Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patocka (Reframing the Boundaries: Thinking the Political) 9781538179222, 9781538179239, 1538179229

Table of contents :
Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: The Idea of Europe and the Ideal of Reason
Chapter 2: A Philosophical Sketch of the Contemporary Situation
Chapter 3: Rational Politics, the Liberal Consensus, and the Agonistic Critique
Chapter 4: Husserl’s Europe as a Philosophical Project
Chapter 5: Husserl’s Phenomenological Reestablishment of the Ideal
Chapter 6: Patočka’s Europe as a Political Project
Chapter 7: Problematicity: From a Religious to a Phenomenological Conception
Chapter 8: Problematicity, Politics, and Europe
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka

REFRAMING THE BOUNDARIES: THINKING THE POLITICAL Series editors: Alison Assiter and Evert van der Zweerde This series aims to mine the rich resources of philosophers in the “continental” tradition for their contributions to thinking the political. It fills a gap in the literature by suggesting that the work of a wider range of philosophers than those normally associated with this sphere of work can be of relevance to the political. Titles in the Series Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy, Michael O’Neill Burns Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality, Anya Topolski The Risk of Freedom: Ethics, Phenomenology and Politics in Jan Patocka, Francesco Tava, translated by Jane Ledlie Nietzsche’s Death of God and Italian Philosophy, Emilio Carlo Corriero, translated by Vanessa Di Stefano Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics and the Political, Andrey Makarychev and Alexandra Yatsyk Axel Honneth: Reconceiving Social Philosophy, Dagmar Wilhelm Sartre, Imagination and Dialectical Reason: Creating Society as a Work of Art, Austin Hayden Smidt Ontologies of Sex: Philosophy in Sexual Politics, Zeynep Direk Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness: Arendt, Derrida and “Care for the World,” Christopher Peys Transforming Politics with Merleau-Ponty: Thinking beyond the State, edited by Jérôme Melançon Derrida and Foucault: Philosophy, Politics, and Polemics, Paul Rekret Foucault and Governmentality: Living to Work in the Age of Control, Benda Hofmeyr Boris Hessen and Philosophy: The Socioeconomic Roots of Classical and Modern Physics, Sean Winkle Education for Political Life: Critique, Theory, and Practice in Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge, Iaan Reynolds Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka, Lorenzo Girardi

Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka Lorenzo Girardi

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Girardi, Lorenzo, author. Title: Europe, phenomenology, and politics in Husserl and Patocka / Lorenzo Girardi. Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, [2023] | Series: Reframing the boundaries: thinking the political | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Lorenzo Girardi brings together themes of Europe, phenomenology and politics to reveal the relevance of Edmund Husserl and Jan Patočka's works for contemporary political issues. Addressing the concept of crisis in Europe, this book presents an agonistic conception of liberal democracy based on Patočka's phenomenological concept of problematicity”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023035451 (print) | LCCN 2023035452 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538179222 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538179239 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Husserl, Edmund, 1859-1938. | Patočka, Jan, 1907-1977. | Political science—Europe—Philosophy. | Phenomenology—Political aspects. | Christianity— Europe—History—19th century. | Christianity—Europe—History—20th century. | Europe—Politics and government—History—19th century. | Europe—Politics and government—History—20th century. Classification: LCC JA84.E9 G57 2023  (print) | LCC JA84.E9  (ebook) | DDC 940.2/8—dc23/eng/20230821 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035451 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035452 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Abbreviations xix Chapter 1: The Idea of Europe and the Ideal of Reason



Chapter 2: A Philosophical Sketch of the Contemporary Situation

1

17

Chapter 3: Rational Politics, the Liberal Consensus, and the Agonistic Critique

29

Chapter 4: Husserl’s Europe as a Philosophical Project

47



Chapter 5: Husserl’s Phenomenological Reestablishment of the Ideal

69

Chapter 6: Patočka’s Europe as a Political Project

93



Chapter 7: Problematicity: From a Religious to a Phenomenological Conception 115 Chapter 8: Problematicity, Politics, and Europe Bibliography



135

153

Notes

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Index

193

About the Author



205

v

Acknowledgments

Chapter 5 is based on material that previously appeared in: Girardi, Lorenzo. “Experience and Unity in Husserl’s Solution to the Crisis.” In Phenomenology and Experience: New Perspectives, edited by Antonio Cimino and Cees Leijenhorst, 81–98. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Sections from chapters 6, 7, and 8 are based on material that previously appeared in: Girardi, Lorenzo. “From Care for the Soul to the Theory of the State in Jan Patočka.” In International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 81, no. 3 (2020): 196–210. I am grateful to the respective publishers, Brill and Taylor & Francis, for granting permission to use this material here.

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There is no shortage of talk about Europe, and much of it places Europe in the context of crisis. Today, these discourses are predominantly economic and political. Less prominent is what can be called Europe’s spiritual or existential crisis—a much-discussed topic during the first half of the twentieth century. For better or for worse, at that time Europe was globally dominant in virtually all conceivable areas: economically, politically, scientifically, technologically, and so on. Despite all this, there was a growing discontent and uncertainty about what this meant for European life and whether it was, in fact, as positive as the optimistic rationalism of the nineteenth century had taken for granted it would be. After the First and Second World Wars in particular, that is, after Europe’s self-inflicted destruction, the principles on which Europe had based itself were put in doubt. The political will to create Europe anew in the second half of the twentieth century was spurred on by its prior failings. Nonetheless, for all its troubles, Europe (at least Western Europe) has been relatively peaceful, prosperous, and stable since the Second World War. Renewed debate in Europe regarding treasured freedoms and institutions, such as current debates surrounding freedom of speech, religion, and even democracy, can be seen as a sign that unclarity or uncertainty regarding Europe’s principles remains. While contemporary Europe no longer identifies itself with rationalism the way it has done in the past, nothing has been put in place to fulfil a similar role as fundamental principle either. Economically and politically, most of Europe is integrated more than ever, but a sense of what it might mean to be European is largely absent. While there is increasing talk of the European Union as a community of values instead of a purely economic or political union, what this would mean concretely remains vague. If principles are mentioned at all, they often remain superficial. Perhaps more importantly, they are taken for granted as if the past centuries have not shown them to be deeply problematic, as if there had not been a deep crisis of the ix

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principles which not that long ago were thought to belong to the very idea of Europe. The following is an investigation of Europe’s crisis on the basis of the hypothesis that this crisis itself might contain valuable insights that can be used to address Europe’s situation. It is typical for accounts of the crisis that Europe’s essence is identified with a single element that has contributed substantially to its development—often either rationalism or Christianity. The crisis would then be the loss or distortion of this element and the solution its reestablishment. There are historical and philosophical reasons for why this might not be viable. Moreover, such a hope for restoration can lead us to overlook truths that manifest themselves in situations of crisis. It is thus worthwhile to attempt to think the crisis through to its end and to attempt to articulate those truths. While the threads of this book—Europe, phenomenology, and politics— are very different from each other, their combination is a natural one in light of what they share: a concern with the dissolution of the world, the dissolution of a shared horizon of human existence. As indicated by Europe’s history of internal strife, no such shared horizon has ever existed in Europe unproblematically. Nonetheless, the ways in which such a horizon and its dissolution were thought of and articulated tell us a great deal about how Europe itself was thought of and articulated. Following Johann P. Arnason, a civilisational complex can best be seen as a “way of articulating the world.”1 European history can be seen as the development, interplay, and conflict between different ways of doing so. Arnason makes the case that this fundamentally involves the intertwined categories of wealth, power, and meaning. The latter in particular links civilisational analysis to phenomenology. As the philosophical investigation of human experience in terms of meaning, phenomenology has been a somewhat implicit but nonetheless important source of civilisational analysis. To an extent, this goes back to the influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the work of authors such as Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. However, the phenomenological philosophies of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and Jan Patočka, one of Husserl’s last students who would later become known as the spokesperson of the Czech dissident group Charta 77, provide valuable insights for any such inquiry as well. Importantly, these concern the experience and constitution of the world. There are many other philosophical approaches one can take to Europe’s crisis. The critical theory of the Frankfurter Schule, to name one, is not only largely dedicated to the same topic, but also resonates with the approach taken here. As will be discussed, however, the different ways in which Europe’s crisis has been articulated, philosophically and otherwise, is related to the idea of the loss of a meaningful world. This means that phenomenology

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has a special value here, not in the least to see whether this idea itself is valid. Moreover, many phenomenologists, Husserl and Patočka foremost, have explicitly linked this problematic to reflections on not just Europe’s crisis but on the very idea of Europe itself. This at first sight peculiar connection is worth exploring in and of itself. Given the focus on the articulation of the world, a comparative study of other civilisations and comparable discourses of crisis would be of tremendous value, but exceeds both the scope of this book and the competencies of its author. If this means that this work ends up being too lenient to some aspects of the European perspective which it takes as its subject matter and its context, then the hope is that this serves to bring out relevant characteristics, rather than to proceed on the basis of hidden biases. As much of this work concerns Europe’s self-understanding(s) more than its reality, some idealisation and simplification is perhaps unavoidable. This, of course, does not excuse any uncritical instances of this. Although we will see that the relation between reality and ideality plays an important role in Europe’s self-understanding as a special civilisation, discussion of Europe’s concrete material or economic circumstances are beyond the present scope as well. While the category of wealth from Arnason’s tripartite distinction is left behind, the same does not entirely go for the realm of power in its political form. One of the clearest contemporary expressions of Europe’s crisis is the development of a generally relativist intellectual and political climate, combined with unclarity about its predominant political model, liberal democracy. The articulation of the world that formed the ideal basis of the model of reconciliation of liberal democracy has run its course. The latter’s difficulties in dealing with new societal emphases on culture and religion point to the need to engage with these as presenting worldviews, rather than as particular practices of private individuals. The politics that is discussed here is thus not that of European international politics, but that of the function and meaning of politics as such, which one might call the political. The modern conception of the political in which reason—whether in an instrumental or in a more substantial sense—played a central role, has devolved into a depoliticised politics that is largely indifferent to the actual truth, value, and meaning of the positions between which it claims to mediate. While this is not primarily discussed in terms of European international politics, it does concern the latter insofar as such politics these days is mainly seen either in terms of a stale EU bureaucracy without any meaningful substance, or, in opposition to this, in terms of a substantial European identity revolving around a supposed European culture or religion. Both of these options are equally problematic, albeit in different though not unrelated ways as shall become clear.

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This book explores an alternative conception of politics, sought on the basis of the breakdown of the modern ideal, following the contours set out by agonistic political thought. The latter emphasises the reality of conflict rather than the ideal of reconciliation. Given the contemporary absence of a shared political horizon and the growing pluralist character of European societies, new ways of giving a place to and channelling conflict are needed. While this takes different forms in different agonistic authors, this often leaves the door open to a relativism that might in fact reinforce the unequal relations of power that agonistic political thought sets out to correct. Phenomenology is not a major source of agonistic thought, which tends towards poststructuralist frameworks instead, but it is not completely foreign to it either. By analysing the concrete ways our world is structured phenomenologically, the limits of the ideal of rational reconciliation can be shown, without falling into a relativism where anything goes. This amounts to both a phenomenological justification for and limitation of agonistic political thought. Although many in the phenomenological tradition have dealt with or are relevant to the above topics, the work of Husserl and Patočka is of particular relevance. Both see Europe as based on reason and both are critical about the way that this has concretely taken shape over the past centuries. They provide genealogical accounts of how what they take to be Europe’s distinguishing characteristic itself led to its crisis. Moreover, the idea of the world plays a crucial role in both of their accounts. However, there are also important differences between Husserl and Patočka. They can be seen as representatives of two distinct perspectives on Europe’s crisis, respectively more optimistic and more pessimistic, which correspond to two different historical situations. Their work will be approached on the basis of this distinction. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) developed his diagnosis and response to the crisis in the wake of the First World War, although he had already formulated many of the themes of the crisis before. He saw its origin to lie in the loss of Europe’s faith in reason, ultimately due to a one-sided conception of reason which articulated a naturalistic conception of the world incapable of addressing humanity’s existential needs. This dominant form of rationalism was in need of correction, so as to restore the faith in reason and set Europe on its proper path again. For Husserl, phenomenology provided the methodology through which this correction could take shape and through which a fragmented and dispirited Europe could once again aim at a harmonious conception of the world. As one of his last and closest students, Jan Patočka (1907–1977) initially follows Husserl’s account. After the Second World War, however, he starts explicitly diverging from his former teacher. The crisis becomes total in a way that prevents any ‘simple’ restoration of the faith in reason. Whereas Husserl feared the end of Europe, Patočka was convinced that he had already

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witnessed it. For Patočka too, Europe is in need of higher ideals, which he thematises under the Platonic idea of the care of the soul, but this needs to take the fundamentally problematical2 nature of the world into account rather than attempting to overcome it. The similarities and contrasts in their work make these two authors well suited to the themes of this book. Moreover, they present concrete arguments and frameworks on the basis of which the perspectives that they represent can be criticised and developed. Specific cases can show more than general approaches and Husserl and Patočka provide us with exemplary cases of two distinct approaches. Given that their work is presented in relation to their respective historical contexts, a cautionary remark should be given in advance. It is not the intent to historicise their work, that is, to reduce Husserl’s and Patočka’s thought to their historical circumstances. Their philosophies are best understood as responses to these circumstances, but what matters in the end is the content and argument of their work. Husserl’s and Patočka’s respective approaches do not only respond to different historical situations, but are also based on different analyses of the experience and the idea of the world. Indeed, what is presented here is not primarily the continuity between Husserl’s and Patočka’s thought and their historical circumstances, but rather the underexamined continuity between their phenomenology and their thought on Europe and politics. Moreover, the interest in their work is not primarily historical. It pertains to its relevance for us today. The first chapters of this book, although they are not directly concerned with the work of Husserl and Patočka, help set the stage for this contemporary relevance of their work. Chapter 1 provides important background and context to the idea of Europe and thus to Husserl’s and Patočka’s thought on this. It presents the ideological development of this idea, in particular how it came to be related to the ideal of reason. This ideal is one where reason provides a universal standpoint from which the world can be seen as a coherent and rational whole. This was not only seen as the key to scientific and technological superiority, but as the key to a higher form of life. Throughout modernity, Europe came to see itself as embodying this ideal, placing itself in a ‘Grand Narrative’ of historical, civilisational progress. In the twentieth century, however, the various catastrophes made possible by Europe’s scientific and technological superiority for many led to the breakdown of this ideal and consequently to the loss of faith in European civilisation. Chapter 2 sketches Europe’s contemporary situation as a deadlock resulting from the loss of faith in Europe’s past ideals. In a world that is seen as disenchanted and a Europe that is uncertain about its identity and values, recourse is often made to older cultural or religious ideas of Europe. The inadequacy of such proposed ‘returns’ is discussed. Despite this inadequacy,

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matters of meaning and value are increasingly relegated to religion and culture, as reason is viewed with some suspicion these days. This is analysed on the basis of the abandonment of the transcendent as a realm of rational inquiry, an abandonment that is discussed both in terms of its theoretical and its ethico-practical background. This gives shape to a constellation that enables a potentially problematic deterioration into fideism and cultural relativism, a recurring theme throughout this book. Given the role that religion, culture, and reason have played in shaping the idea of Europe, the challenges that this situation presents for Europe’s identity are discussed as well. It is perhaps in the realm of politics that the breakdown of the modern ideal of reason, and the attempt to come to terms with the changing landscape of culture and religion, is visible the most. Chapter 3 particularly focusses on the rationalist strand of political thought that takes reconciliation as its goal. It does so in the context of liberal democracy as the ideological victor of the past century. While liberal thinkers often present this as a neutral political model that is suited best to deal with societal pluralism, various critiques have put this in doubt. This is discussed on the basis of the work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas and the agonistic critique of their reconciliatory kind of political thought. This reconciliatory political thought relies on a view of the world that is in line with the modern ideal of reason, an ideal that has lost much of its footing over the past century, showing the need for a new foundation for liberal democracy. The claim of agonistic political thought is that the liberal focus on reconciliation and consensus in fact inhibits a truly pluralist politics, and that it has adverse and exclusionary results. While this claim has merit, it is shown that agonistic thought itself is not free from potentially adverse effects and a lack of a proper foundation either. Chapter 3 does not resolve these matters, but sets the stage for a phenomenological development of these approaches to politics. The chapters on Husserl serve to see to what extent the view of the world that springs from the ideal of reason can be justified phenomenologically, that is, whether its unitary conception of the world and the corresponding reconciliatory politics have any basis in the structural makeup of human experience and the way it constitutes the world for us. In a similar manner, the chapters on Patočka link up with agonistic political thought, providing a phenomenological basis for its more conflictual view of the world. Chapter 4 presents Husserl’s idea of Europe as a philosophical project and the crisis in which this project found itself in his time. Husserl conceives of Europe as a civilisation based on ideality. This is a civilisation that breaks with the empirical and with tradition through the transcending of particular, relative worldviews towards the one, universal idea of the world. The origin of this teleology in Ancient Greece, and the problematic relation between the empirical and the ideal, are discussed critically in relation to the possible

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reproach of Eurocentrism and in relation to a Husserlian conception of politics. The latter focusses on the idea of universal humanity correlated with the universal idea of the world, and the attempt at reconciliation in light of the ‘irrational facts’ of reality that lead humanity into conflict. This is discussed in contrast with Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political and his criticism of idealistic and universalistic approaches to politics. Schmitt was, roughly, a contemporary of Husserl and an important source for later agonistic political thought. The above matters are discussed in the general terms of Husserl’s philosophy as a whole, rather than in strictly phenomenological terms. There is nothing intrinsically or exclusively phenomenological about Husserl’s discussion of them and the end of the chapter presents Europe’s crisis as one of Husserl’s entry points into phenomenology proper. Chapter 5 provides an analysis and critique of Husserl’s phenomenological solution to Europe’s crisis. Phenomenology is to bring to the fore the life-world as the world that is overlooked by the sciences in order to both clarify the latter, as well as to serve as a new foundation for the ideal of reason. The life-world is analysed in its various layers to see what role these play in Husserl’s solution. As the immediate context of human existence, the life-world is initially encountered as a particular cultural world. Husserl’s aim is to overcome this sense of the life-world towards a universal sense of the world. Although it is often acknowledged that this project has its basis in Husserl’s account of experience, how this works exactly often remains undiscussed. A concrete analysis of this shows the limits of Husserl’s phenomenological justification for his ideal. He relies not so much on phenomenological evidence, but rather on a form of practical reason and faith. This is shown to have a religious aspect to it that relates to Husserl’s project as a whole and to the recurring tension between reality and ideality. Although this in itself is not enough to completely refute his solution to the crisis, it highly problematises its existential and political adequacy. Chapter 6 presents Patočka’s work as an alternative to Husserl’s approach. The shift from Patočka’s earlier, more Husserlian perspective to his later work is discussed to highlight the distinctiveness of Patočka’s later thought on Europe. Central to this is what he refers to as the experience of ‘problematicity’ and the Ancient Greek philosophical project of the care of the soul that follows from it. Like Husserl, Patočka traces Europe’s roots back to Ancient Greek philosophy. Unlike Husserl, this involves the acknowledgement of the fundamentally problematical situation of human existence, rather than the attempt to overcome it. The connection between Patočka’s accounts of philosophy and politics is presented in the context of his discussion of the different forms of the care of the soul. Although it arguably receives the least amount of attention in Patočka’s own work, it is the political form that is argued to be the proper foundation of Europe in Patočka’s thought. Europe develops on the

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basis of subsequent failures to satisfactorily give shape to this in society, from the Ancient Greek polis up to the modern abandonment of the care of the soul. The latter is presented on the basis of Patočka’s ambiguous appraisal of liberal democracy. While he acknowledges that liberal democracy in postwar Europe has led to many material gains and that it secures the freedom of the individual, he criticises it for emptying this freedom of its meaning. Chapter 7 further analyses and develops Patočka’s central notion of problematicity. Patočka’s indication of a solution to Europe’s crisis via Christianity is argued to be inadequate, because it relies on mythical or metaphysical remnants that undermine the fundamental nature of problematicity. Christianity’s incorporation of problematicity into a form of faith goes against core tenets of Patočka’s later philosophy. Rather than rejecting Patočka’s indication of a solution via Christianity, this is developed on the basis of his suggestion that what is needed is a demythologised Christianity. This is used to develop a specifically phenomenological conception of problematicity that sees it as inherent to all meaning as such, rather than as the result of the human being’s incapacity to grasp or establish a nonproblematical meaning of the world. While this leads to a problematical conception of the world, it does not entail that the latter is fundamentally meaningless. On the contrary, it is shown that problematicity is related to a fundamental moment of significance. This phenomenological conception of problematicity is discussed along the lines of the cosmological form of the care of the soul, forming a bridge between Patočka’s phenomenology and his political philosophy. The concluding chapter 8 sets out to see what can be built on the preceding by developing Patočka’s indications of a theory of the state. Given the overlap between problematicity and certain fundamental tenets of agonistic political thought, this is sought along the lines of an agonistic conception of liberal democracy, such as indicated by Chantal Mouffe in particular. This is done against the background of the difficulties often perceived in both Patočka’s thought and agonistic thought regarding institutions, specifically that both exist in tension with the idea of institutions. To overcome these difficulties, Claude Lefort’s work is used to show that agonism can in fact be seen as the essence of certain political institutions. By interpreting his work on democracy in terms of problematicity, it is shown that the freedom which Patočka sees as crucial to the care of the soul need not be in tension with the institutions of liberal democracy. As deriving from the same source, freedom and liberal democracy can delimit each other in a meaningful way. By way of conclusion, it is argued that for such an agonistic reinterpretation of liberal democracy on the basis of problematicity to succeed, Europe is in need of a historical experience that can shape its identity and culture accordingly.

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Although Europe’s catastrophes in the twentieth century served this function, the question is whether they can continue to do so as the active memory of them fades.

Abbreviations

References can be found in the endnotes for each chapter and in the bibliography. For the most frequently cited works of Husserl and Patočka, the following in-text abbreviations are used: CE: Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. CM: Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2013. Hua: The volumes of the Husserliana editions of Husserl’s collected works, followed by the volume number in Roman numerals. HE: Patočka, Jan. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Translated by Erazim Kohák. Edited by James Dodd. Chicago: Open Court, 1996. NP: Patočka, Jan. “Negative Platonism: Reflections Concerning the Rise, the Scope, and the Demise of Metaphysics—And Whether Philosophy Can Survive It.” In Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, translated by Erazim Kohák, 175–206. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. PE: Patočka, Jan. Plato and Europe. Translated by Petr Lom. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. KEE: Patočka, Jan. Ketzerische Essais zur Philosophie der Geschichte und ergänzende Schriften. Edited by Klaus Nellen and Jiří Němec. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of quotes sourced from works in languages other than English are my own.

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Chapter 1

The Idea of Europe and the Ideal of Reason

Due to the ongoing project of European integration, Europe, perhaps more than ever, has become a concrete reality. However, this has primarily been an economic and juridical reality. A meaningful idea of Europe to breathe life into this has been somewhat of an afterthought to the creators of European institutions. While this has become an important focus of the European Union in the past decades, the fact remains that it only became so half a century after the start of European integration, during a period of rapid accession of Central and Eastern European countries with their own distinct histories and narratives, and in a climate of growing Euroscepticism. As a result, the idea of Europe is perhaps also more contested than ever. In its attempt to produce social and cultural cohesion, the European Union has emphasised Europe’s shared history and increasingly the values of European modernity and liberal democracy: freedom, equality, democracy, diversity, tolerance, and so on. Simultaneously, those sceptical of the European Union also espouse a vision of Europe. This tends to come from more illiberal politicians who instead emphasise Europe’s Christian heritage, whether understood in a religious or in a cultural sense. The debate between these different views is clearly not just about the idea of Europe, but covers a whole range of contemporary issues: from Europe’s relation to Russia to climate change and LGBT+ rights. This politicisation of the idea of Europe is nothing new. There is no completely neutral, disinterested version of this idea. Every idea of Europe, insofar as it lays claim to Europe’s heritage, is also an act of remembrance. As such, it is a decision regarding what is to be remembered, how it is to be remembered, and how this relates to our contemporary situation and indeed our future. The designations we use to refer to pivotal moments of Europe’s history (Antiquity, Christendom, the Renaissance, and so on) testify to this 1

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fact. They are products of the attempts of those in later periods to make sense of their past, present, and future. In this regard, a familiar story easily comes to mind when speaking of Europe. This ‘Grand Narrative’1 tells us what Europe is, in one fell swoop covering its supposed core principles and two-and-a-half millennia of its supposed history. The typical version presents Europe—or rather, as will be discussed, Western civilisation—as born in Ancient Greece from where it spread, via the Roman Empire and Christendom, to a Europe which came to spread itself throughout the world on the basis of the superior use of reason it inherited from Ancient Greece, leading to peace and prosperity wherever its principles take hold. Europe is thus presented as more or less synonymous with modernity understood as the fulfilment of a promise contained in Ancient Greek thought. In their own ways, as we will see, Husserl and Patočka follow this narrative as well. It goes without saying that this is a highly reductive, if not to say simply false, narrative. It suggests a largely smooth and coherent development (with the possible exception of a Medieval lapse), but is able to do so only by glossing over Europe’s internal differences and external influences. This coherency is simultaneously the main draw and the biggest flaw of the Grand Narrative. In order to frame Europe’s actual history into a coherent narrative, it distorts it until it is barely recognisable. It scoots over the fact that for most of its history and well into the twentieth century, Europe was not as rational, prosperous, or free for most people as some like to think it was. Its scientific, technological, and economic superiority is relatively recent, given the two-and-a-half millennia the Grand Narrative covers. During most of this period, Europe’s population was illiterate and uneducated, hardly the stuff of Grand Narratives. Moreover, a European identity based on reason could have only a limited reach. The peoples of Europe had their ethnic, linguistic, religious, commercial, and other affiliations, but no idea of Europe played a substantial role in these for the most part. It was something for Europe’s intellectual, cultural, and political elites, if even that. In its most reductive form, the Grand Narrative tends to focus on Ancient Greece as the birthplace of reason to the detriment of other elements. The Roman Empire spread Greek thought, but made no substantial contribution to it. If Christianity’s importance is recognised, this is attributed to it being more rational than other religions. And it is more rational because it is more Greek. While Ancient Greece cannot be called European by any reasonable standard, any Germanic influence and the entirety of Eastern Europe are excluded from the Grand Narrative altogether, even though the idea of Europe could not have taken shape as it did without these. There are clear geopolitical reasons, such as the role of Germany in the two world wars and the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, for these ideological exclusions. They moreover fit

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less easily into the model of modernity that the Grand Narrative presents, even though it has now become more common to speak of multiple, differing modernities in this regard.2 Despite these inaccuracies and the existence of other and even counternarratives, however, the Grand Narrative does tell us a great deal about how a part of Europe, most of all its elites, understood itself quite explicitly until recently and how it often continues to understand itself implicitly. One cannot understand Europe properly if one does not take this self-understanding of its path as a special one in world history into account. That does not entail the acceptance of this narrative, but if (as will be argued) contemporary Europe should be understood against the background of the breakdown of the Grand Narrative and its rationalist ideal, this means that we cannot fully understand Europe without it either. In light of this, the development of the idea of Europe and the way it became linked to modern rationalism is discussed first. This also clarifies the place of the Grand Narrative itself in this development. This is followed by a closer look at the ideal of reason which sees it as the key to a meaningful existence and as the spiritual backbone of Europe. Crucial for this is the idea that reason is capable of providing a meaningful reconciliation between opposing views, generally by providing a universal point of view. (The political legacy of this is the topic of chapter 3.) The final section of this chapter discusses the breakdown of the Grand Narrative and the faith in reason after the catastrophes of the twentieth century. This breakdown proceeded on the basis of already existing counternarratives. In an important sense, it entailed the end of the modern idea of Europe, which can be argued to be the properly European idea of Europe. THE IDEA OF EUROPE The idea of Europe started out as a vaguely defined geographical space in Antiquity, after which it became a cultural idea subordinated to the idea of Christendom in the Middle Ages. It is this rough geographical and cultural unity that throughout modernity would come to detach itself from its religious characterisation and become the idea of Europe we are familiar with today. ‘Europe’ thus became the name of a geographical and cultural entity that preceded the idea of Europe itself. Insofar as we can speak of a historical continuity between these different entities, it is more so the idea of the West, however ill defined, that provided it.3 The idea of Europe came about due to a complex interplay of political, social, and economic realities and civilisational symbolic imaginaries. These can be, and have been, at odds with each other. Whereas such imaginaries

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often came about in opposition to an ‘Other’ of Europe or the West (predominantly the ‘East’, whether Asiatic, Islamic, or Communist), Europe’s reality often was one of economic, cultural, and intellectual exchange with these others. Without these links, Europe could not have become what it was or what it is today. It is important to note that Europe itself has not always been the central or dominant player in these links. In fact, and as already indicated, it should not be assumed that Europe is an entity that as such (that is, qua Europe) has coherently existed throughout history to form these links. In Antiquity, Europe was not an idea of any importance. It was a geographical notion used by the Ancient Greeks, but did not yet designate the continent now called Europe. Moreover, they generally did not see themselves as part of Europe, but as something distinct from both Europe and Asia. When the Ancient Greeks did speak of their part of the world as Europe, this included the Greek parts of Asia and excluded most of the continent to their West, which was largely unknown to them. This was less a self-identification as European and more an attempt to distinguish themselves from the Persian Empire to their East. Although this means that it was not entirely without political or cultural undertones, the Ancient Greek notion of Europe was a geographical one, not an identity-based one, and a vaguely defined one at that. Even if it can be said that Europe owes much to the legacy of the Ancient Greeks, Europe is not unique in this (for example, so do the Orthodox Christian and Islamic worlds), and this legacy has little to do with the Greeks’ own understanding of Europe. Their world (the world of Antiquity in general, as Gerard Delanty has emphasised4) is more properly characterised as Oriental. While the Ancient Greeks did want to distinguish themselves from their eastern neighbours, they also owed them much of their culture and practices. Recently, these Eastern origins of Western civilisation have been more widely studied and acknowledged.5 The East was not a sphere of oriental despotism and mysticism in contrast with Greek freedom and reason, as the Grand Narrative would have it. For example, the idea that philosophy is a Greek invention and a specifically Western enterprise only came about in the late eighteenth century.6 Consequently, the idea that Europe and reason are inextricably intertwined cannot be justified by recourse to a supposedly Greek birth of Europe. More than Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire provided the foundation for the idea of Europe to come. It gave Medieval Europe many of its unifying features: the idea of imperial authority, Roman law, (Latin) Christianity, and Latin as a common language. Importantly, the Roman Empire shifted the centre of the world of Antiquity west. But like the Greeks before them, the Romans did not see themselves as European and only used ‘Europe’ as a geographical designation. Moreover, the Roman Empire claimed universality:

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When, in the second century, the Emperor Antonius Pius was addressed as ‘Lord of all the World’ (dominus totius orbis), this merely gave legal expression to long-held Roman belief that, whether those who lived beyond their borders recognized it or not, the political realm of Rome and the human genus had been made one.7

It is noteworthy that this idea (prefiguring the universalisms of Christianity and modern Europe) followed the Persian idea of a world empire (appropriated by the Hellenic Empire of Alexander the Great), not the Greek idea of democracy.8 Europe as a space indicating more than a geographical territory could only come into being through the breakup of the Roman Empire. Likewise, the idea of the West gained definition due to the division of the Roman Empire as well as the later schism between (Western) Roman Catholic Christianity and (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity. This paved the way for the overlap of the ideas of the West, the Christian world, and geographical Europe in the Middle Ages. In this constellation, the beginnings of the idea Europe as we know it today developed after the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire. This occurred through what can loosely be called the Frankish unification of Europe and the external threat of Islam. The cohesion of the Frankish Empire was based on a Christianity which would come to overlap with the geographical notion of Europe, what is often referred to as Christendom. Like the Roman Empire before it, Christendom’s aspirations were universal. Yet, these aspirations were thwarted by incursions of the Islamic world, which had already taken over the formerly Roman African and Asian coasts of the Mediterranean. These conquests and their halting were central in giving Europe its borders. Moreover, the combination of an external threat and the gradual further acceptance of Christianity by the Germanic tribes gave a sense of identity to the peoples of Europe. They saw themselves as forming a Christian bulwark against the non-Christian world (or in the case of the Orthodox-Christian world which it also bordered: against a wrong-Christian world). From the eighth century onwards, Christianity was hereby Europeanised as much as Europe was Christianised. The division between West and East, Occident and Orient, in Delanty’s words, took on “the character of a moral-religious divide with the Occident signifying civilisation and goodness and the Orient barbarity and evil.”9 However, this Christendom, as Delanty has also pointed out, was “an identity born in defeat, not in victory.”10 Similarly, Denis Guénoun has noted that while Europe claimed to be the place from which the universal came into being, Europe itself only came into being when this universalism was halted.11 It was in the shrinking of the Christian world that Europe attained its identity. While in the sixteenth century Charles V did invoke the idea of

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a universal monarchy, coming closest to a European world empire until the colonialism of the nineteenth century, it is telling that his successor’s priority lay more with the internal division of Europe’s Christianity due to the Reformation.12 Once Christendom had given Europe its unity, this unity could be detached from a specific religion. This was the outcome of the Reformation and the wars of religion, which did away with the unity provided by Christianity. The 1555 Peace of Augsburg and the 1648 Peace of Westphalia (the latter often seen as the beginning of modern Europe) helped put a halt to the wars of religion, but did not do so through the victory or hegemony of one of the Christian denominations. Instead, they institutionalised the plurality of these denominations. Just as there was no religious hegemony, there was also no single political power dominating Europe. As a result, the balance of power now so typically associated with modern Europe was established. While the Peace of Westphalia lay down the political foundations of modern Europe, the modern significance of the name ‘Europe’ itself is of slightly later date. Étienne Balibar has pointed out that it acquired this significance in the confrontation between a hegemonic conception of Europe, led by one dominant nation (represented by France), and a republican conception, which was in favour of equality among different states (represented primarily by an Anglo-Dutch coalition). It was in the propagandistic writings of the latter “that the term Europe replaced Christendom in diplomatic language as a designation of the whole of the relations of force and trade among nations or sovereign states.”13 The idea of Europe, based on neither the hegemonies of the Roman imperial legacy nor on that of a Christian community, now became a European idea of Europe. The West, having previously had Roman and Christian forms, now became a European West. The West had come to designate a system of civilisational values through Christendom’s opposition to a non-Christian East, and this sense of civilisation was transplanted onto Europe. With this, the universalist project already present in the Roman Empire and Christianity arises anew, with Europe itself aspiring to universalism. The sphere of the particular could be assigned to the national cultures of Europe, while universality could be assigned to European civilisation as an overarching idea. The conceptual scheme where human affairs were divided between particular culture and universal civilisation lent itself well for the expanding colonial agenda. Europe had civilisation, while others merely had culture, if even that. A mission civilisatrice practically suggested itself, aided by Europe’s scientific and technological successes. Consequently, the oppositional structure of European imaginary took on new form. Europe’s ‘Other’ was no longer the East but any other. This is not the simple transposition of the same scheme but a transformation of it. Up until this point, Europe and the West had defined

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themselves by pushing back against the East in one form or another. Now, Europe could more easily see itself as the superior civilisation through which the other was defined as non-European. Rather than being a frontier against the East, Europe itself became a frontier expanding across the world. Here the conditions are in place to start understanding Europe in terms of the Grand Narrative: a civilised West in an uncivilised world. Of course, the rest of the world cannot just be seen as un- or underdeveloped in contrast to the West. At the time, Europe was still catching up on other parts of the world in many ways. And rather than this being the start of the process of globalisation, a strong case can be made that Europeans were inserting themselves further into an already-existing world economy stretching from Africa to the Far East. Europe’s exploitation of the New World and sub-Saharan Africa gave it the means to shift the centre of gravity of this economy to Europe, which moreover was not an accomplished fact until the nineteenth century. It is at this point that Europe’s self-image as the embodiment of civilisation truly crystalised. While there had always been counternarratives to this, these did not fully take hold until the dissolution of this modern idea of Europe. THE IDEAL OF REASON The modern idea of a civilisation above others was neither new nor unique to Europe given its Roman and Christian predecessors as well as similar conceptions elsewhere in the world, most notably China. What marked it was an ideal of life and society based on reason. Reason was taken as the key to a meaningful existence and capable of providing a meaningful reconciliation between opposing views—whether via procedures of arriving at reasonable consensus or in the more substantial sense of uncovering universal truths about human existence and the world. This did not necessarily entail that other civilisations and peoples were seen as irrational. The scientific, technological, and economic superiority of Eastern civilisations throughout most of history could not be denied and for a long time there even existed a sense of admiration for this in the West. This included a recognition of forms of rationalism outside of Europe. Classical sources for the modern idea of Europe, such as the work of Max Weber (although, as we shall see, he wrote at its end), were fully aware that rationality existed elsewhere. It could not be denied that India, for instance, had forms of mathematics that for a long time were more advanced than anything found in the West. The claim was rather that although reason was not foreign to others, they did not make it central to their existence in the way that Europe did. They remained caught in traditional mythical or religious frameworks, which was seen as explaining their lack of progress. Europe, not India or

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China (let alone any other civilisation), made rationality its overall goal and incorporated it into every facet of its existence. Weber captured the general meaning of the process of rationalisation well: It means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.14

This makes the Grand Narrative a “subtraction story,” a term from the work of Charles Taylor, which explains progress “by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.”15 This can take various forms, the dominant one being that modern Europe left behind the “particularism and narrow-mindedness of Christendom for the progressive universalism of civilisation.”16 And what else could one find in this liberation from the impediments of tradition, myth, and religion by means of reason than one’s very humanity understood as the capacity for reason? The result of this process was not seen as particular to Europe but as universally valid. The plurality of traditions, myths, and religions in the world were a sign that these were not the key to universality. On the other hand, the products of reason—science, mathematics, and the technology built on these—had the same meaning and use everywhere. That does not mean that what was particular simply had to be dismissed. On the contrary, just as science established universal laws of nature that transcend the particular natural phenomena around us, so also the rational and universal in other domains could be sought. This was made possible through a change in the conception and articulation of the world. Isaiah Berlin formulated this concept of the world that underlies the rational ideal of modern Europe quite well. It holds in the first place that, as in the sciences, all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, that there must be a dependable path towards the discovery of these truths; in the third place, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incompatible with another—that we knew a priori. This kind of omniscience was the solution of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle. In the case of morals, we could then conceive what the perfect life must be, founded as it would be on a correct understanding of the rules that governed the universe. [. . .] Even if we could not ourselves reach these true answers, or indeed, the final system that interweaves them all, the answers must exist—else the questions were not real.17

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Note the clear practical dimension, the existential relevance ascribed to reason. Reason was not just a means of knowing the world, but the path to a better life. It was not just the cause of Europe’s scientific and technological superiority, but also seen as the basis for its supposed social and even moral progress. The idea of an overarching rational unity of the world allowed for the combination of these different forms of progress into a single thought of the progress of humanity as such.18 Reason provided a universal point of view no longer distorted by particular perspectives. This is what allowed humanity to be viewed as one in the first place, rather than as a disparate group of peoples defined more so by their differences than by their commonalities. As already indicated, the result is a teleological path of progress in both a geographical and temporal sense: Reason emanates from its European center to spread over the globe and is projected into the future as the telos, the goal of humanity. This was sustained by a faith in its continued success and for a time this faith seemed warranted. Deviations from this teleology were not essential but temporary. Any downsides were simply the cost of progress or incorporated into it based on the idea that progress can even come about through antagonism, as in Kant’s ‘unsocial sociability’, Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’, or Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. The concept of the world as a coherent totality that can be brought into view through the use of reason, whether through a metaphysical insight into this whole or via the piecemeal putting together of its various domains, is an important one. However, it is not as simple as saying that Europe was defined by this unitary and universal idea of the world. Europe is often also seen as the site that allowed for a plurality of different views. This combined presence of universalistic and pluralist characteristics can be seen as part of a dialectic where pluralism becomes the condition for achieving universalism. After all, it is often the encounter with other views that leads to the critical examination of one’s own and possibly the discovery of a higher truth that transcends both. The more the focus lies on this path towards the truth, rather than on this truth itself, the more pluralism becomes an integral part of the overall rationalist ideal. Especially insofar as the universalism of the modern idea of Europe has a teleological nature, it can thus incorporate this pluralism. That is not to say that this universalism and this pluralism cannot be at odds with each other. As Shmuel N. Eisenstadt has shown, “this tension developed primarily with respect to the very concept of reason and its place in the constitution of human society.”19 The idea of the constitution of society played an important role in Europe. Whereas in the Middle Ages society was subordinated to the state and the church, modernity enabled new ways of thinking about the organisation of society. Not the least of these was the idea that society can organise itself rather than being a natural or divine (and thus fixed) given. Whereas, as mentioned, it is now starting to be accepted that

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modernity as such is not a uniquely European phenomenon but took different forms (including within Europe), this strong presence of civil society remains a typical trait of Western European modernity.20 This openness of the organisation of society meshes well with the rationalist ideal that started gaining traction in Europe at the same time. The search for universal truths was related to the search for the common good, which too could be discovered or established rationally. In terms of politics, the aim to transcend the particular became the duty of the citizen to participate in the common good. As indicated, what political form this takes depends on what reason is thought capable. Emphasis can be placed on either the plurality of views and interests and their reasonable regulation, or on the establishment of a universal good for all. In its form most closely following the ideal of reason, the rational is universal, the universal is common to all, and this is the road to peace and prosperity. THE BREAKDOWN OF THE IDEAL: DISENCHANTMENT According to the ideal of reason, the world could be understood completely on the basis of intelligible forces immanent to it rather than by recourse to mysterious forces transcending it. This naturalistic outlook certainly led to many scientific and technological successes. Throughout modernity it was also increasingly believed that reason could take over from religion in determining our view of the world in a meaningful way. While this was taken for granted by many, in reality this proved to be more uncertain. Weber wondered whether this process of ‘disenchantment’ at the heart of European progress had any meaning “beyond the purely practical and technical?”21 Already in the eighteenth century there were those who answered this question in the negative. Rousseau and Novalis wrote that this so-called progress corrupted our minds and impoverished our world.22 By the early twentieth century Weber could “leave aside altogether the naïve optimism in which science [. . .] has been celebrated as the way to happiness,” a belief only held by “a few big children in university chairs or editorial offices.”23 Matters of value and purpose seemed to be beyond the reach of reason. The rationalist interpretation of the world as an immanent order of nature proved ill-suited to the central questions of human existence. Rationalisation was thus seen as the source of a sense of alienation. This was most prominently articulated in terms of the loss of traditional communal bonds. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, it had become one of the most discussed themes in the burgeoning science of sociology. Alienation was seen as entailing

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relationships that are transitory, impersonal, and segmented; the loss of feelings of attachment and belonging; the absence of meaning and unity in our lives; the sharp dichotomy between public and private life; the isolation and alienation of the individual.24

Those who espouse this view, like the early sociologists and the later communitarian thought they influenced, follow the likes of Rousseau and Novalis in seeing history not primarily in terms of the progress of reason, but as a process of decline. Once, they hold, community was prominent and life was satisfying and meaningful, but now it has given way to society and its ills. Already in an early, influential characterisation of this distinction between community and society, the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies showed the difference in articulations of the world that these are based on, roughly corresponding to enchanted and disenchanted worldviews.25 Generally, community is characterised by its organic nature, consisting of the natural bonds of language, custom, and belief that entail it is a holistic unity oriented towards the same goals. The spheres of the private, social, economic, religious, and so on, form a coherent whole to the point that one cannot properly differentiate between them. All of this is held together by a worldview that provides an overall interpretation of reality that assigns each his or her proper place and role in not just the community but in the world as a whole. There is an order and meaning to everything and this provides those who experience the world in this way with a sense of security. In Patočka’s terms, it is a preproblematical world. This underlies the focus of traditional communities on maintaining the status quo, of preserving the established order.26 Change means corruption and disaster. Understanding this order is not a matter of reason, but of tradition and custom. Society is seen by Tönnies, and those who follow his analysis, as a complete inversion of community. Instead of natural, it is artificial. Rather than resting on an innate sense of cohesion, it is a construction for the purpose of business and travel beyond the boundaries of the traditional community. Its people are precisely not a people but detached individuals looking after their own interests rather than that of the group. As Tönnies sums it up: “In Gemeinschaft [community] they stay together in spite of everything that separates them; in Gesellschaft [society] they remain separate in spite of everything that unites them.”27 Just as from the point of view of community society can only appear as decline, society can only see community as backwards. While the alienation that was thought to be caused by the disenchantment of the world was most often discussed in terms of its societal aspects, it was not seen as limited to this. It could not be, because no strong division between different spheres of society or of reality exists in the enchanted worldview that Tönnies associated with community. What disenchantment perhaps

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reveals above all, is that reality as a whole is not primarily a human reality centred on the existence of the community. You do not have to be nostalgic for a past wholesome community, of which it is dubious whether it ever existed as such, to see that science has progressed to a stage where its results are fundamentally beyond any everyday comprehension. Whether it deals with realities on a subatomic or on a cosmic scale, we can no longer relate our understanding of physical reality to everyday life. Rather than leading to a better understanding of the world, rationalisation increases our ability to act in it. As Hannah Arendt noted well: “Man can do, and successfully do, what he cannot comprehend and cannot express in everyday human language.”28 REASON IN THE CATASTROPHES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The twentieth century is filled with evidence of the fatal nature of the new potentiality for acting provided by reason. It is evident that more powerful machinery, strategic planning, and an overall greater efficiency in achieving ends were instrumental in making the catastrophes of the twentieth century possible. Two world wars, numerous death camps, the atomic bomb: these would not have been possible without the prevalence of rationalism in one form or another. Neither would the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century have been possible, to the point that Zygmunt Bauman can say that Hitler and Stalin did not depart from Western civilisation, but were its most consistent, uninhibited expression.29 Already during the First World War, Randolph Bourne noted the “pragmatic dispensation” of the intelligentsia, “immensely ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared for the intellectual interpretation of the idealistic focusing of ends.”30 Throughout the twentieth century, civilisation and reason themselves came to be associated with the potential for barbarism. The Frankfurter Schule of critical theory famously drew similar conclusions in relation to national socialism and the Second World War. What was seen as the march of progress ended in the trenches and Auschwitz. For many, this designated the end of the Grand Narrative. “What kind of framework could possibly include Athens and Auschwitz? What kind of whole?”31 While the Holocaust32 holds an incomparable significance for the Jewish people and other victims, it also holds a special significance for Western civilisation. In Bauman’s words: The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture.33

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Regardless of whether one thinks that rationality was a necessary, although not sufficient condition of the Holocaust34 or that “in the Auschwitz apocalypse, it was nothing less than the West, in its essence, that revealed itself”,35 if we want to understand the course of Western civilisation, we cannot overlook the role of rationalism in the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Some might take it to be counterintuitive to attribute the failure of civilisation exemplified by the Holocaust to the disenchantment of the world. The Nazis showed a cold rationality, but also glorified passion, culture, the nation, tradition, the family, and even religion to an extent. These are attributed more to premodernity than to modernity, community rather than society, to a world not yet disenchanted. Insofar as the appeal to such phenomena was genuine, it was reactionary, a response to disenchantment. But as Robert A. Nisbet noted, in many cases it was strategic. The Nazis broke up existing social structures to shape the people anew, because “what the totalitarian must have for the realisation of his design is a spiritual and cultural vacuum.”36 Fascism was not aligned with the order of a world that was still enchanted. It was a cult of life and will, the naturalised remains of a disenchanted world. Eric Voegelin accurately perceived that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century response to disenchantment was the creation of new ideologies, whereas in the twentieth century this no longer seemed possible.37 The resources to respond to the disenchantment of the world had atrophied, leaving only immanence and caricatures of transcendence, with fascism exemplary of both. THE LOGIC OF EUROPE’S CRISIS While critiques of rationalism and a more pessimistic outlook on Europe’s situation and future were already articulated before, it was the First World War that established crisis as a major cultural sentiment. Although there are many crises of various natures related to the First World War, the spiritual crisis that was the result of a shaken faith in reason was seen by many, including Husserl and Patočka, to be the most fundamental, because it affected the core of Europe’s spiritual life and self-understanding. This state of crisis is more than a momentary state as a consequence of a singular event. For a crisis to have been possible at all, Europe must have been susceptible to what can be called the logic of the crisis, as analysed most prominently by Reinhart Koselleck. This logic is so fundamentally intertwined with the structure of European modernity and its rationalist ideal, that he goes so far as to call crisis the “structural signature of modernity.”38 In contrast to the indeterminate way the term ‘crisis’ is generally used to refer to all kinds of phenomena, it has a theoretical exactness in the context of theories of history, such as those that accompanied the modern idea of Europe.

