During the 1970s, the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocka devoted most of his philosophical work to a meditation on the question of Europe. In Patocka's thought, reflection about Europe is intrinsically connected to the problem of responsibility, and thus to the notion of care of the soul that could be understood as the philosophical crystallization of the movement of responsibility bringing about the original political life.
According to Patocka, in the care of the soul, we find the spiritual foundation of Europe. More precisely, Europe inherits care of the soul, transmitting its spiritual telos in its historical development. As we learn first of all by reading the collection of lectures and conversations from 1973 published in Plato and Europe, the flow of Europe's history is driven, in Patocka's view, by some catastrophic events that give impulse to the care of the soul. On the other hand, they wear it out, leaving the scar of a spiritual crisis that leads to the definitive consumption of the European spiritual foundation and, by consequence, to the reshaping of Europe - following the two World Wars - as post-Europe, as a Europe deprived of its peculiar spiritual trait.
Martin Cajthaml's Europe and the care of the soul deserves great credit for offering a detailed investigation of the origin and the development of both the thematization of care of the soul and the reflection on the question of Europe in Jan Patocka's thought.
The book stands out for its deep historical and philological work, particularly for the analytical reading of some of Patocka's unpublished manuscripts conserved at the Jan Patocka Archive of Prague. Therefore, the volume offers non Czech-reading scholars the possibility to retrace the whole evolution of Patocka's analysis of the two questions that give the book its title. For this reason, this work could be considered to be the deepest research to date on Patocka's idea on Europe and, consequently, as the necessary starting point of any new research project or didactic activity devoted to this subject.
The author traces a philosophical journey that starts from the thematization of Patocka's investigation of the essence and truthfulness of human existence: this path passes through the analysis of the care of the soul as the spiritual foundation of Europe and culminates in the study of Patocka's reflection of European crisis.
In the first chapter of his work, entitled The Internal Unity of Patocka's Thought, Cajithaml individuates and analyses the essential core of all the philosophical production offered by the Czech philosopher. While Patocka's thought does not synthesize itself as a "continually developed systematic project", it is: ultimately united by one fundamental theme [... ) This theme is the essence and the truthfulness of human existence. The theme includes two basic questions that, taken by themselves, do not have the same formal object. Still [...] in the context of Patocka's articulation of the theme, the answer to the first is by the same token the answer to the second. (8)
More precisely, Cajthaml's purpose is showing that, in Patocka's thought, the question regarding the essence of man and that concerning the truthfulness of human existence have the same answer.
This conviction is justified, according to the author, by the fact that Patocka "thinks that man is a being that, by his very nature, is 'called' to realize his true existence (in both moral and ontological senses of the term) [... ]. "The author argues that all the work of the Czech philosopher individuates the essence - and by consequence the truthfulness - of human existence in the fight against objectivity, namely against objectification, that in Patocka's view coincides with the decadence of human being. Thus the crucial task of the Patockian human existence is that of transcending objectivity.
Transcending is directed by the "knowledge" of what true reality is not by what is not positive, because it is something merely given, only instinctive, sheer routine, or habit. (23)
According to Cajthaml, in Patocka's philosophy we can understand this act of transcending as the essence or, in other words, as human nature, which, as Cajthaml posits, presents "some predermined features" (17).
The essential human tendency toward transcending objectivity finds its original expression in the central core of Socratic-Platonic ethics, the care for the soul. In fact, in Patocka's interpretation, "the Socratic care of the soul does not derive its positivity from the cognition of the human good as some transcendent entity. Rather, it derives its positivity from the incessant process of the exclusion of the unworthy candidates for the human good [... ]." Well, as understood by the Czech philosopher, care for the soul works by transcending the objectivity of the idea of good as a transcendent entity. Thus, following Cajthmal's schema, we could say that Patocka's thought establishes a coincidence between the essence/truthfulness of human existence and the care for the soul.
In his late work from the 1970s, Patocka considers the Socratic-Platonic care of the soul as the spiritual origin of Europe, as its moral foundation. As the spiritual starting point of European history, the ethical gesture of care of the soul shaped itself as the spiritual heritage crossing the entire course of European history:
First, Europe, in the spiritual sense, was born from the Socratic-Platonic care of the soul.
Second, the care of the soul underwent two basic changes in the course of two great historical catastrophes. After the decline of the Greek polis, the Socratic-Platonic form of the care of the soul was transformed into the Stoic care of the soul. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Stoic form of the care of the soul was gradually transformed into the Christian one - the spiritual fundament of Europe in the proper sense.
Third, Europe came into a profound spiritual crisis at the beginning of Modernity as European man started to abandon the spiritual style marked by the care of the soul. (67)
As Cajthmal explains well in the first part of the third chapter, the Modern age converts the care of the soul into a mere care to have, a care to dominate the world (see pp. 69-70), inaugurating the life of homo oeconomicus who will be the most relevant protagonist of the era of technology eventually resulting in the two World Wars. In fact, in the last period of his work, Patocka, following Heidegger's lead, argues that the techno-power, consolidated after the second World War, aims at reducing the existence of human being to the mere economic approach which points to extraction and exploitation all the possible means and forces offered by world. In this way the contemporary epoch of technology fulfils what was inaugurated by Modernity: it risks definitely dampening the care of the soul throwing Europe - and the world - into a condition of spiritual and political crisis which Patocka defines as the Post-European Age.
The ultimate cause of both basic features of the post war world [...] is, according to Patocka, the modern conception of absolute and self-enclosed spirit (subject). The same conception is thus also the ultimate cause of the new global situation, of the coexistence of political, demographic, and economic colossi equipped by European technology and organization having, however, different spiritual and cultural backgrounds, which raises the likelihood of mutual misunderstanding, tension and conflict. (110)
This is the reason why, in Patocka's view, the sole possible exit from the danger of the definitive collapse of European spirituality lies in opposition to the self-enclosed subject of technopower, a new subject which, as it is posited in an essay from the 1970s devoted to Comenius, is characterized by the open soul. In other words, the open soul serves as an antidote against the spiritual crisis working at the same time as "the common spiritual denominator for the new political and economic colossi newly equipped by European technology and organization".
By way of conclusion, Cajthml's work must be read and appreciated for its solid philological and historical structure. Nonetheless, the conceptual structure of the book seems to be centred on a natural law approach to Patocka's ethics and political philosophy that - while it is an interesting and original interpretation - does not find a firm justification in the work produced by the Czech philosopher. As shown above, the author establishes an equivalence between the transcending movement of Patockian human existence and the concept of the essence, namely the nature of human being which, as such, presents predetermined features.
One can see an insolvable incompatibility between the idea of "human nature" and the philosophical gesture of transcending objectivity. In fact, Cajthaml recognizes that Patocka "would be hesitant" to use the traditional concept of human nature (22). Actually, in Patocka's philosophy, the notion of human nature is understandable as one of those metaphysical structures shaken by the action of transcending objectivity.
Martin Cajthaml offers a good argument when, referring to Patocka's Eternity and Historicity, he speaks about predetermined features of human essence/nature that give themselves "only negatively" as empty structures looking for their historical fulfilment by positive contents. Nevertheless, in the light of Patocka's phenomenological background, 1 would rather understand these negatively given features of human beings not as predetermined characters but, speaking with Heidegger, as the existentials constituting the ontological structure of Dasein. As such, the existentials constitute and distinguish essentially human existence without pre-existing human existence, but rather profiling and manifesting themselves in the temporal-historical coming-to-pass (Geschehen) of human existence.
Riccardo Paparusso
Fontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas - Angelicum, Rome, Italy
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