War and History: Jan Patocka, Martin Heidegger, and the Crisis of History

To read Jan Patocka, the tragically understudied Czech philosopher, one needs to peel back the accretion of post-Cold War rhetoric to fully understand him. Patocka sees modern being as located in technicity and war. The scope of history, far from being one of progress and end of history utopia as often portrayed, is actually regressive; not in the sense of a Rousseauian state of nature but in the sense that one must look back into pre-history and the fateful day when man left the home and entered the polis. Central, therefore, is the need to resurrect the idea of the good and for a morality preceding us and proceeding. Patocka, the signatory of Charter 77, became the Socrates of the twentieth century after his death at the hands of the communist police in Czechoslovakia. Asserting that human rights preceded the polis, the state, the totalitarian regime, had regressed from that original care. This “care for the soul” is what epitomizes Greek thought. Greek thinking was nature bound, rooting in a care for the soul (exhibited by the best of ancient Greek philosophy). Man gave up the care for the soul in a Faustian pact with having and consuming, the movement toward demagoguery, comfort, and the security state which totalitarian regimes promise in their many guises.

In this Icarian leap, historical (progressive) man rejects God and stands on the Nietzschean abyss in a constant war against all. The care of the soul is eliminated. Patocka writes:

The soul can either, in its care for itself, give itself fixed shape (feste Gebilde) or it can, neglecting itself and eschewing all education, abandon itself to the indefinite, to the lack of limits inherent in desire and pleasure.[1]

The sense of the soul is omnipresent and gives Patocka’s thought a religious or spiritual element. The care for the soul represents the Good of Plato’s immortality, or the telos of Aristotle. For the Romans “Law” became the jurisdiction of the soul, a way to enable empire. In the Christian era, the Good became holiness which led to redemption and salvation. This is the dilemma for Patocka, at once because he construes care for the soul as a particularly European thing and also that this care can take on different forms as seen in history.

The fall from the care for the soul in Nietzsche was into nihilism. Once man had abandoned God, the wasteland of eternity yearned where the struggle to create anew called man onward and upward. Others took note of the emerging crisis of nihilism. While Husserl had seen the lebenswelt (nature world) as invariant; that being exhibited a primordial constancy, Heidegger introduced the idea that the lebenswelt was, in fact, historicist. Being, or Dasein, is “epoch specific,” and has different concerns. This historicity means that our encounters of the world will vary according to the epoch. This affects our thinking. We don’t perceive like the Greeks. Yet the problem of the modern world view is that there is a lack of concern for consciousness, for care for the soul, something that preoccupied the Greek philosophical mind and carried forward by Christianity. This has resulted in the barbarism and nihilism of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. War is now the dominant culture of the twenty first century because nihilism demands struggle.

Patocka notes, “In all human uncovering of being, originating in history, there emerge ever new historical worlds.”[2] Here, Patocka follows Husserl’s phenomenology and concern with the meaning of history. In this conception of history, history has a teleological continuum in which meaning is passed down generation to generation.

Here phenomenological history assumes a very European structure and Husserl, Heidegger and Patocka are essentially Euro-centric thinkers although not in the sense of geography. The crisis of the modern world is rooted in the past. Modern man inhabits two worlds, the lebenswelt or natural world but also another scientific, technical world which pushes man further away from the care for the soul. The triumph of the scientific, or scientistic, world entails the loss of the soul but the advancement of the scientific world is understood post-Enlightenment as the movement of Progress. The dilemma posited by Patocka is the separation of the historical world from the pre-historical world; the historical world is the world borne of science, industry, technical transformation whereas the pre-historical world of nature cares for the soul. Patocka wants to look back at the point where consciousness was relegated and the scientific, rational, world took over. Like Husserl’s “epoche,” one needs to suspend the “scientific rational” fog and to see the clearing of Heidegger when the mist lifts and the pre-historic consciousness is exposed. The concept of historicity was unveiled by Hegel in the notion of the specificity of consciousness; in different epochs a specific consciousness occurs. In pre-history, which Patocka situates in the era of Platonic questioning, history then took on its problematic identity. Rather than “accepting” the gods, man begins to question them:

Once, however that question had been posed, humans set out on a long journey they had not travelled hitherto, a journey from which they might gain something but also decidedly lose a great deal. It is the journey of history.[3]

So, the question of freedom begins its gushing flow from the high mountain river of the gods and speeding through epochs—each one is defined. For the Chinese this means freedom for the one, the emperor; for the Greeks there are the few; and from the Enlightenment began the idea of the freedom of all men. Now the Hegelian dialectic of history sees this unfolding of history and freedom as an end of history. But entailed in Hegel’s philosophy of history is a view that posits the individual “in” history: man, acting in history, can transform history. Man, in history, uncovers his “being” by acting in the world. This occurrence, for Patocka means, “For living beyond oneself, for legend, for glory, for endurance in the memory of others.”[4]

For Heidegger this means the spirit of authenticity emerges. For Patocka, by contrast, it signifies the free and equal engagement with the world not dominated by toil but excellence, not by telos but by choice. It means that the polis must be about free and equal speech, by persuasion, not control. While for Husserl the individual is a “disinterested observer,” for Patocka the individual engulfs himself in the stream of history, partakes in the tragedy and the glory.

This view Patocka takes from Heidegger. This partaking in events impinges on our view of the present. Increasingly, humanity is removed from partaking as history goes on and on because of the uprooting power of technology. This uprootedness, this alienating factor, occurs as “technics” and the nature of globalized worlds and their administration—thereby removing the majority from “being in the world.” This view (which was predominant with the likes of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of Marxism) saw alienation in the structures of the world. Liberation is through new structures ostensibly administered by the liberals of the Frankfurt School. Yet this, for the left, is the “dialectic of enlightenment”[5] where the liberation of the Enlightenment produces the materialism, the technics, which strangles the world. This dialectic has also produced an administration, a state of terror, where liberal government erodes and demolishes being into the homogenous, rootless, a-historical creature we see in modernity. The political class exists therefore in a master/slave relationship with civil society. Modern bureaucracies work in an extractive quality and become hegemonic by monopolizing ideology erasing man’s historical identity and participation in that history. This represents the triumph of technical world over the world of nature, the triumph of the progressive view of History over “pre-history.”

For Patocka, then, “the result of the primordial shaking of accepted meaning is not a fall into meaninglessness but, on the contrary, the discovery of the possibility of achieving a freer, more demanding meaningfulness.”[6] After pre-history humans take hold of the reins from the gods (of nature). With this new responsibility, History starts. Here Patocka differs with Heidegger’s view of history so let us briefly understand their difference. For Heidegger, being now is “standing out” from existent meaning and awaiting the next revelation. This was put into action through Heidegger’s belief in a meaningfulness of National Socialism as the next revelation. For Patocka it is the polis, the political engagement, an active role. Plato’s thought established the conception of eternal forms so that the good, truth, etc., are fixed in eternity. The phenomenological, that of Heidegger and Patocka, sees meaning (being) morphing through history, through different epochs. It is mutable, to be acted on. Yet metaphysical thinking inhabits the most modern of epochs post-Enlightenment. These immutable modes occupy science, reason, Marxism, etc. They are largely invisible to us. They are abstract, mathematical—hence “scientific socialism,” a rhetorical terminology at once abstract and mathematical (or at least portending to be). This is the epoch we now occupy. The true world of forms, again. The “appearing” world has been subsumed. This scenario seems nihilistic; the absence of meaning within material and technological civilization. Being, according to Patocka “can never be explained by a thing.”