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Koselleck has uncovered this more rigorous meaning of ‘crisis’, going back to the Ancient Greek krino: to separate, choose, judge, or decide, particularly in the spheres of law, theology and medicine. It implies the stark alternatives of right or wrong, salvation or damnation, life or death. A crisis was both the state where a decision had to be made as well as this decision itself, combining the objective state of affairs with the subjective judgment of it. This is perhaps clearest in the medical use of the term: In the case of illness, crisis refers both to the observable condition and to the judgment (judicium) about the course of the illness. At such a time, it will be determined whether the patient will live or die. This required properly identifying the beginning of an illness in order to predict how regular its development will be. Depending on whether or not the crisis led to a full restoration of health, the distinction was made between a perfect crisis and an imperfect crisis. The latter left open the possibility of a relapse.39

This distinction between ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ crises will prove useful in the analysis of Europe’s crisis. Generally, a crisis is a judgment of a critical point in a development. A critical state that does not yet appear as such (and consequently cannot yet be judged as such) is not yet a crisis strictly speaking. ‘Crisis’ is thus conceptually related to ‘apocalypse’ in its original meaning of revelation. It reveals an ongoing development that leads to two stark alternatives. The state of crisis is inherently one of contradiction which, when this contradiction is revealed, aims at its resolution. As the medical use makes clear, it can be that one of the possible outcomes is more definite than the other. One cannot recover from death, but life is always open to new crises. In the eighteenth century, tied to its historical sense of revolution, ‘crisis’ becomes “an expression of a new sense of time which both indicated and intensified the end of an epoch.”40 This relates it to the rising philosophies of history at the time, which make history subservient to an ideal. Rousseau, the first to use the term ‘crisis’ in relation to this, is still very explicit about this. For him, the philosophy of history functions as an undertaking to distinguish properly between what is original and what is artificial in the actual nature of man, or to form a true idea of a state which no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist; and of which it is, nevertheless, necessary to have true ideas, in order to form a proper judgment of our present state.41

Structurally, it does not matter much whether this ideal is posited at the beginning of the crisis-history, in which case this history is one of decline, or at the end, in which case it is one of progress. It is not uncommon to place it both at the beginning and end, creating a story of fall and redemption. Many utopian

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ideas and their accompanying teleologies were articulated in times of great change, in order to make sense of or to counteract it.42 This goes for virtually all suggestions of a lost original or meaningful world. Such suggestions are more a function of changing circumstances in the present than referring to the actual past existence of such a world, although not everyone is as self-aware of this as Rousseau is in the quote above. They provide a measure for history and consequently are the condition of possibility for the idea that history can either fail or succeed. It is only on this basis that a crisis becomes possible. Note that this means that a crisis does not have to be valued negatively: Salvation might be as much of an option as eternal damnation.43 In Europe’s case, the crisis is clear. It posited itself as the bearer of progress by means of reason. But this trajectory itself engendered the contradiction that the highest form of rationalisation also entailed the summum of irrational barbarity. If the First World War shook the general optimism regarding reason but for many kept it intact or at least salvageable, the Second World War, and the Holocaust in particular, made this much harder.44 It stood for a complete loss of the faith in reason and the teleological trajectory that accompanied it. Insofar as it was felt that the Holocaust invalidated the entire trajectory leading up to it, it was a more perfect crisis than the First World War. The work of Husserl and Patočka will provide an opportunity to take a closer look at these two different perspectives. The crisis of the faith in reason, progress, and civilisation did not take hold of the United States in the same manner as it did in Europe. It was Europe, not the United States, that could be seen as both the place and the perpetrator of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. The United States could identify itself as the great Western victor of two world wars and later of the Cold War. Europe’s ‘victory’ (if it is appropriate to speak of such a thing) was pyrrhic. It was confronted with a devastation it had wrought on itself. Whereas from an American perspective the twentieth century vindicated the Grand Narrative, for Europe it showed its destitution. Because of this, and because of the geopolitical rise of the United States and the geopolitical decline of Europe, it was the United States more so than Europe that came to represent and carry the idea of the West.

Chapter 2

A Philosophical Sketch of the Contemporary Situation

After the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, European civilisation was no longer (perhaps could no longer be) experienced as a valuable idea in the same sense it was before. Europe found itself uncertain of its identity, dispirited about its reality, and without a clear idea of its future. What was clear was that Europe’s postwar fate was not in its own hands but in those of its geopolitical successors: the United States and the Soviet Union. Already after the First World War, Paul Valéry had noted that what gave Europe’s crisis its depth and gravity was “the patient’s condition when she was overcome.”1 In the span of a few decades, Europe went from self-identified centre of the world, peak of civilisation, and beacon of progress to a ruin and devastation that was self-inflicted. As the catastrophes of the twentieth century have become defining events for Europe, the awareness of its inability to prevent them has marked a fundamental change in European consciousness. This chapter provides an account of Europe’s contemporary situation in light of this fact, specifically in terms of how this change manifested itself in European thought, society, and politics (the latter understood more so historically in terms of the European project of integration than in terms of political theory, the theme of chapter 3). The phenomena discussed below, focusing on the place of religion and culture in European society, are not unique to Europe and numerous exceptions exist within Europe. They can, however, be seen as presenting a mode of thought that is typical of Europe’s postwar condition. Starting from the logic of crisis presented in the previous chapter, the oft-proposed solutions to Europe’s crisis, as well as their inadequacy for Europe’s situation, are discussed first. Faced with the idea that rationalism might engender an impoverished experience of the world and even barbarism, there are different attitudes one can take to its role in life. The two solutions that naturally suggest themselves stay within the framework of the dichotomy 17

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that forms the heart of the crisis. This amounts to either a stubborn (and at this point arguably irrational) adherence to the modern faith in reason; or a denunciation of reason as the main guide for life and society. The latter is typically accompanied by a suggested renewal of Europe’s past religion or culture as means to keep reason in check, a “recovery of the Old West within the New.”2 Despite the philosophical inadequacy of what in effect is a call for reenchantment, matters of meaning and value are increasingly relegated to religion and culture. The suspicion towards reason is discussed in the context of how this enables a potentially problematic use of religion or culture. Reason is no longer allowed any say on their place and limits in contemporary society and this expresses itself as a renewed potential for blind faith (that is, fideism) and cultural relativism. In both cases, this is based on the abandonment of the transcendent as a realm of rational inquiry. The role of reason in the catastrophes of the twentieth century forms an important ethico-practical background to this, but this situation has also taken shape on the basis of theoretical disputes regarding the universalism of modernity and the capacities of reason. Given the role that religion and culture had in shaping the idea of Europe, this new constellation has also affected the contemporary use of this idea. The final section of this chapter discusses the manner in which debate on Europe has become increasingly dominated by the extremes of a European Union presented as purely bureaucratic and devoid of any spiritual substance, and a conception of Europe that focuses on its religious or cultural heritage. While the Second World War and the Holocaust in particular played a major role in shaping postwar Europe and the institutions of the European Union, providing an alternative to the religious and/or cultural conceptions of Europe, this too is proving to be a contested foundation. REENCHANTMENT: SEARCHING THE PAST FOR SOLUTIONS If one acknowledges that reason played a role in the catastrophes of the twentieth century, it seems clear that a renewed faith in that very same reason cannot straightforwardly be proposed as a solution to the crisis. Nonetheless, there are those who choose precisely this option. Leaving Husserl’s attempt to thoroughly found the rationalist project anew for later chapters, we can take the work of Francis Fukuyama as an illuminating, prominent, and more contemporary example of this solution which as discussed is now more characteristic of the (American) West than of Europe. Fukuyama explicitly goes against the tide of pessimism that followed the Holocaust. While acknowledging the specifically modern circumstances that made it possible, in the end he sees it as a “bypath of history.”3 He by and

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large tries to uphold the teleology of the Grand Narrative, even arguing that it has reached its final stage; his famous appropriation of Hegel’s thesis on “the end of history.” While Fukuyama acknowledges the dissatisfaction that spread through society as a result of the disenchantment of the world, he holds that this is not so much a dissatisfaction caused by this end of history, but a dissatisfaction with the liberty and equality it provides.4 The problem with the modern apotheosis of history is not the ideal of reason itself but humanity’s unsuitability for it. While Fukuyama undoubtedly has a point that “it is not sufficient to simply cite the Holocaust and expect discourse on the question of progress or rationality in human history to end”,5 overlooking the structural connection between the Holocaust and modernity (to repeat Zygmunt Bauman’s words) might be “a sign of dangerous and potentially suicidal blindness.”6 Moreover, Fukuyama does not seem to take seriously the extent of the shock caused by the Holocaust. His claim is that “one can recognize the fact that modernity has permitted new scope for human evil, even question the fact of human moral progress, and yet continue to believe.”7 Yet, it seems precisely that if one takes the catastrophes of the twentieth century seriously enough, it might become impossible to continue to believe. At first sight, the second suggested path out of the crisis seems more viable, although it ultimately runs into a similar issue. It aims to renew the system of values and the experience of the world that kept rationalism in check—in effect a reenchantment of the world. In the European context, this is easily coupled with the project of the search for a European identity. Europe’s social and cultural fragmentation calls for a “supposedly authentic European culture as substitute for the intellectual void of modernity and technological civilisation.”8 If the answer is not sought in European culture (or Europe’s national cultures), reference is often made to the religious legacy of Christianity (culture and religion cannot, of course, be seen completely independent of each other). Fascism, for example, explicitly appealed to culture as a remedy against the ills of modernity, and older ideas of Europe such as those of the Holy Roman Empire or Christendom played an important role in this.9 Exemplary for this is the work of Novalis, who provided an early diagnosis of the pitfalls of European modernity and explicitly called for a reenchantment of the world to find “[its] original meaning again.”10 Equating Europe with Christendom, for Novalis, religion was the key both to reenchanting the world and to giving Europe cohesion again. This centuries-old sentiment has not lost its appeal to some. The past decades have seen a renewed and postsecular appreciation of Christianity in European philosophy.11 Of course, one does not need to be a religious (let alone fascist) reactionary to make an appeal to such solutions. Jürgen Habermas has also emphasised Europe’s need for symbolism and “romantic ideas”12 (his postsecularism will

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be discussed briefly in relation to his political theory in chapter 3). It is telling that the founders of the European Union have stated that if they were to start over, they would begin with European culture.13 The problem with solutions that seek to counteract the disenchantment of the world by an appeal to culture or religion is that they might not take its effects seriously enough. Digging through Europe’s past does little good if this past derives its cohesion as a European past from resources that are no longer believed in. Christendom did not survive disenchantment unscathed and the catastrophes that reason brought about highlighted the weakness of Europe’s culture as a means to keep barbarity in check. This weakness is precisely what made Europe’s crisis so pernicious, as Eric Voegelin pointed out: That is the reason why so many people today, since we don’t have a myth of our own in our civilization, will now go back into archeology, into comparative religion, into comparative literature and similar subject matters, because that is the place where they can recapture the substance that in our acculturated, and now decultured, civilization is getting lost. That is why people all of a sudden become Zen Buddhists. You have to become a Zen Buddhist because there is nothing comparable in Western civilization to which you can fall back, if a dogmatism has run out, as the Christian has in the Age of Enlightenment.14

Much of the thought of the past centuries is obsessed, implicitly or not, by the idea of an original, proper state—be it of culture, religion, community, Europe, the world, humanity, and so on. As discussed in the previous chapter, this is inherent to the logic of the crisis. It provides the means to understand our current situation on the basis of a time when things had not yet gone wrong. Appeals to other cultures and traditions are usually nothing but a variant of this. They are seen as still untainted and thus function as analogous to our own past. Of course, this sought-after past is often one that never existed as such. Episodes from Europe’s past (the same goes for the present of faraway others) are idealised up to the point of severe inaccuracy. This leads to normative claims that are remarkably unconcerned with the historical reality needed to justify them. Such nostalgia has been attacked by many, particular in relation to communitarian thought that posits the prior existence of a wholesome community before the onset of society.15 The Europe or experience of the world that some want to return to in order to fix the problems of modernity is a construction that largely has never existed. This does not only put in doubt solutions that appeal to such past resources. It puts in doubt the common presentation of the crisis as such. After all, if such a past did not exist, neither can it have given way to the disenchanting forces of modernisation.

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The logic of the crisis leads many to remain beholden to the basic structure of the Grand Narrative as a story about a singular process that would explain our contemporary situation. At the same time, this process is not taken seriously enough on its own terms. Suppose that the enchanted past to which some appeal did exist as such. What is to say that a return to these more pristine beginnings of Europe’s decline will not have the same outcome?16 Our current historical situation has to be taken seriously, if only for the reason that it is the only concrete situation that we have to work with. In that sense, recourses to culture or religion can often appear to be disingenuous solutions. The potential use of these sources for communal bonds, a meaningful way of life, and as a means to bring about a European identity is widely recognised. But over the past centuries it is precisely the belief in the truth of these matters that has been lost. Those who diagnose Europe’s condition as the loss of a meaningful worldview and who propose a return to such a worldview without actually believing in it find themselves in good company, as Terry Eagleton has made clear: Machiavelli thought that religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful means of terrorising and pacifying the mob. Voltaire feared infecting his own domestic servants with his impiety. Toland clung to a ‘rational’ Christian belief himself, but thought the rabble should stay with their superstitions. Gibbon, one of the most notorious sceptics of all time, considered that the religious doctrines he despised could nonetheless prove socially useful. So did Montesquieu and Hume. So in our own time does Jürgen Habermas. Diderot scoffed at religion but valued its social cohesiveness. Arnold sought to counter the creeping godlessness of the working class with a poeticised version of the Christian doctrine he himself spurned. Auguste Comte, an out-and-out materialist, brought this dubious lineage to an acme of absurdity with his plans for a secular priesthood. Durkheim had no truck with the deity himself, but thought that religion could be a precious source of edifying sentiment. The philosopher Leo Strauss held that religious faith was essential for social order, though he did not for a moment credit it himself. A philosophical elite aware of the truth of the matter—that there is no sure foundation to political society—must at all costs conceal it from the masses.17

Whether the solution is sought in a renewed faith in reason or in religion or culture, the problem is similar: It is a solution that might work if only we could believe in it. But our historical situation has led us to the point that this is precisely what many find they can no longer do. The result is that Europe finds itself in an ideological stasis with an uneasy relation to not only reason but to culture and religion as well.

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THE UNEASE OF REASON: FIDEISM AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM Europe’s rationalist ideals have been put on trial, but the problem is not so much that they are now in the role of the defence instead of the prosecution, as Alain Finkielkraut put it.18 Rudi Visker has noted more accurately that reason is “at once plaintiff, defendant and counsel” leaving us “with only the drama of an unhappy consciousness that doesn’t know what to do with itself.”19 This captures the situation more accurately, because it is not merely that reason is under fire from other sources of spiritual life, such as religion and culture. It is also reason’s self-limitation that has made room for fideism and cultural relativism. Going against the grain of the secularisation thesis that predicted the ongoing waning of religion, the latter half of the twentieth century has shown a resurgence of religion that has taken many different forms: from fundamentalisms and New Age–type spiritualisms to postsecular thought and theological turns in philosophy. It is perhaps better to term this a new ‘religiosity’ rather than ‘religion’, because the latter has connotations of organised religion that are absent in many contemporary cases. Often, it is not the return of any specific established religion, but the expression of a vaguely defined religious sentiment. It is precisely this sentiment that seems to have become immune to rational approaches and that has fideist traits. The development of modernity itself helped give rise to this situation. Reason was used to critique all facets of life and it did not take long before reason itself became subject to critique. The ironic twist is that by outlining its own limits, reason cordoned off a domain where it could not make any claims itself. While this prevents false claims to knowledge of anything that exceeds the limits of reason, this could also be used as a legitimation for a different kind of access to it, as Quentin Meillassoux has argued.20 In some cases, this was not an unfortunate side effect but the explicit aim. Kant, for example, famously “found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”21 Such moves rest on the idea that reason might not have the final or even any say on some matters. In effect, this functions as a justification for nonrational modes of access to the domains where reason has to stay silent. Thus, the rational critique of rationality harbours within itself a “renewed argument for blind faith”,22 for fideism. Reason’s impotence or indifference towards claims that lie outside of its own scope has become ingrained in much of the West. As Meillassoux notes: “The condemnation of fanaticism is carried out solely in the name of its practical (ethico-political) consequences, never in the name of the ultimate falsity of its contents.”23 As opposed to the modern ideal of reason, truth has become

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a secondary concern. As we will see in the next chapter, this has become a characteristic of contemporary liberal democratic thought. At the same time, nonrational beliefs become all the more compelling when the transcendent is abandoned by reason. As Isaiah Berlin remarked: “the deep, dark sources of art and religion and nationalism, precisely because they are dark and resist detached examination, and vanish under intellectual analysis, are guarded and worshipped as transcendent, inviolable, absolute.”24 The renewed importance given to culture follows a similar logic. While fideism can lay claim to the transcendent that had been abandoned by reason, cultural relativism and particularism lay claim to the immanent because the transcendent (through which the universal was thought) has been abandoned by reason. The values of modernity, which were thought to transcend the particularity of culture, have lost their force. This is not only because reason can no longer claim to know what these values entail, but also because of the immoral acts carried out in their name or as a consequence of them, such as Europe’s colonialism. With the dissolution of the modern ideal after the Second World War, as Gerard Delanty put it, “all of the great promises of the Enlightenment were seen as failures and the European mind abandoned civilisation for culture.”25 While the nineteenth century had no shortage of nationalisms emphasising particular cultures, this often still went hand in hand with some form of the ideal of reason. German Idealism aimed at a synthesis of both and early relativist thinkers such as Herder did not abandon the Enlightenment. Indeed, those that glorified their own nation often did so on the basis of the belief that they exemplified its ideals more than others. This is a marked difference from Julien Benda’s characterisation in the 1920s of the widespread “cult for the particular and the scorn for the universal”26 among intellectuals. While the cultural chauvinism in the first half of the twentieth century had horrible consequences and after the war led to a reluctance of many Europeans to appraise their culture in any strong sense, after the war we nonetheless see a new appreciation of culture. However, instead of emphasising one’s own culture, there is an increasing focus on that of others. In an ever further globalising context, where intercultural encounters are taking place for more people than ever, this is not unusual nor is it without precedent. It has already been discussed how many sought alternative sources for their values, given what Europe’s own values had led to. But there seems to be a further motivation in the respect that is now to be given to the particularity of others, while during the Enlightenment respect was based on what is universal in each. This is not so much a dismissal of the modern ideal as it is an inversion of it, an inversion which took place on both practical and theoretical grounds. This change in outlook becomes clear when we look at the formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War.

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The input of the American Anthropological Association provides a clear example of the inversion of the modern ideal. Their first and foundational principle was as follows: “The individual realizes his personality through his culture, hence respect for individual differences entails a respect for cultural differences.”27 Compare this to the Enlightenment creed that holds it “to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” such as we can find it in United States Declaration of Independence. The emphasis on human dignity in both documents is the same, yet whereas the modern ideal entailed rising above particular differences, after the Second World War these very differences should be respected. The Enlightenment aimed to transcend our particular cultures through the cultivation of a common humanity, whereas the postwar ideal emphasises one’s particular culture. The reasons for this change are made clear in the rest of the statement of the American Anthropological Association as well as in the final version of the declaration. Their second principle expresses that it is not believed that there is a universal, rational standard that transcends the plurality of particular cultures. Any such standard is nothing but a function of a particular culture with no bearing on others. This claim is made based on (empirical) science’s failure to find any universal standard. Cultural relativism is thus justified by the theoretical dismissal of transcendent values. Of course, the context of the declaration cannot be ignored either and the final version of it wastes no time to refer to the “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind” during the Second World War. The theoretical justification for cultural relativism goes hand in hand with the ethico-practical concern of preventing another Auschwitz. Although it is understandable from a historical perspective, it is nonetheless somewhat peculiar that the solution to the ‘cult for the particular’ that targeted people for extermination because of their particular background itself takes the form of a valuation of the particular—albeit in a vastly different constellation. Universalism has been put to abhorrent use, but, it hardly needs mentioning, the same goes for particularism. However, the ill consequences of particularism do not only come about through the glorification of one’s own culture and the disdain towards the other. Our very respect for others, combined with the relativistic impossibility of passing judgment on them, might have ill consequences. As Finkielkraut put it, “we end up limiting the application of the rights of man only to societies identified with the West, believing all the time we have expanded these rights by giving peoples of other traditions the chance to live by the laws of their own cultures.”28 The postwar appreciation of other cultures has gone hand in hand with a devaluation and particularisation of Europe’s own ideals by itself.29 The disenchantment of the world and the Holocaust have become the theoretical and ethico-practical signifiers through which Europe can be seen as having

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ideologically disarmed itself. As Eagleton noted, the West continues to believe in many of its modern values. “It is just that these convictions have to survive in a culture of scepticism which gravely debilitates them.”30 The widespread adoption of cultural relativism in the end not only undermines Europe’s pretension to rationality and universality; it leaves it unarmed against the potential dismantling of the ideas, values, and institutions in the European tradition that are worth upholding. As will be discussed further in chapter 3, this has resulted in tensions within the secular and liberal-democratic political systems of Europe, especially when these are confronted with religious and cultural phenomena that European politics has become uncertain of how to deal with. EUROPE’S CONTESTED IDENTITY The changing role of religion and culture also pertains to the idea of Europe after the breakdown of its modern variant. After the Second World War, the idea of Europe was haunted by its fascist appropriations and the ease with which it lent itself to these. The project of European integration became first and foremost a bureaucratic project—increasing economic integration followed by the political integration required by this. Wavering support for this project has led to an increased emphasis on Europe’s shared history and values, but this has largely been superficial and somewhat of a reactionary move, brought about by the failures of this integration. While the ‘reunification’ of Europe with the fall of the Iron Curtain prompted new discussions on Europe, this did not lead to a firm reestablishment of any idea of Europe. Indeed, without the clear ideological and geopolitical lines of the twentieth century, the many differences within Europe have become all the clearer. The disappearance of the Eastern ‘Other’ entailed the disappearance of that against which (Western) Europe (largely subordinated to the idea of the West) had defined itself. Moreover, the gradual dominance of the modern idea of Europe throughout the previous centuries did not entail that the older idea of Europe as Christendom had simply disappeared. The integration of much of Central and Eastern Europe into the European project makes this clear today. After the fall of the Soviet Bloc and with the return of freedom of religion, Christianity in many cases played an important role in the identity and self-determination of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. It is perhaps an ironic twist of history that a substantial conception of Europe that does not equate it with the European Union can these days mainly be found with the Eurosceptics. They tend to glorify Europe’s culture and history to denounce the empty bureaucracy of the European Union. While the Eurosceptic refusal to identify the European Union with Europe is not

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without its merits, this generally degenerates into a reactionary call for a Christian Europe (often more so in a cultural than a truly religious sense).31 This is evident in the Visegrád group of countries within the European Union but also among populists throughout Western Europe. There is a developing struggle between a Christian conception of Europe with illiberal tendencies, and a liberal conception that is largely pro-European Union. The latter often goes accompanied by reference to the catastrophes of the twentieth century. This reference itself has become a dividing line, if not to say battleground, between these different conceptions of Europe. The project of European integration started against the background of the Second World War, but the war and the Holocaust did not form an active part of attempts to create a new symbolism to carry this project from the start. During its first decades, the focus often lay on the future prospects of increased integration and prosperity. While this proved sufficient during the postwar economic boom under the umbrella of Western values which had won out over fascism, this was less sustainable during periods of recession. Increasingly, especially from the 1990s onwards, the Holocaust became the foundational reference of the European project. While this was successful and already ongoing in Western Europe, this was less the case in Central and Eastern Europe. There, awareness and remembrance of the Holocaust, as well as the acknowledgement of culpability, had developed in a different manner. Something like the words of German chancellor Angela Merkel at her first visit to Auschwitz in 2019, that the responsibility for the Holocaust is part of German identity and of Germany as an enlightened and free democracy, is imaginable in many Western European countries (although, of course, it has a special meaning for Germany). In much of Central and Eastern Europe, however, this is a more difficult matter. In Poland, for example, the mere suggestion that the Polish played any part in this tragedy had become a criminal offence in 2018 before international outcry helped reversed this. Such an attitude towards the Holocaust is shared by many Western right-wing and Eurosceptic politicians who express dissatisfaction with what they see as the tiring reference to the war. In Central and Eastern Europe, it is less the Holocaust and more Stalinism that provides the main frame of reference for the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Attempts to integrate these different frames into one foundation do not mesh well the unicity that has become common to attribute to the Holocaust, nor with the culpability that Western Europe had started making part of its identity.32 Attention to other histories weakens attempts to give the Holocaust a uniquely foundational status for Europe in other ways as well. The emphasis on the Holocaust is criticised more and more as other tragedies (most notably from Europe’s colonial history) are gaining attention.

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With seemingly little providing internal cohesion, in the twenty-first century Europe’s identity is again found in relation to perceived external threats: Islam since 9/11 and the terrorist attacks throughout Europe thereafter, Russia under Putin, and during the presidency of Donald Trump even the United States became a foil against which Europe tried to establish an independent identity. While identification against such external others is not new and can be effective (leaving aside the question whether it is desirable), this nonetheless leaves Europe’s existential and political situation without a strong foundation if it is not accompanied by internal spiritual and symbolic resources.

Chapter 3

Rational Politics, the Liberal Consensus, and the Agonistic Critique

Although reason is no longer the focus of European existence as it was for some in the past, the political function of reason remains to an extent. This is particularly so in Western liberal thought, including in its attempts to come to terms with the changing attitudes towards religion and culture discussed in the previous chapter. Conservative political thought has always been more closely and naturally aligned with these and while much socialist thought also has a rationalist nature, this often included more of an open hostility towards religion. Moreover, the fall of the Soviet Union entailed that Western liberal democracy could present itself as the definite bearer of progress and modernity. Consequently, it is this rationalist liberalism that will be the focus of this chapter. The political function of reason can take different forms, two broad categories of which are discussed first in this chapter. Throughout much of Europe’s modern political history, this concerns the attempt to reconcile the different worldviews (primarily religious denominations) present in society. However, as the faith in reason grew, the idea of a complete rational organisation of society also developed. These two positions correspond to what will be referred to as the more instrumental (and pessimistic) recourse to reason by the early liberal thinkers, and the more substantial (and optimistic) recourse to it by later, more utopian thinkers. The totalitarian consequences of the latter helped firmly establish liberalism as an essential part of the political model of the West. At the same time, this led a more than instrumental value to be projected onto the liberal model. As the totalitarianisms of the past become a fading memory, it seems that we no longer know what liberal democracy means or can mean for us in our contemporary situation, at least not with the self-assuredness with which it was presented for a long time. 29

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While liberal democracy arose out of the need for reconciliation within pluriform societies, demographic changes over the past half century have introduced new religious and cultural minorities in European societies. Together with the renewed postwar respect for the particularities of human existence, religious faith and cultural difference, this has required liberal thought to come to terms with pluralism anew. This is discussed on the basis of the work of John Rawls and the closely related work of Jürgen Habermas. Their work aims at a political reconciliation. They put this in stronger terms than the instrumental reason of modern liberalism, while at the same time attempting to stave off the potentially totalitarian consequences of the more substantial use of reason. Crucial to this is the claim that their conception of politics is procedural. The neutrality and reconciliatory function of their conception of politics rests on its independence from any particular worldview. However, there are reasons to believe that the reconciliatory and mediating function that Rawls and Habermas make essential to liberal democracy nonetheless privileges or is dependent on a particular worldview: the worldview of the modern ideal of reason as discussed in chapter 1. This has consequences for the way liberal democracy is to relate to the content of the views which it is to reconcile. It might no longer be able to remain strictly procedural and neutral towards them, because their truth or falsity has a bearing on the conditions under which liberal democracy can function. The final section of this chapter discusses agonistic political thought through its criticism of liberal thought and its political model of rational reconciliation. Instead of relying on the modern worldview, it rests on the latter’s dissolution and a more conflictual conception of the world. In taking conflict rather than reconciliation as the central notion of politics, it hopes to avoid the inadequacies of the overly idealistic approach of liberal thought. The critique of the latter is discussed as valid on many points, but the agonistic alternative is argued to be susceptible to a relativism with potentially far-reaching consequences. This highlights the need for limits to agonistic politics in the form of a new foundation for liberal democracy. The agonistic critique in this section is broadly drawn from authors such as William E. Connolly, John Gray, Bonnie Honig, and Chantal Mouffe, whose criticism of liberal thought is largely similar despite the differences in their work. The alternative developed in chapter 8 is based on indications given by Mouffe in particular. REASON AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY We have seen that the modern idea of Europe and its rationalist ideal rely on a concept of the world as a coherent totality that can be brought into view

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through the use of reason. Various modern conceptions of the political took shape in line with this, basing politics on an ideal of rational reconciliation. The search for universal truths was related to the search for the common good. At the same time, a certain openness in the organisation of society and the institutionalisation of pluralism have been important features of (Western) European modernity. Liberal democracy should not too easily be seen as the natural outcome of Europe’s history or rationalism, such as the Grand Narrative would have it. The idea that society can be organised, rather than being a pregiven entity confined by the limits of tradition, myth, or religion, gave shape to modern political thought in important ways. However, to a large extent this was thought in opposition to the power of religion or foreign rule. While this laid a basis for a secular and autonomous politics, this does not necessarily entail a rationalist, liberal, or democratic politics. Much modern republicanism can be considered undemocratic and unconcerned with staples of liberalism, such as individual freedom and human rights. The combination of these elements in liberal democracy as we know it today is a contingent matter,1 as is its incorporation into any optimistic narrative of progress.2 Moreover, the role of rationalism in this is not univocal as there were different beliefs regarding what reason was capable of. The mentioned duality between universalism and pluralism can be used to sketch two different kinds of rationalist politics. In both cases, reason provides the key to a peaceful and prosperous coexistence, albeit in more substantial and instrumental ways respectively. The former attempts to establish a universal truth (about the human being, society, and the world) on the basis of which society is to be organised, whereas the latter aims at reconciliation in the absence of such a truth. In line with this, the substantialist view tends towards a specific and total organisation of society whereas the instrumentalist view aims at the mediation between a plurality of goals, interests, claims, and worldviews. The latter was understandably more dominant in a Europe emerging from the wars of religion. But the substantialist view started gaining more traction as Europe’s faith in reason grew throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the more substantial conception of reason and its role in the organisation of society more closely follows the rationalist ideal of modern Europe as presented in chapter 1, it will be discussed first. It attempts to establish a comprehensive view of the world and our place in it and consequently it concerns itself with the content of the views present in society. It works under the assumption that there are truths that determine the right and wrong way to organise society. Other views are thus competing views. Consequently, political neutrality is out of the question; at least insofar as such neutrality is conceived of in terms of a distance towards the other views present in society.3

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Such rationalist politics can be found in the work of utopian authors such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and Karl Marx, and to various degrees prefigures the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. The attempt to conceive of the world as a coherent totality without remainder is mirrored by the attempt to organise society as a coherent totality without remainder. While this tends to the abolition of the state insofar as there ultimately is no need for any enforcement by the state (ideally, everyone can simply understand the truth on the basis of which society is to be organised), this can also be used for an authoritarian top-down implementation of a certain view of society. The truth, after all, is on their side. Once it is established what the human being fundamentally is and needs, it is only a matter of making the ideal state of society come about. Ultimately, as Friedrich Engels famously put it, this has the government of people give way to the administration of things, politics to technocracy. The instrumentalist view of rationalist politics is more closely aligned with the liberal tradition. It is more minimal, because it is less optimistic about the capacities of reason and about human nature. Its aim is not to determine any overall conception of the good life or of society, that is, a higher and common good. What matters is the acknowledgement of a plurality of such goods. This plurality potentially poses a threat to one’s own interests and (should this lead to conflict) to one’s life. As in the work of Thomas Hobbes and other contractarians, it is thus prudent to establish a social contract in which freedom and power are handed over to an authority that in exchange is to guarantee the security of those who do so. While such politics strives for a practical peaceful coexistence, a modus vivendi, coexistence itself is not necessarily its intrinsic goal. The main goal is the avoidance of the state of war that can come about if no limit is set to all interests. Were others not a potential threat and were peaceful coexistence not a helpful means to one’s goals, such coexistence would have no added value. Self-preservation is thus taken as an overriding interest, a condition of possibility for the pursuit of one’s interests in general, and it is rational to secure this at the cost of other interests. This is still very clear, for example, in the work of Friedrich Hayek, who goes so far as to say that even “democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safe-guarding internal peace and individual freedom.”4 Should it no longer fulfil this purpose, it can be discarded without fundamentally altering the liberal and rational basis of this political constellation. Reason plays a role here in weighing one’s interests, but as to the content of these interests or the good life it does not necessarily have anything to offer. The reconciliation that the instrumental model aims at, can thus be based on a minimal agreement on how to peacefully give shape to the coexistence of diverse interests by agreeing on common overriding interests such as mutual

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security. One’s view of the world and outlook on life are irrelevant to politics as long as these do not infringe on the security the latter is to provide. While this seemingly reduces life to a bare life concerned only with survival, this can also be turned around: primarily tasked with the security of its citizens, the state largely does not concern itself with their particular interests. This neutrality is a hallmark of this kind of liberalism. It does not itself present a worldview competing with others but merely mediates between those present in society. Its neutrality is the guarantor of its fairness in this. Note that for both of these extremes of rationalist politics, there is not necessarily all that much need for the kind of debate, deliberation, and discussion we tend to associate with the decision-making process of politics. The substantialist view aims at a truth that essentially warrants unanimity and that can be established theoretically, while in the instrumentalist view a minimal agreement is enough for everyone to go about their own business. The reality of contemporary liberal democracy usually lies between these extremes. It involves the attempt to reach consensus with a much more uncertain, indeterminate conception of what the common good might be, while not being disinterested in it either. The liberal-democratic mediation between different views can then be seen as a means towards the common good or a higher truth, such as we find in the work of Rousseau. As mentioned, the development of rationalist political thought in Europe moved from its more instrumentalist, liberal variant, with its source in the wars of religion, to its more substantial variant, with the increase of the faith in reason during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More than anything, it was in opposition to the totalitarian and authoritarian tendencies of the latter, tendencies that fully realised themselves in the twentieth century, that contemporary liberal democracy took shape. However, the firm establishment of the liberal model as the model of the West also coated it in the universalist and normative terms that were more characteristic of the substantialist view. After all, this model had been vindicated by the Grand Narrative, especially after the fall of its Soviet competitor. However, while the fall of the Soviet Union represented the supposed ultimate victory of the liberal paradigm, it also led to more uncertainty about it. As was the case with the idea of Europe, without a clear (and close) ‘Other’ to define itself against, questions regarding its nature and status have become more pressing. Totalitarianism is becoming or has already become a fading memory, no longer a near threat in the West. It thus no longer suffices to simply say that we are not totalitarian. Moreover, some states such as China have achieved great economic and geopolitical success, creating prosperity for many of its people, while remaining illiberal. What can be seen as the external pressure on the idea of liberal democracy due to this geopolitical and ideological situation is accompanied by

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the internal tension due to the renewed importance attached to religion and culture. This has not taken the form of attempts to supplant the rational and secular foundation of Europe’s political institutions. Religion and culture are instead (again) finding their place within the neutrality of these institutions. However, the postwar focus on and respect for the particularities of human existence, does not necessarily mesh well with the neutral, disinterested nature of the liberal state. The unease with these changing boundaries and balances of societal pluralism becomes clear when we look at the work of two of the most prominent and influential postwar thinkers on liberal democracy. THE LIBERAL CONSENSUS AND PLURALISM For both Rawls and Habermas, rational consensus plays a fundamental role in their explicitly postmetaphysical conception of liberal democracy. They do not see reason’s role in this as substantially determining the good, but neither are they satisfied with a mere modus vivendi. Their aim of a more meaningful reconciliation than a modus vivendi lies in the precarious balance between the instrumental and substantial conceptions of reason outlined above. Similarly, their work is articulated from within the tension between liberalism and democracy. In Rawls’ work the liberal strand is more pronounced, whereas in that of Habermas the emphasis is more democratic. Rawls is primarily interested in the liberal consensus understood as the general framework of the state in which democratic politics can take place in a just way. If the process of arriving at a democratic consensus is the stuff of everyday politics where different goals, interests, claims, and views are to be reconciled with each other to the degree that the result is supported by a majority, the liberal consensus concerns questions of the legitimation and limits of this democratic consensus. For example, the liberal consensus outlines what can and cannot be decided via democratic procedure with respect to individual rights, securing the latter against infringements on it by the former. In classically liberal fashion, the liberal consensus should thus be as independent as possible of the views put forward in the democratic process. When it comes to the framework of this process, these views should give way to “a political conception the principles and values of which all citizens can endorse.”5 The exercise of political power is only justified by this endorsement; or rather, by what “all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse.”6 This latter clause already indicates that Rawls’ foundation of the liberal consensus is to be determined via a detached use of reason. Acceptance of the liberal consensus is not justified directly by any alignment between it and one one’s interests or views. Rather, it is justified by the recognition that it

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is reasonable to accept it irrespective of these. There are limited resources in society, these are not equally distributed, and different people aim to realise different goods with them. Rawls attempts to think of the principles that are fair in the sense that all would (and should) adhere to them, given this situation. In absence of agreement on the outcome of the organisation of society, he devises “a correct or fair procedure such that the outcome is likewise correct or fair.”7 Rawls’ rationalism is thus clearly an instrumental, procedural rationalism that has no pretence that it can determine the common good itself. In his terminology, Rawls prioritises the right over the good and the reasonable over the rational.8 It is important to note that reasonable does not mean strategic here. It does not entail a purely self-interested form of cooperation and bargaining. The fairness which it aims at is worth pursuing in itself as a form of justice. Rawls’ proceduralism relies on the idealised hypothesis of an ‘original position’ in which different parties, their goods, and the means to pursue them are presented in order to make a reasonable judgment on their fair distribution. This is to be done under a ‘veil of ignorance’; in ignorance of one’s place in society, the views one holds, one’s background, and so on. In short: in ignorance of “those contingencies which set men at odds and allow them to be guided by their prejudice.”9 In bracketing these contingencies, what remains is the universal higher-order interest in advancing one’s conception of the good. The liberal consensus thus primarily concerns the general means (such as basic rights and wealth) that enable the pursuit of a wide variety of goods. Constrained by the veil of ignorance, the reasonable insight follows that an adequate distribution of these is to the benefit of each and moreover fair to each. Of course, we do not live under the veil of ignorance. Rawls’ conception of politics thus splits the individual between their personal convictions, relegated to their “non-public identity,”10 and their reasonable participation in the public sphere. Rawls’ argument thus functions by instituting a distinction between private and public that mirrors the divide between particular and universal that is typical of the modern ideal of reason. Views that fall outside of the liberal consensus are relegated to the sphere of the private and are not allowed any say in public matters. Given the focus on the socioeconomic organisation of society and the neutralism of Rawls’ liberalism, this conception of the political goes hand in hand with a highly administrative, if not to say technocratic, organisation of society.11 It need not encourage active citizenship and democratic debate, as the reasonable organisation of society can be determined through the detached use of reason. Ultimately, Rawlsian politics is not based on agreement but on unanimity. Under the veil of ignorance, “the deliberations of one person are typical of all.”12 Rawls’ particular instrumentalist conception of reason starts

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resembling the substantialist conception here, raising the question whether it might implicitly rely on a more substantial conception of reason and a more comprehensive worldview than he would admit. Although Rawls’ liberal consensus is initially set up to be independent of any worldview, in his later work he increasingly recognises the need for a consensus that is supported by the views that people actually hold. Aside from the practical aspect to this (a form of attachment is required for politics to function properly), Rawls also sees it as a liberal principle that the liberal consensus is to be accepted freely: “Justice as fairness is not reasonable in the first place unless it generates its own support in a suitable way by addressing each citizen’s reason, as explained within its own framework.”13 In this development from a more universalistic approach to the attempt to come to terms with the reality of cultural pluralism in contemporary Western societies, Rawls is joined by Habermas. The latter, too, has increasingly moved to see religion and culture as potential resources for the functioning of liberal democracy. This does not mean that either gives up their rationalist legitimation of liberal democracy. It’s just that people holding various views “are expected to appropriate the secular legitimation of constitutional principles under the premises of their own faith.”14 While Rawls’ work became more appreciative of the role that the plurality of worldviews can play in supporting the liberal consensus, this role seems dependent on the fact that they already share certain fundamental elements with the latter, or at least are amenable to it. It is telling that in discussing this proposed overlapping consensus that draws from different sources, Rawls does not turn to the plurality of views in society itself but to the fundamentals found in “our public political culture itself, including its main institutions and the historical traditions of their interpretation, as the shared fund of implicitly recognized basic ideas and principles.”15 Needless to say, this is a particular political culture that is already heavily shaped by liberal thought. The neutrality that Rawls aspires to is at risk as he moves from his earlier independence of the liberal consensus to the idea that it must be “so far as possible, independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines.”16 Of course, independence from doctrines tout court and independence so far as possible from controversial doctrines are very different things. The case is somewhat different for Habermas, but for Rawls this reappreciation of what these doctrines themselves have to offer remains restricted to their possible use in justifying the liberal consensus from a variety of perspectives. They are not to substantially contribute to it. The pluralism of contemporary Western societies is thereby subordinated to his conception of what is reasonable. Differences between views are relegated to the sphere of the private and are not to play a role in establishing the political principles that govern society. There is thus little actual reconciliation going on here.

