Not exactly, but it is an admission that philosophy needs to shift gears to get a handle on what’s going on.
In my episode on J. Glenn Gray I talked about the pearl-clutching over modernity that has characterized philosophy since the late nineteenth century. This was a theme the Nietzsche arguably introduced into philosophy when he warned about nihilism. Many philosophers who came to focus on crisis, as Husserl himself did, were similarly issuing a warning about nihilism. Patočka was part of this tradition, drawing more on Husserl and Heidegger than on Nietzsche, but still there’s a continuity of interests among those who foresaw the disasters of the twentieth century, like Nietzsche, and those who lived through them, like Patočka.
In his later works, when Patočka is speaking more in his own voice, he doesn’t abandon the aspirational Husserlian themes he embraced in his early work on phenomenology, but we could say that he preempts this line of thought by delving more deeply into history, trying to get out in front of it, or behind it, depending on your perspective. Husserl had implied that there was a problem sometime early in the history of Western civilization that only came to a head much later in the crisis that he discusses, but leaves the source of the problem ambiguous. Glenn Gray, following Heidegger, saw the whole history of Western civilization converging on exploitation and destruction. Patočka takes up the theme of Western civilization that these other thinkers grappled with and develops it in his own distinctive way, which he characterizes as heresy.
What was Patočka’s historical heresy in his heretic essays on philosophy of history? In the English translation of Paul Ricoeur’s Preface to the French Edition of Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, Ricoeur identifies it as such: “The heresy lies precisely in the new definition of the natural world as the world of prehistory, which in turn is a consequence of the characterization of history as problematic.” Ricoeur calls this: “…a point of rupture not only with vulgar Marxism—that is too obvious—but, more decisively and dramatically, with the views of Husserl and Heidegger about history.” It’s somewhat unusual for philosophers of history to discuss prehistory, and I’ve tried to emphasize this in my episodes on those with a primarily naturalistic conception of history, as with Leonard Woolley, Hans Zinsser, William MacNeill, V. Gordon Childe, and others, who sought to expand history beyond its conventional scope, including prehistory along with conventional history.
Patočka begins his heretical essays with an essay on prehistory, but it’s not a discussion of prehistory like you’d find in any naturalistic thinker, since he is coming from a background of phenomenology and transcendental philosophy. The natural world with which Patočka begins is the world as given to us in transcendental philosophy. The natural world as it might be understood in, for example, analytical philosophy, he rejects as, “…the ‘artificial’ view of modern mechanistic (meta)physics.” Patočka shows us that he’s aware of the views of analytical philosophy—for example, he cites Bertrand Russell’s neutral monism—but that’s not how he approaches what he calls the natural world as a philosophical problem. The naturalism of analytical philosophy, he says, “…led to hypothetical constructs so complex that it was virtually impossible to recognize the ‘natural world’.” He’s not wrong, and this has proved to be a stumbling block. What is “natural” for Patočka is, “…the world of ‘pure experience,’ of its ‘components’ and of the relations that bring such elements into contact with one another, and so on…” And that,
“…in place of little islands of consciousness in a sea of a first naturally, then natural-scientifically conceived objectivity, we came to think of an ocean of intersubjectivity surrounding the continent of the objective world which served to mediate between individual transcendental ‘streams’ of experience.”
He discusses Husserl and Heidegger for most of his essay on prehistory, considering Husserl’s Lebenswelt, or lifeworld, and Heidegger on Being, but he does eventually converge on prehistory by incrementally backing up from the present and reaching deeper into history. He cites Fustel de Coulanges on the patrician households of antiquity as the basis of the state in Greece and the Roman republic. Then he backs up to a time before classical antiquity, narrowly speaking, and discusses ancient mythology and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Finally, near the end of the essay on prehistory, he explicitly addresses prehistory:
“…this tradition attests to a prehistorical world of which we can speak as ‘natural’ in the sense just described. It is natural in the sense of accepting the community of all it contains as something simply given, something that simply manifests itself. It is a community of gods and mortals, the shared lifespace of those dependent on the nourishing earth and the heavenly lights and of those who are not so dependent and who thus constitute the most wondrous mystery of this world. They are not dependent-yet their mode of being is such that a community with humans can be an advantage to them since what humans do ultimately for the sake of their own survival, the Sisyphian toil in service of self-devouring life, is the work of the gods, a participation in preserving the world order, linking what is above with what is below, earth and the lights, the visibly created with the realm of darkness.”
Patočka’s way to prehistory is very different from what we’d find in any straight-forwardly naturalistic philosopher, but, as I said earlier, Patočka, like Marvin Farber, attempted a synthesis of transcendental philosophy with naturalism, and the result is bound to look different from naturalism itself without the transcendental element in the mix. We could say that it’s a Quixotic quest to attempt to reconcile naturalism and transcendentalism, but this is what Patočka is doing, albeit in his own way. Patočka’s theme is the transition from ahistorical peoples to history proper, and this transition is partly an historical process that can be described in naturalistic terms, but it’s also an historical process that can be described in transcendental terms.
After the six essays of the book, Patočka appended a kind of commentary on his own work, called the author’s gloss, and in his gloss he characterizes the transition from the prehistoric to the historic as follows:
“Prehistoric humanity is a transition: it is close on the one hand to nonhistorical life in the poverty of its living only to live, on the other hand it anticipates the threshold of a new, deeper but also more demanding and more tragic mode of living. Let us consider whether the threshold of ‘living just to live’ is not crossed when prophets arise, risking their life for a religious rebirth, dedicating it to a life-absorbing asceticism, protesting against the powerful and the violent. There are prophets who with full insight work out a firm norm of life not for individuals as exceptions but rather for entire extended communities, that is, a renewal of social life which we would ordinarily unhesitantly identify as historical.”
