Lecture script (do not cite), ÚFaR, FF UK Praha, Apr 6, 2016[1]
In the 50s of the 20th century, Patočka formulates his own philosophical position known as negative Platonism. In fact, the text he put into circulation in 1953 is just a part of this broader project. But in a sense, Patočka’s Platonism is actually an attempt to revitalize a certain kind of Socratism. I will attempt to demonstrate this during this lecture.
Platonic philosophies, old or new, are always metaphysical in their kernel. Everything that is temporal, historical, and singular is based upon the atemporal, which is supposed to be a subject of such metaphysics. Thus, Patočka says that he is trying to work on the “non-metaphysical transposition of Platonic topics.”
Let us explore the situation in which Patočka begins to philosophize. Metaphysics is in crisis. Positive knowledge, accumulated by humankind, does not leave room for metaphysical speculation. There is natural science in its place. Positivism encloses a man in his finitude and rejects the possibility of the transcendence of positively defined beings, which are given to our senses as material of possible knowledge. By the way, is not this standpoint, that is, to postulate a positive content of knowledge that is about to explain the wholeness of being, originally metaphysical?
So, positivism encapsulates a man in his finitude. In the philosophy of Patočka’s time, there was also a strong countermovement against positivism known as modern anthropological humanism. Humanism took the place of old metaphysics in an attempt to understand man’s relationship to the wholeness of being. Of course, it attempts to get rid of metaphysical schemas and theological persistencies. Obviously, Patočka does not deny that metaphysics with all its abstractions, essences, values in itself, etc. has fallen into antinomies. But again, as positivism is not aware of its metaphysical presuppositions, the same is true of anthropological humanism. Humanism still resides in metaphysical roots. Patočka’s enterprise is to find a middle way between positivism, that is aware of the human finitude, and anthrologism, that still connects a man with the wholeness of being. He attempts to preserve the constitutive features (finitude, the wholeness of being), but get rid of metaphysical suppositions.
How can this be done? Patočka answers: We have to return to the very roots of metaphysics, to the bottom, to Plato, or better said, to Platonic topics like idea and chórismos and re-think them again from the field where Plato stood himself. That is from the pre-metaphysical field, from the point of view from which Plato himself drew his inspiration: the character of Socrates. In Patočka’s view, Plato is not a consequential continuation of Socratism. He represents one of the versions of Socratism. This is why I stress that the project of negative Platonism is in fact an attempt to formulate a non-metaphysical version of Socratism.
What does this project actually look like? Let me highlight some of the most important constitutive parts and show how Patočka’s development of this question led him to the philosophy of history.
The constitutive part of Patočka’s project as a whole is the distinction between two modes of experience. On the one hand, there is experience that we have; it is bound to positively given beings, which gives legitimacy to our judgments. This is passive experience. On the other hand, we can also speak about experience which we ourselves are. And this is primary, ontological experience. Sensual, passive experience cannot make judgments about the ontological one. We are usually overwhelmed by passive experiences that hit us, so to speak: objectifiable experience. But the ontological experience, the experience not “of some object,” but the experience which we ourselves are, must be brought to the light. It is not seen by itself; it is not obvious. For Patočka, the experience which we ourselves are is freedom. I quote (my translation): “For the experience of freedom is a decisive ‘negative’ experiences which shows that all the content of passive experience is vanishing, evaporating—it’s just nothing … the ‘negative’ experience, which shows how originally non-real, fantastic, may be more important and more meaningful than just pure passive reality. It has power to give meaning to passive reality.”
The experience of meaning is, thanks to the distance from “real things,” an experience of the whole, of the wholeness of meaning, and thus, the experience of transcendence. It is an experience of negating the real world. First, it is the experience where Socratic dialectic leads us. For Socrates, it is not important to answer the question, but rather to dwell within the question and to understand what is going on, what the question is actually asking us, and what is it calling us to do. As Socrates shows, we are not becoming better because we have found the definition of goodness. Rather, we are becoming better by dwelling and insisting on the question and perpetually asking the question of “what is good?” It is a question that is important, leading us its way to what it points to, not the finite answers.