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While Rawls maintains that this conception of the liberal consensus is ‘political not metaphysical’, the way in which it draws from existing political culture, which has been heavily shaped by modern history and the modern worldview, raises the question to what extent it in fact is as independent as Rawls suggests. His line of defence against the accusation of a reliance on specific metaphysical views is far from convincing. He claims that even if his conception of politics were to rely on some metaphysical views, this is sufficiently minimal and concerns ideas that “are so general that they would not distinguish between the distinctive metaphysical views—Cartesian, Leibnizian, Kantian: realist, idealist, or materialist—with which philosophy has traditionally been concerned.”17 In qualifying the independence of his conception of the liberal consensus in this manner, Rawls takes for granted the modern rationalism that runs through the views he mentions and with which he is aligned himself; the rationalism that holds that a meaningful reconciliation between different views can be achieved by taking more universal point of view. His recourse to “basic intuitive ideas”18 is rather weak, as such ideas tend to be superficial precisely insofar as they are intuitive. Rawls does not elaborate on certain fundamental aspects of his account because he does not think they need it. This creates room for the suspicion that the liberal consensus in fact has stronger ties to a particular worldview, undermining the faith in its neutrality and procedural nature. Or perhaps worse: it creates room for the suspicion that it ultimately provides but a modus vivendi without any normative status and which thus can be dismissed the moment it becomes in one’s interest to do so. Habermas arguably avoids some of these issues, being more sensitive to the actual political process and to what people can contribute to it. Unlike for Rawls, “reasonable or fair results” are not obtained by taking the point of view of a detached spectator but deliberatively, that is: “insofar as the flow of relevant information and its proper handling have not been obstructed.”19 This amounts to a democratic process of public discussion realised under the conditions of ideal discourse: equality, lack of coercion, and so on. Habermas bases his conception of politics on a normativity he sees as inherent to all communication oriented at reaching understanding. This results in a better-founded and more procedural normativity than Rawls provides. The more procedural nature of Habermas’ conception of politics is shown by the fact that he includes the liberal consensus itself in the democratic process, even if he does believe it will lead to similar results as Rawls’ liberal consensus. There is no strict distinction between public and private spheres set in advance and excluded from discussion. Habermas is fully aware that such a constraint “would at least implicitly prejudice the agenda in favor of an inherited background of settled traditions.”20 What does or does not count as a matter of public debate is itself a political question to be shaped by the

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views with which people enter this debate. This moreover prevents the public sphere from becoming a space of technocratic economic distribution devoid of further values, a sphere limited to the strategic direction of competing interests; the “colonisation of the life-world” by economic and technical rationality discussed by Habermas in his early work.21 This refusal to hand the public sphere over to technocratic organisation, goes hand in hand with Habermas’ refusal to allow for the complete privatisation of views. Beyond their potential use in justifying the liberal consensus, Habermas recognises that they may very well have something to contribute to all sorts of debates. For example, while a secular thinker himself, he says that we “must not deny in principle that religious images of the world have the potential to express truth,” nor must we refuse others “the right to make contributions in a religious language to public debates.”22 Habermas thus takes the substance of the various worldviews present in society more seriously than Rawls does. Worldviews such as those provided by religion are not reducible to ethico-practical guidelines. They contain claims to truth and it is this fact that makes pluralism a societal challenge in the first place. Habermas takes the enduring presence of religion and other nonrational sources of meaning in society seriously enough to speak of a ‘postsecular society’. This raises the question in what manner different views are allowed to contribute to public debate. It is clear that this involves concessions and that basic political principles that regulate the process of arriving at a democratic consensus must be accepted. Yet, Habermas avoids any hard cut between the views that people hold and the basic political framework he proposes. Nonetheless, the continuity between these views and their political contribution involves the “translation of their rational content into a publicly accessible language.”23 Consequently, it is not just a matter of renouncing political force and religious indoctrination as means of imposing religious truths; it is also a matter of religious consciousness becoming reflexive when confronted with the necessity of relating its articles of faith to competing systems of belief and to the scientific monopoly on the production of factual knowledge.24

This is a kind of reflexivity that Rawls also asks of the views that are to be part of the liberal consensus, although in his work it is more a matter of filtering out illiberal content than shaping this content deliberatively. Nonetheless, while Habermas emphasises the possible contributions that different views can make to political debate, ultimately his position ends up very close to that of Rawls. On the one hand, Habermas allows for a much more open and democratic shaping of this consensus. Moreover, he asks for the same kind of reflexivity from secularists that he asks of others. He sees that the dominance

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of secularism as a worldview might be “just as unappetizing for the normative self-understanding of a post-secular society as the fundamentalist leaning of a mass of religious citizens.”25 In short, Habermas fully commits to the process rather than to any particular view. On the other hand, this is complicated by Habermas’ uneasy relation to the teleology of secularisation that forms an important part of the Grand Narrative. In his later work, he is no longer as committed to the secularisation thesis as he was in his earlier work. Nonetheless, Habermas presents liberal democracy as the outcome of a progressive historical trajectory. It is a development, a rationalisation, of communicative practices already present in more traditional worldviews, even if he no longer believes that these traditional worldviews can fully be replaced. The reflexive stance which liberal democracy requires is “the result of a learning process,”26 a process that Habermas relates to Europe’s modern history and religious wars. He thus sees his deliberative model of liberal democracy itself as the outcome (through the messy process of history) of the deliberative practice it proposes. It seems that, like Rawls’ conception, Habermas’ conception of liberal democracy presupposes its own validity, independent of and prior to the political process itself. For all Habermas’ attempts to take different views seriously, in terms of the possible contribution that they can make to debates on the principles of politics, ultimately he already seems to know what the outcome of this is to look like. As he himself seems to indicate, having this debate play out nonetheless has more of a pedagogical value for those that have not acquired the necessary reflexive stance.27 Reference to the historical development of liberal democracy in the West is not without its value, but it can neither settle matters of principle, nor provide guarantees for the way this process is to take shape in the future or in the encounter with a much larger variety of views than in the past. Yet, Habermas shies away from firmly positing the truth and validity of his conception of liberal democracy because this would go against its proceduralist nature and democratic open-endedness. This undermines the universal normativity that Habermas’ model of politics aims at, making it ill-suited to ask others to apply the same kind of reflexivity to their views. After all, while Habermas sees it as the outcome of a learning process, this is only so “from the viewpoint of a secular self-understanding of Modernity.”28 The reflexivity necessary for his conception of politics to work, is part of its own historical trajectory that need not have any bearing on the worldviews of others. It might be completely foreign to them. Here, Habermas seems to come very close to the problematic relativism discussed in the previous chapter. It is clear that Habermas does not simply rely on the presupposition that the engagement between different views will lead to similar results as it has done in the West. After all, he bases his approach on a theory of communicative

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practice. Rather than expanding on this theory here, the following chapters will look at Husserl’s work as an attempt to provide a phenomenological foundation for this kind of reconciliation that sees a rationalist proceduralism as the path towards a convergence of different views. Despite Habermas’ critique of Husserlian phenomenology, we will see that their thought is quite similar in their focus on procedural unity and in this Husserl’s approach is arguably more fundamental. However, there are also approaches to politics that criticise this very focus itself. THE AGONISTIC CRITIQUE The main agonistic critique of liberal approaches to politics is that they are forms of ideal theory, concerned with formulating political principles suitable for ideal circumstances. They rely on (their interpretation of) reasonable persons and reasonable communicative practices. While Rawls wants to avoid “claims to universal truth, or claims about the essential nature and identity of persons,”29 his conception of reasonableness is tied to the idea of “informed and willing political agreement between citizens viewed as free and equal persons.”30 In reality, what counts as reasonable is often up for debate and political practices cannot circumvent the social dimension that is involved in many of our actions. As Connolly noted, ideal political theory “places impossible limitations on public dialogue. It rules out most of the considerations that move people to present, defend and reconfigure their identities in public space.”31 As we have seen, Habermas more so than Rawls takes into account the actual political process, yet in the end his account too remains beholden to an ideal of consensus. In reality, deliberation is not only a source of consensus but also of dissensus. Importantly, this is not necessarily a sign of irrationality, unwillingness, or a failure of the political process.32 There might be disagreements for which no ideal conclusion exists because of the nature of their subject matter. Even if ideal standards of deliberation could somehow be implemented perfectly, they would be of little help if resolution is out of reach due to essential reasons related to the matter at hand, rather than due to contingent reasons related to the process via which it is approached. Rawls and Habermas seem to work under the assumption that the political process is in harmony rather than at odds with the views that make up the stuff of politics. As Honig has put it, such thinkers “assume that the world and the self are not resistant to, but only enabled and completed by, their favoured conceptions of order and subjectivity.”33 However, the modern idea that a person can transcend his or her particularity through the use of reason to reach an ordered reconciliation between views is one that cannot simply be taken for

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granted. Moreover, while the political thought based on this presents itself as inclusive, it can actually lead to unwarranted forms of exclusion. It is a feature of Rawls’ political theory in particular that it functions as a filter between different views and within views. It decides on their acceptability based on their fit with the liberal consensus, and divides them internally between this acceptability for the public sphere and what is to be relegated to the private sphere. The liberal consensus takes shape via a process of exclusion and consolidation, and the original position presents this process on an individual level, splitting the individual between reasonable public participation and purely personal convictions. This easily translates into a social dynamic where those that are critical of the liberal consensus can be dismissed as particularistic, narrow-minded, and unreasonable. This social logic enabled by liberal politics has been criticised by many agonistic thinkers. What does not already fit the liberal conception of reasonableness is relegated to the psychology of the individual, rather than being a political matter worthy of public debate. Should this take a collective form, this is not seen as a political collective but as an irrational mob.34 The divide between the private and the public that governs political validity is set in advance and seemingly not up for debate. However, history shows that this divide is not an immutable given and that its very introduction helps produce the ‘irrational’ remainders of liberal politics. The even stronger point can be made, as is done by Honig, that such politics “depend on those remainders to stabilize their orders.”35 Given that a person cannot be neatly split between public citizenship and private convictions, the ideal of the former is upheld by projecting “the subject’s dissonant impulses onto a stable, exteriorized other. The other is then dehumanized, criminalized, or ostracized by an (otherwise inclusive) political community.” As Connolly notes, this is a perpetual process where “intensive pressure for unity, consensus, and normality manufactures new abnormalities, to which idealists of unity then respond by . . . demanding more unity.”36 This process has shaped the dominant centrist politics in much of the West. It consists of a consensus between centre-right and centre-left that presents itself as reasonable and constructive, without much in the way of true ideological conflict. Whether in terms of philosophy or in terms of politics, what can be called the post- or a-political paradigm that aims at consensus dismisses sources of conflict as irrational. It speaks of pluralism, but only envisions it without conflict. Glen Newey has stressed the disconnect between the role that pluralism is often thought to play in liberalism and the fact that in reality it plays no substantial role in the way liberal politics takes shape.37 The distinction between public and private that liberal thought sees as the condition of peaceful coexistence in fact tames the plurality of views between which such coexistence is to take place. Only a ‘reasonable’

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pluralism is allowed, a pluralism within the confines of a liberalism that does not take the possible contribution of a plurality of views in the public sphere all that seriously in the first place. The fact of pluralism is recognised and even nominally appreciated, but its symbolic dimension is missed. Mouffe describes the result of this depoliticisation well: Alas, it is not enough to eliminate the political in its dimension of antagonism and exclusion from one’s theory to make it vanish from the real world. It does come back, and with a vengeance. Once the liberal approach has created a framework in which its dynamics cannot be grasped, and where the institutions and the discourses are missing that could permit that potential antagonisms manifest themselves under an agonistic mode, the danger exists that instead of a struggle among adversaries, what will take place is a war between enemies.38

The liberal approach marginalises potentially genuine drives behind conflict, thereby intensifying these, instead of providing a political outlet for them. They are not seen as legitimately political, but as fit for indifference at best and active expulsion at worst. What, then, is the alternative provided by agonistic thinkers? They tend to focus on resistance to and disruption of the prevailing liberal order. Consequently, their alternatives often start from opposition rather than building itself from the ground up. This aligns with their focus on the reality of politics, but has also led to a wide variety of approaches. While these share certain aims and styles, they draw on various philosophical frameworks and are inspired by different authors: from Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt (whose work will be discussed briefly in the next chapter), to Heidegger and Arendt, to psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and socialist thought.39 What many of them share is the view that the perpetuity of conflict and pluralism is an essential characteristic of the world, rather than a contingent feature of contemporary society. This might very well form the foundation for a political thought that is not only disruptive, working from out of an opposition to liberal theory, but constructive as well.40 It is worth briefly looking at the later work of Gray, as he explicitly attempts to bring this fundamental nature of conflict into the liberal project.41 This will show some of the complications that lie in straying too far from some of the core aspects of liberalism and will return us to the topic of relativism. Gray’s agonistic liberalism or postliberalism revolves around a pluralism for which a modus vivendi is the only adequate political form.42 It acknowledges the possibility of intrinsic conflict between incommensurable values, entailing that

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there is an irreducible variety of ultimate values (goods, excellences, options, reasons for action and so forth) and that when these values come into conflict or competition with one another there is no overarching standard or principle, no common currency or measure, whereby such conflict can be arbitrated or resolved.43

This conflict can enter “into liberal principles themselves and undermines the possibility of a comprehensive system of such principles,”44 including more minimal versions of such a system, such as Rawls’ priority of the right over the good. Consequently, there is no political framework that can be devised a priori or in any fixed manner. For Gray, both democracy and liberalism are “convenient device[s], whose usefulness turns on [their] contribution to peace and the renewal of valuable forms of common life.”45 Without necessarily abandoning liberal democracy, Gray pushes it of its pedestal. This is explicitly motivated by what Gray sees as the failure of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, that is, of the ideal of reason. Based on its rationalist and universalist premises, we “cannot even begin to grapple with the political dilemmas of an age in which political life is dominated by renascent particularisms, militant religions and resurgent ethnicities.”46 For Gray, the failure of the ideal of reason is the triumph of pluralism and politics should shape itself accordingly. However, he does not perceive this as a purely historical event. The failure of a rational, unitary, and universalist trajectory for humanity, and the pluralism exposed by this failure, do not merely designate a contemporary state of Western societies. It “was a truth about human life before it was an inescapable social condition.”47 The Enlightenment rested on what Gray sees as the false view that particular differences are ephemeral to human existence. In reality, “human identities are plural and diverse in their very natures.”48 This variety runs through all aspects of human life. Consequently, we can see Gray as advocating what Connolly has called an ethos of pluralization, rather than one of pluralism. This is an ethos that allows for the shaping of new identities (within and outside of the political process) rather than merely allotting space for already existing ones. In Connolly’s words, pluralism “is often presented as an achievement to be protected, while the eruption of new drives to pluralization are often represented as perils to this achievement.”49 As is typical for agonistic political thought, Gray and Connolly are aware of the social logic that plays a role in the shaping of identity and of the malleability and contingency of the latter. The acknowledgement of this fact not only leads to acceptance, but also to a valorisation of a radical and everchanging pluralism. The relativist consequence of this is that there is no reason to prefer one view over another that is not itself internal to that particular view. Indeed, in Gray’s view pluralism and incommensurability do not only arise between

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different worldviews, but within them as well. This “does not signify any imperfection in our understanding; it marks a feature of the world.”50 It follows that human flourishing and coexistence can be pursued in a variety of political frameworks, depending on the specific characteristics of the people and views involved. No one value intrinsically stands above the rest, whether it would be liberty, justice, or even peaceful coexistence. While it seems that peace and security are the Hobbesian reason d’être of Gray’s modus vivendi,51 even this need not be the case. As John Horton put it: [Gray] need not claim that modus vivendi is the supreme good; only that if people want to live together in a civil manner, without resort to tyranny or persistent violent struggle, and in a way that at least extends a measure of toleration to diverse ways of life, then modus vivendi is the best way forward.52

Any reconciliation between different values, interests, and views can only be worked out in practice. While on these terms liberal democracy has its value as a particularly useful political framework in certain contexts, the salient point is that illiberal views cannot be ruled out. This raises the question whether Gray’s modus vivendi is not too open-ended. Gray himself holds that it does not entail that anything goes, because there are still constraints “on what counts as a reasonable compromise between rival values and ways of life.”53 However, these constraints depend on the contingencies of the actual process of compromise between different groups. The practical, yet uncertain, nature of this modus vivendi entails that it is vulnerable to changing interests, shifts in the balance of power, and other matters which can impact a group’s committal to peaceful coexistence. The agonistic critique of liberalism has its merits, but here it becomes clear why liberalism has its merits as well. With its strong notions of rule of law and universal rights, liberalism aims to protect vulnerable groups from the whims of those in power. In a pure modus vivendi, with its focus on practical resolution, those in power have an outsized influence on what this resolution will look like and who it will favour.54 This is an unfair influence, but fairness is not all that important here; a strategic balance of power is more crucial. The result is that politics can be completely usurped by relations of power. Minority groups will in many cases readily accept an unfair settlement as long as it is an improvement on the prior status quo or deters worse. Gray’s cure for the issues of liberal theory can end up worse than the disease. Not unlike in the work of Rawls and Habermas, there seems to be a disconnect between Gray’s account and the views of those that are to establish his proposed modus vivendi. For all Gray’s emphasis on pluralism as the basis for the modus vivendi, such a pluralism need not be part of a group’s reasons for accepting it. Many ways of life claim superiority precisely because they

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are believed to be the one true and good way of life. Gray does not ask them to renounce this. This leads to the somewhat paradoxical result that while he aims to take the existence of a plurality of views (each with their own value) more serious and indeed as more foundational than the neutrality or indifference of liberalism does, he ultimately does so on terms that are not necessarily compatible with these views. As Horton puts it, for Gray various “ways of life do have value, but not the value that those living them believe them to have.”55 There is a tension between Gray’s use of pluralism as a truth about the world and the relation these views themselves have or do not have to this pluralism. While Gray’s work is not representative for agonistic political thought as a whole, this problem is not exclusive to his work. Many agonistic thinkers radicalise the insight that the liberal consensus itself can and should be approached from various perspectives. But here, the problem is inverse to that discussed above in relation to Rawls and Habermas. Putting the emphasis on pluralism, rather than on the liberal consensus, runs the risk of becoming too relativist, that is, too inclusive rather than too exclusive. The possible fallout of this would mainly affect those with the least means and power. Other agonistic thinkers tend to be more sensitive to this dimension of power than both Gray and the liberal theorists are. Relations of power should neither be simply left as they are, nor ignored in the focus on an ideal theory of politics. As Mouffe has put it, the question is “not how to eliminate power, but how to constitute forms of power which are compatible with democratic values.”56 The aim of this is not to fully overcome liberalism, but to find a new balance between it and the democratic principles that allows for both a meaningful political engagement with and a limitation of the views present in society. While close to the work of Gray and Connolly in many ways, Mouffe in particular wants to avoid the “valorization of all differences” that they tend towards.57 She ultimately has no quarrel with the idea that there are acceptable and unacceptable pluralisms, but what matters is the framework in which this demarcation is made. What is needed is a more rigorous view on the nature of pluralism and its relation to the substance of the diverse views and identities that constitute it. Only in this manner can the appropriate institutions and practices be shaped that can channel rather than depoliticise conflict. A promising resource for such a rearticulation of liberal democracy lies in the acknowledgement of the constitutive role of conflict in politics and in the metaphysical foundation of this in particular. Such a foundation can set and justify limits to the looming threat of relativism. At the same time, an incorporation into a larger framework allows liberal democracy to take on more than an instrumental role. This can help overcome the in some contexts dangerous idea that liberal democracy is merely a useful tool under certain conditions.

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There are many paths into the investigation of the nature of the world and its possible political uses. The one that will be pursued throughout the remainder of this book is that of phenomenology. The nature of the world, and whether it ultimately consists of harmony or conflict, has been a central topic in phenomenology and many phenomenologists have themselves combined their phenomenological work with political reflections. Before we can see how Patočka’s phenomenology in particular can provide a stronger foundation for agonistic political thought, it should be investigated to what extent phenomenology can provide such a foundation for the reconciliatory conception of politics. The following chapters will look at Husserl’s work as an attempt to do so.

Chapter 4

Husserl’s Europe as a Philosophical Project

The period between the First and Second World Wars marks a crisis of the modern idea of Europe, without it being fully abandoned yet. Husserl’s work provides an exemplary case of this and he might well be the last great figure to assert this idea. The aim of this chapter, however, is not to historicise his thought. Neither is it to simply follow what Husserl has to say on Europe. Instead, his plea for a rational Europe will be taken as part of his overall philosophical project. This connects the idea of Europe to a framework that makes it possible to properly analyse and criticise it in terms of its philosophical content, rather than in terms of its ideological presentation. The latter will undoubtedly seem outdated and problematic to many. Husserl’s account contains many of the tropes with which we are well acquainted by now: Europe’s birth in Ancient Greece, a somewhat problematic universalism and Eurocentrism, and a rationalism that is to have more than an instrumental value. What is particularly interesting about Husserl’s idea of Europe is that it is explicitly presented as an idea. It is an idea of Europe as an idea. Much already follows from the role that ideality plays in Husserl’s account, which therefore will be discussed first. This will be followed by a discussion of this ideality in terms of the idea of the world and the establishment of philosophy in Ancient Greece, and by a discussion of Husserl’s political thought based on this. These matters will be discussed in philosophical but not necessarily phenomenological terms. Although he is always phenomenologically minded, there is nothing intrinsically or exclusively phenomenological about Husserl’s discussion of these matters. In fact, Europe’s crisis serves as his path—one of many—into phenomenology. This is a path that the final section of this chapter follows, leading to the more properly phenomenological discussion of Husserl’s solution to the crisis in chapter 5. 47

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Beyond serving as an introduction to phenomenology in general via the crisis-problematic, this chapter can be seen as part of the presentation of Husserl’s system of phenomenology. It is no coincidence that Husserl aimed to develop such a system—which he neither fully articulated nor finished—in the same years that he starts engaging with the crisis-problematic. The latter provides a motivation for his phenomenology in a manner that necessitates reflection on the status of phenomenology itself as a practice in the world. It is in relation to this reflection that we can understand Husserl’s (sparse) writings on politics, but also those on metaphysics and theology. Such subjects might sound far removed from Husserl’s philosophy, but they play an important role in it. This has become increasingly clear with the continued publication of his manuscripts and lectures. Husserl published little during his lifetime and nothing between 1913 and 1928—with the exception of three articles for the Japanese journal Kaizo. Even the main, and for a long time only, source for the topic at hand, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (hereafter: Crisis), was only published, in part, in 1936. The rest did not appear until 1954, still unfinished due to his death in 1938. At the time, the turn to history in the Crisis was considered puzzling by many. Some of the themes discussed in this chapter and the next will also not fit the image of Husserl that still exists based on his main works. That is the image of the philosopher of meticulous analysis, of small change, as he himself put it. Yet, already in 1913, with the publication of the first volume of his Ideas, he explicitly distinguished between pure phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy. As part of the latter, Husserl does not shy away from grander visions of the role of philosophy in the world. Nonetheless, pure phenomenology remains the foundational first philosophy on which all else is to be based. It provides us with the analysis of consciousness, its acts, and its objects qua objects of consciousness. Any reality of these objects is bracketed so as to reflect on the way that they are present to consciousness, thereby reducing them to the way that they are constituted for consciousness. This phenomenological reduction ultimately aims at an eidetics concerned with the ideal laws of this constitution and the essences of what appears to consciousness. This does not mean that what appears to consciousness is not real, but this reality itself is not part of phenomenological investigation. However, this investigation itself is something real. Phenomenology as a philosophical project, as well as the correlation between consciousness and its object which it investigates, has a factical existence. For Husserl to talk about phenomenology as a project, he must go beyond pure phenomenology.1 Consequently, he distinguished between “eidetic phenomenology” and the “phenomenological philosophy of facticity” (Hua VIII: 429). “This facticity,” as Husserl says, “is not the field of phenomenology and logic, but of

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metaphysics” (Hua VII: 394). In relation to reflection on phenomenology itself, this inquiry into facticity might also be called meta-phenomenological. It is this inquiry that steers Husserl towards the themes of history, community, teleology, reason, and unreason, and other themes intimately related to his idea of Europe.2 It is only with the continued publication of previously unavailable material, starting after the Second World War and continuing up to the present, that a clear image of the full scope of Husserl’s philosophy has become possible. This does not mean that this material is fully fleshed out—far from it. Nonetheless, it provides valuable insights on which the following presentation of Husserl’s idea of Europe and his philosophical project as a whole are built. THE IDEA OF EUROPE AS AN IDEA Husserl speaks of Europe on the basis of what he calls its spiritual shape [geistige Gestalt].3 It is this shape that gives Europe as a whole its specific character as distinct from other civilisations. A spiritual shape is “the unity of a spiritual life, activity, creation, with all its ends, interests, cares, and endeavors, with its products of purposeful activity, institutions, organizations” (CE: 273). As a spiritual shape, Europe is neither understood geographically nor on the basis of an ethnically defined people. Husserl includes as ‘European’ the United States and the English dominions, well beyond Europe’s geographical borders, and excludes peoples such as the Roma, even though they “constantly wander about Europe” (CE: 273). While this spiritual shape is a form of ideality, this does not in and of itself entail that Europe is determined by ideality. Clearly, having a spiritual shape as such is not unique to Europe, whereas Husserl maintains that its ideal orientation is. Any civilisation that can properly be spoken of as a single civilisation has its spiritual shape. Even a spiritual shape that transcends national differences is not unique to Europe, according to Husserl. He mentions the similar case of India “with its many peoples and cultural products” which nonetheless has “the unity of a family-like kinship” (CE: 274–75). Europe is “a supranationality of a completely new sort” (CE: 289). In the Crisis, Husserl explains this by distinguishing between empirical anthropological types and spiritual shapes based on an absolute idea. The former are determined by concretely existing empirical practices and cultural elements; what we, so to speak, could point to. While the spiritual shape of an empirical anthropological type is an idealisation of these practices and elements, its ideality follows the empirical. The idea belonging to it is an abstraction from

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this manifold of concrete phenomena to get to their common essence, that is, their spiritual shape. For example, we see a more or less distinct group of people engaged in various activities: voyages of discovery, scientific innovation, trade, and so on. These are distinct practices, but if we were to group them together and abstract from their particularities, we might arrive at the idea of entrepreneurship. This idea may not consciously be part of the way this group sees itself. It may, moreover, be a purely contingent fact that these activities, possibly with distinct origins and goals, lend themselves to be subsumed under a single idea. Nonetheless, calling such a civilisation ‘entrepreneurial’ would not be off the mark. None of these activities in themselves are a complete instantiation of entrepreneurship: The idea transcends its empirical instances. But while it transcends them, it does have its basis in them. Changes in these particular practices and cultural elements would entail changes to the spiritual shape of such a civilisation. Of course, this idea can be grasped consciously and an attempt can be made to keep a civilisation in conformity with it. In other words, it can be separated from its empirical roots and attributed an independent status, becoming a goal in itself. Ultimately, however, it is derived from what is empirical and particular. As opposed to this, Husserl sees Europe’s spiritual shape as based on an absolute idea that exceeds all particular, empirical determination. It is what he also refers to as an idea in the Kantian sense. Such an idea is not the result of generalisation and abstraction from empirical particulars. Rather than having any determinate content, an idea in the Kantian sense radically transcends what is concretely given. The determining idea for Europe, according to Husserl, does not have its roots in any particularity, but is an index of universality that has its source in our capacity for rationality. Husserl is by no means the first to relate Europe to an idea that exceeds its empirical reality. However, he gives this a novel philosophical depth by explicitly discussing this in terms of ideality. Not only does Husserl claim that Europe is exceptional, he claims that its distinctive place in the world is recognised by non-Europeans. Others want to “Europeanize themselves even in their unbroken will to spiritual self-preservation; whereas we, if we understand ourselves properly, would never Indianize ourselves, for example” (CE: 275). The charge of Eurocentrism is easily made and not unjustified. Husserl’s remarks on nonEuropean peoples and civilisations are often condescending. But as Dermot Moran has argued, this should not detract from the content and intent of what he is saying.4 All human beings have the potential to realise their rational nature according to Husserl. This capacity “can never cease, can never be completely absent, even if it remains undeveloped for factual reasons” (CE: 350).

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Still, Husserl preaches a European exceptionalism insofar as Europe “represents a new stage of human nature and reason” (CE: 290). The crux of the matter is the character of this new stage. Husserl emphasises that it is not grounded in anything empirical. As he says: “There is, for essential reasons, no zoology of peoples” (CE: 275). Putting aside the prejudices of Husserl the man, and those of his time, Husserl’s philosophy will not allow a crude racism to divide humanity. Any distinction that it makes between peoples is not based on a particular characteristic of those peoples, but on the inherent capacity of all to overcome the particular through ideality. The absolute idea that Husserl associates uniquely with Europe is by no means intended to be essentially bound up with the particularity of Europe, with Europe as an empirical anthropological type. It is more than unfortunate that Husserl uses the name ‘Europe’ for something that is supposedly universal, but that does not yet make this ideal itself Eurocentric. An unnuanced rejection of Husserl’s thought as Eurocentric tout court is unwarranted. That does not mean, however, that we should ignore the fact that he connects this ideal to Europe. It is, after all, the unity of Europe’s spiritual life, embodied in Europe’s concrete practices, that is somehow directed towards the absolute idea. This makes Husserl’s idea of Europe a peculiar one. In order for Europe to be itself, it must go beyond itself. It is neither the purely empirical anthropological type that we commonly refer to by the name ‘Europe’ nor the absolute idea beyond any empirical determination. The latter is, after all, not European itself. As an absolute idea, as absolute ideality, it has no empirical reality in itself. Yet, there must be something concrete (be it an individual, a group, or an entire civilisation) that directs itself towards it. If it can be granted that Europe has such an ideal orientation, Europe itself nonetheless remains an empirical reality. Whether Husserl’s philosophy turns out to be irredeemably Eurocentric or not, revolves around the question whether the ideality that distinguishes Europe is truly absolute or an idealisation of Europe as an empirical anthropological type. If it is the latter, ‘Europeanisation’ would be nothing but the imposition of Europe’s particularity on others, domination rather than rationalisation. Jacques Derrida has notably picked up on the problematic status of ideality in Husserl’s discussion of Europe. It is crucial to Husserl’s account that the absolute idea towards which Europe directs itself is not determined by Europe’s empirical particularity. Yet, Husserl claims that not just Europe but spiritual Europe has both a spiritual and a geographical birthplace in Ancient Greece (CE: 276). The concern is that this dual origin either makes the absolute idea unintelligible, or that it collapses the distinction between the empirical and the ideal. The idea qua idea cannot have an empirical localisation, whether in Ancient Greece or elsewhere. Yet, Husserl’s repeated remarks on its origin

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refer to specific times and places. Following Derrida, we can reject the possibility that these remarks are of a merely fictional or metaphorical nature. Although to some extent they have been ‘idealisingly-simplified’ (to use a phrase of Husserl’s), Derrida notes that it seems to be a question of “real and irreplaceable facts and of a history that is effectively historical.”5 While Husserl does not go into great historical detail regarding the empirical conditions that gave rise to the orientation towards the ideal, he acknowledges that empirical origins must have existed: “Naturally [the outbreak of this idea], like everything that develops historically, has its factual motivation in the concrete framework of historical occurrence” (CE: 285). Nonetheless, Husserl deems it more important to understand the essential meaning of this historical fact than the empirical circumstances which gave rise to it. The lack of a proper discussion of the empirical origins that would account for this spiritual event entails that the fact of it taking place in Ancient Greece and nowhere else remains a mystery. Perhaps it was in Ancient Greece and only there because historical fact had been ‘idealisingly-simplified’ too much and in a biased manner?6 In any case, after asking how it could have historically become possible that this idea took root, Husserl simply contents himself with the fact that it did (Hua XXVII: 88). If the idea can be led back to the empirical in a manner that remains unclarified, what safeguards Europe from merely being an empirical anthropological type like any other? Husserl himself recognises the remarkable nature of this origin by speaking of it as an outbreak [Aufbruch], irruption [Einbruch], and breakthrough [Durchbruch] (CE: 273–74). The new era of humanity that it introduces is not the result of a gradual evolution but of a sudden rupture, fitting with his characterisation of the transition from the empirical to the ideal as a “leap” (CE: 345). The historical succession of events is interrupted by an idea which gains traction locally, but which sets a universal task for humankind. Yet, the problem of how this could have happened remains. James Dodd has noted that either this event is prefigured by its empirical, historical conditions, in which case it is not much of a break, or it has to remain fundamentally unaccounted for.7 According to Derrida, Husserl is certain that his absolute idea is genuine,8 but this is an overstatement. While Husserl seems convinced that it is, he still calls this “the expression of a presentiment” (CE: 275–76) and it is “yet to be decided whether European humanity bears within itself an absolute idea or whether it is an empirical anthropological type” (CE: 16). The breakthrough of this idea does not entail full insight into it. Clarity is only arrived at in hindsight on the basis of those that have attempted to follow the course it set out. Yet, Husserl’s professed uncertainty only exacerbates the problem. While recognising its remarkable nature, he leaves an explanatory gap. This makes it possible, as will be done in chapter 5, to question whether Husserl

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ultimately does not go beyond description, beyond the bounds of phenomenological method. THE IDEA OF THE WORLD AND THE INFINITE TASK So far, the discussion of the absolute idea at the basis of Husserl’s account of Europe has remained fairly abstract. To get a better sense of what it and the task for humanity that follows from it entails, it can be characterised as an idea of the world. It is a specific conception of the world that, according to Husserl, originates in Ancient Greece. The inquiry into it is philosophy, “in the original sense, nothing other than universal science, science of the universe, of the all-encompassing unity of all that is” (CE: 276). Husserl is aware that there is more to Europe than philosophy, but it is this special class of cultural structures “on whose normal function the genuine, healthy European spiritual life depends” (CE: 290–91). Husserl thematises the origin of the idea of the world and of philosophy on the basis of the breakthrough of a new kind of attitude: the theoretical attitude as an orientation towards the world out of nonpractical concerns. Before this, mythical and religious attitudes already made the world a theme of inquiry to some extent. But this was only the world as “traditionally valid for the civilization in question” (CE: 283). It was based on their particular worldview, “their own subjective validity with all the actualities that are valid for them within it, including, for example, gods, demons, etc.” (CE: 272). Husserl is keen to point out that this does not mean that these peoples were somehow deluded. This world had its own “good, so to say honest sense,” with a “truth that in this natural practical life is indispensable for this praxis” (Hua XXIX: 392). However, all this remains essentially practical in nature. Inquiry into the world is inquiry into the mysterious powers on which humanity’s fate is thought to depend. Its goal is “to serve man in his human purposes so that he may order his worldly life in the happiest possible way and shield it from disease, from every sort of evil fate, from disaster and death” (CE: 284). In Ancient Greece, according to Husserl, the directions of interest changes to a “universal (‘cosmological’) life-interest in the essentially new form of a purely ‘theoretical’ attitude” (CE: 280). This comes about because the Greeks encountered the worlds of others, their similarities and differences:9 Through this astonishing contrast there appears the distinction between world-representation and actual world, and the new question of truth arises: not tradition-bound, everyday truth, but an identical truth which is valid for all who are no longer blinded by traditions, a truth-in-itself. (CE: 286)

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Freed from the particular, taken-for-granted view of the world, the world becomes the object of an attitude that is no longer primarily guided by practical concerns. In a very fundamental sense, the establishment of philosophy is the establishment of a new form of cosmology (see Hua XXVII: 186). It is important to note that the genesis of this idea of the world involves two steps. The first is a relativisation of one’s own world. This is the realisation that one’s view of the world is but one among many and thus perhaps not the absolute truth. This sceptical moment is overcome by a second step. Although one’s worldview might not contain the absolute truth, it might still provide a version of it. There is one world, but it is “mythologised in so many different ways by different peoples according to their traditionality” (Hua XXIX: 387). The new attitude thus entails the “radical demythisation [Entmythisierung] of the world” (Hua XXVII: 189) and the positing of a nonrelative world. In more phenomenological terms, R. Philip Buckley has called it the establishment of “a new type of consciousness directed at a new type of intentional object.”10 Note that the idea of the world posited here to counter scepticism and relativism does not have any concrete content itself. It is “only a vague thought” (Hua XXIX: 45) to be worked out further. It can itself be made “serviceable as material for the possible production of idealities on a higher level, and so on again and again” (CE: 278). The sceptical moment is thereby retained as an impetus to approach “that infinite horizon in which the truth-in-itself counts, so to speak, as an infinitely distant point” (CE: 278). This leads to the idea of the world as the “idea of a rational infinite totality of being” (CE: 22), an idea in the Kantian sense. This teleological idealism turns philosophy into an infinite task. This task does not just have a theoretical goal, as its “truths are destined to become norms” (CE: 303). While these truths are discovered through the change from the practical to the theoretical attitude, philosophy proper is not purely theoretical. Rather, it is a synthesis of the theoretical and practical attitude, which is “called to serve mankind in a new way”: This occurs in the form of a new sort of praxis, that of the universal critique of all life and all life-goals, all cultural products and systems that have already arisen out of the life of man; and thus it also becomes a critique of mankind itself and of the values which guide it explicitly or implicitly. Further, it is a praxis whose aim is to elevate mankind through universal scientific reason, according to norms of truth of all forms, to transform it from the bottom up into a new humanity made capable of an absolute self-responsibility on the basis of absolute theoretical insights. (CE: 283)

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Philosophy does not start from a blank slate, but critiques and rationalises the world it has before it. It is a reorientation towards the world. Everything found in it and naively accepted must be justified beyond its initial givenness. The full task of philosophy thus relates theoretical inquiry into the world to its practical cultivation for human existence, a “revolutionization [Revolutioniering] of the whole culture, a revolutionization of the whole manner in which mankind creates culture” (CE: 279). Note that this is not just a new cultural configuration, which would merely be another empirical anthropological type. It is a new kind of cultural configuration with a “form that distinguishes it alone” (Hua XXVII: 73). It must be the form, rather than any content, that distinguishes it, because the idea of the world that it is based on does not have any content. As this idea is more a process than a fixed given, the rational culture that is to result from it cannot be static either. What this would look like is left open by Husserl. No concrete configuration can be prescribed a priori. This is not only because it is based on a formal idea, but also because it takes the form of a critique and rationalisation of existing culture. Any concrete determination will depend on the particular world where this idea takes hold. What Husserl makes clear, though, is that the guiding normative ideas for this include the ideas of the infinite and true world as correlate of the idea of world-science; ideas of the true and genuine individual personal life and of a genuine community; and finally those of a genuine civilization and the ‘ethical’ ideas belonging to it, ideas of a universal science not merely of the world but of everything that is at all, be it an idea, an ideal norm, etc. (CE: 333)

These are all teleological ideas which stand in a definite relation to each other: the idea of the world to be constituted ad infinitum leads to the idea of philosophy as an infinite task and the idea of a humanity that takes shape as it takes this task upon itself. In each case, Husserl’s goal is an ideal unity: between the various particular worlds, between different regions of the sciences, between nations and peoples, and in the end even a “complete synthesis of possible experiences” (CM: 62). This unitarian aspect is crucial throughout Husserl’s philosophy. It allows him to overcome the idea of an ultimately fragmented humanity through the universality of reason. This is the task that Husserl sees taken up by Europe. However, he does not see the Ancient Greek primordial establishment [Urstiftung] of philosophy as initiating an uninterrupted path of rationalisation and universalisation through history. This original insight into the world can be lost and taken up again in different ways, so-called reestablishments [Nachstiftungen]. Each of these is its own actualisation of the same insight that took hold of the Ancient Greeks. The latter’s importance, as Buckley has noted, thus lies in their “creating

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of a new possibility for the future.”11 Indeed, Husserl relativises the Greek achievement (although not its importance) when he says that it was not yet the full realisation of the idea of philosophy. It was not yet the final establishment [Endstiftung]. Applying this logic of reestablishment to Europe would avoid the issue of having to place the empirical anthropological type ‘Europe’ in any direct causal-historical line from Ancient Greece to the present day. The more essential connection for Husserl lies in Europe’s appropriation of the Greek legacy as a task. Yet, this task can be put as much to others as to Europe, regardless of the fact that Europe may have explicitly identified itself with it. Others might refer back to the primordial establishment and reestablish it in their own way. And what is to rule out that they, like the Ancient Greeks according to Husserl, come up with this primordial establishment on their own? Even if it would be granted that it may be that Europe first and foremost took the Greek legacy upon itself, what matters in this legacy is the break with the empirical. Focusing on the empirical circumstances in which either this break or appropriation took place (that is, Ancient Greece and Europe) highlights precisely the wrong aspect. Yet, as discussed, this breakthrough must have had empirical origins. And if it is the case that it did not take place everywhere (a claim that at least is much more tenable than the claim to Greek exclusivity), then the case can still be made that there must be something extraordinary about the empirical conditions that did give rise to it. This quickly leads to the idea that some peoples are somehow ‘special’; not because they have supposedly achieved universality, but because their empirical conditions at least allowed them to initiate such a task. Although this exceptionality would not directly lie in any cultural substance, one could still hold that some cultures are more conducive to such an encounter and the transcending of one’s world towards the true world. The discussion of the idea of the world assuages some, although not all, of the concerns surrounding Husserl’s Eurocentrism. As a formal idea, it cannot be said to allow for an imposition of Europe’s particularity on others. It is precisely what motivates the overcoming of our particularity. Moreover, as has been highlighted by Timo Miettinen, it contains within itself the possibility of perpetual critique. As Miettinen sees it, the tension between the empirical and the ideal is not primarily the indication of a problem, but instead is one of the most productive aspects of Husserl’s idea of Europe.12 Husserl himself warns against “the constant threat of succumbing to one-sidedness and to premature satisfaction” (CE: 291). Nonetheless, the formality of Husserl’s idea of the world leaves us with questions. What does it entail to reshape culture on the basis of an idea that is itself devoid of content? And is it truly devoid of content, or does it

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nonetheless have an implicit sense of closure that either does not necessarily belong to it or that cannot fully be justified, as Derrida worried? These questions revolve around the matter where this idea is taking us and whether, for instance, it might be possible that on its basis (or on the basis of different establishments of it) it can lead to fundamentally different results. Even if the goal is, and will remain, infinitely distant, it nonetheless provides us with a direction, and Husserl suggests that this direction will be the same for all. Against his own intentions, it might be that he attributes too much to the idea he takes as Europe’s goal. Husserl is aware of the possibility of conflict, of humanity losing its sense of direction. This has an important role in his political thought, insofar as he can be said to have had one. TRUE HUMANITY AND THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL Husserl makes it clear that the establishment of the idea of the world that is to guide humanity, involves a new form of communalisation: “the whole human surrounding world, the political and social existence of mankind, must be fashioned anew through free reason, through the insights of a universal philosophy” (CE: 8). Ideal truths are to lead to a “community of purely ideal interests,” centred on “ideas, which not only are useful to all but belong to all identically” (CE: 286). This community would be the correlate of the constitution of the one true world for all, a cosmopolitanism in a very literal sense. This means that for Husserl, ‘humanity’ is more than a category that would simply include all human beings: “this ‘everyone’ is no longer everyone in the finite sense of prescientific life” (CE: 278). Here we again encounter the difference and inevitable tension between the empirical and the ideal. The humanity Husserl speaks of is not the empirical group of all human beings, but the ideal community of all who use reason to rise above their empirical particularity, freeing themselves from it. Under the guidance of philosophers as the ‘functionaries of mankind’, this community is primarily to spread through education. This leads to the “internal division of the folk-unity into the educated and the uneducated,” but it also follows that this community “is not limited to the home nation” (CE: 286). National boundaries are crossed as a new boundary is set between those that aspire to true humanity and those that still need to be awakened to this ideal. As a possibility it belongs to everyone, “each can realise it in himself, each from every sphere of culture, friend and enemy, Greek or barbarian, child of God’s people or of the people hostile to God” (Hua XXVII: 77). Gradually, this “draws all of humanity under its spell,” (CE: 277) as Husserl speaks of a “spreading synthesis of nations in which each nation, precisely by

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pursuing its own ideal task in the spirit of infinity, gives its best to the nations united with it” (CE: 289). While it seems clear that Husserl advocates a political idealism and universalism, the question is whether a Husserlian concept of the political can be derived from this. As Miettinen has pointed out, Husserl entertains the ideas of a “supranation” [Übernation] or “suprastate” [Überstaat] “that would function as the ‘material’ equivalents of the ethical ideal of universal humanity.”13 What this would amount to concretely, however, is unclear and seems to vary in Husserl’s sparse writings on politics.14 None of them provide a sustained reflection that can be seen as authoritative on this matter. In his classic work on Husserl’s ‘philosophy of the state’, Karl Schuhmann has nonetheless pieced together a well-argued account of this part of Husserl’s philosophy. Whereas Husserl’s phenomenology is ultimately to provide a proper foundation for the kind of communalisation discussed above, Schuhmann notes that indications of Husserl’s political thought are not primarily found in reference to the constitution of true or authentic, universal humanity. They are found “in reference to inauthentic [unechten] humanity, individual and above all social disharmony.”15 If we let ourselves be guided by the insight that led to the establishment of philosophy, we will, ideally, be directed towards the same goal. However, this is clearly not an already established fact. In reality, Husserl finds conflict, not the harmony to which humanity seems to be fundamentally inclined according to his philosophy. This emphasis on the reality of conflict brings Husserl close to the work of Carl Schmitt, notwithstanding significant differences. For both, conflict plays a foundational role in the determination of what politics fundamentally is about, and for both this involves a fundamental division of humanity. Yet, their goals could not be more different and because of this, they end up with very different concepts of the political. Husserl and Schmitt will briefly be compared on this matter to help outline the former’s position. However, it is not so much Schmitt’s own concept of the political that is relevant here, but rather the criticism of political universalism which follows from it. Whatever else we may take Husserl’s political thought to be, it is clear that such universalism is an important part of it, and Schmitt shows why it is potentially problematic if it is not properly accounted for. Schmitt’s concept of the political is premised on the possibility of conflict, which he ultimately reduces to the the distinction between friend and foe.16 This distinction has no specificity of its own, but can be based on any other distinction, be it religious, moral, economic, and so on, as long as it becomes strong enough to group people into friend and foe. Consequently, the political has no intrinsic content of its own. Husserl too introduces a division of humanity, but for him, the important distinction is between rationality and irrationality. Nevertheless, this rationality has a formal nature, also lacking a

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content of its own. This distinction between rationality and irrationality does not present itself as clearly as Schmitt’s distinction between friend and foe. Indeed, there can also be conflict between those equally striving for rationality and between conflicting rationalisms.17 Irrationality is thus not necessarily to be attributed to any specific party in a conflict. The division of humanity between rational and irrational, arguably any division of humanity, is itself already a sign of irrationality. Husserl’s engagement with the problem of irrationality takes off after the First World War, the same period in which he begins to develop a system of phenomenological philosophy. The political thought sketched above fits into this. Ideally, our various engagements with the world and each other lead to a harmonious synthesis in which a single, ‘true’ world is constituted. Philosophy is to give a foundation for this. As a real project that is to be concretely carried out in history, this will unavoidably encounter resistance. Counter to this teleological task led by the ideal of humanity, we find “actual humanity, the worldly [irdische], and fate, coincidence” (Hua XV: 181). Reality itself is an irrational fact that enables conflict and at times seems to resist its resolution. Hence the need for politics, whose goal is the mediation between opposing groups and conflicting goals. Such mediation is crucial if Husserl’s ideals are ever to be realised. As Schuhmann puts it: “The state has the possibility of eliminating and preventing a fundamental breakdown and failure of the entire teleological movement.”18 This means that the political is not (only) a possible object of phenomenological analysis, but also part of what, in the introduction to this chapter, was called the meta-phenomenological domain. To truly understand what politics is about, phenomenologically describing its essence while bracketing its reality will not do. Schmitt’s concept of the political is explicitly realist and while on one level such a realism is at odds with Husserl’s ultimately idealist orientation, for Husserl too the political is the domain of the real, of facticity. Odd as it may sound, as a concept, the political arguably belongs to metaphysics as Husserl understands it. Indeed, when he speaks of metaphysics, he includes the problem of harmony and conflict in the constitution of the one world as a possibility in history (Hua VIII: 458; see also the fifth Cartesian Meditation). For Husserl, the state is thus to have a mediating function, not just between conflicting parties, but between the establishment and the culmination of his teleology. As Schuhmann put it: “The state is settled on the difficult split between the finite and the infinite, more precisely on the border between historical facticity and ideality.”19 It is a necessary element for the realisation of true humanity, but it is neither its beginning nor end. In fact, should this goal be reached, there will no longer be a place for politics. Of course, as this goal will remain infinitely distant, so will the abolition of politics. In an ideal world, so to speak, politics would not be necessary. But we do not, and never

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will, live in an ideal world. Husserl’s political thought is thus conditioned by both the possibility and the impossibility of his ideal. In chapter 5, we will see how he tries to keep the possibility of his ideal alive despite its seeming impossibility. Schmitt agrees that, should something like Husserl’s ideal be reached, politics would have come to an end. The crucial difference lies in the fact that Schmitt takes this to be fully impossible. For him, the distinction between friend and foe is the inescapable beginning and end of politics. Ideas of a universal humanity with a universal state as its correlate do not make sense for Schmitt, because his notion of the state depends on the existence of enemy others. These others form the condition for the political unity of a people. While for Husserl, too, the state comes into being in contrast with other states,20 this is not the only level on which he operates. His teleological ideal cuts through different levels, from that between individuals, to the communal and the state, to the previously mentioned ‘spreading synthesis of nations’. The unity that is to be established at each level is an inclusive one, drawing different elements into it, because they are directed towards the same goal. This is a far cry from Schmitt’s exclusive unity, which is produced by distinguishing an ‘us’ from a ‘them’. The Husserlian politics that follows from this is not unique to his account. Schuhmann already noted its proximity to the liberal thought of James Buchanan and John Rawls.21 However, Husserl is clearly not a liberal thinker in accordance with the more minimal instrumental conception of reason and politics discussed in chapter 3. Husserl’s conception of the political stands in the service of an ideal of authentic humanity that is also concerned with the content of the views between which politics seeks reconciliation. He sees the rational and free agency of the self-responsible individual as an important good, but it is so not only in itself, but also as a means towards his rational ideal of society.22 Given the way that Husserl ultimately ends up accounting for the constitution of the one world and of true humanity as its correlate, it is the work Jürgen Habermas to which Husserl’s political thought perhaps comes closest, as will be discussed in chapter 5. As discussed in chapter 3, the past decades have seen agonistic political theory criticise the liberal and reconciliatory conception of politics to which Husserl is close. This criticism can be traced back to the work of Schmitt, who already spoke of such politics as the “neutralization” and “depoliticization” of politics.23 If conflict is insurmountable in fact, should this not be properly acknowledged, rather than operating as if it can ultimately be overcome? This does not mean that conflict is to become a goal itself, nor that it should be seen as absolute, such as Schmitt does. The hypothesis of some agonistic thinkers is precisely that taking the reality of conflict seriously, can lead to an approach to politics that is better suited to deal with conflict,

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without it developing into an absolute relation of enmity. What they do share with Schmitt in this regard is a concern that a too idealistic conception of politics itself might bring certain risks with it. For Schmitt, a world without conflict, where “enemies” are turned into “competitors” or “debating adversaries,”24 would be a world without politics. Unlike Husserl, he leaves to the side whether such a world would be “desirable as an ideal situation.”25 Schmitt takes this ideal to be impossible anyway, and chasing it will thus always fail to establish the kind of order in society that he strives for.26 Instead, he turns to the concrete use in politics of such a vision guided by an ideal conception of humanity. While the latter ideally is all-encompassing, evading any friend-foe distinction, and thereby fundamentally apolitical, Schmitt sees the use of this idea in politics as particularly dangerous and as having “an especially intensive political meaning.”27 Any political use of this idea, such as a war in name of humanity, is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of the political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed.28

While Schmitt’s own political affiliation with National Socialism shows the catastrophic consequences that his concept of the political leads to, such consequences seem far removed from Husserl’s work. But does that preclude the possible danger that, according to Schmitt, accompanies universalist politics such as Husserl’s?29 At the very least, there is the potential that Husserl’s division of humanity leads to unwarranted exclusion, such as discussed in relation to liberal thought in chapter 3. While Husserl attributes the capacity for rationality to every human being, his universalism nonetheless cannot avoid distinguishing between true and inauthentic humanity. Schmitt would no doubt see this as a point in favour of his own interpretation of the political. Much depends on whether Husserl’s ideal will turn out to be what the latter hopes it to be. This cannot be said with certainty yet. Whether his philosophy is susceptible to this critique depends on the extent to which he can justify its goal, as we will see in chapter 5. THE CRISIS OF THE IDEA It cannot be said that Husserl naively holds on to an optimistic view about the teleology that may or may not be part of Europe’s existence. Indeed, his extended engagement with this idea takes place in the context of its crisis. As said, this crisis becomes the explicit motivation of Husserl’s philosophy,

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prompting him to integrate the various themes he had been discussing for decades into a system. In many ways his account of the crisis is exemplary in following the logic of crisis discussed in chapter 1. That is not to say that he himself articulated such a logic. In his writings it can be unclear what the crisis of which he speaks actually consists in.30 He mentions various crises: of science in general, of specific sciences, of philosophy, of culture, of European humanity, and so on. Of course, these areas are related to each other for Husserl, suggesting that their crises are related as well. The crisis of the sciences appears prominently in the title of the Crisis, but is not necessarily the primary crisis. For example: the Vienna Lecture, which formed part of the basis for the Crisis, does not speak of a crisis of the sciences but of a crisis of European humanity. Given the foundational role that philosophy has for Husserl, it is ultimately philosophy which lies at the root of the various crises: Thus the crisis of philosophy implies the crisis of all modern sciences as members of the philosophical universe: at first a latent, then a more and more prominent crisis of European humanity itself in respect to the total meaningfulness of its cultural life, its total ‘Existenz’. (CE: 12)

Although the crisis is to be led back to the failure of philosophy, it was the First World War that can be said to have revealed this failure. The war had a tremendous influence on Husserl, as it did for many of his contemporaries, such as Schmitt. His two sons and many of his students were at the front. Among the casualties was his son Wolfgang. Expressing the sentiment of the time, Husserl wrote: “This war, the most universal and profound fall into sin of humanity in the whole of its known history, has indeed exposed the unclarity and falsity of all ‘valid’ ideas.”31 It revealed the “inner untruth, the meaninglessness” of Europe’s supposedly rational civilisation (Hua XXVII: 3). In the opening pages of the Crisis, Husserl speaks of the “change in public valuation” that has “gradually become a feeling of hostility among the younger generation” (CE: 6). This is a hostility towards reason. Through the technological advances and the ‘rationalisation’ of the war machine, reason made possible the atrocities of the war and was no longer thought capable of addressing the increasingly burning “questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence” (CE: 6). Notwithstanding this bleak background, Husserl’s crisis-writings are not works of despair. He wants to “justify our boldness in still daring to give a favorable prognosis” (CE: 197). Insofar as the crisis reveals a previously unheeded problem, it is a welcome phenomenon, motivating its own overcoming.32 Husserl’s diagnosis leads the crisis back to the new establishment [Neustiftung] of philosophy in modernity as exemplified by natural science.