Therefore, the post-Christian era suffered anew another “shaking of meaning.” Humanity lives “with a sense of absolute meaninglessness, and if mathematical natural science…represents…the norm of what there is, then it is understandable that for all the expansion of the means with which to live, our life is not only empty but at the mercy of the forces of destruction.”[7] Science, as Husserl had outlined previously in “Crisis of the European Sciences”[8] became the Nazi project – a culmination of Enlightenment sanctification of reason, of science. It also became the Marxist project witnessed in the Soviet Union and China and other revolutionary countries. Patocka sees the modern era as a rapid accumulation of force and energy which is expunged in periodic wars. War is de rigeur for modernism. It is “military Keynesianism.” Yet Patocka does not succumb to nihilism. He attempts to find a way out through a questioning of the lack of meaning. From this position human beings are forced to search for meaning through the Socratic questioning of the polis. Human beings here are active and participate in history. The phenomenological method is the Heideggerian “being in the world,” but for Patocka it is not the “waiting for death” of Dasein but a more open response and the care for the soul. In Patocka’s view this care is not derived from outside, empirical, scientific modes. In this Patocka foresaw the dilemma of technology and rationality, its suffocating denial of the soul:

Modern ideologies objectify the open horizon and thus create an enclosing horizon that needs to be broken through, in order to find the true openness of the horizon of time.[9]

Yet Patocka’s vision was incomplete. Based on a European and Greek perspective, it couldn’t see the new globalized world we live in. The unfolding of the late twentieth century and twenty-first century have given credence to Patocka’s vision but also accentuated its crisis. That this rationalism has spiraled into meaninglessness is visible in a globalized commodification of the world where care for the soul becomes impracticable and due to the scarcity of resources, war takes on an even larger role. The objectifying of the horizon of the future is a particularly damning feature of modernity, in the omnipresent feature of Marxist logic which has permeated all aspects of an end of history horizon making. The liberal world, steeped in materialism and glued to the logic of the past cannot be open to new ideas. This is ironic given the liberal proclamation to be open to new ideas but increasingly stultifying any dissent and truly new ideas from permeating the halls of culture, education, media, and politics. The contradictions of materialism, ecology, consumerism produces a grand spectacle of decay. The “dialectic of enlightenment” shutters the world into darkness, where spaces for phenomenological partaking are closed off in an elite entrapment of freedom.

The US withdrawal from Afghanistan could result in the death of millions. This is now a side show to the war in Ukraine which has captured the media’s focus as well as the politics of spectacle throughout western countries. The common theme in the wars from Afghanistan to Haiti is the need for resources and strategic dominance. The US and UK agreement with Australia (AUKUS) to enable the manufacturing of nuclear submarines to combat China is echoed in Iran where nuclear proficiency beckons. In Yemen the fight is about the oil and gas in Marib and security for shipping lanes entering the Red Sea and Suez Canal.

The epoch we live in is the epochal polemos which Patocka predicted. Polemos was the Greek symbol of war, of night. Patocka contrasts day and night; the day is uncontested being, accepted life, which entails a care for the soul. It is night, polemos which we now have entered, a night is dominated by technics. Removed from the certainty of pre-history and its cyclical being and divine solace, man has accepted the problematic view of a world where meaning needs to be solved. With Christianity there was a return to a kind of solace but as the West lost faith in Christianity there then emerged the Nietzschean wasteland. The descent into nihilism means the Enlightenment era is over and Patocka’s care for the soul, the Platonic examined life, must be redrawn on the canvas of epochs amidst the sounds of shell fire. The shaken, the people thrown into the polemos of modernism must themselves reject and take back their past and future from elites, having and universalism. The spirit of Heraclitus, of grandeur, of authentic being is there waiting for a shepherd.

NOTES:

[1] Patočka Jan, Dodd, J., & Ricoeur, P. (1996). Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Open Court.

[2] Patočka Jan, Dodd, J., & Ricoeur, P. (1996). Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Open Court.

[3] Patočka Jan, Dodd, J., & Ricoeur, P. (1996). Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Open Court.

[4] Patočka Jan, Dodd, J., & Ricoeur, P. (1996). Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Open Court.

[5] Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T. W., Jephcott, E., & Noeri, G. S. (2020). Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press.

[6] Patočka Jan, Dodd, J., & Ricoeur, P. (1996). Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Open Court.

[7] Patočka Jan, Dodd, J., & Ricoeur, P. (1996). Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Open Court.

[8] Moran, D. (2012). Husserl’s crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An introduction. Cambridge University Press.

[9] Patočka Jan, Dodd, J., & Ricoeur, P. (1996). Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Open Court.

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