I said earlier that Patočka’s book An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology was the closest to Husserl’s position, in which he had expressed universal clarity as an ideal. Patočka eventually comes to question universalism, as when he writes: “An existentially oriented phenomenology is marked not only by a subjective, that is, nonobjective principle, but also by giving up any claim to universal validity.” (p. 144) Before this he had offered an explanation of how the former ideal of universality had become tainted:
“…expanding western Europe lacks any universal bond, any universal idea which could be embodied in a concrete and effective bonding institution and authority: the primacy of having over being excludes unity and universality while the attempts to replace them with power prove vain.”
But universality, he argues, has taken on a new form:
“…in science itself, in mathematics foremost, there is a spirit of technological domination emerging, a universality of a wholly different type than the ancient universality of content and modeling: a formalizing universality imperceptibly shifting to an emphasis on product over content, on mastery rather than understanding.”
We can compare this imperceptible shift from understanding to mastery as being part and parcel of the fall of universality from authentically bonding institutions to the mere exercise of power. Patočka’s treatment of this makes it clear that something went wrong, but at the same time he recognized that new forces were released in history, especially in the form of technology. The technological manifestation of modernity, which I discussed in my episode on Glenn Gray, Heidegger and Gray largely rejected, while Filippo Marinetti and Ernst Jünger embraced and celebrated as a new technological epoch of history. Patočka saw that Jünger had grasped something essential about industrialized warfare, and he wanted to recognize this for what it was, rather than merely rejecting it without understanding this new force in history:
“War is simultaneously the greatest undertaking of industrial civilization, both product and instrument of total mobilization (as Ernst Jünger rightly saw), and a release of orgiastic potentials which could not afford such extreme of intoxication with destruction under any other circumstances. Already at the dawn of modernity, at the time of the wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that kind of cruelty and orgiasm emerged.” (Heretical Essays, 114)
In connection with this passage, Patočka cites Jünger’s “Total Mobilization” essay, which I’ve previously mentioned was a significant influence on Heidegger. Patočka also cited Junger’s War as Inner Experience, and he doesn’t flinch at Junger’s strongest formulations, which he gives their full measure. Of the First World War Patočka says:
“The first world war is the decisive event in the history of the twentieth century. It determined its entire character. It was this war that demonstrated that the transformation of the world into a laboratory for releasing reserves of energy accumulated over billions of years can be achieved only by means of wars. Thus it represented a definitive breakthrough of the conception of being that was born in the sixteenth century with the rise of mechanical natural science.”
He even characterizes the front experience of soldiers during the First World War as a form of absolute freedom:
“This absolute freedom is the understanding that here something has already been achieved, something that is not the means to anything else, a stepping stone to . . . , but rather something above and beyond which there can be nothing.”
Strange as it seems, Patočka is surprisingly close to Jünger in seeing that a new order has been brought into being by industrialized warfare (in my episode on Jünger I called it a boundary condition), and this, I think, is far more heretical that the heresy of prehistory that Ricoeur identified. In his detour through the natural world as a philosophical problem and prehistory as the presupposition of history, even as Patočka moves away from explicitly Husserlian themes of rationality and universality, focusing more on openness and freedom, and even recognizing this openness and freedom in the orgiastic excesses of industrialized warfare, at the same time he recurs to fundamental phenomenological themes. For example, he writes:
“The idea that history is the domain of acting in freedom and that freedom consists in grasping the possibility of letting things be what they are, letting them reveal themselves, to present themselves, in the willingness to be the ground of their manifestation, ready for the shaking of the familiar and ‘given’ certainties so that what truly is can become manifest.”
This is a displacement of Husserl’s call to attend to the things themselves into the moral realm of human thought and action. It is in freedom that things reveal themselves for what they are. In the previous quote Patočka mentions the “shaking of the familiar,” and “shaking” was a metaphor he came to use more broadly. He says, “No sooner do humans confront the shaken world than they are not only grasped by its forces but also mobilized for a new battle.” (pp. 126-127) He eventually came to see humanity as what he called the solidarity of the shaken. This emerges in the wake of the front-line experience, once known to only a few soldiers, which becomes the condition of modern society, lived by all. The lived experience of combat that I discussed in relation to Glenn Gray becomes universalized as the human condition. The front line experience, Patočka says, is… “…the experience of all individuals projected individually each to their summit from which they cannot but retreat back to everydayness where they will inevitably be seized again by war…” We are delivered from this unsustainable intensity by the solidarity of the shaken:
“The means by which this state is overcome is the solidarity of the shaken; the solidarity of those who are capable of understanding what life and death are all about, and so what history is about. That history is the conflict of mere life, barren and chained by fear, with life at the peak, life that does not plan for the ordinary days of a future but sees clearly that the everyday, its life and its ‘peace,’ have an end.”
The themes of the shaken, of freedom, and letting the things themselves reveal themselves all come together in the following passage from the author’s gloss that I mentioned earlier:
“The idea that history is the domain of acting in freedom and that freedom consists in grasping the possibility of letting things be what they are, letting them reveal themselves, to present themselves, in the willingness to be the ground of their manifestation, ready for the shaking of the familiar and ‘given’ certainties so that what truly is can become manifest.”
Video Presentation
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Jan_Pato%C4%8Dka:e
https://rumble.com/v6u75vd-patokas-heretical-solidarity-of-the-shaken.html