Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History
Jan Patočka
Open Court, 1996

"[P]recisely the circumstance that the polis arises and sustains itself amid internal and external struggles, that is is *inter arma* that it finds its meaning and that long-sought word of Hellenic life, is characteristic for this new formation and new form of life. Here, in very specific conflicts on a modest territory and with minimal material means is born not only the Western world and its spirit but, perhaps, world history as such. The Western spirit and world history are bound together in their origins: it is the spirit of free meaning bestowal, it is the shaking [PSA: a.k.a. unsettling] of life as simply accepted with all its certainties and at the same time the origin of new possibilities of life in that shaken situation, that is, of philosophy. Since, however, philosophy and the spirit of the polis are closely linked so that the spirit of the polis survives ultimately always in the form of philosophy, this particular event, the emergence of the polis, has a universal significance. We can find evidence of the link between philosophy and the spirit of the polis among the protophilosophers themselves. The spirit of the polis is a spirit of unity in conflict, in battle. One cannot be a citizen - polites - except in a community of some against others, and the conflict itself gives rise to the tension, the tenor of the life of the polis, the shape of the space of freedom that citizens both offer and deny each other - offering themselves in seeking support and overcoming resistance.... Yet the power generated by strife is no blind force. The power that arises from strife is a power that knows and sees: only in this invigorating strife is there life that truly sees into the nature of things - *to phronein*. Thus phronesis, understanding, by the very nature of things, cannot but be at once common and conflicted." (PATOCKA-1996, pp. 41-42)

"In accepting responsibility for themselves and others humans implicitly pose the question of meaning in a new and different way. They are no longer content with the bondage of life to itself, with subsistence as life's content and service in the sweat of their brow as the lot of beings fated to episodicity and subordination. Thus 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. -- This is then linked to that explicit awe [PSA: thauma] before being as a whole, the awe-ful realization that the totality of being *is*, which, according to ancient philosophers, is really the inmost pathos and origin of philosophy. Humans who do not remain in the humility of passively accepted meaning cannot be content with their fated lot and fundamentally linked with that is is also the new possibility of relating to being and meaning which consists not in a predetermined, preaccepted answer but in questioning, and that precisely is philosophy." (PATOCKA-1996, pp. 62-63)

"[T]hat explicit questioning which is philosophy is by far more risky than the submerging conjecture which is myth. It involves greater risk because just as action is an initiative that yields itself the moment it becomes explicit -- it [PSA: i.e., philosophy] puts itself in the hands of an unending contest of insights which lead the original intenction of those who think into the unsuspected and the unforeseen. It is more full of risk because it draws all of life, both individual and social, into the region of the transformation of meaning, a region where it must wholly transform itself in its structure because it is transformed in its meaning. That precisely, and naught else, is what history means. Philosophy did not shake the modest meaning of the small, vital rhythm, dictated by the fascination with corporeal life and its bondage to itself, in order to impoverish humans but rather with the will to enrich them. Humans were to break free of the accepted meaning in order to rise to what had so far given meaning to the universe and to themselves as well as to other dependencies, to plants and animals, and what hitherto determined the meaning of things bbecause it was unperishable and so divine. Philosophy offered a new vision of the imperishable - not merely the permanence, immortality, perenniality proper to the gods, but eternity." (PATOCKA-1996, p. 64)

