Jan Patočka

Jan Patočka (; 1 June 1907 – 13 March 1977) was a Czech philosopher. Having studied in Prague, Paris, Berlin, and Freiburg, he was one of the last pupils of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In Freiburg he also developed a lifelong philosophical friendship with Husserl's assistant Eugen Fink. Patočka worked in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for almost his entire career, but never joined the Communist Party and was affected by persecution, which ended in his death as a dissident spokesperson of Charter 77.

Patočka was a prolific writer and lecturer with a wide range of reference, contributing much to existential phenomenology as well as the interpretation of Czech culture and European culture in general. From his Czech collected works, some of the most notable have been translated to English and other major languages. These include the late works ''Plato and Europe'' (1973) and ''Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History'' (1975), in which Patočka developed a philosophy of history identifying the Socratic- Platonic theme of the care of the soul as the basis of "Europe".

Early life

Patočka attended Jan Neruda Grammar School.

In 1936 he completed his habilitation with a thesis entitled '' Přirozený svět jako filosofický problém '' (The natural world as a philosophical problem), the first systematic phenomenological study in the Czech language, which was correspondingly influential on Czech philosophy. In 1937, Patočka took over the post of editor-in-chief of the philosophical journal '' Česká mysl '' (The Czech Spirit). In 1938 he became a member of the Institut International de Philosophie.

Works

His works mainly dealt with the problem of the original, given world (''Lebenswelt''), its structure and the human position in it. He tried to develop this Husserlian concept under the influence of some core Heideggerian themes (e.g. historicity, technicity, etc.) On the other hand, he also criticised Heideggerian philosophy for not dealing sufficiently with the basic structures of being-in-the-world, which are not truth-revealing activities (this led him to an appreciation of the work of Hannah Arendt). From this standpoint he formulated his own original theory of "three movements of human existence": 1) ''receiving'', 2) ''reproduction'', 3) ''transcendence''. He also translated many of Hegel's and Schelling's works into Czech. In his lifetime, Patočka published in Czech, German, and French.

Apart from his writing on the problem of the ''Lebenswelt'', he wrote interpretations of Presocratic and classical Greek philosophy and several longer essays on the history of Greek ideas in the formation of our concept of Europe. Patočka increasingly focused on the idea of Europe during the 1970s. As he was banned from teaching (see below), he held clandestine lectures in his private apartment on the Greek thought in general and on Plato in particular in the late 70s. These clandestine lectures are collectively known as ''Plato and Europe'', and they are published under the same title in English. He also entered into discussions about modern Czech philosophy, art, history and politics. He was an esteemed scholar of Czech thinkers such as Komensky (b.1592) (also known as Comenius) and Masaryk (b.1850). In 1971, he has published a small treatise on Comenius in German titled ''Die Philosophy der Erziehung des J.A. Comenius (Comenius's Philosophy of Education).'' In 1977, his work on Masaryk culminated in 'Two Studies on Masaryk, which was initially a privately circulated typescript.

Patočka's ''Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History'' is analyzed at length and with much care in Jacques Derrida's important book ''The Gift of Death.'' Derrida was the most recent person who wrote or conversed with Patočka's thought; Paul Ricoeur and Roman Jakobson

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