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While tremendously successful, this turned out to be one-sided, ultimately casting doubt on the ideal of philosophy as such. Idealisation plays a crucial role in this account, both in how it led to the sciences’ lack of insight into their own functioning as well as in how it led existentially relevant questions to be excluded from rational inquiry, as will be discussed below. However, the impact of idealisation goes beyond the sciences. Klaus Held has discussed it as penetrating all areas of contemporary life and recently Tanja Staehler has pointed to its economic role.33 While the concern with the rigour of the sciences might not be much of a public concern these days, the core of Husserl’s diagnosis remains relevant. We still, and increasingly so, live in a world dominated by numbers and algorithms that often conceal the concrete lives that they are ultimately about.34 This concealment goes to the heart of the matter. The problem lies in the fact that the sciences substitute an idealised, mathematically constructed world for the world given in experience, the world in which we actually live. As Husserl says, they “take for true being what is actually a method,” (CE: 51–52) overlooking both the concrete world which forms the basis for any idealisation and the subjectivity which accomplishes it. The Crisis provides a genealogy that traces this back to Galileo’s appropriation of geometry for natural science. It is useful to briefly follow this genealogy to show precisely how modern natural science is a new establishment of the ideal of philosophy, of universal science, as well as to show why this is not and cannot be its final establishment, and why phenomenology would possibly be. Geometry deals with idealities, ideal shapes, which as such cannot be found in everyday experience. No real circle is as perfectly round as its ideal equivalent. While the origin of these idealities ultimately lies in increasingly precise measurements for practical purposes, geometry provided a methodology to exactly determine them theoretically. What geometry did for spatiality, Galileo sought to do for all other aspects of nature, leading him to revolutionise science. In Husserl’s words: Starting with the practically understandable manner in which geometry, in an old traditional sphere, aids in bringing the sensible surrounding world to univocal determination, Galileo said to himself: Wherever such a methodology is developed, there we have also overcome the relativity of subjective interpretations which is, after all, essential to the empirically intuited world. For in this manner we attain an identical, nonrelative truth of which everyone who can understand and use this method can convince himself. Here, then, we recognize something that truly is—though only in the form of a constantly increasing approximation, beginning with what is empirically given, to the geometrical ideal shape which functions as a guiding pole. (CE: 29)

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Not everything is as naturally commensurable with this geometrical and mathematical approach as spatiality. A length is easily measured and expressed in number, but this is already more difficult when it comes to, for example, warmth, smoothness, brightness, and so on. However, the regularity of the relation between these and the spatial aspects of nature (such as between temperature and the expansion of mercury in a thermometer) entails that they can be measured accurately, though indirectly, through measurement of the latter. Non-spatial aspects of nature can thus be mathematised by being led back to those aspects which geometry is so proficient at determining: What we experienced, in prescientific life, as colors, tones, warmth, and weight belonging to the things themselves and experienced causally as a body’s radiation of warmth which makes adjacent bodies warm, and the like, indicates in terms of physics, of course, tone-vibrations, warmth-vibrations, i.e., pure events in the world of shapes. (CE: 36)

Based on the success of this approach, it is taken as an a priori rule that everything has its “mathematical index in events belonging to the sphere of shapes—which is, of course, already thought of as idealized” (CE: 37). But whereas geometry’s idealities are still of the same kind as the shapes found in experience, a fundamental transformation takes place with this indirect mathematisation. It is not only a further but a different kind of step removed from ordinary experience. The more the natural sciences advance, the more they proceed purely on the basis of numbers, “remembering only at the end that numbers signify magnitudes” (CE: 44). In doing so, there is the risk of science becoming a mere technique, an application of rules without a full understanding of either these rules or its results. After all, one can arrive at further results through calculation without ever having to refer to the things these results are ultimately about. While this incredibly useful development enabled tremendous scientific advances, Husserl’s concern is that a science oblivious to its own functioning is not properly scientific. More importantly, this can lead to the misinterpretation of its results and ultimately “the surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable” (CE: 48–49). While this world of idealities does ultimately refer back to the world as it is given in experience, it is completely foreign to our actual experience of it. The world as we live it is overlooked or devalued as less true, even though science continues to presuppose it. Nonetheless, the natural sciences continue to flourish and can hardly be blamed for this. For a long time, it seemed as if the ideal of philosophy as universal science would be fulfilled by it. It not only developed the idea of

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the world as all-encompassing, infinite unity, but it found the key to this unity in a mathematical index that could relate phenomena of completely different kinds to each other. Even today, with the so-called ‘theory of everything’ still very far away, the progress made over the past centuries is astounding enough to make the idea of such a theory on the basis of mathematical physics believable to many, though not certain. Yet, despite its advances in the articulation of the concept of the world and of a corresponding universal science, natural science is not the final establishment of philosophy, because of a crucial lack. In principle it excludes not only an entire domain but a fundamental domain. As long as the concrete world of experience is not taken into account, and as long as it is overlooked that science itself is “a product of the spirit that investigates nature and thus presupposes the science of spirit” (CE: 297), it cannot realise the ideal of philosophy as universal and ultimately grounding science. As long as it overlooks this, this rationalism is “superficial, in its entanglement in ‘naturalism’ and ‘objectivism’” (CE: 299). This naturalism not only gets in the way of the universalism of the philosophical ideal, but also of its existential relevance. Husserl shared the belief of many of his contemporaries that the philosophy and sciences of his day were of no help when it comes to what he refers to as the ‘ethico-religious’ questions: questions such as those regarding the meaning of life, the purpose of the world, and the role of God. But for Husserl this was not due to a fundamental impossibility, but due to the inherent reductionism of the dominant naturalism. Perhaps this is expressed best at the start of his 1929 Formal and Transcendental Logic: The belief that science leads to wisdom—to an actually rational self-cognition and cognition of the world and God, and, by means of such cognition, to a life somehow to be shaped closer to perfection, a life truly worth living, a life of ‘happiness’, contentment, well-being, or the like—this great belief, once the substitute for religious belief, has (at least in wide circles) lost its force.35

Naturalistic science cannot make good on this belief as it abstracts “from all that is in any way spiritual, from all cultural properties which are attached to things in human praxis” (CE: 60). The naturalistic worldview this leads to is by far the dominant scientific worldview, if not the dominant worldview as such in late modernity. This leaves us with “a peculiarly split world,” (CE: 61) split between nature and culture. The success regarding the former is mirrored by the neglect of the latter. Of course, it is not the job of the natural sciences but of the human sciences to inquire into matters of culture. In the Vienna Lecture, Husserl goes as far as suggesting that the crisis is “a problem purely within the humanistic

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disciplines” (CE: 273). It is not just that the human sciences have failed to provide a rational approach to the human spirit. It is not on their agenda at all anymore. Attempting to emulate the success of the natural sciences, the human sciences copy their approach, reducing the world to one of things and descriptive facts about these things. While this too has its successes, it excludes all matters of valuation, lacking any normative element that would make them existentially relevant. Yet, for Husserl, ultimately neither the natural sciences nor the human sciences (whatever form either might take) are responsible for the crisis. It is philosophy’s inability to provide a viable alternative or correction to the naturalistic interpretation of the world that allowed this to turn into a crisis of humanity. Philosophy failed to provide an overall scheme through which the truths of the various sciences could be related to each other and to everyday life. This allowed for the encroachment of naturalism into the human sciences, debilitating the possibility of a truly universal science that could clarify the foundation of the sciences and that could help address humanity’s existential questions. Without a universal science to tie them together, the various spheres of life and the various domains of the sciences are shattered, without hope of making coherent sense of this whole. The world has become unintelligible, has become a problem, as Husserl says.36 Ultimately the problem is what Dodd has called “the need for a world,”37 a world comprehensive and comprehensible enough to deal with both theoretical and existential issues. The problem is not just that philosophy has in fact failed. What has been lost is “the inspiring belief in its ideal” (CE: 10). Husserl, however, only speaks of the “apparent failure of rationalism,” the failure of the one-sided, naturalistic rationalism (CE: 299). Whether philosophy (and Europe with it) can or cannot live up to its ideal, is still to be made out. Failure so far is no proof of its impossibility. Indeed, Husserl’s inquiry prompted by the crisis has shown where modern rationalism went wrong, exposing it as one-sided, to be replaced by what he at one point refers to as “a kind of super-rationalism [Überrationalismus].”38 In the final paragraph of the Vienna Lecture Husserl presents us with the dilemma that the crisis presents to European humanity: There are only two escapes from the crisis of European existence: the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity; or the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all. Europe’s greatest danger is weariness. If we struggle against this greatest of all dangers as “good Europeans” with the sort of courage that does not fear even an infinite struggle, then out of the destructive blaze of lack of faith, the smoldering fire of despair over the West’s mission for humanity, the

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ashes of great weariness, will rise up the phoenix of a new life-inwardness and spiritualization as the pledge of a great and distant future for man: for the spirit alone is immortal. (CE: 299)

If we look past the bombastic rhetoric, the main components of Husserl’s proposed solution to the crisis become clear: an overcoming of naturalism and a renewed faith in reason. The latter is not an easy task insofar as the entire spiritual situation of the time is determined by the loss of this faith. Even those who still hold on to it are struggling to sustain it. As Husserl asks: “what should we, who believe, do in order to be able to believe?” (CE: 17).39 Although it was philosophy that failed to properly respond to this, the possibility of a rational approach to human existence would perhaps not have become inconceivable if it was not for the utter dominance of the natural-scientific approach and its overlooking of the thoroughly human world of experience. Consequently, any solution to the crisis must bring this world, which Husserl calls the life-world, to the fore. As Bernhard Waldenfels has aptly put it, though the life-world is “drowned out by science, it is brought to voice by philosophy.”40 This entails uncovering the source of the sciences in the prescientific experience of the world. Only through the latter can the sciences achieve a final grounding. For this, an “epochē of all objective sciences” (CE: 140) is necessary. This involves a radical separation of the experience of the life-world from its natural-scientific interpretation in order to reach a perspective that is uncontaminated by the latter. While this would not yet address the lack of a rational approach to human affairs, it would clear the ground for it. When the life-world is thematised as the foundation of the sciences, it can subsequently be made into an autonomous domain of inquiry. The life-world is not just the foundation of the sciences, but a meaningful region in its own right to which all human activity is related.41 By showing that there can be a rational concordance [Einstimmigkeit] regarding the life-world, the ideals of the world and of philosophy, as well as the possibility of a rational, universal humanity, can come into view again. What is called for, then, is phenomenology as “the great task of a pure theory of essence of the life-world” (CE: 141), as uncovering the universal a priori of all human theoretical and practical endeavours: for the sake of clarifying this [the accomplishments of modern science] and all other acquisitions of human activity, the concrete life-world must first be taken into consideration; and it must be considered in terms of the truly concrete universality whereby it embraces, both directly and in the manner of horizons, all the built-up levels of validity acquired by men for the world of their common life and whereby it has the totality of these levels related in the end to a

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world-nucleus to be distilled by abstraction, namely, the world of straightforward intersubjective experiences. (CE: 133)

This grounding in the immediate evidence of experience is the path through which phenomenological analysis is to make Husserl’s ideal believable again. What this would lead to is the basis for a phenomenologically inspired worldview that does not succumb to naturalism but that can provide a correction to it.42 The question is whether this recovery of the life-world is enough to achieve Husserl’s lofty goals.

Chapter 5

Husserl’s Phenomenological Reestablishment of the Ideal

Husserl’s proposed solution to the crisis takes the path of phenomenology. While his diagnosis of the crisis makes it clear how a foundational analysis of experience can contribute to mend the schism between the results of the sciences and the everyday life-world, it is not immediately evident how it can reestablish the philosophical project he takes Europe to be. This chapter shows how Husserl’s phenomenological analyses can contribute to the reestablishment of this rationalism and in particular its universalism. This can be seen as a phenomenological attempt to provide a foundation for the reconciliatory politics that follows from Husserl’s philosophy. The link between Husserl’s phenomenology and his philosophical project is often assumed rather than explored. Taking his work seriously as an attempt to solve Europe’s crisis, however, entails looking at exactly how this is supposed to work. This is done in in the first section of this chapter, by showing how Husserl’s recourse to the life-world involves a recourse to the structures of the experience of the world that indicate a possible universal sense of the world. Different layers of the life-world and different senses of the world are addressed in the context of Husserl’s solution to the crisis, showing which of these are involved in this solution and how. This involves a tripartite distinction between 1) the life-world as a cultural world and the foundation of everyday human existence; 2) a universal sense of the world derived from the teleological structure of the life-world as a horizon; and 3) the universal sense of the world posited as a goal motivated by this teleology. This phenomenological exploration of Husserl’s solution to the crisis will show that while there is indeed a phenomenological basis for his goal, the latter is nonetheless not fully justified phenomenologically. This is argued for on the basis of two different kinds of horizon that Husserl analyses: the internal horizon of the constitution of objects and the external horizon of the world. While it is the latter that plays a role in the discussed phenomenological 69

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foundation of Husserl’s universalism, he seemingly relies on characteristics of the former to give a concreteness to his goal that it otherwise would not have. This is discussed in relation to the unity of the world that Husserl takes as his goal. This is a unity which he ultimately cannot justify, whether by recourse to the horizonal structure of experience or by the intersubjective nature of the constitution of the one world for all. Looking beyond Husserl’s concrete phenomenological analyses, his work shows an awareness of the limits of phenomenological and indeed theoretical justification for his goal. The tension between reality and ideality discussed in the previous chapter, is one that Husserl takes seriously. He acknowledges that he cannot justify his project by recourse to any given fact—whether historical or phenomenological fact. Consequently, he must motivate his project on other grounds. We will see that practical reason plays an important role in this. Husserl does not justify the possibility of his goal by refuting the irrationality of the world but by refusing it. This is entwined with a religious dimension of his philosophy, the importance of which to his philosophical project as a whole is not always fully acknowledged. The final section of this chapter discusses how this practical and religious dimension of Husserl’s solution to the crisis remains inadequate. While his philosophy is coherent, it fails to address the lack of faith in the modern philosophical project that goes to the heart of the crisis. Moreover, the ultimately formal nature of his solution sheds doubt on what exactly the successful execution of his project would entail in relation to the life-world as an existential home for humanity. It might well be that Husserl’s project has alienating effects similar to those of the sciences. This unclarity remains, even when Husserl arguably tries to address the formal nature of his universalist rationalism by recourse to a form of community that values the particular: the community of love. This is related to the work of Jürgen Habermas which, as discussed in chapter 3, is exemplary for modern reconciliatory political thought, and which despite its criticism of Husserl shows a great proximity to the latter’s work as presented here. THE LIFE-WORLD IN THE SOLUTION TO THE CRISIS The concept of the life-world is essential to Husserl’s later work and his solution to the crisis.1 However, even within the Crisis, there are different conceptions of it. Husserl acknowledges this by speaking of narrower and broader senses of the concept, and of different levels or strata of the life-world (CE: 122, 168). This becomes problematic when the term is used in ways that are incompatible with each other, as has been noted by many.2 Rather than providing an exhaustive overview of the different uses and ambiguities of

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the life-world, this section focuses on Husserl’s use of the life-world in the specific context of his solution to the crisis. This will reveal several senses of ‘world’, which Husserl does not always clearly distinguish, and which potentially problematise his solution to the crisis and in particular the world he takes as his goal. Despite Husserl’s emphasis on the life-world, it should not be forgotten that his inquiry into it is the starting-point and not the end-goal of his philosophy. An ultimate clarification of the sciences cannot stop at the life-world, but has to take into account the constitution of the life-world itself by transcendental subjectivity. Likewise, the thematisation of the life-world is only a first step towards solving the crisis, because ultimately Husserl is not interested in any life-world whatsoever but in one that fits his rational ideals. Although it initially needs to be treated “in its neglected relativity and according to all the manners of relativity belonging essentially to it,” (CE: 156) this relativity must be overcome. As Bernhard Waldenfels put it: “Husserl first revalorizes doxa with respect to scientific reason only to finally devaluate it with respect to philosophical reason.”3 The basic sense of the life-world has already been made clear in the discussion of the crisis in the previous chapter. It is the world in which we live precisely as we live in it, opposed to the abstraction of the world that the sciences provide. The life-world is “what we know best, what is always taken for granted in all human life” (CE: 123). It is this world as taken for granted (in both everyday life and the sciences) which Husserl wants to investigate as it is concretely experienced. Thus, it is not a view or interpretation of the world but the initial experience of the world, a “realm of original self-evidence” (CE: 127), of which there can be interpretations. It is a perceptual world, the world as perceived through the senses rather than as thought by the sciences. The perceptual is a privileged level of the life-world insofar as that everything that exhibits itself in the life-world as a concrete thing has a bodily, sensible character, even if it is not a mere body (CE: 106; Hua XXIX: 329). However, as the latter already indicates, a bare perceptual world is not the life-world as we are most intimately acquainted with it. We do not live in a world of mere bodily things and even in relatively straightforward, ‘bare’ perception we do not perceive objects individually but as belonging to a world that exceeds them. As experienced in everyday life, the life-world is a cultural world.4 As Husserl says, only an infant or a mentally impeded person sees a perceptual world without properly grasping its cultural level (Hua XV: 231). It is as a cultural world that the life-world functions as the foundation for all human activity. Every praxis “presupposes its ‘truth and falsity’ in terms of what exists and does not exist, of what is right and wrong in the broader and broadest sphere of being” (CE: 379). These truths and values make the

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life-world a secure ground for us, a homeworld as opposed to the alien worlds of others in which we can have difficulties finding our way around. It is thus the life-world as including culture that Husserl is after as the most immediate world in which we live and as foundation of the sciences. The life-world as it is immediately given has to include the full garb of culture, lest we already distinguish between a perceptual world and a cultural world in a theoretical manoeuvre which Husserl precisely wants to avoid. Moreover, recourse to a mere perceptual world is clearly insufficient to address the spiritual needs of humanity, whereas a thematisation of the life-world as cultural world is a thematisation of the structures that guide everyday praxis and thus have a higher existential relevance. While this entails that the life-world as cultural world is the proper domain on the basis of which to address the crisis, it also shows why this is not enough. What Husserl aims at here is the “changing, surrounding life-worlds of peoples and periods” (CE: 147). The life-world in this sense is in fact a plurality of particular cultural worlds. The norms and values to be found in them are inherited through tradition rather than rationally developed. They are binding for the particular world of which they are a part but do not necessarily have any validity beyond it. A return to the life-world as cultural world is thus a return to a cultural relativism that runs counter to Husserl’s rationalist project.5 The ultimate goal is to transcend the relativity of the plurality of cultural worlds towards a single, universal sense of the world. The life-world as cultural world is what needs to be made rational so as to reach this universality. The step back from the world of science to the everyday, cultural life-world is followed by a step beyond it in the direction of a life-world with validity for everyone because it is shaped by reason. As discussed in the previous chapter, this idea of the world is central to what Husserl takes philosophy to be. He sees it as the goal of philosophy since its inception with the Ancient Greeks, who first discovered the world in this proper sense. The clash between different worldviews led them to the idea of a single world for all, and the same still goes for all of us: Each of us has his life-world, meant as the world for all. Each has it with the sense of a polar unity of subjectively, relatively meant worlds which, in the course of correction, are transformed into mere appearances of the world, the life-world for all. This is the world; another world would have no meaning at all for us. (CE: 254–55)

Note that this is not the emergence of the experience of a single world, but rather the explicit thematisation of the idea of it in the face of a plurality of cultural worlds. Experientially, the world is always already ‘meant for all’. The realisation that the way the world is experienced might not be as

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universal as it seems is what calls for the reestablishment of the world in line with the universality that it was assumed to have. The importance of the Ancient Greeks for Husserl lies in the fact that instead of succumbing to relativism, they reacted against the plurality of different worldviews by postulating one, true world distinct from any particular view on it. It is not hard to see Husserl as a descendent of these Greek philosophers, operating within a climate of relativism and scepticism, but seeing this not as a reason to give up the dream of universality but as a reason to rationally rethink it. How, then, can this dream be realised? To an extent, the various cultural worlds might share a foundation in a common perceptual world, but there is no such thing as a universal culture that they all reflect. However, as Andrea Staiti has argued, “since they necessarily share the reference to pure nature, different cultural worlds must share more than just the reference to pure nature,” that is, inevitably there are similarities to the way this is constituted as part of the life-world.6 There are what Husserl calls fundamental generative features [das Urgenerative]. For example, all life-worlds are constituted on the basis of shared biological needs that direct our acting (Hua XV: 433–36). Similarly, although this may take shape in different ways, it is a structural characteristic that there is a sense of the earth as a foundation below us, the expanse of heaven above us, and so on (Hua XXIX: 38).7 There are common elements to the various cultural worlds and necessarily so. While Husserl seeks the universality he takes as his goal in the common structure of all life-worlds, not all commonalities can be the source of a properly universal sense of the world nor are they necessarily rational. Moreover, while common culturally constitutive features of the life-world are crucial to understanding life-worlds other than our own,8 they do not account for the movement from a particular life-world to one with a universal sense. What is crucial for the latter is a more fundamental level of the life-world. This cannot be some object or region of objects (cultural or otherwise) given within the life-world and that might be shared between worlds. Such commonalities might be universal in fact, while not being so in principle. Moreover, as Husserl emphasises, this would take the investigation in a direction that again overlooks the life-world itself (CE: 138–39). The solution lies in the fundamental structure of the life-world as horizon for any object, a horizon pregiven in the alterations of the life-world’s manners of givenness (CE: 154). What is universal in the life-world is not something present in all worlds and which they have in common. Instead, it is the sense of the openness of the world as an indeterminate horizon against which things can become determinate. This entails that there is, in principle, always at least an incipient extension of the life-world beyond the limits of any particular cultural world which as such is a partially determined, ‘filled in’ horizon. The life-world as an already partially constituted configuration

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of meaning itself relies on a more universal horizon for its constitution.9 This latter horizon in principle goes beyond the limitation of any empirical particulars that would determine the life-world as a particular world, as an empirical anthropological type as discussed in the previous chapter. It is clear that there are two very distinct senses of ‘world’ at play here, to the point that Husserl says that the world “exists in ‘contradiction’ with itself” (Hua XV: 380). At times, he distinguishes between the life-world in the sense of a particular, concrete cultural world, and what he calls the “world in general,” that is, the world as universal horizon (CE: 382). The latter can be seen as embracing all layers of the life-world or as its most fundamental layer. This distinction is crucial, as it enables the project of actively shaping any life-world in terms of the world as horizon, resolving the contradiction between them. This project is instantiated when the idea of the world in its universal sense enters history and shows the relativity of all particular lifeworlds (Hua XXXIX: 55–56). This is precisely what Husserl says took place in the shift of culture in Ancient Greece from a finite to an infinite mode of historical existence; the shift from a self-enclosed society in a particular cultural world to a form of universalisation that incorporates the sense of the world as horizon into the very being of an existing life-world (CE: 279; Hua VIII: 200). Concretely, this takes place in the double move of critique and rationalisation discussed in the previous chapter. Based on the world as an infinite horizon, this is a process that can never fully be completed. It is a teleological process that can actively be taken up in the struggle for ever-increasing rationality and universality and the attempt to constitute one world for all. Husserl’s rationalist teleology is thus already implicitly contained in the structure of experience. It is implicit within all life-worlds as its “fundamental category” (Hua Mat. IX: 187). The universal sense of the world is thus to be found in, or can emerge from within, the particular life-worlds.10 The idea of the world at stake in Husserl’s rationalist teleology is a goal motivated by experience itself. Insofar as this universal sense of the world becomes an explicit goal taken up within a particular life-world, there no longer are just two senses of ‘world’ in play (concrete, particular life-world and world as universal horizon) but three. This is because the universal sense of the world posited as a goal for the concrete life-world, is not simply the same as the world as horizon as fundamental layer of the life-world. The world as horizon is not something constituted or to be constituted, but rather “a universal movement and synthesis in the movement of all my representations [Vorstellungen]” (Hua XXIX: 268). It is this constituting activity that leads to the correlate goal-idea of a unitary world, which would be the to-beconstituted ‘object’ of this synthesis through a “critique of a universal experience that is to restore unity to all homeworlds that are to be synthetically

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connected” (Hua XV: 235). The question is to what extent this goal is phenomenologically justified. The notions of the life-world and the world as horizon may have come about through phenomenological inquiry, but this is less clear for the goal that follows from this, as it is not given in experience but motivated by it. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION AND ITS LIMITS In the Crisis or elsewhere, there is no discussion of what this world that Husserl takes as his goal would look like concretely. It is an “infinitely distant and unattainable idea, of which only the form, as an absolute norm for the construction of all starting points, is given” (CE: 305). As discussed in the previous chapter, what Husserl aims at is not any definite state of society, but a shape which best suits the further pursuit of this infinite task. This is to result in a more rational and arguably a more meaningful world—at least more meaningful for human affairs than anything the naturalistic worldview can provide. Importantly, this teleology is to converge on some form of rational unity that allows it to function as a safeguard to relativism. It is this that would allow Husserl to overcome the idea of an ultimately fragmented humankind through the universality of reason. However, the justification for this guiding idea of unity, and with it of the idea of the world Husserl takes as his goal, is unclear. Although rationality and unity are traditionally taken to go together, Husserl does not give explicit arguments for why rationality entails unity, to be more precise: for why there can be only one rational conception of the world he takes as his goal. His rationalist teleology is based on the world as horizon, which allows for the superseding of any particular cultural world, but this in itself does not entail the possibility of a single, universal world for all. There might be different, equally rational ways the world can take shape without these ways converging on each other. It has been remarked by some that this idea of a unitary goal might be Husserl’s greatest presupposition, and one that remains unclarified in his work, including by Patočka.11 We have seen how Husserl utilises the world in the sense of the universal horizon of experience to motivate the instantiation of the universal sense of the world in a concrete life-world. However, as several commentators have noted, at times Husserl treats the world in the sense of horizon (that is, as constituting or constitution-guiding) as a world to be constituted.12 This allows Husserl to treat his ideal world as if it were an object, that is, as something with a coherent, unified sense. Even if Husserl acknowledges the essential

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impossibility of a completed constitution of the world he takes as his goal, his reliance on its possible future, coherent, unified sense goes against the very idea of a horizon. A horizon is not an object with any form of synthetic unity, as Husserl himself is very much aware: The world [. . .] does not exist as an entity, as an object, but exists which such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it. Every plural, and every singular drawn from it, presupposes the world-horizon. (CE: 143)

For the same reason that it does not make sense to talk of the world in the plural, it strictly speaking does not make sense to talk about it in the singular. The world as horizon is not a ‘thing’ to which these categories are applicable. Treating it as such nonetheless (even as an ever-to-be-constituted object), entails implicitly turning it into a possibly unified, determined state. There is thus a fundamental tension between the world as horizon and the world as goal that is motivated by this horizon. Not only is the latter not given in experience, it might be in conflict with it. If this is the case, it might be that Husserl, although he attributes a formal status devoid of content to it, still attributes too much to his goal, specifically its real unity. There needs to be some measure to the process of overcoming the plurality of cultural worlds to a single world with a universal sense. Something needs to specify the direction of its development, its path of universalisation, and it seems that Husserl oversteps the boundaries of what his recourse to the world as horizon can justify. This can be shown on the basis of the difference between two kinds of horizon and their corresponding teleologies that are to be found in Husserl’s analyses of the structure of experience. These are what Husserl calls the internal and external horizons of objects of experience. This difference corresponds to the difference between the objects of experience and the world as horizon of experience. Importantly, they can be used to show precisely in which manner the world in the sense of horizon is not like an object and how Husserl’s recourse to the world as horizon fails to provide a sufficient measure for his rationalist teleology. A central idea of Husserl’s phenomenology is that objects are never fully given in experience but always in perspective. We always only perceive a particular side, a particular aspect, and so forth. Nonetheless, we have an awareness of the object as a whole. This predelineation of the object as a whole, an “indeterminateness” with a “determinate structure” (CM: 45), is its internal horizon. On its basis we go beyond the sensory manifold actually given in experience towards a unity (the object) which appears ‘through’ this manifold in various ways. This object can always be fleshed out further. Although we can never have a ‘complete’ view of it, the object itself is there “in person”

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[leibhaftig], as “a pole of identity, always meant expectantly as having a sense yet to be actualized” (CM: 45–46). This actualisation can never be completed, not only because there is infinitely more to discover about the object, but also because every partial perspective obscures another partial perspective. Husserl calls perception the attempt to accomplish something which by its very nature it cannot accomplish.13 Nonetheless, it does approach the object itself as it receives ever further determination. Crucially, this process is object-guided, in the sense that the manifold given in experience gains its sense in relation to the object. This is not a “blending of externals” but a continual further determination of something that already presents itself (CE: 158). The partial appearances are not free-floating and independent, but precisely appearances of an object. The measure for successful integration of the various appearances thus emerges from within this process itself, in an interplay between the manifold of appearances and the object of which they are appearances. This means that no principle external to this experience itself is needed to function as a measure for success or failure of the constitution of an object.14 Of course, my experience of the object is always open to correction, to the point that the object can turn out to be completely different from how it was experienced initially. It might not even have been a single object or any object at all. Nonetheless, there is something that presents itself and which functions as the measure for the success or failure of its further determination, whether it was the object it seemed I saw, or something completely different. Given this ever-present possibility of revision, the ideal of the fully constituted object does not so much designate the object itself as it designates the infinite further determination of the object. This guides the process as an idea in the Kantian sense. It is again worth noting that while this idea is thus distinct from the content of any given object, it is nonetheless generated by the object itself. It is the object we see that suggests there is more to it than we presently see and that invites further inspection. Although the internal horizon thus functions according to a formal idea of the unity of the object, it nonetheless proceeds on the basis of a given content. This entails that we cannot constitute the object in any way whatsoever, but only on its own terms. This characteristic distinguishes the internal horizon from the external horizon. The latter allows for the extension of experience from object to object and region to region, via a synthesis between objects of experience. Although both internal and external horizon are regulative principles prefiguring and ordering experience, the measures according to which they operate are different. The external horizon has no object or content to it. It is not itself an object waiting to become determinate, thematic, or to present any objective sense itself.15 As opposed to the life-world as a concrete cultural

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world (which already has some content partially determining it), the world as horizon is an openness that cannot be identified with any content. As Husserl says: “It persists in this openness” (CE: 320). It is “devoid of any intuitively given framework that would require only more differentiated ways of sketching it in.”16 Of course, the synthesis performed by either horizon may fail. We may have seen something wrong, a perspective may have been misleading, and in extreme cases our experience may break up into a confused discordance of sensations. But if there is an object involved, it is this very object that presents itself in a new light which shows us we were wrong. It can push back against mistaken views on it. The same goes for the life-world, which is a horizon but also a configuration of meaning constituted in a particular way with a particular cultural content. Someone can tell us that we have not adequately grasped a particular cultural world. The ideal unity indicated by the external horizon or the world as horizon, however, does not have any content that can function in this manner. The world that Husserl takes as his goal based on this horizon thus lacks any measure on the basis of which its constitution can be viewed as proper or improper. Or rather, as will be discussed further, the intersubjective nature of this process of unification provides a measure that is insufficient to account for any determinate outcome. The constitution of an object and the constitution of the world are two distinct processes and László Tengelyi was right in claiming that it is one of the most important features of Husserl’s account that “it is not the world as a whole but each single thing in its particular reality which is considered by him as an Idea in a Kantian sense.”17 Yet, at times, Husserl fails to properly distinguish between the two kinds of horizon, in one stroke calling both object and world “infinite ideas correlating to a complete synthesis of possible experiences” (CM: 62). At various places in his work he models his theory of the world as horizon on the givenness of objects.18 It has been suggested that Husserl makes this mistake of confusing the world as horizon for a totality of objects or a sort of total object, because he was always under the spell of the kind of synthesis so successful in the one-sided rationalism exemplified by the natural sciences.19 While Husserl increasingly criticises this mistake of treating the world in a way not proper to its horizonal character, he himself is susceptible to it. A crucial part of Husserl’s account that has been left out so far is the role of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity is crucial because constitution is not an individual process accomplished by isolated egos. Others provide perspectives on the same objects available to me and thus support my constitution of these objects. The fundamental incompleteness of our experience requires others to fill it out and to provide a stable background that is independent of any individual, finite constituting capacity.20 A plurality of constituting

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egos provides a measure of stability to what is essentially a never-ending, contingent process that is always susceptible to future refutation and outright failure. That is why, as Husserl argues in the Cartesian Meditations, that it is “ultimately a community of monads, which, moreover, (in its communalized intentionality) constitutes the one identical world” (CM: 107). If the world is constituted intersubjectively, it makes sense to claim that all egos must be taking part in the shaping of the same world, even though no individual ego possesses it as a whole. Husserl allows for deviations from this multiegoic but single process of constitution: not everyone will have the same, identical experience of the world. Nonetheless, in principle it is one and the same world that is the correlate of the intersubjective process of constitution as a whole. Everyone shares in the constitution of this one world of which each world-experience is thus only a relative approximation which, when this is taken up as a task, can converge on it in infinity. If a measure for the constitution of the world that Husserl takes as his goal is to be found anywhere, it is in the intersubjective nature of this process. However, this argument for the unity of the world that is to be constituted relies on the dubious impossibility of a plurality of separate monadic communities. Although Husserl is quite insistent on the idea that there can only exist a single community of monads, this is not all that evident. The existence of multiple constituting communities is inconceivable to him, “a pure absurdity” (CM: 140). But can we not say that it is only recently that humankind became aware of itself as a whole? Even now there exist communities in South America and Southeast Asia that live in complete isolation from others. And even more extreme cases of separation are imaginable, where it becomes even more problematic to hold that distant communities take part in the constitution of our world or we in theirs. To take the most extreme example: We can imagine communities between which a separation in space and time exists of which the laws of physics tell us it cannot be bridged. Why, then, is the very idea of a plurality of monadic communities an absurdity for Husserl? The argument Husserl provides is an answer to Paul Ricoeur’s question: “‘In’ which consciousness is the plurality of consciousnessess posited?”21 Husserl’s answer: “In my sphere of ownness, naturally” (CM: 107). Despite his emphasis on transcendental intersubjectivity, he cannot conceive of the plurality of monads except on the basis of a “constitutive primal monad relative to them” (CM: 140). This primacy of a single monad is crucial to his argument for the impossibility of a plurality of communities: “Accordingly they belong in truth to a single universal community, which includes me and comprises unitarily all the monads and groups of monads that can be conceived as co-existent” (CM: 140). While this accounts for the unity of the community of monads, this community is not that of all monads but of all monads insofar as they are conceived by the primal monad:

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For indeed the two intersubjectivities are not absolutely isolated. As imagined by me, each of them is in necessary communion with me (or with me in respect of a possible variant of myself) as the constitutive primal monad relative to them. (CM: 140, emphasis added)

Unity is presupposed here by relying on the synthetic nature of subjectivity, on the fact that it is a fundamental feature that we experience everything as belonging to the same world, but it is not justified insofar as there can be communities of monads not conceived by the primal monad, as in the case of communities closed off from the rest of humankind of which we are unaware.22 Even if we grant that the mere thought of being in communion with possible other communities to some extent includes them into my world, this does not entail any real coconstitution of the same world. If there are in fact separate monadic communities, then without an external measure or content to guide their progression in the same direction, their processes of constitution would be distinct and they would ipso facto be constituting separate worlds. Even if this separation between constituting communities would only be a matter of fact and if in principle they could always form a single community, the question still remains whether they would always do so based on the same measure. As Gail Soffer has noted, Husserl’s analyses of intersubjectivity show that something must be in common or constituted as in common to form a community, but they do not show that this necessarily has to be the same in all cases or for all involved in the process.23 What one community shares with a second in their mutual constitution of the world is not necessarily the same as what it shares with a third community. Rather than constituting a single world, this communalisation might form a tapestry of a variety of different, partially overlapping worlds. If there is no measure to guarantee the actual unity of the world which Husserl takes as his goal, there is nothing guaranteeing that the process of rationalisation and universalisation will end up at the same world for everyone engaged in this project. Of course, it is likely they will through contact with each other, but in principle this does not have to be the case. This means that Husserl can justify his rationalist teleology, the process of universalisation, through his account of experience as inherently horizonal and indefinitely extendable and able to incorporate new experiences. But there is no phenomenological basis for his goal as a particular (singular, rational, even if not predetermined) way in which this has to happen. If the unity this goal is to provide is not justified, neither is the move from the plurality of particular life-worlds to a single world with a universal sense, undermining essential aspects of Husserl’s project.

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HUSSERL’S RELIANCE ON PRACTICAL REASON AND FAITH Although Husserl’s diagnosis of the crisis serves as an introduction to phenomenology and indeed a phenomenological solution to the crisis, he does not explicitly or completely justify the world he takes as his goal by recourse to experience. Arguably, the account of history in the Crisis is an attempt to show that his rationalist teleology is inherent to the development of history. Yet, this must be understood in the right way. Husserl does not conceive of his teleology as an autonomous process of historical development. He outlines a path from the Greek birth of philosophy to the establishment of phenomenology itself as working towards the realisation of his goal, but this is not a metaphysical claim about a necessary course of history. It is about the establishment and subsequent reestablishments of an insight regarding the world. As discussed in chapter 4, it is the task that follows from this insight more so than history itself which is of importance to Husserl. What ultimately matters for Husserl in his philosophical account of history, is the way it can be a source of motivation regardless of the historical truth of his interpretations (Hua XXIX: 47–51). There are many remarks that show that Husserl was not that concerned with the factual accuracy of his account of history, at least as far as its importance for his philosophy was concerned. He says we need to take it with a grain of salt (Hua XXVII: 84) and explicitly rejects a scientific concern for history (CE: 393). The “poetic invention of the history of philosophy” serves the philosopher “in understanding himself and his aim” and that “which makes up philosophy ‘as such’ as a unitary telos” (CE: 395). Husserl’s account of history is a story that motivates his account of what philosophy should be. As James G. Hart has pointed out, this semifictitious nature of Husserl’s account of history does not make his goal itself a mere fiction.24 If the aim of Husserl’s use of history is to motivate, then it would be wrong to measure it by the standard of factual history. History cannot have a goal in itself insofar as “goals, tasks are only held by persons that pose tasks to themselves. In similar fashion that is the case where we take over a task from tradition” (Hua XXIX: 373). Even where we find goals in history, it is not their mere presence that makes them goals for us. Goals are there only insofar as we intervene in history in the attempt to shape it. Husserl’s goal is invoked in a struggle for a better world, indeed, an infinitely better world. By definition it exceeds anything history has to offer. More often than not, history seems to be going against this goal, to the point that Husserl calls his task “a struggle between awakened reason and the powers of historical reality” (Hua XXVII: 106). It

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is no wonder that Husserl mentions that fictional accounts can motivate just as well or better than historical reality (Hua XXIX: 50–51). Husserl’s remarks on his use of history shed light on the impossibility of supporting his goal by historical or indeed any kind of fact. Instead, it relies on a motivation, a will to be rational and to make history rational. Rather than looking for a ground outside of itself, we can say that Husserl’s rationalism is a consequence of humankind “understanding that it is rational in seeking to be rational” (CE: 341). He even says that “the absolutely rational person is regarding its rationality causa sui” (Hua XXVII: 36). This leaves us with the question of the nature and status of this causa sui rationality, of this will to be rational. This question is of particular importance in light of the fact that we are never ‘the absolutely rational person’ and thus have to motivate or sustain this will to rationality when confronted with a historical situation that calls rationality itself into question. Husserl sees that the world, both historically and in his life, does not live up to his ideal to the extent that he considers doubting it himself: Is it not better to say: Worldly life is a delusion, purposeless, nothing comes of it—? I cannot conclusively affirm my life in the human community and the world, I can do that only when I believe in the sense of the world. “Theoretically” I have no reason for that. I cannot prove anything here based on experience (Kant). Experience teaches that, when in part many things also succeed, as a whole everything still fails. Nothing is definitive, every finality is relative. Universal decline devours everything seemingly eternally valuable. (Hua VIII: 355)

Husserl’s crisis-sentiment extends beyond the factual nonexistence of his ideal. There are signs that it might be impossible. This can be highlighted based on a recurring and personal example in Husserl’s writings: the love of a parent for its child. The child is uniquely the object of its love, irreplaceable in its singular existence and as such it represents an absolute value. Yet, for Husserl, there is equally the love for the fatherland, a love for which one can be called to war to sacrifice one’s life (Hua XLII: 458). This indicates the possibility of an insolvable conflict between values, “where the sense of the choice consists in the incompatibility between disjunctive values” (Hua XLII: 466). Aside from this concrete example, such conflicts between the highest values are certainly imaginable. And if they are possible in principle, it might not only be the case that the world is not yet rational, but that there is no final way to resolve certain dilemmas, that the final concordance which is to be found in the constitution of the world that Husserl takes as his goal is impossible. Around him, Husserl sees more evidence of fundamental conflict than of the possibility of his goal:

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What can bind us to our goal? Is it only the foolhardiness of striving toward a goal which is beautiful but only vaguely possible, one which is not definitely impossible but still, in the end, imaginary, one which gradually, after the experience of millennia, finally begins to bear a very great inductive probability of being unattainable? Or does what appears from the outside to be a failure, and on the whole actually is one, bring with it a certain evidence of practical possibility and necessity, as the evidence of an imperfect, one-sided, partial success, but still a success in this failure? However, if such an evidence ever was alive, in our time at any rate it has become weak, has lost its vitality. (CE: 391)

Remarkably, it is from within the utmost uncertainty that Husserl suggests a ‘practical possibility and necessity’ of his goal. In his later writings on ethics and metaphysics he explicitly relies on practical rather than theoretical reason to support it.25 Husserl invokes Kant’s theory of postulates as containing a “deep truth” and as providing a source of strength for his thought (Hua XLII: 217). Fragments such as the following are telling: The world must have a “sense.” In all individual and communal [völkischen] destiny there must lie a unitary and intelligible sense—philosophy must construct this sense in relation to the irrationality of the fact [of the world]. This is irrationality over and against theoretical-practical rationality. What must be believed, so the world can still have a sense, so that life can remain reasonable within it? The content of this faith cannot be justified through “theoretical” knowledge, but this faith is justifiable from the motive of a possible practical life of reason. (Hua XLII: 238)

Husserl’s use of teleology as a rational bulwark against relativism and the senselessness of the world, is thus deeply connected with a faith in reason that is not itself theoretically justifiable. Throughout the Crisis he makes use of the terminology of faith, which in light of the quoted remarks seems to be more than mere rhetoric. He speaks of “the faith in ‘absolute’ reason, through which the world has its meaning” and identifies a lack of such a faith as the cause of the crisis (CE: 10, 13). As Philip R. Buckley has noted, whereas this aspect of faith is only hinted at in the Crisis, writings such as the Kaizo articles bring this aspect out more explicitly.26 This has been corroborated by other recent publications of Husserl’s Nachlass such as the Grenzprobleme volume which deals with the themes of metaphysics, ethics, and religion (Hua XLII). It is important to note that this recourse to faith is not a sudden irruption of irrationality in an otherwise rational project. For Husserl, it is a practical necessity for the realisation of this project. He does not refute but refuses the irrationality of the world. Yet, this refusal becomes problematic when it is connected to a faith in God, shedding doubt on Timo Miettinen’s

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recent characterisation of Husserl’s teleology as a “post-theological or post-metaphysical—but not post-modern—concept.”27 This theological element is hard to pin down exactly, because there is not necessarily a robust and coherent philosophy of religion to be found in Husserl’s writings. In part, this is because Husserl did not set out to develop his philosophy as a philosophy of religion or as a theology. He calls it “nonconfessional” (Hua XLII: 25) and even “an atheistic path towards God” (Hua XXXIX: 166–67) that is not based on revelation. Philosophy is said to autonomously and necessarily arrive at these considerations, which causes Husserl to say that in infinity philosophy and theology overlap (Hua XLII: 260). His writings on this are fragmentary, yet prevalent and important enough to include them in any overall interpretation of Husserl’s work.28 They are present not as addition to or embellishment of his philosophy, but pertain to its most foundational elements, in particular its teleological aspects, in terms of both Husserl’s philosophy of history and of his account of the teleological structure of subjectivity. Husserl associates God with his teleology in various ways. At times, he equates the idea of God with the realisation of his goal beyond all finite instantiations of it (Hua XXVII: 33–34). Elsewhere, God is not the goal itself but the drive or motivation behind the teleology (Hua XV: 385; Hua XLII: 203). He goes as far as calling the teleological structure of subjectivity the “divine will” inside each of us (Hua XV: 381). While this might be at odds with the atheistic and nonconfessional path he set out, it is not all that peculiar to see such a meaning-giving, ordering element in our subjectivity on the basis of which one can strive for reason in a world that otherwise would be irrational and senseless, as a divine principle. Husserl’s project is not just about a more rational world. He also takes it to be a more beautiful and ethical world, where an order is possible in which we can find not only happiness [Glück] but bliss [Seligkeit] (Hua VII: 16).29 Rather than the conflicting values Husserl sees around him and that he experienced firsthand, this would be a world with a coherent order of values forming a “synthesis of all relative values, in which an infinite absolute value realises itself,” which Husserl can only understand on the basis of the idea of God (Hua XLII: 203). The question is to what extent this reliance on a theological motif is still phenomenological. While God cannot be an object of experience, from Husserl’s perspective of the constitution of the world, God is experienced in this desire that motivates us to engage in the rational teleology. Crucially, if this drive is part of the fundamental makeup of subjectivity, this means that the underlying motivation-structures of philosophy are universal, despite uneven development or divergent motivational trends among individuals or communities. It entails that “to the facticity of human existence always and necessarily belongs the idea of reason of a community of peace, and with it

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a realm of agreeing goals, and a world of humans, that everyone can affirm” (Hua XXIX: 270–71). Although Husserl’s rationalist teleology finds its source in the teleological structure of subjectivity itself, “the human being as human being is burdened with original sin, which belongs to the essence [Wesensform] of human beings” (Hua XXVII: 44). As said, we are never the absolutely rational person. As such, we cannot always sustain or actively take up the teleology present in us. Accordingly, Louis Dupré has interpreted Husserl’s use of God as a countermeasure against the contingency of his infinite task.30 Faith in God takes on the form of the motivation for Husserl’s goal. As such, God would be the guarantor of the eternal possibility of Husserl’s teleology, guaranteeing at the very least the possibility that a rational world could come to be even when humankind factually lapses into unreason and even when there is no further justification to take up an infinite task. It is only an external guarantor that keeps his teleology on a straight path towards his goal as concretely the same goal for everyone. Without such a principle, there is nothing to guarantee the possibility of his ideal in the way that he conceives of it. Husserl’s reliance on practical reason and faith make sense if we look at how he accounts for the historical inception of the rational teleology: the clash of different worldviews and the subsequent positing of the one, true, universal world as a goal. While it is easy to see how the experience of such a clash leads to the relativisation of our worldviews, it does not automatically lead to the idea that they must be views of a single world, even though we cannot but experience everything as belonging to a single world. The overcoming of a plurality of relative worlds through the positing of a single world is a second step requiring its own justification. As argued, Husserl seems to do this by treating the world as horizon as a to-be-constituted object. But while this is motivated through the teleological structure of experience itself, there is no such object to actually provide the unity his teleology requires. Without it, his infinite teleology might lead nowhere, or at least not inherently towards the same world for all. It can be called a speculative idea, insofar as it exceeds the boundary of what can strictly speaking be justified phenomenologically. As Buckley has noted: “Ultimately, Husserl’s optimistic rationalism can only be supported by the theological dimension at work in his philosophy.”31 That is not a philosophical sin per se. Yet, if one of the aims of Husserl’s specifically phenomenological approach to the crisis was to provide a solid foundation for his solution in the form of a convincing justification or motivation for the rational world he takes as his goal and in which European humanity has lost faith, then this must be seen as a failure insofar as it relies on a religious faith that he cannot properly justify. A crisis of a lack of faith in reason is not easily remedied by having recourse to faith itself, to an “ethical