"[T]he heritage of the Roman Empire itself carries on another heritage, one which Roman and Hellenistic heritages had taken over from the Greek polis and which culminates in the striving for a community of a perceived truth and justice as the highest moral idea of ancient philosophy. This idea, though, matured in reflection into the greatness and the failure of the polis and the global significance and misery of the Greeks in their characteristic social framework in which they defied mere quantitative superiority only toe discredit and destroy both themselves and this framework with distrust, envy, and fear of being surpassed and obscured. The destiny of the truthful and the just, of those who opt for life in truth, renders the idea of such a new human community indispensible: only in such a community of truth will they be capable of living without perishing in a conflict with reality. The world thus wallows in evil and in passing judgment over the just, condemns itself. What, though, makes humans just and truthful is their care for their soul. Care for the soul is the bequest of ancient Greek philosophy. Care for the soul means that truth is something not given once and for all, nor merely a matter of observing and acknowledging the observed, but rather a lifelong inquiry, a self-controlling, self-unifying intellectual and vital practice. Greek thought distilled the care for the soul in two forms: we care for the soul so it could undertake its spiritual journey through the world, the eternity of the cosmos, in complete purity and undistorted sight and so for at least a brief while achieve the mode of existing proper to the gods (Democritus, later Aristotle), or, conversely, we think and learn to render our soul into that firm crystal of being, an untarnished steel crystal in the view of eternity, which represents one of the possibilities of the being which bears within it the source of movement, of deciding its being or nonbeing, that is, dissolution in the uncertainty of instinct and unclarified tradition (Plato)." (PATOCKA-1996, pp. 81-82)

"The great turning point in the life of western Europe appears to be the sixteenth century. From that time on another motif comes to the fore, opposing the motif of the care of the soul and coming to dominate one area after another, politics, economics, faith, and science, transforming them in a new style. Not a care for the soul, the care to be, but rather the care to have, care for the external world and its conquest, becomes the dominant concern." (PATOCKA-1996, p. 83)

"We might suppose that the special character of ancient society favored the special character of ancient philosophy in its classical phase. Plato's thought, decisive for the ontological character of this philosophy as a metaphysics, is, according to Eugen Fink's apt description, an attempt to think light without shadow (in the last instance, to be sure, because there can be no doubt about the duality of reason and necessity in the world of fact as Plato sees it). That means that philosophy can dedicate itself to its inmost life's task, that of being the nonecstatic, nonorgiastic counterpart and inmost resolution of the problem posed by everydayness, regardless of the structure of the society - reason, understanding, has here only this function and can find its fulfillment in it since in living reality there is so much that is nonordinary that there need be no fear that the pathos of the everyday might overwhelm and choke out its opposite. This ontology is for that reason a philosophy of the soul which, by perceiving that authentic, transcendent being differs from our reality of mere transient, changing opinion by virtue of its character of eternally immovable being, first gains its own unitary core, capable of resisting the pressure of various questions and problems which would otherwise drive the soul hither and yon. Unity is the essence of the soul, achieved by thought, an inner dialogue, a dialectic which is the proper method of insight and the essence of reason. That is why philosophy must be at the same time the care for the soul (epimeleia tēs psuchēs), ontology and theology - and all that in the care for the polis, for the optimal state. It retains this structure even when the nature of its proper object shifts from idea to energeia (Aristotle) and transcendence shifts from the world of ideas to god or gods." (PATOCKA-1996, pp. 103-104)

"We can speak of freedom by contrast only with an upheaval aimed at the former meaning of life as a whole, creating a new "for the sake of," a new hou heneka, because the problematic [PSA: uncertain, precarious] nature, the question of the "natural" meaning has confronted us clearly. It is no longer a matter of sensing or preaching or prophesying, nor a reliance on the "unshakeable" faith; it is a matter of seeing, and that seeing is not a matter of simply looking at something we can keep at a distance and merely obseve. While previous meaning is shaken and understood as the "small meaning," there simultaneously emerges a thrust for a new meaning, with an evident urgency. The evidence is not an evidence of seeing, of looking. It is a leap into new meaning which is realized in the clarity of the problematic situation. If Socrates comes to the conclusion that courage means knowing what to fear and what not to fear, then it is intellectualistically expressed, but at the same time it expresses the meaning of life problematized as it has never been in religious experience. It is meaning in the mode of questioning because the question is built up on an awareness to the problematic nature of meaning. Therefore freedom, which is always a freedom to let what is be what and how it is, but ever anew and to the greatest depth, is a seeing freedom, not merely sensing and most of all not believing, proclaiming, and insisting." (PATOCKA-1996, p. 142)

"However, philosophy in this form - as the radical question of meaning based on the shaking of the naive, directly accepted meaning of life, which it follows by the question of truth and drives this problematic nature even further - developed only along western lines." (PATOCKA-1996, p. 143)

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