So far, I hope, we have some idea of Patočka’s initial philosophical project and the importance of negativity and how Patočka sees the role of negativity. I will now briefly show the negative role of Socratic dialectic, which is not the only feature of Socratism that Patočka sees in his attempt in the non-metaphysical transposition of the Platonic themes. The second role Patočka prescribes to Socratism is his open door to the philosophy of history.
The negation of all finite theses, distance from the fullness of being, which does not suppose anything in the empty space instead—these are pure acts of transcendence. These acts bring us to the experience which we ourselves are: that we are free. Without this kind of freedom, the freedom of negation, to get rid of the boundness to sensual experiences, the act of transcendence would not be possible. The Socratic standpoint refuses to put anything positive above this dynamic, above this movement, as metaphysics used to do. Socratism, according to Patočka, refuses to freeze the openness of existence in any eternal positivities, which is why Patočka can see Socrates as a discoverer of human historicity. I quote: “Transcensus is essentially acting. It is a turning of life toward its kernel that is not atemporal, but historical. That is why we must understand Socrates as a philosopher of historicity in the first place.” Here we are entering a new realm of Patočka’s philosophy: the philosophy of history.
Patočka’s late philosophy in 70s of the 20th century is substantially a reflection on Europe—its kernel a historical unity, about its beginning and end, and the upcoming post-European era. Patočka basically agrees with Husserl’s diagnostics of the crisis, as we found in Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences. The core of European success according to Husserl is rational insight into universality. European history is responsible life based on this insight. The crisis begins with the fact that rationality escaped its link to the original moral bound and shattered its link to the natural world of man. Patočka follows Husserl to the extent that he accepts the principle of the insight, but he rejects the teleological Husserlian schema of the continual growth of rationality. Patočka also no longer believes that the natural world is a universal invariant for man, as Husserl imagined. Instead, for Patočka, the natural world is historical with no transcendental anchor. Patočka says that the natural world is not a place for humankind’s continuous realization in growing rationality, but rather it is a space for the drama of man’s freedom.
Patočka, in his attempt at formulating what Europe is as a spiritual unit, puts forward a hypothesis of Europe’s beginning, that is about the inception of history as such. Of course, the idea that history has a beginning is a strange one. But is it not true that history is more than merely the accumulation of events of the past? History in its original meaning is the realization of what humankind is at its core—a historical being. But the historicity of man is not obviously given. The space for the realization of freedom needs to be mined, extracted somehow, eruate, to distinct. Patočka writes: “A man does not possess history from the beginning; he does not have history because he is historical being, but only in a certain formulation of what man as a historical being is, history appears, only in a certain conception of his historical task.” It is up to a man what he creates for himself, and whether he takes on the task that he is called to from his nature as a historical being. Thus, the philosophy of history is not a metaphysical construction above the past events, but it is the “explication of the history from within human historicity.”
In the resemblance of two modes of experience we met in the project of negative Platonism (passive experience and experience which we ourselves are), Patočka explicates historicity as a continuous movement of human existence between rising and decadence. I quote: “Historical insight is not at all knowledge about some ideas… history is absolutely not a matter of knowledge and its use in history… but it is about an insight into these fundamental moral relationships of rising and decadence, about the possibility of freedom and about its subversion.” As we see, history and freedom are fundamentally bound. Of course, history is not a growing consciousness about freedom, and the emergence of freedom does not mean its victory. Freedom is shattering our links to beings; it is a call to transcendence, to which says its “no.” Only transcendence allows for the possibility of freedom that is explicated throughout history.
On the more fundamental philosophical level, where we unfortunately cannot go far due to our given time, it is necessary to at least note that Patočka’s conception has deeper philosophical and phenomenological grounding; it is Patočka’s interpretation of Heidegger’s ontological difference that is the main difference between the being and beings (Sein und Seiende). I will sum this up very, very schematically: ontic phenomena are phenomena of something that is given, what is. On the contrary, ontological phenomena are not given at hand, are not appearing at the first moment. They are, of course, phenomena not of beings, but of the being of beings (das Sein des Seienden). Ontological phenomena speak about the character of the beingness. So, to understand Patočka, we need to see that the question of freedom here is understood ontologically. It is not a question about “free will” as the activity of the subject; this would be an ontic question. So, while the ontic realm is always here at hand, ontological phenomena need to be eruated, mined, extracted. Such is freedom; it needs human activity to achieve, it is not here by itself. In this task, we either take responsibility to extract what we have in essence as historical—this is what Patočka calls rising—or we forget about this task, its decadence or falleness, as Heidegger used to call it.