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as if” (Hua XLII: 317) that might be “good practically” but even according to Husserl himself is “reprehensible theoretically” (Hua XLII: 323). THE EXISTENTIAL AND POLITICAL INADEQUACY OF HUSSERL’S SOLUTION If Husserl has to rely on speculative or religious means to justify or motivate the rational and universal world that is his goal, then this allows us to question not just the unity upon which the plurality of cultural worlds is to converge teleologically, but this world as such. Importantly, this questioning can itself be motivated by Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of what makes the life-world a meaningful world in which we can be at home, that is, a homeworld. On the basis of the preceding, Husserl’s more strictly phenomenological work can be seen to be in tension with his broader rationalist project, as David Carr has also argued.32 The question can thus be posed how his rational teleology would shape the life-world while bracketing Husserl’s own assumptions regarding, and faith in, its outcome. Husserl’s rational teleology is entirely formal in nature, more so than the formal nature of the internal horizon of objects. As discussed, the latter has a measure for its further determination on the basis of a given content or object, but the world as horizon (that is, the phenomenological foundation of his rational teleology) does not offer any such measure. Operating on the basis of an entirely formal notion, without a clear sense of how this concretely shapes the life-world, we can wonder whether this might not entail an emptying of its meaning. What can be called a nihilistic moment is part of the way Husserl accounts for the historical inception of Europe’s infinite task. It starts in crisis, in the exposing of the fact that the meaning of the world as given initially was not as absolute as was thought. But the principle on the basis of which this problematical sense of the world is to be overcome (that is, the second step of positing a new sense of the world) has now become uncertain. The life-world as a homeworld is shaken, but nothing remains to restore a sense of being at home in the world, which was one of the motivations for the project of the Crisis as a reaction to the formalisation of the world by the sciences. Is the rationalisation of the life-world on the basis of a purely formal measure not akin to that of which Husserl accuses the sciences, as suggested by Buckley?33 When speaking of philosophy’s comportment to the life-world, Husserl explicitly notes two possibilities: “What is traditionally valid is either completely discarded, or its content is taken over philosophically and thereby formed anew in the spirit of philosophical ideality” (CE: 280). Husserl does

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not opt for the dismissal of the traditional sense of the world, but for its transformation. This interpretation has been furthered recently by Miettinen, who emphasises that the universalist nature of philosophy for Husserl is to be articulated “from within a particular tradition,” while standing “in a critical relation towards that tradition.”34 The departure from tradition cannot be achieved once and for all, but consists in a perpetual critique. Far from being misled by a metaphysical ideal that he could not justify, Husserl’s teleology would be “a critical requisite of philosophical thinking” that shows the “necessary finitude and incompleteness” of the accomplishments of the present moment.35 Instead of being guided by the possible end of history, Miettinen sees teleological reflection as crucial, “because we are ‘not yet’ at the end of history, or, more precisely, because we constantly think we are.”36 While this interpretation focusing on the critical side of Husserl’s project is valid, the question nonetheless remains whether this does not still end up with a dismissal of what makes the life-world a homeworld.37 This certainly is not Husserl’s intent, but it might nonetheless be the outcome, given the way he conceptualises the teleological transformation of the world. The matter revolves around the manner in which Husserl’s philosophical insights can transform the life-world in a fundamental way. Can they contribute to the life-world without, as Patočka put it, being “simply an elimination of what is meaningless and contradictory”?38 Note that what is meaningless or contradictory from the perspective of philosophical reason might nonetheless be meaningful and valid in the naivete of everyday life. Husserl makes it clear that the accomplishments of the sciences can ‘flow into’ the life-world and become part of its makeup as ground for future activities and accomplishments. This has contributed to the success of the sciences, as they do not need to reproduce every foundational step on which they are built. But it has also contributed to the crisis insofar as it has pushed back and devaluated a more natural experience of the life-world. Importantly, Husserl also connects this possibility of results flowing into the life-world to his phenomenological results (Hua XXIX: 79–80). However, for all its successes in uncovering the functioning of the natural attitude, the phenomenological attitude is far from natural itself. Husserl himself admits that the old naiveté of the life-world can never fully return after the phenomenological reorientation: As a phenomenologist I can, of course, at any time go back into the natural attitude, back to the straightforward pursuit of my theoretical or other life-interests; I can, as before, be active as a father, a citizen, an official, as a “good European,” etc., that is, as a human being in my human community, in my world. As before—and yet not quite as before. For I can never again achieve the old naiveté; I can only understand it. (CE: 210)

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It seems as if the enrichment of our understanding of the life-world is also a fundamentally alienating experience, such as was contained in the inception of Husserl’s rationalist teleology. His phenomenology provides a deeper understanding of the life-world, but it is not primarily an explicit understanding of the world that allows us to find our way in it. It is precisely as taken for granted that we know the life-world the best and as which it forms the background to human existence. The cultural world provides us with what we need to move around in the world, perform tasks, go about our business as shaped in the interplay with others. It is a homeworld for us in being constituted together with others and as opposed to the alien worlds of others. This is what is to be transcended if we follow Husserl’s teleology and little indication is given of anything that can replace its role and meaning in our lives. As Rodolphe Gasché put it, the world Husserl takes as his goal is an ahuman one and “precisely its ahumanity secures that it is universally binding for all humans.”39 The strength of Husserl’s position is simultaneously its flaw. The formal nature of his teleology allows him to skilfully avoid the universal as a mere idealisation of empirical particulars and which would thus not be a true universal. It allows for a never-ending critique of the world. Yet, this is also a disenchantment of the world that uproots human existence. However, there are indications in Husserl’s work of a project which does not transcend the particular in a way that might destroy it, but which can be said to embrace the particular while still engaging with the teleological process of establishing a better world. What Husserl calls the community of love (Liebesgemeinschaft) addresses some of the issues that arise with the community of reason (see, e.g., Hua XIV: 172–75; Hua XV: 512). The community of love would not be a community of those who have fully transcended all particularism. Love is respectful of, and even emphasises, the particular individuality of each, in the sense that a parent uniquely loves its child in its irreplaceable singularity. In this sense, love is also a motivational force as it aims to support the particular self-realisation of the individual. Husserl’s ideal community would consist of a unity not only brought about through shared rational insight, but also through this form of love, motivating an infinite task.40 The community of love consists in this “blessed unity,” the intimate interlacing of different wills that are nonetheless working towards the same in their own way and motivate and support each other’s particular ways of doing so (Hua XXXV: 44). This is a reciprocal striving that does not leave behind the particular but cherishes it. Indeed, Anthony Steinbock suggests that Husserl’s ethical ideal might involve “a richness and diversity that is to be generated.”41 Although it seems that love is a fundamental complement to the rationalist line of Husserl’s project, explicit and systematic reflection on the relation between the two is missing from his work.42 It is, moreover, related to the

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more religious dimension in his work and like the latter, Husserl’s writings on the community of love are equally fragmented and subject to interpretation. Although the presence in his work of a community that would not overcome the particular, but would include it in the rationalist teleology, suggests that Husserl was aware of some of the problems addressed in this chapter, it does not entail a satisfying solution to them. The all-important question of how the particular relates to the universal remains unanswered, and the community of love too seems to revolve around a faith in its possibility, rather than around a philosophical justification. In chapter 4, it was discussed how Husserl’s political thought aims at reconciliation between different views, and the present chapter can be seen as an outline of the attempt to provide a phenomenological foundation for his and similar conceptions of the political. Given his attempt to include the particular into what is otherwise a purely formal process of reconciliation, Husserl’s thought comes very close to that of Habermas as discussed in chapter 3, despite the latter’s criticism of Husserl.43 A certain proximity is already evident based on Habermas’ appropriation of Husserl’s concept of the life-world, which he too sees as a more fundamental yet overlooked foundation of meaning and human praxis. Habermas famously speaks of a ‘colonisation of the life-world’ by economic and technical rationality and, like Husserl, he suggests a reorientation from the sciences to the life-world and a reinterpretation of rationality on this basis. Despite this proximity, Habermas is not a Husserlian, explicitly advocating a shift from philosophies of the subject, such as phenomenology, to a theory of communication.44 However, we have seen that Husserl’s attempt to provide a phenomenological underpinning to his project takes the path of intersubjectivity and the intersubjective constitution of the world. Although Habermas is critical of the centrality Husserl gives to the subject, the actual process of rationalisation Husserl proposes is precisely that: a process between subjects. As argued, Husserl’s idea of the unity of the world relies on a ‘primal monad’ and Habermas criticised him for this as well.45 But while the abandonment of a foundation in the subject is not without its consequences for Husserl’s justification of the outcome of this intersubjective process, this process itself remains relatively unscathed. Indeed, bracketing its outcome ends up being very similar to Habermas’ explicitly postmetaphysical attempt at a purely procedural approach to reconciliation. Both Husserl and Habermas have a faith in the rational transformation of particular views with an eye on their reconciliation, and both have recourse to the life-world itself to justify their procedural universalism: Husserl by locating a universal sense of the world as horizon in it, Habermas by “rationally reconstructing the intuitive pre-theoretical knowledge of competently speaking, acting, and judging subjects.”46

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As Matheson Russell has pointed out, although Habermas stops his analysis at the level of communicative practice, there is no real reason to stop there, and “recourse to something like Husserl’s transcendental investigations may, by contrast, furnish the means to ground those very ‘idealizations’ of language use that Habermas finds himself having merely to posit as givens.”47 Similarly, Habermas’ description of the norms and procedures according to which communicative practices ideally take place, can be seen as more concrete, practical complements to Husserl’s foundational investigations. If Husserl shows the phenomenological structure of the intersubjective process whereby progress is made towards the constitution of a single world for humanity, Habermas shows the pragmatic conditions of free and unconstrained public deliberation that need to be in place for this process to play out in practice. However, the similarity between the work of Husserl and Habermas also exposes the politics they theorise and advocate to the same criticisms. The reconciliation and unity their work aims to support is not as neutral as they make it appear. It relies on a more substantive worldview that is not fully justified, and that strictly speaking goes beyond the purely formal or procedural limits that Husserl and Habermas establish. While Husserl does provide a more robust foundation for their shared ideal of a meaningful reconciliation, this nonetheless remains insufficient to fully justify its possibility. He accounts for the transcending of one’s particular life-world in a movement he refers to as universalisation, but this movement is not ipso facto one of reconciliation. For both Husserl and Habermas, rationality has a normative status and aims at more than a minimal consensus. But the idea that all relevant views can meaningfully be reconciled with each other is neither self-evident nor properly justified by them. The only measure given for this in their work is an intersubjective process of reconciliation, of arriving at consensus, but little heed is given to whether all views are amenable to this process, that is, to the relation between these views and the worldview on which this process is based itself in the first place. In that sense, the criticism aimed at Rawls in chapter 3 equally holds for Husserl and Habermas. The attempt at neutrality, in the case of the latter two authors by relying on the shaping of views in this intersubjective process itself, provides no guarantee that this will lead to a truth or meaning that is not just as particular as the views that enter this process. Our recourse to Husserl was meant to see whether his phenomenology could provide a foundation for a more robust idea of political reconciliation, but this has been shown to be inadequate insofar as he has too much faith in the teleological process and in particular in the unitary nature of its outcome. This process itself remains purely formal and although Husserl attempted to correct this by focussing on the rational transformation of culture rather than

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its dismissal, this lacks the concreteness to make it convincing in absence of his own optimistic faith in reason. It is this very absence of faith that characterises much of Europe’s situation since the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Although Husserl’s phenomenology does not fully justify the reconciliatory conception of the political, this does not mean that his results are without value. While his idea of the world is not properly justified, this is not the only moment in Husserl’s teleology that contained a supposed truth about the world. This teleology is initiated only after the initial relativisation of the views that take part in it and this is not a neutral event as regards their possible validity. Arguably the most important finding is, as James Dodd put it, that “the questionability of the world is irremovable.”48 This is in line with the interpretation of the universal sense of the world as a fundamentally indeterminate horizon. Moreover, it is in this questionability that the initial critical potential of Husserl’s teleology lies. This does not entail a failure of his project, but is a reason to rethink it. Seeing the problematical nature of the sense of the world as itself a phenomenological finding takes the revelatory moment of the crisis seriously, even if the truth that it reveals might be an uncomfortable one. We can find a phenomenological project in line with this in the work of Patočka.

Chapter 6

Patočka’s Europe as a Political Project

Patočka’s work is characterised by a great diversity in its themes as well as in its approaches.1 Yet, there is continuity via the topic of a life based on truth or insight. Although this has meant different things throughout his work, it has always formed the basis of Patočka’s idea of Europe. In his later work (for present purposes broadly conceived as his work from the Second World War onward), this is conceptualised on the basis of the Platonic motif of the care of the soul. In what follows, the focus will primarily be on this later work.2 This is not only because that is where we can find Patočka’s discussion of the care of the soul as the spiritual foundation of Europe, but also because this work diverges from his Husserlian beginnings. It thus provides a contrast with the previous chapters on Husserl’s idea of Europe. The divergence of Patočka’s thought is discussed in the first section of this chapter, with particular focus on the influence of the Second World War. Even as Patočka moves away from Husserl’s philosophy, for which he will retain a deep respect, his approach of inquiring into Europe’s history to address its crisis remains similar. He sees this as both essential and neglected, with Husserl’s being the last great attempt at this. Even during his own seminars on Europe, Patočka is struck by the fact that all questions are “about phenomenology, and Heidegger, and so on, but that no question came regarding Europe” (PE: 178). This neglect is a sign of Europe’s spiritual self-neglect, which for Patočka means that Europe essentially has come to an end. What he wants to do above all is to bring this to attention in the first place. As was the case for Husserl, this involves considering Europe’s history as a unitary one, based on a fundamental principle: the care of the soul as “that in the being of humans which transcends the sphere of the preservation of life” (KEE: 194–95). It is on this basis that Europe’s history can be seen as one of lift and decline, of transcendence and the turn towards the physical. This is not unlike Husserl’s account of the struggle between reason and unreason, 93

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the ideal and the empirical, or the universal and the particular. Patočka is careful to emphasise that we should not idealise, that we should not neglect Europe’s concrete realisations in philosophy, science, theology, and law, or their corresponding institutions. While he acknowledges the complexity of his subject matter, and although he is not as single-mindedly focused on the history of philosophy as Husserl, one can still ask whether Patočka does not end up doing the kind of idealised philosophy of history that he disavowed.3 If anything saves Patočka from the optimistic and Eurocentric idealisation that is part of many discourses on Europe, it is a keen awareness of the catastrophes throughout its history. In his account we find no smooth development, no unimpeded march through history, nor anything as firm as Husserl’s ‘final establishment’. The care of the soul leads from one failure to the next. What aids a non-Eurocentric reading or appropriation of Patočka’s work is that he reflects on Europe after what he considered its end.4 At the same time, he still tends to interpret Europe’s failures as partial successes adapting to changing historical conditions. Overall, however, Patočka is certainly less optimistic about Europe’s trajectory and the capacities of reason than Husserl was. If it can be said that Patočka’s Eurocentrism is ambiguous in relation to Europe, it must be admitted that it is less so in relation to the rest of the world. Europe’s history is presented as the history of its successes and failures to realise something more than its own biological self-preservation. The rest of the world is presented as devoid of this attempt, let alone any successes. While Patočka does have some hope that non-European sources can accomplish what Europe could not, his work tends to the belief, as Martin Ritter has put it, “that only Europeans understand what history is about because other cultures were not and are not really free.”5 As was the case of Husserl’s work, the question is whether or to what extent this Eurocentrism undermines what Patočka has to tell us, as he thematises the transcending of empirical particularity, including that of Europe. This balance between the ideal possibilities of human existence and historical reality is precarious in his work, but it is also one of its main themes. While transcendence, of which the care of the soul is a particular actualisation, has a special role in the European tradition according to Patočka, it is part of what he refers to as the movement of human existence. It belongs to every human being. This saves the fundamentals of Patočka’s account from becoming insurmountably bogged down by any Eurocentrism. Moreover, as will be developed further in chapter 7, Patočka aims to reconceptualise transcendence as radically nonobjective and nonteleological. More so than Husserl’s ‘absolute Idea’, it sets out to break from reality without a transcendent telos to which it reaches out and in which it anchors itself. Nonetheless, we must look at what Patočka takes to be the specific European institutionalisation of transcendence as well. It will be argued that



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it is not the care of the soul as such, without qualification, that gave shape to Europe in his account. It is rather a specifically political institutionalisation of the care of the soul on which Europe is built. While the care of the soul is fundamental as a spiritual principle, it is the building of institutions in reaction to its initial failure that gave Europe its specificity. Hence, the perhaps provocative title of this chapter suggesting that, for Patočka, Europe is not primarily a philosophical project but a political one—albeit with philosophical roots. This more prominent political aspect than we find in Husserl’s work is not accompanied by much clarity surrounding Patočka’s political philosophy. While there is a general agreement that much of Patočka’s work is political, there is no clear agreement on the nature of its political content. This matter is further complicated by his political engagement with Charta 77, for which he wrote directly political texts intended for a general audience. While some are hesitant to link the roughly liberal democratic outlook in these texts to Patočka’s philosophical work, for others this is less problematic.6 There is some consensus that Patočka is perhaps best considered as part of the tradition of ‘nonpolitical politics’,  deeply engaged politically without advocating any particular political program.7 This follows in part from the fact that his engagement took the form of dissidence against a totalitarian regime. Patočka’s thought is indeed particularly suited for this. However, this must not lead us to overlook what will be argued to be intrinsic links between his thought and at least a certain conception of liberal democracy. The discussion of the care of the soul, and the experience of problematicity from which it arises, sheds some light on the links between the more ‘philosophical’ and more ‘political’ sides of Patočka’s work, as this care is presented as having three interrelated forms. Its first form, which can be seen as the care of the soul proper in that it consists in the shaping of the soul, following the movement of human existence most directly, is discussed first. This also touches on the second, cosmological form of the care of the soul, which concerns an insight into the world (discussed more extensively in phenomenological terms in chapter 7). The third, political form of the care of the soul is argued to have two distinct components to it: the political life (which remains close to the first form) and the idea of the just state. The final section of this chapter further discusses this latter idea, by presenting Patočka’s account of Europe’s development in terms of the idea of the just state. It does so from its origin in the initial failure of the care of the soul, to the ongoing situation of crisis, which is discussed in terms of Patočka’s ambiguous criticism of liberal democracy. This will provide the basis for the development, in chapter 8, of Patočka’s political thought, for which the cosmological form of the soul will prove instrumental. Before going into the care of the soul, however, it is useful to discuss Patočka’s transition from his earlier, more Husserlian thought to his post-war work.

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THE CHANGE IN PATOČKA’S THOUGHT Patočka’s proximity to Husserl in the 1930s can hardly be overstated. He was one of Husserl’s last and closest students, fellow countryman of what is now the Czech Republic and central to the Prague Philosophy Circle, where Husserl delivered the lectures that became the basis for the Crisis. As Karel Novotný notes, Patočka became a close student of Husserl precisely when the latter was working on the problem of the unity of the world in relation to the situation of crisis.8 Patočka’s 1936 The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem was the first book dedicated to Husserl’s concept of the life-world (‘natural world’ in Patočka’s terminology), published even before the first part of the Crisis was.9 Like Husserl’s Crisis, this early work of Patočka locates the source of Europe’s crisis in the fact that, despite the proliferation of worldviews that present themselves otherwise, “modern man has no unified worldview,”10 “no definite worldview proper to our way of life.”11 The life-world and the natural-scientific interpretation of the world are in conflict, inhibiting the possibility to simply live in one’s life-world in a natural manner. This Husserlian diagnosis leads to an equally Husserlian solution: both views are to be traced back to the subjectivity that constitutes them to show how they are fundamentally related. For Patočka, too, the goal is to establish unity, which “is something we need and something we can bring about—in philosophy—by our own efforts.”12 Patočka portrays this teleological position well and as typically European in an essay on European culture published just before the Second World War: Here, man may appear to be a creature torn apart by internal fragmentation. He can never know, with absolute intellectual clarity, whether or not he has attained a final coherence of meaning, the very bottom of himself. But unity of human effort and all rational legislation of life stand on the belief that it is possible to attain such coherence of meaning, that such coherence, reaching beyond all partial and intellectual understanding, truly exists.13

Around the same time, however, Patočka’s focus starts to shift away from the goal of a final harmony. In his 1939 Life in Balance, Life in Amplitude he speaks of two attitudes, one which corresponds to the above. Yet, Patočka sees that this optimistic rationalism in reality leads to tragedy and that it is in tension that one is free and can “attain that which Man truly is.”14 This tension is not presented as a deviation from the normal situation of life. It is always present underneath its surface. While sharing Husserl’s diagnosis that the sense of the world has become a problem, Patočka’s later phenomenological



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investigations will not discover an implicitly prefigured harmony at the heart of experience. This move away from Patočka’s earlier, Husserlian rationalism can be related to the Second World War. This is warranted not only from a historical or biographical perspective, but also because Patočka himself conceptualises a distinction between the situations after the two world wars, that is, between Husserl’s situation and his own. This follows the distinction between imperfect and perfect crises outlined in chapter 1: The First World War shook, but did not completely do away with, the optimistic rationalism characteristic of the nineteenth century, while the Second World War constituted a more definite end.15 The First World War was easier to approach as an exception to, rather than an expression of, the status quo. It was not yet a final decision regarding Europe’s fate, leaving hope for its restoration. By contrast, the situation of the Second World War was more final. As a response to this, Patočka’s thought gains the traits corresponding to a more ‘perfect’ crisis. One example he gives is the disappearance of the distinction between home and frontline due to “aerial warfare that was capable of striking anywhere with equal cruelty,” which became a permanent condition with the ensuing nuclear reality of the Cold War (HE: 132). Society remained mobilised and any remaining struggle was no longer a struggle for higher ideals, but for power or survival. Although the irrationalism represented by fascism was defeated, Europe did not recover spiritually: “It is true that that irrationalism somehow evaporated amid the storms of our time. Yet has the faith in reason as Husserl understood it been restored? Surely it has not.”16 Going decisively beyond Husserl’s crisis-sentiment, Patočka did not fear the end of Europe and its rationalism. He felt that he had already witnessed it. What remains is “a deep helplessness and inability to stand upon anything in any way solid” (PE: 6). Husserl’s thought, with its optimistic rationalism that for many was already out of place before the Second World War, belonged to an age and spirit from which Patočka was cut off after the Second World War. This new historical reality leads Patočka to abandon a teleological solution to the crisis. While he does not extensively treat this topic in relation to Husserl, in a late essay he denounces the theory of postulates in general for its lack of proper supports. Instead of following the Kantian approach of Husserl, in which the impossibility of knowledge regarding the goals of humanity enables the faith that sustains them, Patočka follows Ivan from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in asking “if they are not cognitions, how does one take them seriously, how does one attach to them the overall meaning of life?”17 Given the circumstances in which Patočka finds himself, faith no longer provides a sufficient motivation for any optimistic rationalism.

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There is another, phenomenologically grounded, reason why Husserl’s solution can no longer work for Patočka. Although Husserl’s goal could not fully be justified experientially, we saw in the previous chapter that it was not completely based on faith but also on the teleological structure of experience as formed by the constituting activity of the subject. In his later work, Patočka attempts to move away from what he perceives as Husserl’s subjectivism, because it “rests on a primacy of the subjective side of the world-phenomenon that is not grounded in the phenomenon itself.”18 What Patočka’s ‘asubjective phenomenology’ retains from Husserlian phenomenology is the epochē, the bracketing of all theses regarding the reality of what appears, including the thesis that this reality is underpinned by a subject, to reach appearing itself qua appearing. Patočka wants to maintain the absolute primacy of the phenomenon as such, as it has a structure of its own that cannot properly be analysed when it is seen as founded in a subject.19 That is, after all, not how it gives itself. What Patočka consequently dismisses, is what he sees as the second step: the phenomenological reduction that attempts to trace everything that remains after the epochē back to its constitution by the subject. Although Husserl’s work itself is arguably ambiguous regarding this, Patočka did not see it as Husserl’s intention to absolutize subjectivity. He even defends Husserl against such criticisms.20 But Patočka nonetheless thinks that the fundamental reference to the subject in Husserlian phenomenology entails “the danger here of surrendering, of abandoning its discoveries in the field of appearing and embarking upon the terrain of a subjective construction.”21 Patočka seems to use this to dismiss Husserlian teleology, as it is founded in Husserl’s own constructive reinterpretation of experience, rather than in any goal that is intrinsically part of experience.22 This change in phenomenological direction has consequences for the civilisational project that both Husserl and Patočka want to give a phenomenological foundation. Patočka comes to think that in the Husserlian approach, “there is no reconciliation between human worlds, no universal human contact to be reached, but only a destruction of fundamental humanities [Menschlichkeiten, i.e., ways of being human] through a generalised emptying of world-mysteries.”23 As mentioned in the previous chapter, the formal nature of Husserl’s teleology leaves Patočka wondering where exactly it will lead “if it is not simply an elimination of what is meaningless and contradictory, if it is not a mere manifestation of what is purely given and its overcoming in the project of pure rationality.”24 Indeed, if the life-world contains an intrinsically problematical dimension, then such a project will rid us of the very stage on which human existence plays out. This criticism opens the way for alternative approaches that lead to different conceptions of politics as well. Such an alternative can be found in Patočka’s conception of the care of the soul.



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PROBLEMATICITY AND THE CARE OF THE SOUL Patočka’s account of the care of the soul mainly draws from the work of Plato where, as said, it has several interrelated forms. The best way to understand the care of the soul, is through its origin and the situation it distances itself from. Central to this is what Patočka refers to using the term ‘problematicity’,  which will be discussed further in chapter 7. The experience of problematicity throws into doubt the sense of the world as provided by myth and tradition. This is the start of history proper for Patočka, whereas history before this is characterised by a focus on survival and sustenance, “with no other idea of life than living” (HE: 13). It is important to understand from the outset that the preproblematical situation is a limit case, itself best understood as an idealisation used to make sense of the problematical situation. Problematicity has always been part of human experience, as will become increasingly clear. Preproblematical humanity is akin to traditional forms of community as described in chapter 1 and there are clear parallels to Husserl’s account of the birth of philosophy as described in chapter 4 as well. It places its physical toil in the context of a divine world-order which it does not question. This constellation comes about through what Patočka calls an “instinctive-affective harmony” with the world.25 This can be seen as describing human existence in its infancy—whether on a civilisational level or in a more literal sense. In this infancy, we have little control over either the world or ourselves: “it is a region in which we are being moved rather than moving ourselves.”26 Determined by physical need and without any higher plan for life, life is “fragmented into individual moments of good luck and ill, of happiness and sorrow, on which life focuses as if it had no overall conception.”27 The world manifests itself primarily in life’s dependence on it as a source of nourishment and orientation. This is how Patočka accounts for the struggle of life becoming related to an experience of the divine. The world is encountered as a mysterious, nonindividuated “force and power” preceding us and ruling over us.28 When humanity reaches a situation where its basic needs are taken care of, it can start relating to the world in a different manner, no longer merely accepting what it has to offer, but actively shaping it. The production of lasting things helps in “giving the human world the character of something firm, lasting, perennial, a skeleton underneath the constant form of vital reproduction” (HE: 16). This is the origin of ancient civilisations according to Patočka. However, these remain dedicated to reproduction—to the perpetuation of life but also to the reproduction of what has come before in general. These civilisations are supported by a mythical framework where the divine “is placed in

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a mythical beginning in the form of an event, a fate, or a decision that gives its special imprint to everything that comes after, that explains and gives meaning to everything that follows.”29 Deviation from this is sacrilegious and puts humanity’s place in the world at risk. Although Patočka calls this world preproblematical, it is clear that this does not mean that this world is completely nonproblematical. Humanity’s existence is precarious and the world is full of mysterious elements on which its fate depends. There are moments of alleviation from physical toil, moments that present the opportunity to transcend the focus on the physical, such as in ritualistic ecstasy. This transcendence, however, is not yet the care of the soul. It consists in surrendering oneself to a higher power through divine enthusiasm, rather than in a free and responsible shaping of one’s life (HE: 101). Aside from being experienced in ritual, the preproblematical sense of the world as one of both order and mystery is recounted in myth. Myth is of crucial importance to Patočka, because it is a first, albeit rudimentary, form of insight into the world as a whole. It accounts for the appearance of the world via divine forces, linking the mundane and the divine. In fact, it makes no sharp distinction between these, operating on the basis of what Patočka calls a kind of ontological metaphor of which it is itself unaware (HE: 32). No distinction is made, for example, between the earth as a concrete entity providing physical nourishment and Earth as the mother-goddess from which everything springs forth and manifests itself. This ontological confusion (which we will see is important for Patočka when distinguishing between myth, religion, metaphysics, and phenomenology) entails that while the preproblematical world has a place for transcendence, it gives this a mundane interpretation. For all its mystery, myth’s mediation between the divine and the mundane provides a safe ground to move on. As Patočka says: “everything is given within it, everything in it is already accounted for and complete in its own way: there, answers are given before questions” (PE: 135). Not everything is given as present to human existence, but there is a sense that even what is not given as such is, quite literally, in order. The possibility of insight into this order and even of breaking from it is present in myth, but this is reserved for divine or semidivine beings, for whom it rarely ends well. There is thus little incentive to break with preproblematical life. Although it is a life in service of physical needs, it finds itself in a world full of meaning. Accepting problematicity puts all this at stake: Nothing of the earlier life of acceptance remains in peace; all the pillars of the community, traditions, and myths, are equally shaken, as are all the answers that once preceded questions, the modest yet secure and soothing meaning, though not lost, is transformed. It becomes as enigmatic as all else. (HE: 39–40)



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Patočka remains vague about what would have caused such a shaking, even saying that “we would be asking erroneously if we were to ask what caused this shock” (HE: 62). The problematical is always already present but suppressed. The experience of problematicity reveals something already there, rather than constituting something new. As was the case for Husserl, the importance of Greek philosophy for Patočka lies in its attempt to transform this uncertain situation into a positive project for life, based on a new insight into the world. Freed from mere acceptance of it, one can reflect on the world. This is a different mode of relating to it than was present in myth, and while it provides a similar starting point to what we can find in Husserl’s philosophy, it ends up with a very different conception of the world. For Patočka, problematicity is neither to be mythically repressed nor teleologically overcome. It is not a fall into meaninglessness to be avoided but “the discovery of the possibility of achieving a freer, more demanding meaningfulness” (HE: 63). The care of the soul is the cultivation of this freedom. It allows humanity to transcend the mere preservation of life, achieving something higher “when it goes against the stream and general tendency of reality, against thingliness” (KEE: 282). In the context of Greek philosophy this happens with the discovery of the transcendent, that is, of a higher, permanent reality. This reality manifests itself when one distances oneself from the fleeting world of the senses. While this is similar to the transcendence of ritualistic ecstasy, the novelty of philosophy lies in the attempt to achieve this in a disciplined, responsible manner (HE: 103–4). Rather than surrendering oneself to higher powers in religious devotion or via divinely inspired enthusiasm, this is done through knowledge. Yet, this is not merely a quest for higher knowledge: The Socratic-Platonic innovation is that this is also done for the good of the soul itself. That is where the care of the soul properly begins. As Ritter has pointed out, the transcendence given shape in the care of the soul has two directions.30 It goes beyond the physical world as given to the senses, but is also a circular movement directed towards the soul itself. This is because any transcendent endpoint remains fundamentally out of reach, such as we see in the Platonic Idea of the Good. Indeed, the assumption that in transcendence one establishes an actual relation to something transcendent, would be akin to a mythical interpretation subject to ontological confusion, as will be argued in the next chapter. Patočka attempts to avoid this and to settle on a position where human existence is neither reduced to its physical reality nor made dependent on a transcendent entity. The fact that transcendence also turns towards the soul itself does not mean that the soul discovers itself as an entity, as a thing in the world. As Ritter rightly emphasises, “to take care of the soul is not to take care of something. The soul consists rather in the care itself.”31 Preproblematical life was subject

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to the arbitrariness of physical need and desire, and was consequently at risk of losing itself in individual moments of pleasure and pain. Guided by the senses and the changeable impressions provided by them, there was nothing giving life unity or coherence. Of course, this is a matter of degree, but Patočka’s point is that preproblematical humanity lacked any firm foundation for such a unity or coherence. It is only when our various faculties are taken up into a project that is not based on the changeable and contingent nature of the physical and the sensory, that we can properly speak of the soul at all. Only in achieving a form of harmony, not with the world but with one’s thought and actions, can the soul be at all. This gives it shape in a quite literal sense: “the soul that is cared for is more, it has a higher, elevated being. This being is, so to speak, thickened, concentrated, it is always the same, it does not dissolve, does not blur” (PE: 120–21). Without something that pulls it together, the soul runs “the risk of shattering into contradictory pieces” (PE: 85–86). It is in this way that the care of the soul forms the condition for a responsible life. Rather than living from moment to moment, handing oneself over to mysterious powers, or simply following existing societal norms, one strives to justify oneself and one’s actions. That means acting on the basis of insight, on the basis of reasons why one is doing one thing rather than another. Of course, any insight can be questioned and problematised further, making this a matter of lifelong inquiry. The problematical is in a sense allowed to thrive and the soul shapes itself accordingly. While the focus here is on knowledge, or at least inquiry, what kind of beings we are ultimately does not become clear through contemplation. Above all, it is revealed through the way we manifest ourselves in the world, that is, through what we do. The example of this that Patočka points to is Socrates, the archetypical figure of the care of the soul, who did not merely inquire into the Good, but attempted to establish it in his life, to embody it, and thus to embody this inquiry itself.32 This makes it clear that the care of the soul cannot consist in a mystical or intellectual abandonment of the physical in favour of some otherworldly realm. Rather, it is the elevation of the world we live in and of which we inextricably form a part. It is because of this that the care of the soul cannot be a purely individual undertaking but involves the community. THE CARE OF THE SOUL AS A POLITICAL PROJECT According to Patočka, the shaking of pregiven answers is not just the condition of philosophy. It “represents a nearly simultaneous—and in a more profound sense really unitary—origin of politics and philosophy” (HE: 61).



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The philosophical and political life overlap in their sense of freedom and responsibility. Due to the shaking of the mythical framework around which society was organised originally, new principles around which to organise society are required. Justification for this is all the more necessary insofar as one uses this freedom to break with the existing order of preproblematical civilisations and choses a life not dedicated to life itself. Given the security and meaning that the preproblematical order provides to the community, this is not without its risks. Patočka even thinks that it is natural that those who engage in the care of the soul are persecuted (PE: 87). They can, of course, avoid this dangerous situation by leaving the community. Indeed, the care of the soul so far primarily seems an individual undertaking, taking place through the separation from the traditional bonds of community. Yet, like Socrates, they should not abandon the community. Patočka holds that this care is fundamentally related to the community and not merely negatively. It is “at the same time a care for the own soul and with this a care for the soul of the community, both of which are inseparable from one another” (KEE: 260). Patočka states this connection more often than he elaborates on it, but in his work we can find two reasons for it: the care of the soul is made possible by the community and the care of the soul becomes a care for the community. The community is the space that makes an awareness of problematicity possible in the first place, because it is where a plurality of views can be encountered that can make us question the things we have always naively accepted. Of course, this requires a particular kind of community where a plurality of views is possible. This is what Patočka sees in the Ancient Greek polis, where physical sustenance and reproduction is relegated to the private sphere of the household and a public sphere is created where freedom and thus conflict are allowed to exist (HE: 23).33 Conflict, of course, existed before the polis, but it was not part of the internal makeup of earlier communities. Moreover, there are different kinds of conflict. There is the conflict between parties that remain steadfast in their own views and that aim to eliminate other views due to the threat they pose to their own. But there is also conflict between those who are open to dialogue and questioning, a fecund conflict for the betterment of the polis. So far, this is similar to Husserl’s conception of politics. However, this is a political instantiation of problematicity that is not simply to be suppressed or overcome. It is itself a principle that gives meaning to human, and in this case communal, existence. Nonetheless, should one’s views and traditional bond to the community be shaken, it is easy to imagine that this can be followed by a life outside of the community. Yet, Patočka does not only see the community as the origin of the care of the soul but also as its enduring condition insofar as it is the natural place where the actions of the soul are visible. As mentioned, it is

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through its manifestation in the world, through action, that the state of the soul becomes visible. It is thus in the community that it becomes visible (for oneself, for others and for oneself through others) whether one truly lives up to the standard created by the care of the soul, whether there is real unity and responsibility rather than the mere semblance of it. For this to be a success, one must be surrounded by others who also strive for this. The community is thus both the enduring condition for the care of the soul and its object of transformation. It is important to note that Patočka does not view this merely in terms of the utility of the community for the individual care of the soul. The one who cares for the soul is convinced that its new life is a better life and wants to elevate the lives of others as well. It is equally a care for the good of the community beyond its mere survival. This leads to “the question of the lawful arrangement of life in the community from the point of view of the thought of the just life” (PE: 104). This differs from law in preproblematical civilisations, which aims at the survival of the community. Moreover, the lawful order of these civilisations is marked by inequality between those who actually carried out the physical toil and those who performed the more spiritual task of sustaining this divine order: priests and god-kings. The care of the soul enables a new kind of spiritual politics, not based on religious authority, but on public justification by those who are capable of understanding “the point of history” (HE: 76) and “what life and death are all about” (HE: 134). This is not an individualist matter, but the task of those who band together in what Patočka calls the “solidarity of the shaken,” which he discusses in the context of the experience of war rather than that of the Greek care of the soul (HE: 134). As already indicated and as will become clearer, their spiritual politics does not necessarily take place in words. It can also take place in actions—maybe primarily so. However, it seems that this spiritual politics is fundamentally dissident in nature: It will not offer positive programs but will speak, like Socrates’ daimonion, in warnings and prohibitions. It can and must create a spiritual authority, become a spiritual power that could drive the warring world to some restraint, rendering some acts and measures impossible. (HE: 135)

This is in line with the role of problematicity as the shaking of given certainties, a distancing from (though not abandoning of) the empirical world, and in relation to the community this seems to mainly lead to providing a provocative corrective, rather than a constructive contribution. Does Patočka, then, leave us with a fundamentally dissident politics, suitable for the situation in which he found himself but not offering anything constructive?34 While there is much to be said for this, there is a risk in interpreting Patočka’s philosophy



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as purely dissident. This can cause us to overlook the moments where a more constructive political philosophy is present or at least alluded to.35 It will thus be good to focus on these moments, sparse as they may be, as a correction to the risk of one-sided interpretations of his thought. Although Patočka’s political thought draws heavily from Plato, the legislative figure of the philosopher-king is notably absent. However, there are clear parallels between his discussion of the shaken and of the guardian class in the work of Plato: Upon them, upon this intermediate, rests the whole state; upon their asceticism, upon their sincerity, upon the soul of their self-abnegation rest the mores of the social whole. They are also the model for all the rest. And those who live the life of the community, meaning to live for the community, for the whole, for others, only because they live in this kind of way for others, render possible something such as the state of justice. (PE: 106–7)

There is a continuity between the guardian and the dissident insofar as the dissident only becomes such when the community has strayed too far. Yet, their care for the community and their willingness for self-sacrifice is fundamentally the same. This continuity is important, because it bridges the looming gap between dissident activity and a different, more constructive kind of politics. That would mean it is not necessarily the case that for a Patočkan political philosophy the “properly political and truly historical activity” of the shaking of accepted meaning is to “quickly shed its true political sense and turn to the establishment of a post-political edifice of stable institutions,” as Darian Meacham and Francesco Tava have put it.36 While, as will be argued further, institutions and the stability they provide have a crucial role to play, this role is no less political in the ‘true political sense’. There undoubtedly exists a difficult tension between problematicity and any form of institution, but this tension can be attenuated if problematicity itself can be institutionalised. The essential connection between problematicity and political institutions, and with it the possibility to overcome the tension between them, will be discussed in chapter 8 and will go beyond Patočka’s own work. Patočka himself, however, gives a contingent, albeit no less important, link between the care of the soul and political institutions. As mentioned, Patočka takes Socrates to be the archetypical figure of the care of the soul. Socrates exemplarily philosophised in public and famously rarely left Athens. His care of the soul took place in the community and was a care for the soul of the community. But Socrates also provides the example of what this can lead to. He was “a constant thorn in the side of the entire community” (PE: 113), not because he wanted to overhaul all of society and replace its traditional values with

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something completely different. Rather, “Socrates defends with new methods the old” (PE: 84). He defends standards that most people would already agree with but not necessarily live up to. For this, Socrates had to pay with his life. While he was exemplary in his care of the soul, Patočka notes that this does not mean that others should go down the same path: The heirs [of Socrates] are no longer to die for philosophy, for the care of the soul and for the new community, but rather have the task to create the new community before their minds and then in reality. (KEE: 271)

It is in response to this initial failure of the project of the care of the soul that Patočka says the idea of the just state arose in Plato. This would be the state where Socrates would not have had to die. If the care of the soul is to have a happy ending, a state is needed in which this is possible. Tava has correctly identified Patočka’s great dilemma as the question of how to conceive the shaking that is so suitable to build a dissident politics “not as a simple oppositional energy of a negative nature, but as a force which was capable of taking charge of the foundation of a new form of statehood.”37 Interpretations like those of Edward F. Findlay that Patočka’s “is not the type of political thought to which one can look for specific help in establishing a constitutional order”38 thus neglect what was an important part of Patočka’s project, even if this part presented great difficulties for Patočka himself. It is this political project of the care of the soul involving the idea of the just state that Patočka sees as the foundation of Europe. It is because Plato was “also the founder of the philosophical theory of the state” that Patočka calls him, not Socrates, the “founder of European ideals” (KEE: 210). Together with the moral ideals that developed out of the care of the soul, Patočka mentions the institutions that this project brought forth. This not only entails that in Patočka’s view Europe was a political project from its inception, but also that from the start this project was formulated as the response to failure and catastrophe. EUROPE’S FOUNDATION IN THE CARE OF THE SOUL Patočka sees Europe as founded on the care of the soul after its initial failure led to the idea of a just state. Or rather: Europe was founded on a series of subsequent attempts and failures to realize this state—from Athens, to the Roman Empire, to the Holy Roman Empire (in this context roughly equivalent to Christendom as discussed in chapter 1). Each of these takes up the care of the soul, shaping it under new historical conditions. This involves changes in the conception of the individual care of the soul, as well as in that of the



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kind of state in which this can take place, and perhaps most importantly of the balance between these two. A noteworthy aspect of the philosophical history of Europe that Patočka presents is that each of these transformations (although they do not present any clear teleology) take up the care of the soul in a more general, more encompassing way than what preceded it (PE: 89). As for Husserl, Europe’s history is one of universalisation and generalisation. However, for Patočka, this does not reach its peak as Europe but on the basis of Europe’s end. The realisation of what Husserl still called the ‘Europeanisation’ of the world is also its de-Europeanisation for Patočka. Moreover, the way in which this is achieved, through modern rationality and technology, entails that “European civilization became a global link in precisely that form which Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences showed to be decadent” (HE: 45). This relates to a second aspect of Patočka’s account that diverges from Husserl. Whereas the latter’s idea of Europe is eminently modern, for Patočka the ‘true’ Europe, that still took the care of the soul to heart, was that of the Holy Roman Empire. Modern Europe is already the start of Europe’s spiritual and ultimately its political demise, ushering in a post-European age after the Second World War. Europe is thus born in a state of decline. It is no wonder that Patočka attempts a recourse to Christianity to lift Europe out of this decline, as will be discussed in the next chapter. However, this cannot be a simple return to Christianity, because it is the Christian appropriation of the care of the soul that ultimately sets up the objectivistic conception of the world wherein this care no longer has a proper place. While this account is clearly similar to that of Husserl, Patočka is much more receptive to the role that Christianity played in Europe’s development on all fronts. The Greek polis as birthplace of the care of the soul has already been discussed as ending in catastrophe. Its enduring significance, however, lay in the fact that it left behind “an inheritance of thinking about the state where philosophers might live, about a state of justice founded not on mere tradition, but rather on insight” (PE: 88, trans. modified). Precisely because this inheritance was not essentially attached to the particularity of the Greek polis (and even betrayed by the reality of the polis), it created a heritage that could survive the latter’s decline. This heritage was taken up in the Roman Empire through the influence of Stoicism and “matured in reflection on the greatness and failure of the polis” (HE: 81). While it did not create the Roman state, Patočka deems Greek thought responsible for elevating it to the level of a more ideal state, a more just state of law. Like the Greek polis, it emphasised equality, but it expanded this by expanding its concept of citizenship. Whereas Athenian citizenship was largely based on birthright, the peoples conquered by the Roman Empire could become citizens more or less equal to the ‘ethnic’ Romans.

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Yet, the Roman Empire too failed to realise itself as a true state of justice. The reasons Patočka gives for this are the contradiction between the Roman praise of justice and universalism and its glorification of domination, its remaining attachment to a certain ethnic foundation, and its spurious rule depending on the will of whoever was in charge at any given point. Despite its ideal, the reality of the Roman Empire was rife with social and political inequality, leading to an untenable alienation between the people and the state (HE: 80–81; PE: 89). Its concrete governance and organisation lacked a proper foundation to guarantee the realisation of its justice and universalism. The Roman Empire found such a foundation when it came to redefine itself through Christianity. From then on, according to Patočka, “freedom is no longer defined in terms of a relationship to equals (other citizens) but to a transcendent Good” (HE: 106). This “gives rise to a much broader human community than the Roman-Mediterranean had been while at the same time disciplining inner humanity and giving it greater depth” (HE: 83). This transcendent foundation allows for the possibility of true universalism where all are equal because all share an equal individual relation to God. It moreover leads to the idea of a state “not founded on the changeability of human things as Rome was, but rather on absolute truth, so that it would be the kingdom of God upon earth” (PE: 89). Like the attempt of the individual to base its life on truth, the state was to be given shape in the same way. Of course, this is not a new idea but the further realisation of the Platonic idea of the just state. While this idea of a ‘holy empire’ is the foundation for the Holy Roman Empire, it is not this idea as such that gives Europe’s its specificity according to Patočka. Equally important is the concrete realisation of this idea under Europe’s specific historical and material conditions. Patočka speaks of three versions of the holy empire, each with their own characteristics. Aside from the Holy Roman Empire, this idea is also present in the Byzantine Eastern Orthodox version (with Russia as its heir) and the Islamic caliphates. What distinguished the Holy Roman Empire was that it was “constituted internally by the duality of spiritual and secular power under the supremacy of the former” (HE: 80). In neither the Byzantine nor the Islamic East there was such a separation of powers. Divine and worldly rule, religious and secular law, were united in and derived from a single divine source, whereas in the West the Church achieved a spiritual but not a political hegemony.39 The importance of this separation of powers in the West can hardly be overstated. The Church was all-encompassing, but allowed for a plurality of states, cultures, ethnicities, and so on to retain an independent existence. A precarious balance was achieved between the spiritual and the secular because neither had both the (military) means and the (spiritual) authority to dominate the other fully. Although Patočka is certainly too optimistic about the reality of this constellation and his emphasis on the Holy Roman Empire



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is peculiar to say the least, in theory this provides a state that does not limit the individual’s spiritual freedom and a spiritual authority that does not attempt to use its authority to fully organise society. While Patočka sees the Christian Holy Roman Empire as the last great attempt to realise the care of the soul on a large scale, its separation between the spiritual and the secular also sets up the later dominance of the objectivistic conception of the world in which the idea of the care of the soul as a transcending of the physical increasingly loses its place (HE: 110). Unlike preproblematical civilisation where the divine was everywhere, here the divine is not found in the world but beyond it. The world itself is one of mere things without intrinsic spiritual significance, things with which one can do as one wishes. According to Patočka, Europe’s spiritual decline is only prevented at this point by the existence of a spiritual authority that governs the inner life of humanity. But in an increasingly disenchanted world where frequent struggles arise between this spiritual and secular authority, the latter in the form of either the state or the autonomous individual, this is a losing battle. Like Marchel Gauchet, Patočka thus sees Christianity as “a religion for departing from religion.”40 Such a change in Europe’s spiritual situation could not but also effect the political reality with which it was correlated. As Patočka points out, in modern Europe politics was tied to the economic and the social, not to the moral (KEE: 193). With the disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire as the intermediate entity between Europe’s particular nations and its spiritual authority, and with the ongoing retreat of the latter, Europe is no longer a spiritually unified entity and thus not a real entity at all. Like the soul that is not cared for, it runs the risk of shattering into contradictory pieces. More and more, the spiritual becomes a purely individual matter and the various European states encroach more and more on every other aspect of life and society. For Patočka, this designates more than a political shift in the balance of power between spiritual and secular authority. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, crises arose in all domains, because “the political and social structures of Europe rest on something that society in its actual practice long since denied all trust and obedience” (HE: 92). Political power is no longer practiced on the basis of or kept in check by any spiritual principle. This situation came to a head with the First World War. There, Patočka says, the lack of spiritual principles was compensated for “by means of the act, the re-establishment of a factual dominance” (KEE: 197–98). As discussed, the Second World War only exacerbated this breakthrough. The dominant powers after the Second World War operated on the basis of what Patočka refers to as a “biological-technical belief” (KEE: 200–01). This is a rationality that we can no longer do without but that has lost its existential importance. For all

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its utility, reason does not provide any foundation for a project that transcends the physical needs of life. Europe’s spiritual downfall already having taken place, the world wars signified its political downfall as well and it became divided between the two models of the United States and the Soviet Union. In the early 1950s, in his unfinished project of the essay Negative Platonism, Patočka characterises Europe’s condition in terms of ‘overcivilisation’, and later, in the Heretical Essays from the 1970s, in terms of ‘decadence’. These categories are used to interpret the same phenomena and take over the diagnostic function of the concept of crisis from his earlier work. These new categories seem to have a clearer political aspect to them. For present purposes, they can be seen as having a value for Patočka’s interpretation of the constellation of liberal democracy. As in his early work, in Overcivilisation and Its Inner Conflict Patočka defines European civilisation by its rationality. In this essay, the inner tensions that the rationalisation of society leads to, are addressed on the basis of its two forms which he names moderate and radical overcivilisation. These roughly correspond to the models of liberal democracy and socialist totalitarianism, the two main and competing models for society at the time of Patočka’s writing. Despite their differences, Patočka attempts to understand these two models and their flaws from the perspective of the rationalism that they have in common. This aligns with the conceptions of reason and their political use discussed in chapter 3. Radical overcivilisation attempts to organise all of society on the basis of rational principles, leaving no room for individual freedom. This links up with Patočka’s description of the Second World War where everything, human life included, becomes part of the total mobilisation of society, part of the same accumulation and organisation of forces. After the war, this is represented by the Soviet Union, which Patočka sees as the main example of radical overcivilisation and as the inheritor of the Byzantine holy empire, “ruling both human bodies and their souls” (HE: 129). As Rodolphe Gasché describes it, radical overcivilisation “seeks to dominate life in its entirety by eliminating all the functions of life that do not conform to objective and impersonal rationality.”41 Its totality is thus not achieved by incorporating all facets of life but by eliminating what does not fit. Basing itself on what it sees as an absolute truth, it “forgets its own finitude,” as Patočka puts it.42 In doing so, as Tava has noted, radical overcivilisation ultimately has “more affinity with the irrational side of the human being than with cold universal reason.”43 The rationalism of radical overcivilisation is too optimistic about what it is capable of, leading it to overstep its boundaries with catastrophic consequences.



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While this totalitarianism was clearly one of the most pressing problems of twentieth-century Europe, it is moderate overcivilisation that is more pertinent to contemporary Europe. What distinguishes it from radical overcivilisation is that it values freedom as well as reason. The desire to organise society rationally is limited by the space allowed for individual freedom. Moderate overcivilisation recognises human existence as more than an object to be organised among other objects, thus escaping the objectivist view and leaving space for the self-determination of the individual. The latter is autonomous in the “determination of life’s ultimate meaning.”44 In modernity, this developed in the context of religious freedom based on the idea that the individual answers directly to God, without society as an intermediary. Moderate overcivilisation can thus be seen as successor to the Western version of the holy empire and as an answer to the totalitarianism of radical overcivilisation. However, Patočka sees moderate overcivilisation as being in a crisis of its own. In terms of the duality of secular and spiritual power, it keeps the former in check, but it provides nothing in terms of the latter. While it limits rationality, it does not acknowledge any other principle for human existence. Moderate overcivilisation thus requires additional spiritual resources, such as culture or religion, to make the freedom it enables meaningful and to guarantee its own functioning. Yet, its rationalist nature entails that any such resources will be at odds with it, not unlike what was discussed in the context of liberal political thought in chapter 3. Moreover, this relies on something that Europe’s spiritual stagnation and recent history no longer allow it to fully commit to. The balance between the secular and the spiritual that Patočka appreciated in Europe’s past (now in the form of the state’s organisation of society and the freedom of the individual) cannot be established in the same way as was done the past. While moderate overcivilisation allows for freedom, the latter is confined to the sphere of the private, with the risk of becoming an empty concept. While freedom is celebrated in liberal democracy, in many cases it seems more apt to say that it is condoned, as long as it does not interfere with the rational (largely economic) processes of societal organisation. That is, freedom is not allowed to meaningfully enter into debates regarding the good of society.45 Such an empty freedom is what Patočka refers to as decadent (HE: 97). He relates this to various phenomena: “addiction to things, to their everyday procurement, to bondage to life” (HE: 113), sceptical relativism, the indifference of pure intellectualism, aestheticism, and so on (KEE: 333). In short: the absence of any higher plan for life such as the care of the soul provided. Despite the pessimistic picture that Patočka sketches, he also sees that postwar Europe is not a complete failure. At times he hesitantly acknowledges that his ideal state would look a lot like modern liberal democracies.

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Both Overcivilisation and Its Inner Conflict and the Heretical Essays provide very critical accounts of liberal democracy, yet this does not lead to its full denunciation. Imperfect as they are, Patočka seems forced to recognise its success as well: [T]his civilization makes possible more than any previous human constellation: a life without violence and with far-reaching equality of opportunity. Not in the sense that this goal would anywhere be actual, but humans have never before found the means of struggle with external misery, with lack and want, which this civilization offers. (HE: 118)

Yet, Patočka is pessimistic about the motives for the “gigantic work of economic renewal, the unheard-of, even undreamed-of social achievement” of Europe after the Second World War (HE: 132). It was not a great programme of spiritual lift, but the result of the fact that “this continent has opted for demobilization because it has no other option” (HE: 132).46 It was the result of the ruination brought about by spiritual poverty. In the end “exterior successes and failure can never be completely convincing as long as life decisions are concerned, about where is the real, where is the ultimate truth.”47 While the struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism provides an important context to Patočka’s discussion of overcivilisation, he thus does not unambiguously support the former. As in his Charta 77 writings, his support of liberal democracy takes place in the context of the opposition to totalitarianism. Some see Patočka’s work as inconsistently democratic at one moment and antidemocratic at the next48 or as having a “a pronounced distance from politics in general and democracy in particular.”49 While liberal democracy has its issues for Patočka, it can be argued that it is a reconceived liberal democracy that is put on the same foundation as human freedom that can lead Europe out of the crisis, although this will go beyond Patočka’s own attempt to do.50 As Patočka writes: “the real question concerning the individual is not at issue between liberalism and socialism, between democracy and totalitarianism, which for all their profound differences equally overlook all that is neither objective nor a role” (HE: 115). This does not unequivocally advocate liberal democracy, but it does not preclude it either. Whatever political form one proposes, it must receive its proper substance from the spirit that supports it. It is a spiritual principle on the basis of which societal organisation and human freedom must be reconceptualised so that a balance can be found between them, linking them without lapsing into totalitarianism. This is what Europe has not found a way to do. Thus, Europe has come to an end, at least in the only meaningful sense it had for Patočka. The question is what can come after Europe that is not merely a repetition of the same.



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When Patočka says that the disappearance of Europe is perhaps the greatest event in world history, this is not only because world history for him is fundamentally intertwined with Europe’s history, nor merely because it signals the failure of the program that lifted humanity to new heights. It is also because this event might signal the beginning of something new—not only after this event but on its basis. This is what Patočka saw happen throughout history. For Patočka, however, this will no longer be European but post-European. The idea of post-Europe is an important one, even if Patočka did not end up writing as much on it as he would have liked.51 There are remarkable similarities between this break with Europe’s history after its end and Husserl’s discussion of the break represented by Europe’s birth in Ancient Greece. This raises similar issues as well: Can Europe really be left behind, especially if such a move is move motivated by Europe’s history itself? Such questions are not only relevant from the perspective of Europe’s end, but also from that of the process of globalisation which led to a post-European world. After all, it did so on the basis of European roots. The ironic fortuity of history is that what can be seen as the Europeanisation of other peoples, is also what freed them from European domination.52 Now, these peoples are no longer passive participators, but actively take their place on the world stage and in history by what Patočka refers to as ‘European means’: knowledge, organisation, and technology of European origin (KEE: 200). While “these inheritors will never allow Europe to be what it once was” (PE: 9), they also take up the legacy of Europe and can do so in ways that Europe was not able to. Crucial here, according to Patočka, is that these others still have living traditions wherein the sense of the world has not yet been fully reduced to objectivity.53 European modernity has done away with all forms of transcendence, leaving it with a world of mere things on the basis of which no spiritual project can be undertaken. But because other peoples retained more aspects reminiscent of preproblematical life, Patočka thinks the situation is not yet so dire for them: It is expected that all of these traditions, directly or indirectly, whether in a conscious reaching back or in elementary spontaneity, will assert themselves, that in them there will be a renaissance of matters of which no European had thought, that fusions between modern rationality and the unexpected will come to exist.54

While this matches with the recent thought that there are multiple modernities informed by the specificity of the traditions in which modernity took root, this seems to be as far as Patočka’s reflections on the post-European era take us towards a solution of the crisis. We can ask what perspective this provides for Europe. Assuming that other traditions might have the resources to incorporate modern rationalism without coming into conflict with it, this does not

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provide a way out of Europe’s own crisis. We cannot suppose that Patočka intends for others to find a way to meaningfully deal with the problem so that Europe can then take over their solution. Although Europe has again become an other among others in a globalised world, it seems to be the case that in order for Europe to address its situation, it needs to engage with its own situation and not that of others. It thus seems that solutions must be found within Europe’s own heritage, in a similar way that Patočka holds out the hope that others can do so in theirs. That is the motivation behind Patočka’s own inquiry into the care of the soul as the foundation for Europe. Crucially, when speaking of the still living traditions in the world, Patočka mentions Christianity in relation to Europe.55 In the Heretical Essays he explicitly turns to Christianity as a possible way of addressing Europe’s situation, even if he sees Christianity as having played a crucial role in the decline of the care of the soul. The next chapter argues that it is not so much a renewal of Christianity but its transformation into something that is no longer of a religious nature that can be of help here. This leads into Patočka’s phenomenological reflection on the world, which aligns with a crucial part of the care of the soul and which can provide the resources for such a transformation.

Chapter 7

Problematicity: From a Religious to a Phenomenological Conception

As we have seen, what Patočka refers to as ‘problematicity’ plays a crucial role in his account of the care of the soul. When he suggests that the solution to Europe’s decadence might lie in Christianity and in the reinstatement of a principle of human existence against the objectivism that leaves no room for transcendence, this amounts to a renewal of the care of the soul. Of course, this can only be a renewal in the form of a transformation and adaption to the contemporary situation, a situation for which Christianity as we know it might not be suitable anymore. This chapter starts by providing an overview of Patočka’s recourse to Christianity, a path that many of his interpreters have attempted to follow. Christianity is to provide a deepening of the soul and an accompanying sense of responsibility through its notion of an unfathomable God, which is to counteract the Platonic metaphysical tendencies that can still be found in Christianity. What is presented as the struggle between Christianity and Platonism shows that Patočka’s recourse to the former might not entail a religious answer but a move away from religion. It will be argued that the transcendence Patočka seeks in Christianity is burdened by the mythico-metaphysical remnant of Christianity itself, a remnant which ultimately nullifies its existential value. The context of Patočka’s indication of a demythologised Christianity is that of the loss of faith, rather than its instantiation. This shows itself in Patočka’s discussion of sacrifice, which brings this account close to his account of the political life as discussed in the previous chapter. Having shown that the recourse to Christianity remains caught within a mythico-metaphyical framework, the next section takes a closer look at Patočka’s appropriation of the concept of problematicity from Wilhelm Weischedel. This discussion shows the boundaries between which Patočka attempts to manoeuvrer. These boundaries are formed by his search for a global meaning to stave of nihilism, while nonetheless taking nihilism seriously. 115

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This leads into Patočka’s project from the essay Negative Platonism. This is his earlier attempt to come to terms with transcendence without relying on any mythico-metaphysical framework, that is, without making it dependent on anything transcendent. While in his later work Patočka did not pursue this in terms of a negative Platonism, the discussion of negative Platonism provides insights into how and why Patočka attempts to frame this problem in phenomenological terms. The final section of this chapter cashes in on the insights of the prior discussion, not only by developing them in phenomenological terms, but by seeing phenomenology as itself a development in line with negative Platonism and Patočka’s attempt to develop an adequate thought of problematicity. This leads to a phenomenology of the world that performs the function of what Patočka discusses as the second, cosmological form of the care of the soul, that is, the insight into the manifestation of the world. The central insight at the heart of this phenomenology is that the world is inherently and necessarily problematical, that is, contingent and conflictual. In other words, problematicity is a truth about the world and not merely about the existential predicament of the human being in it. This moves problematicity out of the sphere of the problems indicated in the religious conception of problematicity. CHRISTIANITY AS THE POSSIBILITY AN UNHEARD-OF METANOEIN The suggestion that it is Christianity which might be capable of reinstating a spiritual principle that can lift Europe out of its decadence, is present but not fully worked out in Patočka’s work.1 As he says: By virtue of this foundation in the abysmal deepening of the soul, Christianity remains thus far the greatest, unsurpassed but also un-thought human outreach that enabled humans to struggle against decadence. (HE: 108)

In Gasché’s formulation, those who take up this line of thought hold that Patočka maintains “the possibility of a Christian Europe that would finally make good on what announced itself with its emergence in the shape of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—that is a genuinely Christian Europe.”2 Christianity would provide the most promising option for the “gigantic conversion” or “unheard-of metanoein” that Patočka deemed necessary to turn European life around (HE: 75). Its “foundation in the abysmal deepening of the soul” is seen as a countermeasure to the objectivistic metaphysical tendencies within the European tradition that go back to the Platonism at its root. According to Patočka, this Platonism is still at work

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in Christianity. Those who have taken up this line of thought thus seek a Christianity that has freed itself from Platonism. As Jacques Derrida has put it, it is because of this Platonism that Christianity has not yet come to Christianity. What has not yet come about is the fulfillment, within history and in political history, and first and foremost in European politics, of the new responsibility announced by the mysterium tremendum. There has not yet been an authentically Christian politics because there remains this residue of the Platonic polis. Christian politics must break more definitively and more radically with Greco-Roman Platonic politics in order to finally fulfill the mysterium tremendum.3

The core of the solution sought in Christianity lies in this mysterium tremendum, the overwhelming experience of the divine that does not allow itself to be captured objectively. If there is a resource to be found within Christianity to overcome its Platonism, this is the most likely candidate as Patočka sees this transformation of the Platonic way of dealing with the divine as the decisive feature of Christianity. Like Platonism, Christianity aims to transcend the everyday and the orgiastic, but the central Platonic motif that this is to be done through knowledge is rejected.4 The divine Good is reinterpreted as something more transcendent, more superior, and thus more inaccessible to the human being, than Plato arguably took it to be. This is precisely the reason it is experienced as a mysterium tremendum: Tremendum, for responsibility is now vested not in a humanly comprehensible essence of goodness and unity but, rather, in an inscrutable relation to the absolute highest being in whose hands we are not externally, but internally. (HE: 106)

Hence, Patočka can say it was more so religion than philosophy “which discovered the realm of the personal.”5 This supports claims such as that of Ludger Hagedorn that religious experiences are “the privileged field” of the transcendence which is Patočka’s subject matter.6 However, this possible solution has also been challenged and for good reasons as will be argued.7 Patočka’s turn to Christianity is a heretical turn. It is ambiguous what the Christianity after Christianity that he has in mind would consist of, and whether it can still properly be called Christian. In Ivan Chvatík’s reading, which is discussed further below, Patočka aims at “a kind of non-Christian Christianity—a religion which though it does not have God, remains religious in character.”8 This meshes with Erazim Kohák’s interpretation, which acknowledges that Patočka’s question is a religious one, but which also suggests that “the deep underlying theme of Patočka’s thought may well be whether that question is susceptible to a secular answer.”9

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That Patočka sees the mysterium tremendum as an important possibility to bring about a different attitude towards the world is not a matter of debate. The question is whether this is a viable solution. As the mysterium tremendum precludes any relation to the divine based on knowledge, the manner in which Christianity aims to give place to transcendence is through faith (HE: 66–67). Martin Koci and Hagedorn in particular have interpreted faith in terms of the experience of problematicity as “shaking open the very possibility of meaning, truth, freedom, and the experience of transcendence.”10 There is certainly material in Patočka’s work that supports such an interpretation. The passage where such a position is perhaps most explicitly put forward by Patočka can be found in a letter to the theologian J.B. Souček, where Patočka writes: I am convinced that every God—independently of whether it is a single god or a plurality of gods—is an idol and a false god, as long as it is understood in a mythological way as pure origin, but not through faith as the condition of the possibility of human freedom, which is secured by the act of faith.11

While faith receives a positive appraisal, this passage also brings to the fore a possibly problematic connection to God. The reference to God is permitted, but only if it is not “understood in a mythological way as pure origin.” That is, God should not be posited as an actual transcendent entity to which we can relate, because that would be a mythological or metaphysical move. The question is whether Christianity can do without such mythological or metaphysical moves, that is, whether “the fully ripened form of demythologized Christianity” that Patočka seeks is possible.12 Although it is not always made explicit, interpretations of Patočka’s resort to Christianity often rely on God as a transcendent entity from which the transcendence of human existence originates. Hagedorn speaks of “a concrete goal, a telos, to the transcending move.”13 What he refers to as the “transcendent basis of the religious perspective” is what “affords us the possibility of calling the world itself into question.”14 In other words, transcendence is made possible and meaningful by something transcendent beyond it. Koci recognises that Patočka’s work does not simply allow for such a move and says that faith is precisely the impossibility of thinking such an entity. Yet, he also holds that “for phenomenology of Patočka’s kind, theology is impossible to articulate, but it is not denounced.”15 This comes very close to what was discussed in chapter 2 as the legitimisation of the religious on the basis of its non-rationality. Koci explicitly takes what he sees as Patočka’s silence on the matter “not as an opposition but an openness” for a theological reading.16 Transcendence is made dependent on a transcendent insofar as the distance opened by it is “the distance between us and God about whom we think in faith.”17 Such interpretations or developments of Patočka’s work

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become hard to follow if they are not taken to posit God as something transcendent at the end of the movement of transcendence. It is Christianity’s introduction of a personal God, as opposed to the Platonic Idea of the Good as a transcendent object of knowledge, that allowed for the possibility of the deepening of the soul that Patočka is interested in. The core of this move can thus be seen to rest on a theological foundation, or as Koci puts it, “to be precise, in the actual plausibility and existential relevance of this theological claim concerning the impossible possibility.”18 Without the “actual plausibility and existential relevance” of the notion of a personal god, the solution sought in Christianity does not work. However, the fact that the notion of a personal god is necessary for it to work is not an argument in favour of any theological claim. It can also be seen as problematising this solution. Little remains of its viability if God in one form or another is taken out of the picture. It is precisely the “actual plausibility and existential relevance” of God that can also be argued against on the basis of Patočka’s work. Although Patočka says that the difference between Christianity and Platonism lies in the metaphysical character of the latter (HE: 107–8), it is possible to attribute such a character to Christianity as well. Patočka himself often does so. Already in 1934, Patočka notes that religion goes beyond transcendence towards the transcendent, that “it posits the transcendent in place of transcendence.”19 And while he holds that Christianity starts from the experience of problematicity, the same is said about metaphysics.20 As is the case for metaphysics, this does not mean that Christianity does not become entangled in attempts to overcome this experience by finding a secure ground outside of the human being. Explicitly referring to both Platonism and Christianity, Patočka notes a desire for a lasting reality of meaning beyond the world and the reality here down below, to posit the “good,” “love,” unity, reconciliation, in short, all value, in a “true world,” an ideal world, which thereby devalues this world.21

As Chvatík points out, this is not just a criticism of “a totalizing transcendent Highest Being,” but also of any “similarly totalizing and transcending (but non-being) Being that would be the bearer of absolute meaning; inaccessible for mankind and therefore problematical, but as a promise always present and searched for.”22 That is, this criticism would also affect the idea of God as nonbeing but still beyond the human movement of transcendence as an in itself nonproblematical source of meaning. As Patočka notes, this has far-reaching consequences for how we should interpret the experience of problematicity:

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As long as value is understood as an eternal spring of meaningfulness, Idea, or God as that which bestows meaning on things, human acts, and events, it remains possible to interpret the experience of the loss of meaning as a flaw not in that which bestows meaning but of that on which it is bestowed. (HE: 56)

The positing of a transcendent principle of meaning makes any strong interpretation of problematicity impossible. No matter how uncertain our lives are, the meaning of the world is ultimately secure. The mysterium tremendum would, then, not be all that mysterious in itself, but would only be experienced as such because of the limited capacities offered by human existence. While it is certainly true that for Patočka problematicity is a characteristic of human existence, this does not mean that it is derived from human existence as will be discussed further. To speak of the problematicity of human existence, while not necessarily wrong, can thus be misleading. It opens the door for what can be seen as a weaker, more subjective interpretation of problematicity that can lead to the quest for nonproblematical views of the world. As discussed in the previous chapter, such a position is perhaps characteristic of Patočka’s early work, but clearly goes against fundamental tenets of his later work, which we will see he argues for on phenomenological grounds. Yet, even in the later Heretical Essays some of this earlier position remains. There, Patočka states he wants to uphold the “scepticism about the scepticism of dogmatically posited meaning” (HE: 74). That is, we are right to be critical of any given meaning that we might take to be absolute, but we also need to keep open at least the possibility of its absolute truth. When Patočka tends towards this, he remains caught up in the kind of metaphysics he elsewhere tries to escape. Although such a metaphysical move “represents a barrier against the nihilism of meaning,” it also has a weakness “in the need to have recourse to metaphysical concepts while meaning and its loss are phenomena of concrete experience” (HE: 56). Ironically, precisely the move that is to save the phenomena leads to their devaluation. In excluding the divine from the world around us, in making it transcendent, this world becomes nothing but objective material, with which we can do what we wish. The domain of the experience which is at stake in problematicity is overlooked in favour of something supposedly higher. We can wonder what good an unproblematical world is, if it is not the world in which we actually live. If Christianity is to be the source of a new meaning of human existence, recourse to something not actually present to human existence will not do. What is experienced is a mystery that is problematical, but this experience itself does not necessarily point towards anything beyond this mystery. Patočka explicitly states that invoking God as the source of transcendence means that “this movement would lack all human closure,

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would have no practical value” and that it would entail “the irrationalism of that prevenient being at whose mercy the meaning of being human then is.”23 Although Patočka looks towards Christianity for a way out of Europe’s predicament, in his work we can find good reasons not to interpret this as advocating a turn towards faith. As discussed in the previous chapter, after the Second World War Patočka seems to denounce the use of faith and of practical postulates. While this can be seen as a turn away from Christianity, interestingly this can also be understood as a move that thinks Christianity through to its end, an end that no longer seems to be Christian. As Chvatík suggests, the way in which Patočka takes Christianity to be relevant to our age might not be in the form of the instantiation of Christian faith, but in its loss.24 The experience of problematicity signalled the loss of an unreflective faith in myth and it is hard to see why the same experience would not also challenge the inherently more precarious faith of religion. In relation to this we can find a highly interesting discussion of Christianity in one of Patočka’s seminars.25 In these seminars, Patočka gives an interpretation of the last words of Christ on the cross: “Why has Thou forsaken me?” Rather than attempting to answer this question, Patočka asks the following: “What would have happened if Thou has not forsaken me? Nothing. Something can happen only if Thou hast forsaken me.”26 This is not a condition to be overcome through a return of the divine in God that has become man. It is itself the basis on which something different can manifest itself: “And suddenly it turns out that the so-called better world there, in heaven that originally was the goal to achieve, was only a pretext to let appear something that was hidden.”27 The start of an answer to the question of what manifests itself here, can be given on the basis of Patočka’s discussion of sacrifice. Sacrifice is both a crucial topic in his work and, of course, a central element of Christianity. According to Patočka, the very idea of sacrifice presupposes a difference between higher and lower, between divine and nondivine. It presupposes a certain significance: “A person does not sacrifice something that is indifferent to him, something that does not concern him.”28 The importance of sacrifice thus lies in the fact that it can introduce, or rather demonstrate, a difference of order in a world that no longer has any place for transcendence, for any distinction in the order of being. But the crucial characteristic of a true, radical sacrifice is that it only concerns this distinction itself. As Patočka says: “In a certain essential sense, it is a sacrifice for nothing.”29 It should not be justified in name of anything, that is, it should not derive its significance from anything other than itself. As Francesco Tava points out, it is thus not so much figures such as Socrates or Jan Hus (and we can add Christ) which for Patočka would be instances of a pure sacrifice, as their deaths cannot be seen as separate from “a message which gave their action a clear sense.”30 Tava

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suggests it is rather the self-immolation of Jan Palach out of pure protest that is the emblematic figure of sacrifice.31 Patočka’s discussions of sacrifice do not lead into an extensive discussion of Christianity.32 It is rather the experience of war at the front which is taken as the paradigmatic case of radical sacrifice, because it shows the transition from a sacrifice with a relative significance to one that is significant solely in itself. Those sent out to the front initially sacrifice themselves in a way that makes their lives subservient to a goal set by others. Such a sacrifice is thus significant only insofar as this goal is significant, it has no meaning in itself. However, drawing on descriptions of the experience at the front by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Ernst Jünger, Patočka notes that the actual experience at the front is different. The relative significance of sacrifice is lost as “it is no longer the cost we pay for a program of development, progress, intensification, and extension of life’s possibilities, rather it is significant solely in itself” (HE: 129). Sacrifice, more precisely self-sacrifice, demands “endurance in the face of death” and this points towards a higher life than mere biological life, even if nothing concrete is encountered as higher (HE: 129). The irreducibility and singularity of one’s existence becomes manifest as life “trips on nothingness, on a boundary over which it cannot step, along which everything is transformed” (HE: 131). An absolute freedom is experienced precisely where all is shaken. Importantly, Patočka speaks of this as the possibility of metanoia which he invokes in relation to Christianity (HE: 135). Although the possibility of a positive appropriation of problematicity is indicated here, Patočka is also pessimistic of the possibility of such a metanoia on a grand scale. Even for the individual, this experience is not a lasting one but a “summit” from which one “cannot but retreat back into everydayness” (HE: 134). The next chapter will discuss what possibilities this experience might nonetheless enable, particularly in terms of solidarity, and whether Patočka’s pessimism was fully warranted. For now, one aspect has a particular relevance. Patočka sees the modern age, devoid of belief in anything higher, as the pristine setting for a true sacrifice, a sacrifice not in name of anything else. A true experience of transcendence is made possible there where “no metaphysico-mythological remnants are responsible for it.”33 It is in this context that Patočka relates the topic of sacrifice to Christianity when he suggests that “perhaps it is in this sense that we need to seek the fully ripened form of demythologized Christianity.”34 It is along these lines that Patočka’s remarks on the sacrifice of Christ need to be understood: “The sacrifice must go to its end. Thou hast forsaken me so that nothing remains for me to hold on to.”35 This strongly suggests that it is not a faith in God, but a radical break with any such faith that is crucial in Patočka’s recourse to Christianity.

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The question remains what becomes manifest through the experience that Patočka variously refers to as the experience of problematicity, sacrifice, or transcendence. It might be that religion is of no further help regarding this question. Indeed, Patočka says that religion, not unlike myth, does not attain any clarity about this ontological experience and thus no “explicit clarity about the mode of being of the responsible beings that humans are” (HE: 101). While religion has a sense for problematicity, it does not arrive at a proper understanding of it. What seems to be called for is a philosophical clarification of the experience of transcendence and of the world-mystery (HE: 101, 142–43). In a way, that is a return to Platonism rather than to Christianity. However, as was to be the case with the return to Christianity, this is to be a Platonism unburdened of its metaphysical tendencies. It is a return to what Patočka calls a negative Platonism. PROBLEMATICITY AND NEGATIVE PLATONISM At the heart of Patočka’s later writings lies the experience of problematicity, which he tries find a meaningful way of coming to terms with. He “wonders about what problematic meaning signifies and in what sense problematic meaning may after all mean something positive.”36 It has been discussed what a preproblematical life entails, that the experience of problematicity marks the possibility of a transition to a new form of life, and that it lies at the basis of the metanoesis which Patočka hopes will turn around European life. This metanoesis is said to depend on “a stance of uprootedness in which alone a meaningfulness, both absolute and accessible to humans, because it is problematic, might be realized” (HE: 76). Both metaphysics and Christianity fail in fully attaining such a stance, as they ultimately place the source of the sought-after absolute meaningfulness in something with no meaningful relation to concrete, that is, worldly, human existence. Moreover, it is not this source itself which is taken to be problematical but the human being’s relation to it. It is difficult to understand what Patočka may have meant by this puzzling reference to a meaningfulness that combines these seemingly contradictory characteristics: absolute, accessible, and problematical. An extra difficulty lies in the fact that Patočka did not settle on any final position regarding this matter, instead trying to find a way between seemingly opposite positions. Patočka’s motivation for the search of a meaningfulness that is both absolute and problematical is motivated by his attempt to stave of nihilism. He sees the world as caught between two kinds of nihilism: one that remains attached to “inconsistent remnants of antiquated meaning” and another that carries through “the transvaluation of all values from the standpoint of strength

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and power” (HE, 73). In other words, a nihilism that remains attached to a mythico-metaphysical belief in something that would safeguard the meaning of the world, and a nihilism that takes the world to be utterly devoid of meaning and thus sees meaning as something to be established through force and acts of will. The inadequacy of the first form of nihilism, in its reliance on something not present to human existence, has been discussed in the previous section. The experience of meaninglessness, however, can be very real and Patočka says we need to take it “in all seriousness” (HE, 56). Experience thus tends more towards the possibility of the absolute meaninglessness of the world than to its absolute meaning. The dilemma between absolute meaninglessness and absolute meaning is spurred on by an argument of Wilhelm Weischedel’s, from whom Patočka appropriated the term ‘problematicity’. According to Weischedel, all meaning presupposes further meaning.37 This can be illustrated on the basis of an example from Heidegger, whose work forms an important background to both Weischedel’s argument and Patočka’s later work in general. Under normal circumstances, a hammer has the meaning of a hammer. Yet, it cannot have this meaning independent from an entire referential network of meaning. A hammer, quite literally, makes no sense without presupposing nails, the house to be built, the wood that serves as the material, and so on. There is thus an ever more encompassing chain of meaning that is required to account for the meaning of the hammer. As with the hammer, the meaning of every other link in this chain is relative and dependent on the rest. Weischedel’s claim, which sets up Patočka’s dilemma, is that for this entire chain of relative meanings to be meaningful, there needs to be some absolute, itself unconditioned meaning to ground it in. Weischedel does not go as far as to claim that such an absolute meaning exists, only that either it or absolute meaninglessness is the final answer. It is on the basis of this argument that Patočka holds that “life cannot rest on a relative meaning which itself rests on meaninglessness,” and that “no relative meaning can ever render the meaningless meaningful but, rather, is always itself dragged into meaninglessness by it” (HE: 59). Consequently, he rejects the Nietzschean option of embracing nihilism in name of a perpetual creation of new, but relative, meaning. However, this does not mean that Patočka concedes that everything is absolutely meaningless. This, after all, would also go against our experience, which despite its lapses into meaninglessness certainly also includes experiences of meaning, relative as they may be. Patočka thus sees the Nietzschean active nihilism as just as dogmatic as the reference to an absolute, but inaccessible, meaning (HE: 74). Neither the ultimate meaningfulness nor the ultimate meaninglessness of everything should be accepted naively.

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In his attempt to navigate between these extremes, Patočka is searching for something that can fulfil the function of an absolute meaning, something akin to an overall meaning or meaning of the whole, but that does not absolutize this in a metaphysical manner and that moreover is compatible with the experience of problematicity. It would have to be a form of meaningfulness that is not derived from any particular meaning within the world, but that also makes no reference to any absolute beyond the world. To understand this, Patočka’s project of a negative Platonism, started in the 1950s but subsequently abandoned, can provide useful insights.38 Moreover, if what is required is not so much a Christianity unburdened of its Platonism, but a Platonism unburdened of its metaphysical tendencies, then this is precisely what we find in his essay Negative Platonism. It does not opt for the reinstatement of a subjective principle, but instead moves towards problematicity as a more objective insight, what Patočka would have perhaps called a cosmological insight in terms of the second form of the care of the soul. The central move of negative Platonism lies in its reinterpretation of the Platonic Idea as a call to transcendence, rather than a transcendent entity that would bestow meaning on the entities which participate in it. It thus tries to avoid any metaphysical move by turning Platonism’s most metaphysical aspect (its positing of a transcendent entity) into something explicitly antimetaphysical. This is done by focussing on the notion of the chorismos, the gap between the empirical and the ideal world. Traditionality, the chorismos is seen as “a separation of something from something, of two regions of objects,” but this is precisely the interpretation that Patočka rejects: Chorismos meant originally a separateness without a second object realm. It is a gap that does not separate two realms coordinated or linked by something third that would embrace them both and so would serve as the foundation of both their coordination and separation. Chorismos is a separateness, a distinctness an sich, an absolute one, for itself. It does not entail the secret of another continent, somewhere beyond a separating ocean. Rather, its mystery must be read out of the chorismos itself, found purely within it. (NP: 198)

The reference to a “mystery” of the chorismos is interesting in relation to the invocation of the mysterium tremendum in Patočka’s discussion of Christianity. If, as was argued, Christianity ultimately relies on a mythico-metaphysical remnant, the chorismos radically precludes any such reference to anything transcendent. The Idea is reinterpreted on the basis of the primacy of the chorismos. It is nothing but a “shorthand for the chorismos,” a transcendence without anything transcendent (NP: 199). The experience of the chorismos is thus that of a transcendence in the sense of a distance with respect to reality, but it is not a transcendence onto anything transcendent that would exist

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independent of this movement. As Patočka says, this transcendence has “no positive content,” “no vision, no final terminus” (NP: 196). What remains is “the pure supraobjective call of transcendence” (NP: 204). While this transcendence is devoid of any content, it is not meaningless. This pure distancing is precisely what allows for the detachment from the physical, through what the Heretical Essays will call the shaking from the bondage of life to life. Already in the project on negative Platonism the experience of the chorismos is called an experience of freedom (NP: 198). As when Patočka discusses the experience of the world made possible by the shaking of pregiven meaning, here too he says that the experience of the chorismos allows for an encounter with the world as a whole. It shows that “the content of passive experience is trivial, transient and insubstantial” and indicates “an experience of the whole, one pertaining to a global meaning” (NP: 193). Any truth based on this transcendence is thus “not relative and mundane, even though it cannot be formulated positively, in terms of contents” (NP: 205). Crucially, a “global meaning” is indicated here for which “negative experiences,” that is, experiences such as the loss of meaning, are decisive (NP: 193). Negative Platonism is thus concerned with the kind of meaning that Patočka seeks in order to address nihilism without reference to any mundane or divine reality. What he here refers to as modernity’s “negative metaphysics of empiricism” (which absolutizes the empirical world) can only be avoided “by turning to the experience of transcendence and by seeking to use this experience to the full” (NP: 193). The Idea in this sense is “the power from which we derive all our ability to struggle against the ‘sheer reality,’ the reality that would impose itself on us as an absolute, inevitable, and invincible law” (NP: 199). It is the power to struggle against decadence. Plato erroneously interpreted the Idea in terms of transcendent entities because of his unclarity regarding the difference between that which accounts for manifestation and the plane of existence which becomes manifest. This lack of clarity is shared by myth, which understood transcendence “in terms of something like an ontological metaphor” (HE: 32), and as was argued also by religion, which although it allows for the chorismos as the infinite distance between the human being and God, ends up positing God as a transcendent anchor-point on which transcendence relies. In modernity, the chorismos is not so much misinterpreted, but excluded all together in favour of the single plane of empirical reality. As Patočka says: “modern explanations can preserve and understand everything about the Idea except the chorismos” (NP: 198). All these approaches thus either misinterpret the chorismos on the basis of some kind of reality or exclude it all together in favour of empirical reality. The central tenet of negative Platonism, however, is that the Idea “is the only

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nonreality that cannot be explained as a construct of mere realities” (NP: 204). In other words, that which is to account for the manifestation of the world should not be interpreted in terms of any kind of manifest existent. In ridding itself of the reference to any transcendent reality while retaining the sense of transcendence, negative Platonism is said to shed light on “our given life-world, uncovering what had been hidden in it, its concealed meaning, its intrinsic structure, its internal drama” (NP: 197). While this inquiry into the “internal drama” of the world does not take place in the essay on negative Platonism, it makes clear what would be needed for such an inquiry. It should avoid proceeding “constructively and speculatively” (NP: 197), explaining “as real phenomena certain philosophical themes which modern philosophy for the most part rejected as corresponding to nothing in experience” (NP: 203). As we have seen, it is phenomenology which sharply distinguishes between existence and phenomenon. Phenomenology sees the latter as neither reality nor as an absolute nihil. Although negative Platonism is not presented specifically as a phenomenological project, the overlap is clear and its insights can be seen to provide the motivation for the asubjective direction in which Patočka takes his phenomenology.39 A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PROBLEMATICITY As discussed in the previous chapter, Patočka favours a phenomenology that is based on the epochē, but that does away with the reduction. As it is carried out in human existence, the epochē is always grounded in reality, but what it uncovers is the movement of transcendence as the movement from existence to appearance, to phenomenon. It shows that there is a difference between existence and phenomenon, as the latter appears unaltered during the epoché, whereas the former is excluded.40 What the epochē thus unveils is the chorismos, transcendence without any point beyond it, from beings to the nonbeing of their appearing, which Patočka also refers to as the ontological difference.41 Importantly, this ontological difference is not subjective. It is not created by the epoché, but brought to the fore by it.42 Hence, Patočka says that “this difference functions continuously in human life,” albeit in a hidden way, and that “the discovery of the difference is linked to the shaking of all relative meaning and its reign.”43 The epochē thus follows the breakthrough of transcendence in its essential paths, as the human being follows itself in its essential possibilities, which are not psychological facts, but ways in which it takes over its existence or flees for itself, in which it carries its existence, exerts it.44

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This is what Patočka elsewhere discusses in terms of the experience of problematicity and the care of the soul as enacting the possibility of the movement of human existence. When the natural way we are in the world is shaken, we find ourselves in a world into which we do not fully fit, in which we become aware of ourselves in a new way as we attain a certain distance to it. The epochē is a methodological appropriation of this. Phenomenological inquiry would thus be crucial in clarifying the experience of problematicity in a way that Patočka claimed religion could not do. In this sense, phenomenology can be seen as a development of the cosmological form of the care of the soul. For Patočka, the soul is what is concerned about manifestation. It allows us to discern not just that there is being, but that it appears (PE: 16). While everything we encounter in the world manifests itself to us in some way, the shaken situation makes possible “an encounter with what there is, on the boundary of all that is where this whole remains insistent because something quite other than individual entities, interests, and realities within it inevitably emerges there” (HE, 39–40). This sense of the whole endures but does not let itself be grasped. Greek philosophy attempted to do so, but succumbed to the idea that what accounts for the manifestation of existence must itself be a higher, more permanent form of existence. As Patočka puts it at one point, Plato came close to something like phenomenology, but then coupled it with a “fantastic physics,” giving it a metaphysical interpretation (KEE: 300). It is only in the wake of phenomenology that it has become clear that the problem of manifesting should be treated “without regard to any kind of reality” and that “the structure of appearing must itself stand upon itself” (PE: 41). What Patočka calls “the phenomenology of the whole of the world” would be an attempt to look for a way between metaphysics and nihilism: The phenomenology of the whole of the world [des Weltganzen] is not a metaphysics that seeks to discover a true world behind the appearances, but an attempt to make the appearances themselves transparent to the wholeness present within them.45

Similar to Husserl’s recourse to the world as horizon of experience, the global meaning which Patočka is looking for is not sought as distinct from the relative meaning we encounter in the world. It is to be found in their manner of appearing. The question is thus about the way in which the world as a whole is present in the meaning it gives to what we find in it. Patočka’s approach in both Negative Platonism and in his asubjective phenomenology precludes any absolute grounding of meaning, such as he took Weischedel’s argument to show was necessary. While holding that it is the whole that gives the particular meaning, Patočka asks:

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But does this whole too, that confers meaning on things and provides the foundation for every meaning, insofar as in it the things emerge and vanish again and again, insofar as they belong to this whole, insofar as they also are—does this whole too have a meaning?46

Patočka denounces the metaphysical mistake where this whole is turned into something akin to an all-embracing object. He explicitly states that the world, as itself the horizon of all meaning, does not have anything like a meaning.47 The essence of the world as the field of appearing “consists in manifesting, disclosing and presenting other beings.”48 Meaning can be found within the world, but crucial to the notion of the world as horizon is that it is not to be treated like anything inner-worldly. However, what we find in the world is constantly changing and often meaningless. If meaninglessness itself is, in its own way, a phenomenon that can manifest itself, and if all manifesting is based on the world as horizon, then according to Patočka that entails that the latter should account both for the meaningful and the meaningless (HE: 57). As the background to the full range of human experience, the world cannot provide an absolute meaning. If we take this full range seriously, from the meaningful to the meaningless, this indicates that we might confront what Patočka calls “meaning’s point zero” (HE: 56). It is in this “point zero” of meaning that we are to locate the absoluteness that is disclosed in experiences where all meaning is shaken. As Hans R. Sepp has rightly noted, what Patočka is trying to get at is not some absolute meaning to replace a lost one (for example, a renewal of the mythical worldview). He is not after an other meaning but the other of meaning.49 When we encounter the limit of meaning, this no longer is an ordinary experience of meaning but a confrontation with meaning as such. In the work of Jean-Luc Nancy we can find a similar discussion that is helpful in clarifying what Patočka is getting at.50 Nancy speaks of “meaning at the limit of signification,”51 the encounter with which, like Patočka, he refers to as a shock.52 Following Nancy’s suggestion, we can distinguish between the meaning of particular phenomena and the encounter with the limit of meaning by calling the latter “significance.”53 Significance is not any particular meaning but the “act or movement in which the possibility of meaning arises.”54 It is the taking place of meaning “understood as presentation or as coming into presence” which “pre-exists and exceeds any particular meaning.”55 This “border” of meaning, as Sepp calls it, is not “a dividing line between fields of meaning,” but an experience where the significance of meaning, its taking place as distinct from existence, comes to the fore.56 Significance is, so to speak, the meaningfulness of meaning.

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This meaningfulness itself is not something meaningful. As Patočka says, the ontological difference, which allows for meaning in distinction from existence, does not have a meaning in itself. It is an “openness” indicating “meaning as such.”57 Having no meaning of its own, it does not direct the content of any meaning given through it. It merely allows for the latter to take place and be experienced. Significance is the sheer presentation of the meaning which it itself is not. As Nancy puts it: Meaning in this sense [as significance] is not a meaning; it is not a signification, whether determinate or indeterminate, completed or still in progress, already present or yet to be won. [It] is the possibility of significations; it is the system of their presentation and the limit of their meanings.58

To bestow a meaning on significance itself is the mistake of myth, religion, and metaphysics which each do so in their own way. They attempt to establish what Nancy called “the meaning of meaning.”59 That is, they attempt to give closure to the world in attributing a meaning to significance as that which allows meaning to take place, overlooking that it is fundamentally incommensurable with any given meaning. Despite his advances in founding phenomenology, Patočka takes Husserl to also strive for such an “absolute philosophy, that circumscribes the universe as a whole and decides on its final meaning.”60 Chvatík even attributes such a tendency to Patočka in his quest for an absolute meaning.61 But the interpretation of this absolute meaning as not a meaning but as significance relays this concern. Significance as the taking place of meaning is absolute, the sine qua non of all meaning (because what is meaning without its presentation?), but any concretely given meaning is fundamentally problematical. Although significance is not to be taken as something meaningful itself, it should also not be understood as meaningless. While significance does not indicate any particular way that meaning is to take place, it is not meaningless in the way that innerworldly phenomena can be meaningless. It is of a different category, beyond the dichotomy presented by the meaning or meaninglessness of what we can encounter in the world. It is the condition of possibility of all meaning, but also of all experienced meaninglessness. Although it cannot bestow any ultimate meaning, and although on its basis meaning can always be lost, significance entails that meaning can also always be regained. No meaning is absolute, but no loss of meaning is absolute either. The experience of significance would thus be an experience beyond any particular meaning, an experience of meaninglessness at the limit of meaning that takes place in experiences of radical transcendence, such as sacrifice or the encounter with the world as a whole. There, an absolute meaningfulness is experienced in absolute meaninglessness, that is, a significance that because

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it does not provide any concrete meaning is experienced as problematical. Significance and problematicity are two sides of the same coin, entailing that problematicity is inherent to any and all meaning. Patočka speaks of “the problematic nature of all meaningfulness” (HE: 57). It follows that problematicity is a characteristic of the world as such, not first and foremost of our relation to the world. This stronger or more ‘objective’ side of problematicity, what in terms of the care of the soul can be called its cosmological side, is often overlooked in favour of the existential, more ‘subjective’ side of problematicity.62 But while Patočka rarely stresses it, it can be seen as the foundation of his conception of problematicity as a whole. This corresponds to his claims that the freedom of human existence in the shaking brought about by the experience of problematicity is “the obverse of the transcendence of the Idea,” a claim explicitly made in order to avoid any subjectivism (NP: 200–02; see also HE: 49). The connection between these two sides of problematicity is highlighted in the following passage: If man himself is correctly described as an earthling, earth within him undergoes a quake. He discovers here his existence not as accepted and anchored but rather as naked—and he discovers at the same time that earth and heaven have a trans, a beyond. This means further that there is in them nothing capable of giving existence an ultimate support, an ultimate anchoring, a goal, a “why.”63

The experience of problematicity is the discovery of transcendence and of the lack of transcendent supports. But this is not a fact to be lamented. Although it entails that all meaning has a fundamental reference to a form of meaninglessness, this higher meaninglessness is tied to its very significance. Problematicity indicates a relative significance and sufficiency of more everyday meaningful experience. It follows that problematicity is not something to be overcome, but something we need to come to terms with. In the end, the most important insight that Patočka takes from the work of Weischedel is not that there has to be an absolute, final meaning, but that “questioning and rendering problematic are not merely subjective acts and attitudes but presuppose problematicity as something further and transsubjective, as a transsubjective situation” (HE: 75). Interpretations such as that of Edward F. Findlay are thus mistaken in saying that in Patočka’s account the final court of appeal is one’s own fragile humanity,64 because this fragility has its foundation in the fragility of meaning itself, in the fragility of the world as a whole. This not only tells us something about the human condition, but also about the possibility, or rather the impossibility of absolute meaning. Problematicity, understood as the absence of absolute meaning, is itself

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absolute.65 There is no final, ‘true’ meaning to the world and there cannot be. As Patočka says, What, though, is the significance of this problematic nature if not that our very openness for things and for others warns us that we should not yield to the inclination to absolutize particular ways of understanding meaning and the meaningfulness appropriate to them? (HE: 57–58)

We can now return to Patočka’s curious statement about “a meaningfulness, both absolute and accessible to humans, because it is problematic” (HE: 67). Meaningfulness as significance is indeed absolute, that is, not relative to or dependent on any particular meaning. But meaningfulness as concretely experienced is problematical, because this significance itself can never fully be incorporated into any given meaning. It does not have a meaning itself. This is also why Patočka can say that significance would be accessible to humans because of the problematicity of meaning. We encounter significance in itself precisely where we run up to the limit of meaning, a limit that we can neither appropriate nor cross, and that is thus experienced as problematical. This interpretation of problematicity precludes the establishment of a crucial aspect shared by Christianity and Husserl’s philosophy. It goes against any teleology that would take a nonproblematical world as its goal. Even if this would be a regulative idea, it would still depend on something that fundamentally goes against the problematicity inherent to the world. Unlike the role that crisis plays in Husserl, where problematicity can be seen to open up the possibility of a goal that we can move towards in an attempt to overcome problematicity, Patočka says that “history is nothing other than the shaken certitude of pre-given meaning. It has no other meaning or goal” (HE: 118). When Patočka subsequently says that “the question is whether historical humans are still willing to embrace history” (HE: 118), this is a reformulation of his earlier question whether they are willing to take responsibility for meaninglessness (HE: 75–76). We have seen that this meaninglessness is fundamentally related to significance. Any attempt to overcome it would be the attempt to do away with significance. Given the phenomenology of the world that frames much of Patočka’s thought, Tava and Darian Meacham are fully right to note that the responsibility Patočka speaks of in his work is “not solely for one’s own actions, pragmatic engagement, and valuations, but for the character of the overall value-orientation of the field of appearance and its infrastructural institutions.”66 Patočka’s is a responsibility for the sense of the world and our lives in relation to that sense. Given that this sense is fundamentally problematical, the question is what a fundamentally problematical foundation can bring us. We have seen that Patočka’s political thought leans towards a

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dissident politics based on the shaking that is the result of the experience of problematicity. This is a fruitful line of thought, but now that we have given a more cosmological interpretation of problematicity, problematicity as a truth about the world rather than only its disruption, it remains to be seen whether a more constructive political thought can be shaped in line with this as well.