Hence, rising is only possible by shaking all worldly links. The thing is to let the ontological appear as a phenomenon. The ontological is really the rising of freedom. What kind of freedom? A negative kind. Freedom of stepping back in front of beings (vor dem Seienden zurücktreten). Patočka writes: “Freedom … is always freedom to let what there is to be as it is.” Or elsewhere: “The experience of freedom is exactly the experience of the insignificance of the reality of the world that is left to itself.” This explains why the experience which we ourselves are is fundamentally the experience of freedom.
The inception of history itself took place in the Greek polis. “History is and will be only insofar as there are people who do not want just to live, but are able to step back from bare life, willing to found and protect the rudiments of the community of mutual respect. What is founded by it … is freedom, i.e., possibilities that surpass bare life.” The conception of negativity plays a fundamental role in this account: “Western spirit and world history are bound in their beginning: they are … shaking of the purely accepted life and its certainties and finding new possibilities of life in the space of the shakiness.” The shaking is one of the important aspects where Patočka places the birth of history, the difference between pre-historical and historical eras. Pre-historical man, a man of myth, has the answer prior to having formulated any question. The situation is changed by the rise of problematicity. Problematicity is fed by negating our boundness to bare beings. In Patočka’s words, it is the apparition of the problematicity of the being (not the pre-established answers, as in mythology) that is the core of historicity. “History is nothing other than the shaken certitude of pre-given meaning,” writes Patočka.
Once again, we meet the character of Socrates at this very core of Patočka’s conception of the birth of history. He is the example of the shakiness, a living bearer of the problematicity of the naïve life. Socrates is not only the one who shakes the naïve beliefs of his fellow citizens. First, he is the character who keeps the openness for what shakes our beliefs. I quote: “Socrates renews what was at the origin [of Athens] by virtue of radical reflection. … He is virtually Teiresius, God’s messenger, who discloses the blindness of those who think they can remain naïve in the age of the rising questions.” Socrates, by way of a dialogue, tries to bring his fellow citizens to conversion, metanoésis, that is, the experience of the loss of our firsthand naïve meanings. Metanoein, conversion, the turnover of life, is part of Patočka’s distinction between pre-historical and historical eras. Shaking our beliefs and pre-given meaning is a conversion in life. It is the experience in which we are becoming free from the boundaries of bare beings, freeing ourselves from existential decadence. And we already know that this freedom to let our ontological kernel appear as is, fainesthai, is at the same time bringing the historicity of human beings into play.
Socrates initiates this experience. His solution is obviously negative. He does not offer any positive knowledge or program. The new Socratic approach does not solve our relationship to the wholeness of the world by bounding it to anything finite and positive. It is not merely about searching and finding the meaning of our lives and meaning of the things in the world, but rather the search itself is becoming the new meaning. This is the core of Socrates’ defense in the court, and this is the core what Patočka calls, with Plato, tés psychés epimelesthai, the care of the soul.
Patočka is convinced that we surpassed the limit of our European historical era and we are entering the new post-European age. The post-European age tends to overlook what stands in the origins of Europe: historicity. So in Patočka’s words, there is a major task left for us, which he sums up as follows: “The question is whether a historical man still wants to adhere to history.”
–mk
- This is a support text for the guest lecture delivered to Norwegian students of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, on April 6, 2016 on the request of the student society Praxis. It is not intented to be cited or used as a text source. All citations are just provisional translations from the Czech original; they have not been cross-referenced with their existing English translations. This lecture is based on my paper originaly published in Slovak, see KRIŠŠÁK, M.: Za iného Sókrata. Poznámka k Patočkovi. In: Filozofia 63(1): 63-74. The study in the Filozofia journal includes all citation references and used literature. The original paper can be found online here: http://www.klemens.sav.sk/fiusav/doc/filozofia/2008/1/63-74.pdf ↑