Chapter 8

Problematicity, Politics, and Europe

In many accounts of Europe and in phenomenological accounts in particular, Europe is said to be in crisis. The structure of this crisis is a dichotomy which leads suggested answers to the crisis to remain beholden to its logic. Patočka’s account of problematicity provides resources to think this logic through to its end, rather than attempting to overcome it. In other words, it takes the crisis more seriously than is often done. The crisis—or rather: what it indicates—is not just as a possibly fleeting historical moment, but a structural characteristic of human existence and the world in general. As discussed in chapter 1, a crisis can also be seen as a revelation that contains a truth itself. Depending on what we take this truth to be, it might be possible to traverse between the absolutist tendencies of reason and the self-defeating nature of the relativism that followed its the renunciation. When it comes to the contemporary political side of Europe’s crisis, primarily characterised by a lack of foundations and the ensuing risk of relativism, the interpretation of problematicity given in the previous chapter can be put to use as a new foundation. The first section of this chapter shows how a political theory can be developed accordingly on the basis of Patočka’s work. This is done by discussing different approaches one can take to this. Going beyond the problematicity of human existence as providing the possibility of political dissidence, the problematicity of the world can set boundaries to the space of the political in a way that can be put in institutional terms. At first sight this creates a tension with Patočka’s conception of freedom, but this need not be an insurmountable tension. While he took issue with the status of freedom in liberal democracy—where freedom is placed in an antitotalitarian framework, but where neither this freedom nor this framework itself are given any further significance—the tension between institutions and freedom can be mediated when both are interpreted as having a common source in problematicity. This opens the path to a rearticulation of liberal democracy 135

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that has a significance in its own right, and that is compatible with Patočka’s conception of freedom. The section of this chapter develops the outlines of such a political framework by connecting the preceding to insights from agonistic political thought. Aside from providing a fruitful development of Patočka’s philosophy, this addresses some of the concerns identified in chapter 3, particularly the risk of agonistic thought leading to an unchecked relativism. As it is not self-evident to link Patočka’s phenomenological insights to agonistic political thought nor to turn to the latter for institutional considerations, these moves will be justified in turn. This is followed by a specification of the kind of agonistic political thought to which recourse is had here, which, following indications made by Chantal Mouffe in particular, is a pluralist kind concerned with setting the right boundaries for political pluralism while retaining its agonistic moment. The discussion in chapter 3 showed that both liberal and agonistic political thought would benefit from a more rigorous view on the nature and limits of the pluralism that both see as the essential characteristic of politics. In particular, discussions surrounding political pluralism would benefit from an explication of the relation between pluralism and the substance of the views that constitute this pluralism. Problematicity serves as a helpful interpretive key in this regard, as it is an intrinsic characteristic of the makeup of any worldview, without being a universal term that fully sublates conflicts between different worldviews. To make this politically fruitful, it is connected to a rehabilitation of tolerance as a form of agonistic respect, which is put in phenomenological terms via Patočka’s conception of the solidarity of the shaken. Claude Lefort’s conceptualisation of democracy is particularly valuable for thinking this agonistic pluralism in institutional terms. Crucially, it conceptualises this this in a way that is compatible with Patočka’s notion of problematicity. Pace Patočka’s own thoughts on liberal democracy, this allows for a rearticulation of the latter in line with Patočka’s philosophy. This can put the idea of liberal democracy on firmer footing again, not by redesigning it from the ground up, but via what Chantal Mouffe has referred to as a “‘metaphoric redescription’ of liberal democratic institutions—a redescription that could grasp what is at stake in pluralist democratic politics.”1 This is not intended to argue that Western-style liberal democracy is the only way to politically incorporate problematicity. The point is that it is a way and that this is a way that has particular importance for Europe, given the historical background of the breakdown of its modern, rationalist ideal. While problematicity provides more than a historical justification for liberal democracy, the final section of this chapter argues for the importance of the recourse to history to motivate the political framework developed here. In the vein of Patočka’s similar recourse to the catastrophes in history—but against his own pessimism on Europe after the Second World War—it is suggested

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that the building of European institutions after and with reference to the Second World War and the Holocaust might be interpreted in terms of his idea of the solidarity of the shaken. However, this possible postwar metanoia of Europe should not be taken for granted. Much depends on a responsible use of history; something which seems to be lacking in the most prominent contemporary positions on Europe. EXPANDING PATOČKA’S POLITICAL THEORY It is hard to pin down any specific political programme on the basis of Patočka’s work. While there is a general agreement that much of it is political, there is no clear agreement on the nature of its political content.2 It is primarily in terms of principles that his thought can be valuable. While this might limit the scope of a political theory that bases itself on Patočka’s work, this is nonetheless not without its relevance, particularly in Europe’s contemporary situation. There is no shortage of political programmes, but these have become more difficult to justify and defend—even where there is broad consensus regarding them. This has gone hand in hand with both instrumentalist and relativist conceptions of the liberal-democratic framework characteristic of modern Europe. Patočka’s discussions of political resistance and sacrifice, and indeed his own political resistance and sacrifice, have led many to overlook suggestions of a more constructive political theory, such as the idea of a theory of the state. The antitotalitarian character of problematicity could even lead one to believe that Patočka’s work fundamentally and necessarily leads to a dissident or even relativist politics. After all, it does not seek significance in overarching universalist principles, but in the concrete movement of human existence, a movement which resists capture in any objectivising or rationalising systems. Without wanting to downplay the importance of dissidence for either his thought or his life, the expansion of Patočka’s thought in the direction of a theory of the state is also justified. As discussed in chapter 6, he himself saw this as a fundamental part of the project of the care of the soul. He was aware of the limitations of the focus on resistance. This is one reason why the tragic death of Socrates and the Platonic response to it play such an important role in his thought. However, the theory of the state is not to be seen as a supplement to the ‘proper’ care of the soul such as exemplified by Socrates. It ultimately is an intrinsic part of its political form. Nonetheless, there exists a clear tension between the dissident nature of Patočka’s thought and the attempt to develop a theory of the state. As Darian Meacham and Francesco Tava put it, “an attempt to investigate what aspects

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of Patočka’s political thought may be developed into a more general theory of the political necessitates trying to negotiate, if not move beyond, this tension.”3 The dissident nature of Patočka’s thought follows from the shaking that lies at the heart of the experience of problematicity. However, we have seen that much depends on how this experience is interpreted. While it is the notion of problematicity from which the aforementioned tension arises, it also provides the resources to overcome it. Patočka primarily thematises the experience of problematicity as the shaking of pregiven answers and the loss of solid ground. While this absence of final answers is the reason for the perpetual inquiry that characterises the care of the soul, this should be seen as more than the loss of meaning and the attainment of a new attitude. Edward F. Findlay, while he emphasises what can be called the more ‘subjective’ side of problematicity when he says that the final court of appeal in Patočka’s account is “one’s own fragile humanity” and that “the foundation it uncovers must itself be recognized ever again as problematic,”4 has also noted that for Patočka problematicity itself can nonetheless serve as a foundation: Patočka conceives of philosophy itself as the development of the theme of the problematic; within the boundaries of an understanding of problematicity, he argues, it is appropriate to philosophy to seek something permanent, but only as long as it is understood that the ground sought is never simple and concrete, but always problematic.5

While Patočka establishes the possibility of significant action on the basis of problematicity, such as we find in sacrifice and political resistance, the question here is whether we can do more than provide a significant response to the situations we find ourselves in. Beyond shaking it on the basis of problematicity, can we also shape this situation itself in line with problematicity? There are possibilities that Patočka indicated, but left undeveloped. One such possibility lies in the explicit interpretation of problematicity as not just an existential, but a cosmological insight, that is, a truth about the world. As has been argued, problematicity is not only a trait of human existence. It is inherent to any meaningful world and tied to the significance of such a world. While insight into problematicity can be the result of a problematising stance, any such stance is made possible by the problematicity of the world itself. As such, it is a more solid ground than one might initially expect and can itself be seen as absolute, without doing away with its fundamentally problematical nature. Truly taking problematicity seriously entails more than “to accept meaning as a way” (HE: 77). It also says something about what is and is not to be done along this way. Patočka’s idea of the state can be developed on this basis. To an extent, this bypasses the existential side of

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problematicity that quite naturally leads to notions of subjective resistance against objectifying political systems, or to the personal responsibility of the care of the soul. That is not to say that trying to establish a constructive politics based on the existential side of the care of the soul is wrongheaded. Patočka himself suggests this approach by his emphasis on the just state as the state where the one who cares for the soul does not need to die, but can flourish (PE: 110– 11).6 Following this line of thought, James Mensch has articulated a list of human rights that follow from Patočka’s account of the movement of human existence and that any just state should uphold.7 Mensch relates political and social rights such as the right to association, assembly, petition, publication, and speech to the experience of problematicity and transcendence: As such, they preserve our ability to call into question the existing interpretations—be they social, economic, moral or political—that define our relations to others. So regarded, they preserve the motion of our problematization, understood as that of “living in truth.”8

Although this approach is valuable and thematises the crucial idea that “the actualization of [. . .] openness as political freedom demands a certain framework,”9 it does not engage with the possibility of interpreting problematicity in different ways. Given the tight connection between the existential and cosmological sides of problematicity, this may merely be a matter of emphasis, but it is an important one. Different interpretations of problematicity have different political consequences. Interpreting problematicity as something ‘subjective’ leaves open the possibility of claims to overcome it, to ultimate answers which would effectively abolish politics in favour of absolutism. This would entail a dubious return to a preproblematical world and consequently a preproblematical social organisation based on an absolute view of the whole that gives everything its place and meaning. In such a scenario, there is no need for politics in any substantial sense. Only questions of implementation would remain, as it is more or less clear what is to be done—at least for those with a purported insight into this whole, whether it be a priestly caste, a god-king, or a technocratic governing body. Further, when problematicity is seen as a characteristic of human existence, it is something we can nurture, but Patočka is all too aware that people can fall back into decline.10 Any political framework should not be made too dependent on the personal responsibility and insight of individuals, necessary as these might be. Patočka’s political thought is not one of philosopher-kings. It is aware of wider societal and institutional considerations. Of course, institutions cannot prevent decline either, but they can provide a stable framework

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with a degree of independence from personal inclinations. That is the nature of institutionalisation. Aspects of the personal responsibility of the care of the soul can be captured in institutions and in line with this Patočka, like his Greek philosophical predecessors, places great importance on education, one of the most important tasks of the state. But rather than basing a theory of the state directly on the care of the soul in this manner, it can be based on the founding principle of the care of the soul, that is, on problematicity. While Patočka himself does not take this approach, it does follow his reflections on the relation between the three forms of the care of the soul and the idea of a holy empire. Akin to Patočka’s account of the latter, the state is “to be founded not on the changeability of human things [. . .] but rather on absolute truth” (PE: 89). It is in this sense that problematicity can found, set limits to, and give a justification for a political framework. Problematicity is, after all, a form of insight into the whole, that is, it is a form of knowledge. Many political thinkers, including Patočka himself, have expressed concerns with strong claims to knowledge in relation to politics. The intertwinement of knowledge and politics is often feared to have totalitarian tendencies, such as in Patočka’s account of radical overcivilisation. This is why it is common to advocate a separation between the spheres of knowledge and politics. However, the Patočkan claim to knowledge regarding problematicity preempts concerns regarding totalitarianism, because its claim concerns the very exclusion of the absolute views that would form the basis of a totalitarian society. It is a self-limiting, nontotalising claim. If the stronger interpretation of problematicity, given in the previous chapter, is followed, politics can be based on the knowledge that an all-encompassing, absolute meaning to the world is impossible and that an alternative to existing views (but not any alternative) is thus always possible. It is this exclusion which enables the sphere of the political and sets rigid boundaries for it. Denying this by, as it were, problematising problematicity itself in a self-negating move, fails to grasp the true nature of problematicity. As discussed in chapter 6, Patočka sees the classical polis as the first properly political space. Following the breakdown of the traditional social order, it allowed room for disagreement and debate on fundamental matters.11 It established the public sphere as a space of strife, a “space of freedom that citizens both offer and deny each other—offering themselves in seeking support and overcoming resistance” (HE: 41–42). This is the sphere of the political in the proper sense of the word for Patočka. As opposed to the mere organisation of the social, it is a space where true conflict, including between fundamentally different views of the world and of our social organisation, is possible. There is a distinction here between the framework that allows for conflict and debate, and any position put forth within this framework. The polis is the

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space of the political where one can put forward one’s views without their content, the basis of concrete politics, being dictated.12 This is clearly distinct from Schmitt’s concept of the political, which does not allow for such internal diversity and conflict. The goal of the political agonism invoked here is not to enter a conflict that in the end only leaves space for the victor. It is to find reconciliation between fundamentally conflicting views without denouncing their possible truth and meaning. As in Husserl, this reconciliation can take the form of a convergence on a single truth, but unlike for Husserl, it does not have to. It can also take the form of an acknowledgment of a shared root in the problematical situation of human existence. Responses to this situation can be diverse and conflicting while nonetheless allowing space for the recognition of their mutual significance.13 It is along these lines that it has been suggested to interpret Patočka’s political thought as a form of agonistic political thought.14 Parallel to the way that the absence of an absolute meaning to the world does not entail the impossibility of meaning and significant acts, the loss of the traditional mythico-religious foundations of politics does not entail the loss of meaningful politics. On the contrary, the fundamentally indeterminate nature of the political entails that a plurality of positions can be politically meaningful. As Marion Bernard has noted, Patočka does not just highlight “the phenomenal fecundity of the plurality of perspectives,” he also “gives it a cosmological foundation.”15 This separation between two domains, that of the political and that of politics, is in line with Patočka’s account of the Western version of the holy empire as founded on a distinction between divine and worldly rule or moral and political authority.16 But whereas, in Patočka’s analysis of history, this distinction in the past led to a widening of the gap between these two domains and ultimately to an alienation between them, this need not be inevitable. Note that for Patočka, the issue with moderate overcivilisation or liberal democracy lies in the fact that, while it correctly posits the political as an indeterminate space, they empty freedom of its significance. Freedom is barred from the political domain and reduced to a negative and arbitrary freedom, far removed from the freedom based on insight and responsibility that was characteristic of the care of the soul. As the latter is based on the experience of problematicity, a political framework equally based on problematicity can retain its intrinsic connection to this deeper concept of freedom. When this is kept in view, it avoids the widening of the gap between the two domains that ultimately leads to their being governed by radically different principles and the attempt of the one to dominate the other. While Patočka does not say much on the political institutionalisation of problematicity beyond the Ancient Greek polis, the following will follow

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Tamara Cărăuş’ suggestion that, even though Patočka has no explicit or developed views on this, modern liberal-democratic politics needs to accept his insights regarding problematicity.17 This opens the path to a rearticulation of liberal democracy along agonistic lines that is not reducible to its antitotalitarian moment, but which has a significance in its own right. PROBLEMATICITY AND AGONISTIC LIBERAL DEMOCRACY It is not self-evident to turn towards agonistic political thought in order to expand Patočka’s work on the theory of the state in the suggested directions. The former, too, naturally tends towards a focus on political resistance and as a whole has been accused of neglecting institutional considerations.18 Three aspects need to be clarified here: 1) The relation between the notion of problematicity in the work of Patočka and the antagonism that is at the centre of agonistic political thought. After all, problematicity is first and foremost a phenomenological concept and it should not be taken for granted that it overlaps with notions of antagonism or conflict that are primarily of a social or political nature. 2) The manner in which agonistic thought can be put to use to think pluralism, rather than a purely adversarial antagonistic relation (that is, resistance). 3) The possibility of institutions based on problematicity and conflict. As discussed in chapter 3, the view that conflict and pluralism are essential, rather than contingent, features of society is a widely shared aspect of agonistic political thought. This hinges on the dismissal of the idea of a rational totality of the world. We have seen that such a dismissal and its sociopolitical consequences are key features of Patočka’s work as well. Nonetheless, the latter articulates this in phenomenological terms, and key agonistic thinkers have been somewhat dismissive of phenomenology. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, for example, see phenomenology as too subjectivist. Their poststructuralist approach rejects the notion of a subject outside of discourse that can function as a founding or unifying subject.19 While, as we have seen, such criticism is possibly justified in the case of the phenomenology of Husserl, Patočka’s work shares this rejection of that kind of subject. He himself levels the very same criticism against Husserl’s work, not only without abandoning phenomenology, but on phenomenological grounds. Further, while Laclau and Mouffe, like many agonistic thinkers, primarily speak of the social or of discourse rather than of meaning or sense, they also make it clear that this pertains to a general ontology that puts meaning front and central.20 That does not make them phenomenologists, but it does place their work in the same sphere as phenomenology. Laclau and Mouffe

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thematise the social dimension of what phenomenology has called the life-world. While the phenomenological tradition has been pivotal in what can be called the discovery of the life-world, including its social dimension, the phenomenological approach is, of course, not the only one suited to address this dimension. This proximity pertains to Laclau and Mouffe’s central notion of antagonism as well. They continually hint at a phenomenological import by discussing it in terms of an experience and a showing.21 Antagonism “has a revelatory function, in that it shows the ultimately contingent nature of all objectivity,”22 it is related to the “limits of the signifying system” which “cannot themselves be signified, but have to show themselves as the interruption or breakdown of the process of signification.”23 Like problematicity, it is an experience that transcends normal discursive apprehension, without providing access to something beyond normal discursive articulation.24 The presentation of antagonism in the work of Laclau and Mouffe, but also that of other agonistic thinkers, shares enough with Patočka’s phenomenological account of the experience of problematicity to justify the claim that they are talking about the same phenomenon in different contexts. While many agonistic political thinkers indicate something at least akin to problematicity in their account of social antagonism, this is often utilised to form a front of solidary resistance that divides the social body in two camps; we will see something similar in Patočka’s discussion of what he calls the solidarity of the shaken. Antagonism irrupts when the façade of a harmonious social totality becomes untenable and institutes an adversarial division between those who wish to uphold the current sociopolitical hegemony and those who wish to replace it. While this conceptualisation of antagonism has its theoretical and practical uses, it does not easily create a basis for a rearticulation of liberal democracy or the building of institutions. As Ed Wingenbach has noted, only a pluralist, rather than a purely adversarial agonistic thought, can generate institutional recommendations, because an antagonistic model centred around resistance tends to be precisely antagonistic towards institutionalised politics.25 However, pluralist and adversarial models of agonistic political thought are not necessarily at odds with each other. We can find both in the work of Mouffe, which, aside from the need for resistance, shows an awareness of the necessity for building stable political frameworks that encourage pluralism.26 In chapter 3, it was already remarked that Mouffe ultimately has no quarrel with the idea that there are acceptable and unacceptable pluralisms, as what matters is the justification and framework of this demarcation. She positions the moveable adversarial relation that she takes to be an insurmountable characteristic of the social domain on and as the border between an acceptable and an unacceptable pluralism. It is important to note that she does not do

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this solely because, in her account of the social, such a division is ultimately inevitable. A more substantial motivation for this is to keep the inevitably unchecked relativism of a pure pluralism at bay. To put it in the words of Wingenbach: “Not all conflicts are democratic and not all contestation is agonistic.”27 There can exist tensions between the political ideal of pluralism, as based on a nontotalitarian view of the world, and views that exist as part of this pluralism, but which have not incorporated a pluralist outlook themselves. The crux of the matter lies not so much with the fact that a line is drawn but on what grounds and on whether this is transparently acknowledged as such. We saw that this is where the pluralism of liberalism tends to go wrong, leading to a restrictive and not fully transparent version of what an acceptable pluralism is. If the pluralist model and take on liberal democracy suggested by some agonistic thinkers can be tied to problematicity, then problematicity can function as a nonarbitrary norm for such an exclusion. This avoids locating the ultimate source of antagonism in unequal social relations. While these are, of course, to be taken into account in the establishing of a more just society, they are also contingent. Taking them as the ultimate basis, as is often the case in more adversarial models of agonistic political thought, can lead to unwelcome relativist outcomes. The fact that a group is oppressed due to contingent social dynamics, however unjust this may be, does not preclude that, separate from this, there might be democratically valid reasons to exclude some of their views. The same, of course, can go for groups that have the upper hand in these social dynamics. An incompatibility with the fundamentals of pluralist liberal democracy might constitute such a reason for exclusion. The pluralist side of Mouffe’s work hinges on the acceptance of these fundamentals and in particular on the distinction she makes between adversaries and enemies.28 While disagreement exists between adversaries, this takes place in a shared political space where the potential validity of opposing views is upheld. This prevents the kind of radical conflict that aims to eliminate the enemy, without dismissing conflict as contingent. Crucial to this is a re-evaluation of tolerance. In a relativist climate, tolerance can be perceived as chauvinistic, as it involves a negative judgement of that which is tolerated. There are societal trends that for this reason emphasise acceptance over tolerance. However, what makes tolerance a political virtue is precisely that it gives us the ability to deal with matters that we strongly disagree with. As Mouffe emphasises: This is the real meaning of liberal-democratic tolerance, which does not entail condoning ideas that we oppose or being indifferent to standpoints that we disagree with, but treating those who defend them as legitimate opponents.29

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The critical nature of tolerance can help avoid the fall into a radical relativism that precludes the judgment of views other than our own. Although tolerance can be a sign of cultural chauvinism, this is not necessarily the case. It can equally be a sign of respect because it takes a view seriously as containing a claim to truth or morality; a claim, moreover, that might concern us as well. William E. Connolly has called this “agonistic respect.”30 Agonistic respect can play a crucial role in rearticulating liberal democracy, because it remains at a distance from the pitfalls of both relativism and liberalism. It avoids the radical pluralism that entails a valorisation of all positions and it steers clear of the liberal version of tolerance that is often nothing more than instrumentalist indifference. The agonistic respect that can support a pluralist agonistic political model can be difficult to achieve. Mouffe describes it as involving “a radical change in political identity,” “more a sort of conversion than a process of rational persuasion.”31 Something akin to this we find in Patočka’s account of the solidarity of the shaken, already mentioned briefly in chapter 6. Continuing his analysis of the experience of sacrifice at the front, where one is confronted with both meaninglessness and significance, Patočka says that it is not only one’s one own relative importance for the overall war effort that is transcended. The other, including the enemy, is revealed as a fellow participant in this situation: “Here we encounter the abysmal realm of the ‘prayer for the enemy,’ the phenomenon of ‘loving those who hate us’—the solidarity of the shaken for all their contradiction and conflict” (HE: 131). As Hans R. Sepp has noted, the experience of problematicity, as the experience of the limit of meaning, is not only significant because it makes one aware of the limits of one’s own world. It is also significant because of “what is actually ‘transitional’ in such a conflict—that is the partner in the conflict” and because of “a coming together in a shared space of meaning.”32 In having one’s world shaken, in becoming aware of the precarious nature of all meaning, it is no longer merely one’s own attempt to establish meaning in the world that is to be valued, but also, as Ivan Chvatík put it, “the possible meaningfulness of what [one’s] political enemy is fighting for with equal ardour.”33 Solidarity and agonistic respect are not founded in the expansion of my own world to include the other, or in crossing the border from my world into that of the other. It comes about in the crossing of the border of meaning itself into a shared space of significance that nonetheless does not entail a shared meaning. While the solidarity of the shaken cuts through established antagonistic relations, such as those between soldiers of opposing armies, it sets up a new division between those that take problematicity to heart and those who do not. However, it does not dissolve existing differences. This is why it is a fruitful

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basis for the demarcation of the kind of pluralism Mouffe envisions in her attempt to reframe liberal democracy along agonistic lines. As already noted, Patočka himself primarily frames the community of the shaken as a fundamentally dissident community: “It will not offer positive programs but will speak, like Socrates’ daimonion, in warnings and prohibitions” (HE: 135). However, that does not mean that it is limited to this. In this regard it is interesting to note that, while Patočka develops the idea of such a community as part of a primarily dissident framework, it is nonetheless an idea that is put to constructive use. The solidarity of the shaken is introduced as a means to overcome the singular and transitory nature of the experience of problematicity so that it can become a factor in history. Despite its dissident nature, it thus also has a stabilising, constructive aspect to it. This move brings Patočka very close to the idea of developing political institutions on its basis, even though the dissident framework that his thought inhabits here prevents him from doing so. While, as mentioned, agonistic political thought is often seen as neglecting constructive institutional considerations, or even to be hostile to these, Wingenbach and more recently Marie Paxton have argued not only that certain types of institutions are compatible with agonistic thought, but that such institutions are necessary to create and sustain the context within which agonistic politics can take place.34 The question is how to translate the insight into problematicity into a basis on which political institutions can be developed. However, whereas Patočka’s account of problematicity is novel, the accompanying idea of keeping totalitarianism or absolutism at bay, and allowing for a plurality of perspectives to enter the sphere of the political, is not. There is a wealth of political theory going back to modernity that describes the institutional apparatuses that ward of absolutisms: the separation of powers, control of the state by the people, the right to free speech, and so on. As indicated in chapter 6, at times Patočka hesitantly acknowledges that his ideal state would look a lot like modern liberal democracy. While Patočka did not develop a positive conception of liberal democracy, there are striking similarities between his thought and that of Claude Lefort. Lefort, too, connects the contemplation of forms of society to a new meaning of the idea of freedom and sees what he calls “the operation of negativity and the institution of political freedom” as “one and the same.”35 The crucial difference, however, is that Lefort disagrees with the suggestion—which he calls common in his day and which we saw Patočka also suggest—that “the only difference between democracy and the totalitarian system is the degree of oppression.”36 Whereas Patočka’s criticism of liberal democracy stems from the inadequate position it accords to human existence and freedom (a point on which it would not fundamentally differ from totalitarianism), Lefort thinks that democracy is fundamentally connected to the problematical situation of

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human existence from which the possibility of a responsible freedom arises according to Patočka. Central to Lefort’s interpretation of democracy is what he refers to as the empty place of power. “Power,” he writes, “becomes and remains democratic when it proves to belong to no one.”37 Of course, there are concrete people and institutions that temporarily occupy this empty place, but they do not coincide with it. In nondemocratic political systems, on the other hand, power belongs to an individual or specific group. Historically, this was embodied in them as part of a mythico-religious worldview, where the one in power mediated between the ruling transcendent powers and the people. Lefort’s description of traditional forms of society, and the way their organisation and power structure were dependent on their worldviews, matches Patočka’s account of preproblematical societies. Similarly, both see totalitarianism, or at least aspects of it, as a regression towards such preproblematical societies. While Lefort’s analysis is concerned with the transformation of the way power has historically been distributed in society, what is primarily of importance here is the symbolic framework in which, rather than the concrete rules through which, this takes place. As Oliver Marchart has noted, this ontological dimension of Lefort’s account is often overlooked.38 Nonetheless, Lefort is quite clear that for him democracy is not simply a form of government.39 To use Jean-Luc Nancy’s characterisation: “democracy is first of all a metaphysics and only afterwards a politics.”40 It is not merely one manner of organising society and distributing power. On a more fundamental level it is a way of maintaining of “a gap between the symbolic and the real.”41 It is this gap that prevents the confusion of the (symbolic) rule of law with the (real) rule of power. What underlies Lefort’s analysis is the dissolution of a worldview that contains a final authority that could rightfully be seen to appropriate all power. Hence, he refers to the shaking of the traditional worldview, which allows for the institution of democracy, as “the dissolution of the markers of certainty.”42 Through this, a fundamental indeterminacy enters society which opens up the possibility of debate about its foundation. This indeterminacy at the heart of Lefort’s account of democracy is what Patočka refers to as problematicity. This fundamental link between the two allows Lefort’s account of democracy to complement Patočka’s philosophy. The political framework that follows from this is fundamentally agonistic and pluralist. Lefort speaks of democracy as “an institutionalization of conflict” and “a controlled contest with permanent rules.”43 This resonates with Patočka’s discussion of the Ancient Greek polis.44 The absence of final answers entails the need for the recognition and acknowledgement of a plurality of possible solutions to life’s problems. While the checks and balances that are part and parcel of liberal democracy are there to prevent the

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consolidation of power of a single view that could impose itself on society as a whole, it should not be overlooked that this system often also actively enables pluralism in its own right. While this is done differently in different states and with varying results, liberal democratic states typically guarantee freedom of association, provide funding for a plurality of political parties, are set up in a manner that encourages government via coalitions, and so on. While this can be lacking—and agonistic thought often emphasises this lack and aims at a more participatory democracy—the basics for a pluralist democracy are often in place. However, the motivation to participate in this political system is a different matter to which we will return shortly. While liberal democracy in this sense promotes pluralism, the mentioned absence of final answers does not entail that anything goes. The state is to be a neutral power as to allow the free competition between views, but this competition itself is not without its own conditions. While Lefort advocates the neutrality of the state, he sees that this neutrality is not indifferent to the content of political debate. While it appears to “to have no opinions or be above opinions,” the establishment of the modern liberal democratic state itself “occurred as a result of changes in public opinion, or in response to them.”45 It is important to distinguish neutrality from indifference, which liberal thought too often fails to do. And pace Patočka’s critique of liberal democracy, it follows that democratic state apparatuses are not purely a matter of form.46 A democracy based on problematicity has to be a particular kind of democracy. It can be called a militant democracy, which, as Jan-Werner Müller puts it, “is explicitly not neutral about its own principles and values—and puts in place strong checks on those hostile to its principles.”47 In order to safeguard its functioning and self-limitation, it must be vigilant in relation to perspectives that do not limit themselves and that present nonproblematical views of the world. Some liberal democratic states already have a strong militant nature of this kind, albeit often on historical or practical, rather than theoretical, grounds. For example, several articles of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany have as their purpose to defend its constitutional democracy, banning antidemocratic parties and even allowing the limiting of basic rights in some cases.48 However, this is not necessarily the norm. The debate on what should or should not be possible in a liberal democracy is far from settled. A notable incident took place in the Netherlands in 2006, when the then Minister of Justice Piet Hein Donner stated that a democracy should be able to abolish itself: “If two-thirds of all Dutch people want to establish sharia law tomorrow, then should that possibility not exist?” Importantly, he called this “the essence of democracy,” although he took back his words soon after. We have seen that such an instrumentalist conception of democracy can be part of both

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liberal and agonistic thought. While, as Lefort put it, ultimately “no artifice can prevent a majority from emerging in the here and now or from giving an answer which can stand in for the truth,” this should not be allowed to take place in a way that endangers “the right to denounce that answer as hollow or wrong.”49 A state based on problematicity thus sets boundaries to democracy and to (political) freedom. This seemingly goes against Patočka’s usual emphasis on the primacy of freedom and resembles the division between public and private that he is critical of. Here, it is important to reiterate that such boundaries not only are necessary to guarantee the existence of a space in which freedom can exist, but also that they are based on the same principle of problematicity that freedom is based on. When problematicity is taken as the common principle of both freedom and the political, the apparent contradiction disappears. If we take Patočka’s idea of freedom to be based on not just the experience of, but also on the insight into, problematicity, then he might have agreed with Herbert Marcuse’s claim that “liberty must be defined and confined by truth.”50 These are constraints that the responsible freedom that Patočka aims at, as opposed to an empty and arbitrary freedom, would need to accept as well. While this removes the conceptual problem of squaring the problematic of freedom with that of liberal democratic institutions, it does not address the issue that this freedom needs to be nourished as well. Lefort too saw it necessary that the space of the political “is so constituted that everyone is encouraged to speak and to listen without being subject to the authority of another.”51 Political freedom in this sense cannot merely be a negative freedom, that is, a freedom from the authority of others. The space of the political must be constituted in such a way so “that everyone is urged to will the power he has been given.”52 Merely safeguarding this space is not sufficient for this. While throughout history such safeguarding has taken various forms (from independent judiciaries and senates, to military interventions and political dissidence, and even education and journalism), as Hannah Arendt has pointed out: “There is no doubt that all these politically relevant functions are performed outside the political realm.”53 LESSONS FROM EUROPE’S HISTORY Traditional forms of the organisation of society were embedded in a larger view of the world. Suggestions that for democracy to function it is in need of a civil religion points to something quite fundamental in this regard. As Oliver Marchart notes, what is needed are symbolic frameworks “which allow for the acceptance of interrogation, debate, questioning, and conflict

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as that which generates democracy.”54 Those who have tried to bring institutional considerations into agonistic political thought have similarly emphasised the importance of culture.55 However, when undone of any mythical, religious, or metaphysical supports, problematicity does not easily lend itself to the establishment of a political culture, let alone one that would be readily accepted by many. The experience of problematicity is uprooting and the insight into it is far removed from everyday understanding. As mentioned, Patočka is pessimistic about the possibility of his hoped-for spiritual conversion, a societal metanoia on a large scale. As we saw, Patočka claims that the Second World War and the new “nuclear reality” that followed it “eliminated the distinction between the front line and the home front” (HE: 132). In a way, everyone was confronted with their own finitude. Yet, this still did not bring about any decisive change. He wonders why the arguably universal experience of war that his generation witnessed did not bring it about. It seems rather that history ended up where it began, “with the bondage of life to its self-consumption and with work as the basic means of its perpetuation,” but without any overall meaning to existence such as was characteristic of prehistory (HE: 74). Yet, is it right to say that Europe did not take problematicity to heart? Do the Second World War and the Holocaust historically not designate the breakdown of a view of the world and of a European self-understanding that aimed to overcome problematicity, and did this not spur political transformation as well? While Patočka’s focus on decadence and the issue of a higher plan for life leads him to draw the conclusion that Europe has definitely come to an end, from a political perspective significant changes have taken place since the Second World War. Political institutions have been Europeanised and the postwar era has seen a new focus on human rights. Although Patočka’s own circumstances certainly explain why he would not be very optimistic, in the context of his dissidence as part of the Charta 77 movement he himself refers to the new focus on human rights as indicating a new historical epoch that is not based primarily on fear or profit, but on respect for something higher for which one is prepared to face a certain risk.56 Can the European political project in the wake of the Second World War not be seen in terms of the solidarity of the shaken? Even if this did not lead to a large-scale spiritual renewal in terms of a higher plan for human existence, is this not akin to Patočka’s community of the shaken as attempting to render some tragedies impossible, as captured in the call nie wieder? What is important in the Holocaust’s use as a foundational event for the European project is not just the awareness of this catastrophe, but a sense of responsibility for it. As discussed, the Holocaust was seen, at least in part, as a European catastrophe for which (some of the) blame could be attributed to European civilisation. At the very least this civilisation could not prevent

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it. This aspect of culpability is the foundation of the responsibility not to let something similar happen in the future. In a way, this combines Patočka’s solidarity of the shaken as spurred on by tragedy and his attempt to deepen a sense of responsibility through Christian motifs. This points to the importance of historical events, which is in line with Patočka’s own continual recourse to the catastrophes in history. For Patočka, Europe was a political project and from the outset this project was formulated in response to failure and catastrophe. If this is the case, then the question whether the Second World War and the Holocaust mark the ultimate end of Europe or whether it is also a transformative new beginning can perhaps be answered in a different way than Patočka himself seems to have done. However, in chapter 2 we have seen the limits of this use of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Any impetus given to animate European politics in the form of a historical moment is subject to waning, due to changing historical circumstances. The catastrophes of Europe’s past are becoming further removed from us and thus less able to animate our politics. The same goes for attempts to generalise the lessons from this particular historical moment, even if this moment could be said to ultimately have a universal significance. The more its ties to particular places, times, and events are loosened, the less the sense of responsibility that is to follow from it will be felt. The manner in which reference to the Holocaust in European politics takes place matters a great deal as well. As mentioned in chapter 2, those strongly in favour of the European Union often attribute what is seen as the long period of peace in Europe after the Second World War to the European Union and its predecessors. Combined with the economic prosperity which the postwar period brought, it is all too easy to slip back into a narrative of progress and superior European civilisation. The Holocaust often plays a role in this narrative, but its tragic significance is pushed to the back of an aggrandising tale about the European Union. The focus becomes the success of what Patočka referred to as “the perspective of peace, day, and life,” even as Europe’s success “contributes to the deepening of the gap between the blessed haves and those who are dying of hunger on a planet rich in energy—thus intensifying the state of war” (HE: 132). It has become clear that little remains of European solidarity, or indeed solidarity with those struck by catastrophe, as soon as it comes to the matter of, for example, relocating refugees across Europe. At the same time, many Eurosceptics explicitly denounce what they see as the constant, tiring reference to the catastrophes of Europe’s past. The most prominent stances on Europe, which increasingly manifest themselves as the default camps of politics as such, both forego the significance of the catastrophes on the basis of which postwar Europe attempted to reinvent itself. They increasingly ignore or dismiss, in Patočka’s words, “the night,” which came “suddenly to be an absolute obstacle on the path of the day to the

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bad infinity of tomorrows” (HE: 130). If a new Europe began to take shape after and on the basis of the catastrophes of the twentieth century, is an inherently precarious Europe, in which we should not put too much hope unless we are prepared to take responsibility for it ourselves.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Johann P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 198–99. 2. To distinguish more clearly between ordinary uses of the word ‘problematic’ and those that refer to Patočka’s concept of problematicity, ‘problematical’ shall be used for the latter cases. Of course, in many cases these uses are not completely distinct.

CHAPTER 1 1. For the current context, I appropriate this term from the work of David Gress and Gerard Delanty, but the work of Jean-François Lyotard on the end of Grand Narratives is obviously an important background for its use as well. 2. The idea of multiple modernities was made prominent by the work of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. 3. For more expansive and historical overviews of the idea of Europe, see Gerard Delanty’s Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) and Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Heikki Mikkeli’s Europe as an Idea and Identity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); and Anthony Pagden’s work in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002). 4. Delanty, Inventing Europe, 16. 5. See, e.g., John M. Hobson’s not completely uncontroversial The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 6. See, e.g., Robert Bernasconi, “Heidegger and the Invention of the Western Philosophical Tradition,” Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 26, no. 3 (1995): 240; Peter K.J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon 1780–1830 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 1. 167

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7. Anthony Pagden, “Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent,” in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002), 42. 8. See Hans Schelkshorn, “Selbstbegrenzung in der polyzentrischen Weltgesellschaft: Revisionen der imaginären Grenzen Europas,” Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 4, no. 1 (2016): 57. 9. Delanty, Inventing Europe, 26. 10. Ibid. 11. Denis Guénoun, About Europe: Philosophical Hypotheses, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 232. 12. See Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, 56, 129. 13. Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 6. 14. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 139. 15. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 22. 16. David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and its Opponents (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 261. A somewhat novel version of the subtraction thesis is to be found in the work of Hans Blumenberg who takes not just medieval religiosity, but also the Ancients as his targets. For modernity to arise, Western scholars not only had to rid themselves of the former but also of the authoritative and restricting status of ancient science, art, and literature. See The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983), 33. 17. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 5–6. 18. See Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 229. For the general development of the idea of progress see also Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949) and Robert A. Nisbet, “The Idea of Progress,” Literature of Liberty 2, no. 1 (1979): 7–37. 19. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 7. 20. See, e.g., Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, European Civilization in a Comparative Perspective: A Study in the Relations between Culture and Social Structure (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1987). 21. Weber, “Science as Vocation,” 139. 22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and the Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 7–8; Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 149. 23. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 143. 24. Derek L. Philips, Looking Backward: A Critical Appraisal of Communitarian Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3. 25. See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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26. On this orientation towards a preexisting order and thus the past, see Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: A Harvest Book. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), 12; Eric Voegelin, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 174–78; and Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 13. 27. Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, 52. 28. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 264. 29. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 93. 30. Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911–1918 (New York: Urizen, 1977), 122. 31. Christian Meier, From Athens to Auschwitz: The Uses of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 138. 32. ‘Holocaust’ is a contested term. Its literal meaning, sacrifice by fire, has religious connotations that can be seen as offensive. This moreover does not fit the characterisation of the Holocaust given here as proceeding from a radically immanent view of the world. While these considerations are valid, ‘Holocaust’ is the main term that will be used to designate the organised murder perpetrated by the Nazis. This is because of convention, but also because of the lack of suitable alternatives. The Hebrew ‘Shoah’ (catastrophe) specifically denotes the Jewish disaster (even more so than is the case for ‘Holocaust’). While Jews were victims of the Holocaust in a unique way, they were not the only targeted group. 33. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, x. 34. Ibid., 13. 35. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 35. 36. Robert A. Nisbet, Community and Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 203. 37. Eric Voegelin, The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers 1939–1984 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 227. 38. Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” trans Michaela W. Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 2 (2006): 372. 39. Ibid., 360. 40. Ibid., 358. While this application of ‘crisis’ to history and teleology has its precursor in the judicial-theological use of the term, the idea of history as an immanent development with a culmination is predominantly modern. As discussed, premodern views tended to focus more on the past than on the future. There were, of course, the Judaic and Christian eschatologies. While these had a decisive influence on Europe, for centuries the standard Christian view was that history had already been fulfilled with the coming of Christ. It was only with the Joachimite thought of the twelfth century (when the second coming took longer than expected) that the future gained a renewed emphasis. See Löwith, Meaning in History, 154–57. Moreover, even as late

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as the eighteenth century, “the term [crisis] is found not in the work of progressives but in the writings of philosophers committed to the cyclic view of history.” Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 161. 41. Rousseau, The Social Contract and the Discourses, 44. 42. See Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 22; Voegelin, The Drama of Humanity, 229. 43. “Actually, it is difficult to find any prominent author, politician, intellectual, or journalist in Weimar Germany who publicly used the notion of crisis in a pessimistic or even fatalistic sense. All of the contemporary authors, at least, left it undecided in which way the crisis would be resolved, if the old or the new—and in their view good—powers held an advantage and would succeed. Most of them considered the ‘horrible, low state of the present’ not as the end, but believed that the current ‘Krisis’ was a state of ‘extremely severe, confused fermentation,’ heading toward a near, light, and better future.” Rüdiger Graf, “Either-Or: The Narrative of ‘Crisis’ in Weimar Germany and in Historiography,” Central European History 43, no. 4 (2010): 602–03. 44. To an extent, this classification of the two world wars as respectively imperfect and perfect crises is an idealisation. For many, the First World War was already experienced as a perfect crisis. And even after the Holocaust the Grand Narrative did not disappear completely. In his overview of the influence of the First World War on philosophy, Nicolas de Warren makes a comparable claim regarding the difference after the First World War and the Second World War: “A new form of thinking that is fashioned as a response to the First World War becomes internalized into the conceptual vocabulary after the Second World War.” Nicolas De Warren, “The First World War, Philosophy, Europe,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 76, no. 4 (2014): 732–33. See also Ernst Jünger, “Across the Line,” trans. Timothy Sean Quinn, in Martin Heidegger—Ernst Jünger Correspondence 1949–1975 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 86–87, 95.

CHAPTER 2 1. Paul Valéry, The Outlook for Intelligence, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 26. 2. David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 48. 3. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992), 127. 4. Ibid., 334. 5. Ibid., 128. 6. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), x. 7. Fukuyama, The End of History, 130. 8. Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 110.

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9. Of course, this was mainly so for German fascism, whose ‘third Reich’ saw itself as the successor of the Holy Roman Empire. Italian fascism instead saw the Roman Empire as its model. 10. Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 60. 11. See, e.g., Gianni Vattimo, according to whom a proper affirmation of European identity “can be nothing else but the recovery of Christianity as the West.” Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 74. 12. Jürgen Habermas, “Europa ist uns über die Köpfe hinweggerollt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6 June 2005. 13. See Peter van Ham, “Europe’s Postmodern Identity: A Critical Appraisal,” International Politics 38 (2001): 245. 14. Eric Voegelin, The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers 1939–1984 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 178. 15. See, e.g., Joseph R. Gusfield, Community: A Critical Response (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) and Derek L. Phillips, Looking Backward: A Critical Appraisal of Communitarian Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Widerquist and McCall attack not just such a nostalgia but the illegitimate use of supposedly past states of society in political philosophy in general. See Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 16. On this, see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 5. 17. Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 206–07. 18. Alain Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Mind, trans. Judith Friedlander (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 56. 19. Rudi Visker, Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 151. 20. See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 41. 21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B xxx. 22. Ibid., 49. Similar arguments can be found in the work of Max Scheler (On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble [London: Transaction Publishers, 2010], 142– 43), Eric Voegelin (What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990], 218) and Jan Assmann (The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010]). 23. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 47. 24. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 195. 25. Delanty, Inventing Europe, 109. 26. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007), §3.

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27. Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, “Statement on Human Rights,” American Anthropologist 49, no. 4.1 (1947): 541. 28. Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Mind, 106–07. 29. This is done explicitly in the statement by the American Anthropological Society: “The problem of drawing up a Declaration of Human Rights was relatively simple in the Eighteenth Century, because it was not a matter of human rights, but of the rights of men within the framework of sanctions laid by a single society.” “Statement on Human Rights,” 542. This perfectly follows the critique of the CounterEnlightenment, such as those of Joseph de Maistre: “The Constitution of 1795, just like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In the course of my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians etc.; I know, too, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life; if he exists, he is unknown to me.” Cited in Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 100. 30. Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, 198. 31. One can wonder how many of the recently self-professed cultural Christians would identify themselves as such if this could not be used to oppose themselves to other groups in contemporary multicultural societies, Muslims in particular. 32. Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, “The EU Politics of Remembrance: Can Europeans Remember Together?” West European Politics 35, no. 5 (2012): 1182–202.

CHAPTER 3 1. For this historical claim, see Gerard Delanty, Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 121–22. Carl Schmitt had already argued this as well, see his The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988). 2. Sheldon Wolin pointed to the fact that early liberalism was not all that optimistic in its rationalism but “was a philosophy of sobriety, born in fear, nourished in disenchantment, and prone to believe that the human condition was and was likely to remain one of pain and anxiety.” Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 263. 3. Of course, if neutrality is understood as impartiality, this more substantial political rationalism is the most neutral of all insofar as it supposedly is not guided by particular interests but by the truth itself. 4. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 2001), 74. 5. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 10. 6. Ibid., 217. 7. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 86. 8. For Rawls, the rational is tied to the determination of the good and the articulation of a corresponding plan for life. 9. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 19.

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10. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (1985): 241. 11. Although this suggests a more robust role of the government than is often associated with liberalism, it must not be forgotten that the more minimal role attributed to the government in classical liberalism is not a denunciation of this kind of technocracy. The difference is not one of principle but of mode: organisation by the government or by the rules of the market which were thought to lead to the benefit of all. 12. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 263. 13. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2001), 186. 14. Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” New Perspectives Quarterly 25:27. 15. Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” 228. 16. Ibid., 223. 17. Ibid., 240n22. 18. Ibid., 246. 19. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 296. 20. Ibid., 309. 21. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas A. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984; 1987). 22. Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization (London: Ignatius, 2007), 51. 23. Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” 21–22. 24. Ibid., 21. 25. Ibid., 27. 26. Ibid., 28. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” 233. 30. Ibid., 230. 31. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 161. 32. See Martin Ebeling, Conciliatory Democracy: From Deliberation Toward a New Politics of Disagreement (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 33. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 3. 34. See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). 35. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, 4. 36. Connolly, Identity/Difference, 172. 37. Glen Newey, After Politics: The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Thought (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 38. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005), 31.

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39. For overviews of agonistic political thought and different ways of categorising its various authors, see Ed Wingenbach, Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy: Post-Foundationalism and Political Liberalism (Routledge: London, 2011), 41–78; and Marie Paxton, Agonistic Democracy: Rethinking Political Institutions in Pluralist Times (New York: Routledge, 2020), 55–77. 40. Mouffe has been one of the few agonistic thinkers to point explicitly towards the need of a more constructive side to agonistic thought. See Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013), 14. Connolly to an extent disagrees with the criticism that agonistic thought focuses too much on resistance in lieu of construction. In his view, most agonistic thought calls for a balance more so than for pure resistance or disturbance and the latter is a somewhat disingenuous frame by the critics of agonistic thought. See The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 21. While there is some truth to this, it is evident that agonistic political thought’s potential for resistance is both much clearer and more developed than its constructive potential. 41. At various points in his work Gray has adhered to, transformed, and left behind liberalism. We will not be concerned here with these different stages of his work and his varying attitudes towards liberalism and the different labels he has applied to this. 42. Gray specifically speaks of a value-pluralism, a notion he derives from the work of Isaiah Berlin. 43. John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 2007), 103. 44. Ibid., 199. 45. Ibid., 210–11. 46. Ibid., 2. 47. John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: Polity Press 2004), 34. 48. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 98. 49. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, xiv. 50. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 105. 51. See, e.g., Crowder, “Gray and the Politics of Pluralism,” in The Political Theory of John Gray, ed. John Horton and Glen Newey (New York: Routledge, 2007), 66. 52. Horton, “John Gray and the Political Theory of Modus Vivendi,” 54–55. 53. Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 19–20. ‘Reasonable’ should be read as ‘acceptable to the participating groups,’ lest Gray end up with a Rawlsian priority of the reasonable. 54. This criticism was expressed, among others, by Monique Deveaux and Iris Marion Young. See Paxton, Agonistic Democracy, 14. 55. Horton, “John Gray and the Political Theory of Modus Vivendi,” 48. 56. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 22. 57. Ibid., 19–20. Connolly himself acknowledges that the conditions for a politics of pluralization “also create temptations for the politics of fundamentalization” (The Ethos of Pluralization, 194). Thus, he too recognises the need for limits to pluralism, although this goes somewhat against the general spirit of his writing.

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CHAPTER 4 1. See also Kenneth Knies, “The Practical Obscurity of Philosophy: Husserl’s ‘Arbeit der Probleme der letzten Voraussetzungen,” Husserl Studies 27 (2011): 97. 2. For an excellent account of reason in Husserl’s philosophy, see Andrea Cimino, “Husserl’s Project, Critique, and Idea of Reason,” Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 1, no. 2 (2020): 183–217. 3. ‘Spirit’ is used here to translate the German Geist. This translation is not fully adequate, as ‘spirit’ does not carry the same connotations as Geist, which refers to ‘human’ (that is, not purely physical) matters such as culture, sociality, or ethics. This can be seen in the term Geisteswissenschaften, the English equivalent of which would be ‘humanities’ or ‘human sciences.’ 4. See Dermot Moran, “‘Even the Papuan Is a Man and Not a Beast’: Husserl on Universalism and the Relativity of Cultures,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 49, no. 4 (2011): 463–94. 5. Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 155. 6. The fact that elsewhere similar breakthroughs as the one Husserl attributes solely to Greek philosophy took place is the subject of the scholarship on what is called the ‘axial age’ as prominently discussed by Karl Jaspers in The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953) and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986). 7. James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 76. 8. Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 154. 9. For Husserl’s more detailed and somewhat more empirically oriented account of various stages this can involve, see Hua XXIX: 41–46. In relation to this, Rodolphe Gasché remarks that the early philosophers were of heterogeneous origins, foreigners, and exiles traveling outside of their homelands. Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 26. 10. Philip R. Buckley, Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), 39. 11. Ibid., 39. 12. See Timo Miettinen, “Teleology Beyond Metaphysics,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28, no. 3 (2014). 13. Timo Miettinen, The Idea of Europe in Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Study in Generativity and Historicity, PhD diss. (University of Helsinki), 298. 14. “In terms of political institutions, Husserl’s political reflections seemed to balance between Fichtean nationalism (especially during the First World War), Kantian republicanism (early 1920s), and what almost seems like a mixture of Stoic cosmopolitanism and socialist internationalism.” Timo Miettinen, Husserl and the Idea of Europe (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 123. 15. Karl Schuhmann, Husserls Staatsphilosophie (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1988), 106.

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16. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 26. 17. This possibility is indicated by the different establishments of philosophy and lies at the heart of Husserl’s account of the crisis. 18. Ibid., 45. 19. Schuhmann, Husserls Staatsphilosophie, 196. 20. See John Drummond, “Political Community,” in Phenomenology of the Political, eds. Kevin Thompson and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000). 21. Ibid., 199. 22. See also Drummond, “Political Community,” 41–44; and Miettinen, Husserl and the Idea of Europe, 128–29. 23. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 69. 24. Ibid., 28. 25. Ibid., 35. 26. Note that while Schmitt is an important source for agonistic thought, for him the problem was that liberalism can never lead to order, while for agonistic thought the problem is that liberalism aims at too much order. I thank Evert van der Zweerde for this formulation. 27. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 54. 28. Ibid., 36. 29. In this regard, it is worth mentioning that while Husserl came to see the First World War as humanity’s fall into sin, he initially showed enthusiasm for the war, as did many of his colleagues. See Miettinen, Husserl and the Idea of Europe, 28–29. This was, however, in a more nationalist phase of Husserl’s thought and does not necessarily relate to the more cosmopolitan thought pertinent for Schmitt’s argument. 30. For two recent discussions of this unclarity see Emiliano Trizio, “What Is the Crisis of Western Sciences?” Husserl Studies 32 (2016): 191–211; and George Heffernan, “The Concept of Krisis in Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies 33 (2017): 229–57. 31. Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel III: Die Göttinger Schule, HuDo III/3, eds. Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), 12. 32. That ‘crisis’ in Husserl’s day was not a purely negative term has been discussed in chapter 1. That the crisis in the sense discussed here was a welcome phenomenon for Husserl has also been noted by Buckley (Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility, 86) and Dodd (Crisis and Reflection, 2). 33. Klaus Held, Europa und die Welt: Studien zur welt-bürgerlichen Phänomenologie (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2013), 129–44; Tanja Staehler, Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 14. 34. Even from the standpoint of a concern with scientific methodology, Husserl’s relevance remains, as is shown by the recent attention to the so-called ‘replication crisis’ in the social sciences and in medicine. 35. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 5. 36. See ibid., 5; Hua XXVII: 213. 37. Dodd, Crisis and Reflection, 32.

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38. Edmund Husserl, “Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, 11 March 1935,” trans. Dermot Moran and Lukas Steinacher, New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 8 (2008): 352. 39. For the status of Husserl’s questioning of this goal, see Knies, “The Practical Obscurity of Philosophy.” 40. Bernhard Waldenfels, “Despised Doxa: Husserl and the Continuing Crisis of Western Reason,” trans. Claude Evans, Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982): 25. 41. We can see something similar in various attempts to uncover the concrete reality of the political from underneath the depoliticised bureaucracy which it has increasingly become. Michael Marder uses this to relate the work of Carl Schmitt to that of Husserl. See Michael Marder, Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt (New York: Continuum, 2010), 4. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe themselves relate their political thought to this aspect of Husserl’s philosophy. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001), viii. An important and interesting difference between these figures and Husserl is that they do this to reestablish the fundamental possibility of conflict in politics, whereas Husserl does this to reestablish the philosophical ideal that ultimately is to overcome all conflict. 42. Husserl’s disdain for worldviews due to the relativism that they imply is well known, yet often overstated. Andrea Staiti has argued that to some extent Husserl changed his mind about them: “His later work can be read as a deliberate effort to set the basis for a phenomenologically inspired worldview, which is designed to provide a viable alternative to the dominance of naturalism.” Andrea Staiti, Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 236. In line with the context of Husserl’s later work, Staiti argues that Husserl’s change of heart regarding the notion of worldview was instigated by the First World War and the spiritual bankruptcy of the time. The argument that Husserl is looking to instate a phenomenologically inspired worldview based on his investigations into the life-world of course does not mean that the life-world is itself a worldview.

CHAPTER 5 1. For a brief overview of the concept before Husserl’s use of it see Ernst Wolfgang Orth, “‘Lebenswelt’ als eine unvermeidliche Illusion? Husserls Lebensweltbegriff und sein kulturpolitischen Weiterungen,” in Protosoziologie im Kontext. “Lebenswelt” und “System” in Philosophie und Soziologie, ed. Gerhard Preyer (Frankfurt am Main: Humanities Online, 2000), 29–31. For overviews of Husserl’s uses of it as well as various ways to classify these see David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 166; Anthony J. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Philosophy After Husserl (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 87–88; Orth, “‘Lebenswelt’ als eine unvermeidliche Illusion?,” 31–33; Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 129–30; and Dermot Moran, “Everydayness, Historicity and

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the World of Science: Husserl’s Life-World Reconsidered,” in The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility—Formalisation and the Life-World, eds. Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 112–15. 2. See, e.g., David Carr, “Husserl’s Problematic Concept of the Life-World,” American Philosophical Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1970): 331–39; Orth, “‘Lebenswelt’ als eine unvermeidliche Illusion?,” 37; and Rudolf Bernet, “Husserl’s Concept of the World,” in Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, eds. Rudolf Bernet, Donn Welton and Gina Zavota (London: Routledge, 2005), 19. 3. Bernhard Waldenfels, “Despised Doxa. Husserl and the Continuing Crisis of Western Reason,” trans. Claude Evans, Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982): 22. 4. On the importance of culture in Husserl’s analysis, see Andrea Staiti, “Different Worlds and Tendency to Concordance: Towards a New Perspective on Husserl’s Phenomenology of Culture,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 10 (2010): 127–43. 5. On the place of relativism in Husserl’s project, see Gail Soffer, Husserl and the Question of Relativism (Dordrecht: Springer, 1991). 6. Staiti, “Different Worlds and Tendency to Concordance,” 133. 7. See also Edmund Husserl, “Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum phänomenologischen Ursprung der Räumlichkeit der Natur,” in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Farber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940): 319. 8. See Dieter Lohmar, “The Foreignness of a Foreign Culture,” in Self-Awareness, Temporarily, and Alterity, ed. Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Springer, 1998), 215. 9. See Alfredo Ferrarin, “From the World to Philosophy and Back,” in Phenomenology in a New Key: Between Analysis and History: Analysis and History. Essays in Honor of Richard-Cobb Stevens, eds. Jeffrey Bloechl and Nicholas de Warren (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 89. 10. That reason can be found within the life-world has been noted by many. See Ludwig Landgrebe, “The World as a Phenomenological Problem,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1, no. 1 (1940): 49–50; Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, of the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009): 35; Timo Miettinen, “Edmund Husserl’s Europe,” New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 11 (2011): 97; Dermot Moran, “‘Even the Papuan Is a Man and Not a Beast’: Husserl on Universalism and the Relativity of Cultures,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 49, no. 4 (2011): 492; Andrea Staiti, Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 286. As Andrea Cimino has recently noted: “reason does not ‘emerge’ from an a-rational or pre-rational constitutive ground. Reason ‘co-exists,’ so to speak, with what is constituted in and through intentional operations in consciousness. It is a telos that performs a regulating function.” Andrea Cimino, “Husserl’s Project, Critique, and Idea of Reason,” Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 1, no. 2 (2020): 211.

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11. Jan Patočka, An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 169. See also Soffer, Husserl and the Question of Relativism, 115. 12. See, e.g., Ludwig Landgrebe, “A Meditation on Husserl’s Statement: ‘History Is the Grand Fact of Absolute Being,’” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 5, no. 3 (1974): 124; Steinbock, Home and Beyond, 99–102; and Donn Welton, The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 343. 13. Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 39. 14. See also Tanja Staehler, Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 47. 15. See, e.g., Steinbock, Home and Beyond, 108; James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 152–53; and Nicholas de Warren, “Husserl’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology of the Life-World as Culture Reconsidered,” in The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility—Formalisation and the Life-World, eds. Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 153. 16. Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 43. 17. Laszlo Tengelyi, “Experience and Infinity in Kant and Husserl,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 68 (2005): 493. 18. This is the case in Ideas I and in the Cartesian Meditations as noted by Carr (Phenomenology and the Problem of History, 154) and Welton (The Other Husserl, 345). 19. See, e.g., Waldenfels, Despised Doxa, 32–33; Donn Welton, “Husserl and the Japanese,” The Review of Metaphysics 44, no. 3 (1991): 602; Philip R. Buckley, Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), 248; and Klaus Held, Europa und die Welt: Studien zur welt-bürgerlichen Phänomenologie (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2013), 73. 20. See James Mensch, Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 160. 21. Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Philosophy, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 150. 22. See also Daniele De Santis, “‘Metaphysische Ergebnisse’: Phenomenology and Metaphysics in Edmund Husserl’s Cartesianische Meditationen (§60). Attempt at Commentary,” Husserl Studies 34 (2018): 63–83. 23. Soffer, Husserl and the Question of Relativism, 184–85. 24. James G. Hart, “From ‘Mythos’ to ‘Logos’ to Utopian Poetics: An Husserlian Narrative,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 25, no. 3 (1989): 164. 25. On this ‘heroism of reason,’ see Marco Cavallaro, “Der Heroismus der Vernunft. Ein Beitrag zur späten Ethik Husserls,” in Mathesis, Grund, Vernunft. Die philosophische Identität Europas zwischen Deutschem Idealismus und Phänomenologie (Würzburg: Ergon, 2019): 147–68. See also Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant: Eine Untersuchung über Husserls Verhaltnis zu Kant und dem Neukantianismus (The Hague:

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Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 302; and Rudolf Bernet et al., An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 212. 26. Buckley, Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility, 141. 27. Timo Miettinen, Husserl and the Idea of Europe (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 4. 28. Lee Chun Lo provides the most extensive overview of this dimension to Husserl’s work. Lee Chun Lo, Die Gottesauffassung in Husserls Phänomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008). See also Louis Dupré, “Husserl’s Thought on God and Faith,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 29, no. 2 (1968): 201–15; Mensch, Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism, 368–74; Ullrich Melle, “Edmund Husserl: From Reason to Love,” in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy, eds. John J. Drummond and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002): 228–48; Klaus Held, “Gott in Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie,” in Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences, eds. Filip Mattens, Hanne Jacobs, and Carlo Ierna (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010): 723–38; and John Drummond, “Husserl’s Middle Period and the Development of his Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 149–51). 29. See Marco Cavallaro and George Heffernan, “From Happiness to Blessedness: Husserl on Eudaimonia, Virtue, and the Best Life,” Horizon. Studies in Phenomenology 8, no. 2 (2019): 353–88. 30. Dupré, “Husserl’s Thought on God and Faith,” 202. See also Held, “Gott in Edmund Husserl’s Phänomenologie.” 31. Buckley, Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility, 141. See also Melle, “Edmund Husserl: From Reason to Love,” 241; and Drummond, “Husserl’s Middle Period and the Development of his Ethics,” 150–51. 32. David Carr, Interpreting Husserl (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 12. 33. Buckley, Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility, 248. 34. Miettinen, Husserl and the Idea of Europe, 3. 35. Ibid., 144. 36. Ibid. 37. As has been suggested by Ernst Wolfgang Orth, “Interkulturalität und Inter-Intentionalität. Zu Husserls Ethos der Erneuerung in seinen Japanischen Kaizo-Artikeln,’” Zeitschrift Für Philosophische Forschung 47, no. 3 (1993): 346; Steinbock, Home and Beyond, 207; Lohmar, “The Foreignness of a Foreign Culture,” 213–14; and Staehler, Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds, 183. 38. Patočka, An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, 169. 39. Gasché, Europe, of the Infinite Task, 83. 40. See also Susi Ferrarello, Husserl’s Ethics and Practical Intentionality (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 179. 41. Steinbock, Home and Beyond, 202. 42. See Melle, “Edmund Husserl: From Reason to Love,” 247.

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43. For an overview of Habermas’ critical remarks on Husserl’s work but also of their similarities and possible complementarity, see Matheson Russell, “On Habermas’ Critique of Husserl,” Husserl Studies 27:41–62. 44. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), 294ff. 45. See Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 42. 46. Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 38. 47. Russell, “On Habermas’ Critique of Husserl,” 59. 48. Dodd, Crisis and Reflection, 156.

CHAPTER 6 1. For an editorial perspective on the unity of Patočka’s work and the extent of the artificiality of this unity, see Ondřej Švec, “In the Name of the Author: The Artificial Unity of Jan Patočka’s Scattered Works,” Aisthesis 13, no. 2 (2020): 97–107. 2. Good overviews of the Patočka’s work as a whole and its development can be found in Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Martin Cajthaml, Europe and the Care of the Soul: Jan Patočka’s Conception of the Spiritual Foundations of Europe (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2014); and Martin Ritter, Into the World: The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology (Cham: Springer, 2019). 3. See Paul Ricoeur’s preface to the translation of the Heretical Essays (HE: xiii) and Aviezer Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 67. 4. See also Karel Novotný, “Europe, Post-Europe, and Eurocentrism,” in Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, eds. Darian Meacham and Francesco Tava (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). 5. Ritter, Into the World, 149. 6. Among those that show a hesitancy regarding this, see Michael Gubser, “Jan Patočka’s Transcendence to the World,” in Asubjective Phenomenology: Jan Patočka’s Project in the Broader Context of His Work, eds. L’ubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2011), 91; and James Dodd, “Polemos in Jan Patočka’s Political Thought,” in Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, eds. Darian Meacham and Francesco Tava (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 79. For those who see reference to Patočka’s Charta 77 texts as less problematic, see Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence, 16; Edward F. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patočka (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 129; James Mensch, Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology: Toward a New Concept of Human Rights (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2016); and Švec, “In the Name of the Author,” 105.

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7. For this view, see Johann P. Arnason, “The Idea of Negative Platonism: Jan Patočka’s Critique and Recovery of Metaphysics,” Thesis Eleven 90 (2007): 25; Eric Manton, “The Political Philosophy of a Non-Political Philosopher,” in Living in Problematicity, ed. Eric Manton (Prague: Oikúmené, 2007), 70–79; and Jakub Homolka, “Jan Patočka’s Non-Political Politics,” Interpretationes 1 (2017): 130–46. 8. Karel Novotný, “Leben und Natur: Zur frühen Phänomenologie der Natürlichen Welt bei Jan Patočka,” Interpretationes 1 (2017): 13. 9. While this work follows Husserl’s phenomenology, it should be noted that Martin Heidegger’s work was already becoming on important influence on Patočka as well. The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem might not even be all that of an accurate representation of Patočka’s own thought at the time (see Cajthaml, Europe and the Care of the Soul, 13). The contrast with his later work and its usefulness in showing Patočka’s move away from Husserl’s thought is all the greater for it. For a more extensive look at Patočka’s early work up to the 1950s, see Cajthaml, Europe and the Care of the Soul, 12–24. 10. Jan Patočka, The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, eds. Ivan Chvatík and L’ubica Učník (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 3. 11. Ibid., 6. 12. Ibid., 6–7. 13. Jan Patočka, “European Culture,” trans. Paul Wilson, Cross Currents 3 (1984): 6. 14. Jan Patočka, Living in Problematicity, ed. Eric Manton (Prague: Oikúmené, 2007), 40. Incidentally, Patočka already conceptualises this using the Platonic concept of the chorismos so important to his later Negative Platonism, which will be discussed in the next chapter. 15. See HE: 119–21; and Jan Patočka, “Ideology and Life in the Idea,” trans. Eric Manton, Studia Phaenomenologica 7:90–91. 16. Jan Patočka, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 224. 17. Jan Patočka, “On Masaryk’s Philosophy of Religion,” trans. Jiří Rothbauer, revised by James Dodd, Christinia Gschwandter, and Ludger Hagedorn, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14:113. 18. Jan Patočka, Vom Erscheinen als solchem. Texte aus dem Nachlass, eds. Helga Blaschek‑Hahn and Karel Novotný (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2000), 124. 19. Ibid., 123. 20. Jan Patočka, Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz, eds. Klaus Nellen, Jiri Nemec, and Ilja Srubar (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), 180. 21. Jan Patočka, “Husserl’s Subjectivism and the Call for an Asubjective Phenomenology,” in Asubjective Phenomenology: Jan Patočka’s Project in the Broader Context of His Work, eds. Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams. (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2015), 31. 22. See Jan Patočka, An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 169. 23. Jan Patočka, “Die Selbstbesinnung Europas,” trans. Josef Zumr, Perspektiven der Philosophie 20 (1994): 257.

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24. Patočka, Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, 169. 25. Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1998), 148. 26. Ibid., 140. 27. Ibid., 159–60. 28. Patočka, Philosophy and Selected Writings, 255. 29. Jan Patočka, “Time, Myth, Faith,” trans. Ludger Hagedorn, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14 (2015): 6. 30. Martin Ritter, “Patočka’s Care of the Soul Reconsidered: Performing the Soul Through Movement,” Human Studies 40 (2017): 236. 31. Ibid., 246. 32. Patočka, “Ideology and Life in the Idea,” 93. 33. For this, Patočka draws on the work of Hannah Arendt. 34. On this, see also Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence, 17; Ritter, Into the World, 154; and Darian Meacham and Francesco Tava, “Epoché and Institution: The Fundamental Tension in Jan Patočka’s Phenomenology,” Studies in East European Thought 73 (2021): 322. 35. See also Lorenzo Girardi, “From Care for the Soul to the Theory of the State in Jan Patočka,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 81, no. 3 (2020): 196–210. 36. Meacham and Tava, “Epoché and Institution,” 322. 37. Francesco Tava, The Risk of Freedom: Ethics, Phenomenology and Politics in Jan Patočka (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 134. 38. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age, 171. 39. While this idea of the absence of a separation of powers for a long time was a common trope regarding the Byzantine and Islamic world, more recent scholarship has indicated that this has been somewhat overstated. See Johann P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 25–27. 40. See Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burges (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 41. Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 380. 42. Jan Patočka, Liberté et sacrifice: Ecrits politiques, trans. Erika Abrams (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990), 127. 43. Tava, The Risk of Freedom, 12; see also Darian Meacham, “Supercivilization and Biologism,” in Thinking after Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, eds. Darian Meacham and Francesco Tava (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 106. 44. Patočka, Liberté et sacrifice, 119–20. 45. See also Meacham, “Supercivilization and Biologism,” 105. 46. Patočka is also aware of the global costs of Europe’s success, which still contributes “to the deepening of the gap between the blessed haves and those who are dying of hunger on a planet rich in energy” (HE: 132). 47. Patočka, “Ideology and Life in the Idea,” 92. 48. Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence, 105.

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49. Arnason, “The Idea of Negative Platonism,” 24–25. 50. See also Michal Zvarík, “The Decline of Freedom: Jan Patočka’s Phenomenological Critique of Liberalism,” The Yearbook on History and Interpretation of Phenomenology 4 (2016): 79–99. For a reading of Patočka that is more hostile to liberalism, see Ritter, Into the World, 161f. 51. See Patočka’s, “Fragment of a Letter to Irena Kronská,” in Thinking after Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, eds. Darian Meacham and Francesco Tava (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), xx–xxi. 52. See Patočka, “Die Selbstbesinnung Europas,” 264. 53. See, e.g., ibid., 273. 54. Jan Patočka, “Die nacheuropäische Epoche und ihre geistigen Probleme,” in Jan Patočka und die Idee von Europa, eds. Armin Homp and Markus Sedlaczek (Berlin: MitOst, 2003), 68. 55. See ibid., 68; KEE: 361.

CHAPTER 7 1. Already in his review of Husserl’s Crisis, Patočka says that Europe is Christianity more so than rationalism—with the caveat that he does not see them opposed to each other. Jan Patočka, “Edmund Husserl’s ‘Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transcendentale Phänomenologie,’” trans. Erika Abrams and Martin Pokorný, in Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility—Formalisation and the Life-World, eds. Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 27–28. 2. Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 239. 3. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 28. 4. It should be noted that at times Patočka downplays the claim that Christianity does not involve knowledge (PE, 139–40). Of course, the distinction between Christianity and Platonism should not be exaggerated. The crucial elements of Christianity, Patočka says, are derived from Plato (PE, 89–90, 128). 5. Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1998), 10. 6. Ludger Hagedorn, “Auto-Immunity or Transcendence: A Phenomenological Re-Consideration of Religion with Derrida and Patočka,” in Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers, ed. Hans Ruin (Stockholm: Södertörn University Publishers, 2010), 143–44. 7. In particular, Derrida’s overemphasis of Christianity in his interpretation of Patočka’s thought has been criticised; see, e.g., Ľubica Učník, “Patočka on Techno-Power and the Sacrificial Victim (Oběť),” in Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology: Centenary Papers, eds. Ivan Chvatík and Erika Abrams (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 188; Golfo Maggini, “Europe’s Janus Head: Jan Patočka’s Notion of ‘Overcivilization,’” Epoché 19, no. 1 (2014): 188; and Ivan Chvatík, “Jan Patočka

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and the Possibility of Spiritual Politics,” in Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, eds. Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 35. 8. Ivan Chvatík, “The Heretical Conception of the European Legacy in the Late Essays of Jan Patočka,” trans. James Hill, CTS (September 2003): 23. 9. Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 105. 10. Martin Koci, “Metaphysical Thinking After Metaphysics: A Theological Reading of Jan Patočka’s Negative Platonism,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79, no. 1–2 (2018): 31; see also Ludger Hagedorn, “‘Christianity Un-Thought’—A Reconsideration of Myth, Faith, and Historicity,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14 (2015): 38. 11. Quoted in Hagedorn, “Christianity Un-Thought,” 31. The letter itself is from 8 April 1944 and can be found in the Patočka Archives in Prague with signature 5052. As of yet, it is unpublished. 12. Jan Patočka, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 339. 13. Hagedorn, “Auto-Immunity or Transcendence,” 140. 14. Ibid., 147. 15. Martin Koci, “Christianity After Christendom: Rethinking Jan Patočka’s Heresy,” The Heythrop Journal (2019): 11. 16. Ibid. 17. Koci, “Metaphysical Thinking After Metaphysics,” 31. 18. Koci, “Christianity after Christendom,” 11. 19. Jan Patočka, Living in Problematicity, ed. Eric Manton (Prague: Oikúmené, 2007), 22. 20. Ibid., 68. 21. Jan Patočka, “On Masaryk’s Philosophy of Religion,” trans. Jiří Rothbauer, revised by James Dodd, Christinia Gschwandter, and Ludger Hagedorn, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14 (2015): 122. 22. Chvatík, “Jan Patočka and the Possibility of Spiritual Politics,” 35–36. That is not to say that it is irrelevant what kind of ‘being’ or ‘nonbeing’ the god that is invoked is. As discussed, it is a personal god, rather than as a metaphysical highest being. Yet, as Patočka remarks, “what a person is, that is not really adequately thematized in the Christian perspective” (HE: 107). 23. Patočka, Philosophy and Selected Writings, 271. 24. Ivan Chvatík, “The Responsibility of the ‘Shaken’: Jan Patočka and His ‘Care for the Soul’ in the ‘Post-European’ World,” Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology: Centenary Papers, eds. Ivan Chvatík and Erika Abrams (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 275. 25. The seminars referred to were privately held in the 1970s in Patočka’s apartment. They were recorded, transcribed, and published in the third volume of Patočka’s collected works in Czech. Fortunately, Chvatík quotes extensively from them and has translated full passages.

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26. Quoted in Ivan Chvatík, “Rethinking Christianity as a Suitable Religion for the Postmodern World,” in Phenomenology 2010: Selected Essays from Northern Europe 4 (2011): 319. 27. Quoted in Chvatík, “Rethinking Christianity,” 319. 28. Patočka, Philosophy and Selected Writings, 336. 29. Ibid., 339. 30. Francesco Tava, The Risk of Freedom: Ethics, Phenomenology and Politics in Jan Patočka (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 75. 31. It should be noted that this example is not entirely fitting either: Prior to his self-immolation, Palach wrote several letters to the Stalinist regime, demanding the end of their censorship and propaganda. It might be best to consider the completely pure sacrifice as a limit case. 32. This is the case in both the Heretical Essays and the Varna Lecture. 33. Patočka, Philosophy and Selected Writings, 338. 34. Ibid., 339. 35. Quoted in Chvatík, “Rethinking Christianity,” 318. 36. Patočka, “On Masaryk’s Philosophy of Religion,” 130. 37. See Wilhelm Weischedel, Der Gott der Philosophen. Grundlegung einer philosophischen Theologie im Zeitalter des Nihilismus (Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider, 1983), 170–73. Weischedel’s argument shows an interesting combination of two important sources of his thought: Heidegger’s phenomenology and Kant’s dialectic. He was a student of the former and editor of the works of the latter. 38. For a brief outline and history of Patočka’s project of negative Platonism beyond the essay discussed here, see Johann P. Arnason, “The Idea of Negative Platonism: Jan Patočka’s Critique and Recovery of Metaphysics,” Thesis Eleven 90 (2007). Of particular interest is the fact that the essay on Overcivilisation and Its Inner Conflict was part of the project, highlighting the link between Patočka’s metaphysical and political thought. Following Findlay and Tava, the essay on negative Platonism will be taken as the philosophical ground of Patočka’s later work on not just metaphysics and phenomenology but also on Europe and politics. See Edward F. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patočka (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 68; Tava, The Risk of Freedom, 7. 39. Among others, Kohák has already noted the pronounced kinship between Patočka’s negative Platonism and phenomenology. See Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 59. 40. Jan Patočka, Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz, eds. Klaus Nellen, Jiri Nemec, and Ilja Srubar (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), 441; Jan Patočka, Vom Erscheinen als solchem. Texte aus dem Nachlass, eds. Helga Blaschek‑Hahn and Karel Novotný (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2000), 190. 41. Patočka, Vom Erscheinen als solchem, 194. 42. Ibid., 190. 43. Patočka, “On Masaryk’s Philosophy of Religion,” 127. 44. Patočka, Vom Erscheinen als solchem, 208. 45. Patočka, Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz, 264.

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46. Ibid., 155. 47. Ibid., 264. 48. Jan Patočka, “Husserl’s Subjectivism and the Call for an Asubjective Phenomenology,” in Asubjective Phenomenology: Jan Patočka’s Project in the Broader Context of His Work, eds. Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams. (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2015), 33. 49. Hans R. Sepp, “On the Border: Cultural Difference in and beyond Jan Patočka’s Philosophy of History,” New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 3 (2003): 163. 50. There are remarkable similarities between the work of Patočka and Nancy. It is clear that this is in part because of the important influence of Heidegger on both. Although Nancy nowhere provides an in-depth discussion of Patočka’s work, he was familiar with it. On occasion he referred to it, albeit in a very general manner. The most important, albeit also brief, reference is in The Sense of the World, where in the very first line Nancy refers to the “crisis of sense,” a phrase which he attributes to Patočka and which is one of the main themes of Nancy’s work in general. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 2. The only other reference to Patočka seems to be as an inclusion in a list of philosophers of history. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth of Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 144. Unfortunately, whereas the French original correctly spells Patočka’s name, the translation renders it almost unrecognizable as ‘Paturca.’ 51. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 58. 52. Ibid., 70. 53. Ibid., 23. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 59. 56. Sepp, “On the Border,” 170. 57. Patočka, “On Masaryk’s Philosophy of Religion,” 131. 58. Nancy, The Gravity of Thought, 59. 59. Ibid. 60. Patočka, Vom Erscheinen als solchem, 41. 61. Chvatík, “Jan Patočka and the Possibility of Spiritual Politics,” 36. 62. Marin Cajthaml, for instance, recognises a tension between the existential and cosmological sides of problematicity, but he interprets Patočka as reducing the latter to the former. See Martin Cajthaml, Europe and the Care of the Soul. Jan Patočka’s Conception of the Spiritual Foundations of Europe (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2014), 50–51, 134–43. He rightfully addresses this problem but overlooks the possibility that the opposite interpretation is also possible on the basis of Patočka’s work, even if Patočka himself did not take any strong position on this. The reason for this is that Cajthaml thinks that doing so would entail giving up the idea of transcendence without a transcendent, which he agrees is fundamental to Patočka’s work. The interpretation of problematicity given in this section avoids this problem because it bases

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the problematicity of human existence on problematicity as a cosmological truth that nonetheless does not have reference to anything transcendent. 63. Jan Patočka, “On the Prehistory of the Science of Movement: World, Earth, Heaven and the Movement of Human Life,” trans. Erika Abrams, in Dis-Orientations: Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity, eds. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Tora Lane (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 71. 64. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age, 105–06. 65. Koci has denounced this move of interpreting problematicity itself as absolute, because “there is a certain adequacy still operative in what [Patočka] calls inadequacy” (‘inadequacy’ more or less being a synonym for problematicity). Koci, “Metaphysical Thinking After Metaphysics,” 28. Yet, taking problematicity to be absolute does not preclude there being any adequacy, any stable meaning in our lives or the world at all. It merely precludes the existence of a total adequacy that could not, in principle, be overcome by inadequacy, just as inadequacy could never be fully overcome by adequacy. 66. Darian Meacham and Francesco Tava, “Epoché and Institution: The Fundamental Tension in Jan Patočka’s Phenomenology,” Studies in East European Thought 73 (2021): 317.

CHAPTER 8 1. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013), 6. 2. For a brief overview of Patočka as a political philosopher, see Eric Manton, “The Political Philosophy of a Non-Political Philosopher,” in Living in Problematicity (Prague: Oikúmené, 2007), 70–79. 3. Darian Meacham and Francesco Tava, “Epoché and Institution: The Fundamental Tension in Jan Patočka’s Phenomenology,” Studies in East European Thought 73 (2021): 322. 4. Edward F. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patočka (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 105–06. 5. Ibid., 196. 6. This is the view taken by Aviezer Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 19. 7. See James Mensch, Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology: Toward a New Concept of Human Rights (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2016). Mensch articulates three different categories of rights corresponding to the three movement of human existence that Patočka discusses in his work. His theory of the movement of human existence has not been discussed here, so the focus will be on the third movement which corresponds to what has been discussed as transcendence. Mensch correlates the first movement (that of grounding or anchoring) with that of personal rights (such as the rights to life, privacy, and property), and the second movement

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(that of self-sustenance or extension) to economic rights (such as gainful employment). The third movement (that of authentic human existence) corresponds with political and social rights. Martin Ritter has correctly emphasised that treating these movements as fully separate is an abstraction (see Martin Ritter, Into the World: The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology [Cham: Springer, 2019], 156–57). Not only are there physical conditions for the care of the soul to take place, but this care ultimately aims at the elevation of the physical and not of its abandonment. Taking this into account, matters such as sustenance or even power and wealth can belong to the care of the soul. 8. Mensch, Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology, 154. 9. Ibid., 156. 10. Tucker has related this issue to the political circumstances of Patočka himself, or rather, those of Charta 77. He notes that after the Velvet Revolution, where many of those involved with Charta 77 attained prominent political positions, the philosophy that proved suitable for political resistance was problematic when in power. The significance of institutions was overlooked, allowing the old elite and new political opportunists to corrupt politics again. See Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence, 17. 11. As noted in chapter 6, to an extent this concerned debate on principles more so than concrete practices, as “Socrates defends with new methods the old” (PE: 84). 12. For an overview of the classical distinction between politics and the political, see Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 35–60. 13. The proponents of value pluralism also stress that despite the impossibility of any view to be the one and only absolute truth, these views are not indifferent to truth. See Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Vintage Books [Division of Random House Inc.], 1992), 79–80, 87; and John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 2007), 106. 14. See Tamara Cărăuş, “Patočka’s Radical and Agonistic Politics,” in Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, eds. Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015): 248; and Gustav Strandberg, “An A-subjective Coexistence,” Interpretationes 1 (2017): 44. 15. Marion Bernard, “Patočka’s Figures of Political Community,” in Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, eds. Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015): 269. 16. This goes against Cajthaml’s interpretation of Patočka as advocating the unity of political power and spiritual authority. See Martin Cajthaml, Europe and the Care of the Soul: Jan Patočka’s Conception of the Spiritual Foundations of Europe (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2014), 128, 131. While Patočka does at times suggest such a link, this is mainly in terms of dissidence, which as mentioned in chapter 6 can be seen as a limit case that aims at restoring the space of the political as such rather than presenting a concrete politics beyond this. 17. Cărăuş, “Patočka’s Radical and Agonistic Politics,” 249.

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18. Marie Paxton discusses the institutional deficit of agonistic democracy and the extent to which it holds. See Marie Paxton, Agonistic Democracy: Rethinking Political Institutions in Pluralist Times (New York: Routledge, 2020), 80–86. See also Ed Wingenbach, Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy: Post-Foundationalism and Political Liberalism (London: Routledge, 2011). 19. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001), 115. 20. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, “Post-Marxism without Apologies,” New Left Review 166 (1987): 82. 21. See, e.g., Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 122, 125. 22. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on The Revolutions of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 18. 23. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 37. 24. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 126. 25. See Wingenbach, Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy, xv. 26. Hence, Wingenbach can place Mouffe as one of the primary pluralist thinkers in the agonistic tradition (Wingenbach, Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy, xv) while Paxton sees her as more adversarial (Paxton, Agonistic Democracy, 67). 27. Wingenbach, Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy, 99. 28. See Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005), 13. 29. Ibid., 102. 30. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 166. See also William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 128. 31. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 102. 32. Hans R. Sepp, “On the Border: Cultural Difference in and Beyond Jan Patočka’s Philosophy of History,” New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 3 (2003): 162. 33. Ivan Chvatík, “Jan Patočka and the Possibility of Spiritual Politics,” in Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, eds. Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 36. 34. See Wingenbach, Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy, 99; and Paxton, Agonistic Democracy, 13. 35. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 27. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. See Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 85–86. 39. See Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 24. 40. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 34.

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41. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 225. Although they approach it on the basis of different frameworks that cannot simply be equated, the gap of which Lefort speaks is very similar to what Patočka discussed as the chorismos in his Negative Platonism. 42. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 19. 43. Ibid., 17. 44. This is not surprising, given that both Patočka and Lefort were influenced by Hannah Arendt’s influential work on the topic. 45. Ibid., 34–35. 46. Ibid., 28. 47. Jan-Werner Müller, “On the Origins of Constitutional Patriotism,” Contemporary Political Theory 5 (2006): 279. 48. See, e.g., article 21(2) of the Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, which declares that political parties that undermine the democratic order of Germany are unconstitutional. 49. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 41. 50. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 86. 51. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 41. 52. Ibid. 53. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 258. We can perhaps also interpret the following comment of Patočka’s in this light: The shaken individual “is not of course a politician and is not political in the usual sense of the word,” but nonetheless “cannot be apolitical.” Jan Patočka, Living in Problematicity, ed. Eric Manton (Prague: Oikúmené, 2007), 63. 54. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 107. 55. See Paxton, Agonistic Democracy, 177. 56. See Jan Patočka, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 342. Since this text was written in the context of Charta 77 and intended for a more general audience, its place in Patočka’s philosophy and the question whether it should be counted as a proper part of it all is somewhat complicated. Insofar as it is an accurate statement of his views on human rights in the postwar period, however, it suits the present argument.

Index

absolute subjectivity, 98 active nihilism, 124 agonist critique, of liberal democracy, 46; alternative political approaches in, 42–44; concept of the political and, 59–60; Connolly on, 40–41; Gray and, 42–45; Habermas and, 40–41, 45; merits of, 44; Mouffe on, 42, 45; pluralism and, 42, 143–44; private thought and, 42; problematicity and, 142–49; public thought and, 42; Rawls and, 40–41, 45; relativism and, 44; social logic in, 41; in Western nations, 41–42 agonistic respect, 145 Alexander the Great, 5 American Anthropological Association, 24, 172 American Anthropological Society, 172n29 Americas. See ‘New World’ Ancient Greece: in CE, 51–52; in Grand Narrative, 2; in Hua, 52; idea of Europe and, 4; idea of the world influenced by, 53–56; lifeworld and, 73; philosophy developed in, 4; polis in, 107, 141–42, 147; reason developed in, 2; soul in, 104; universal life-interest in, 53

Antiquity era, 1; idea of Europe during, 4 Arendt, Hannah, 12, 42, 191n53 Auschwitz Camp, 12–13, 26 authoritarianism, rationalist politics and, 33 Balibar, Étienne, 6 Bauman, Zygmunt, 12, 19 Benda, Julien, 23 Berlin, Isaiah, 8 Bernard, Marion, 141 Between Past and Future (Arendt), 191n53 Blumenberg, Hans, 168n16 Bourne, Randolph, 12 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoyevsky), 97 Buchanan, James, 60 Buckley, R. Philip, 55–56, 86; on faith, 83, 85 Byzantine Eastern Orthodox Roman Empire, 108 Cajthaml, Marin, 187n62 Cărăuş, Tamara, 142 Carr, David, 86 Cartesianism, 37 193

194

Index

Cartesian Meditations (CM) (Husserl): humanity in, 59; isolation from community in, 79; lifeworld in, 79; phenomenological structure in, 76; phenomenology in, 76–77, 79 Castoriadis, Cornelius, x Catholic Christianity, 5 CE. See The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology Central Europe, Stalinism as influence in, 26 Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de, 122 Charles V (King), 5 Charta 77 (dissident group), x, 95, 112, 150, 189n10, 191n56 China, 34 chorismos, in NP, 125–26, 191n41 Christendom, 1; Europe label as replacement for, 6; in idea of Europe, 5; during Middle Ages, 3; Peace of Augsburg, 6; Peace of Westphalia, 6 Christian doctrine, 21 Christianity: crisis as concept in, 169n40; demythologised, xvi, 122; divisions with, 5; in Eastern Europe, 25; in Europe, x, 5, 26, 184n1; Europeanisation of, 5; Europe as idea and, 4; in HE, 114, 116, 118–20, 122–23; metanoesis and, 116–23; mysterium tremendum and, 117–18, 120, 125; Patočka on, 109, 114, 116–23; Plato as influence on, 184n4; Platonism as distinct from, 119, 123; rationality of, 2, 21; in Roman Empire, 4, 109; universalism of, 5. See also Catholic Christianity; Orthodox Christianity Chvatik, Ivan, 117, 119, 145, 185n25 civilisation, catastrophes of, 12–13 civil society: during Middle Ages, 9; modernity and, 10 classical liberalism, 173n11 climate change, European Union and, 1

CM. See Cartesian Meditations Cold War, 97 community: characteristics of, 11; in CM, 79; isolation from, 79; of love, 88–89; of monads, 79; problematicity and, 99; universal, 79 Comte, Auguste, 21, 32 Connolly, William E., 30, 40–41, 145, 174n40, 174n57; ethos of pluralisation, 43–44; on social logic, 44 cosmopolitanism, 175n14 Counter-Enlightenment, 172n29 crises, for Europe as an idea: in Christian contexts, 169n40; definition of, 13–14; of faith, 15; First World War as, 13, 47, 170n44; history of, 14; Husserl on, 13; imperfect, 14; in Judaic contexts, 169n40; Koselleck on, 13–14; logic of, 20–21; Patočka on, 13; perfect, 14; Rousseau on, 14; Second World War as, 47, 170n44 Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, The (CE) (Husserl), 48; Ancient Greece as European influence in, 51–52; care of the soul in, 107; ‘crisis of the idea’ in, 62–68; Eurocentrism in, 50; European exceptionalism, 51; Europe as supranationality, 49; humanity in, 57–58; idea of the world in, 53–56; lifeworld in, 70–75; phenomenological justification in, 75–80; phenomenological results in, 87; practical reason in, 81–83; prescientific life in, 57; spiritual life of Europe in, 53; spiritual shape of Europe, 49–51 ‘crisis of the idea’: in CE, 62–68; in Formal and Transcendental Logic, 65; in Hua, 62–63; Husserl on, 61–68; life-world and, 66–68; naturalism and, 65; in natural

Index

sciences, 64–66; objectivism and, 65; philosophy of modernity as result of, 62–63; rationalism and, 66–67; theory of everything and, 65; in Vienna Lecture, 62, 65–67 cult for the particular, 23–24 cultural relativism: adoption of, 25; cult for the particular and, 23–24; justification of, 24; universalism and, 24 culture: chauvinism and, 23; lifeworld and, 69, 72. See also national culture Declaration of Human Rights, 172n29 Declaration of Independence, in US, 24 Delanty, Gerard, 4–5, 23, 167n1 democracy: freedom of, ix; Gray on, 43; Lefort on, 136; liberalism in conflict with, 34. See also liberal democracy demythologised Christianity, xvi, 122 Derrida, Jacques, 51–52; Platonism for, 117 Diderot, Denis, 21 Dodd, James, 52, 91 Donner, Piet Hein, 148–49 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 97 Dupré, Louis, 85 Durkheim, Emile, 21 Eagleton, Terry, 21, 25 Eastern civilisations: as ‘Other’, 25; rationalism in, 7; superiority of, 7. See also China Eastern Europe: Christianity in, 25; exclusion from, 2; Stalinism as influence in, 26 economic rights, 188n7 eidetic phenomenology, 48 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 9 Enlightenment: Counter-Enlightenment, 172n29; failures of, 23 EU. See European Union Eurocentrism, xvi, 47; in CE, 50; of Husserl, 51, 56; Patočka and, 94

195

Europe: care of the soul and, 106–14; Christendom replaced by, 6; Christianity in, x, 5, 26, 184n1; contested identity of, 25–27; crises in, 13–15; early geographic boundaries of, 3; essence of, x; etymological origins of name, 6; exploitation of ‘New World’, 7; exploitation of sub-Saharan Africa, 7; Frankish unification of, 5; Germanic influences in, 2; as idea, 3–10; illiterate population in, 2; integration after Second World War, 25–26; Islam as external threat to, 5; modernity in, 10, 19; national cultures of, 19; overcivilisation of, 110; Peace of Westphalia, 6; as philosophical project, xiv; rationalism in, x, 25; reason expanded through, 9; after Second World War, 112; Soviet Union as geopolitical successor of, 17; as supranationality, 49–50; symbolism of, 19–20; theoretical approach to, x–xi; universalism in, 25, 47; United States as geopolitical successor of, 17. See also Antiquity era; Central Europe; Christendom; Eastern Europe; Grand Narrative European Union (EU): climate change and, 1; criticism of, 25–26; cultural cohesion as purpose of, 1; Euroscepticism and, 25–26; LGBTQ+ rights in, 1; Russia and, 1; social cohesion as purpose of, 1 ‘Europe as an idea’: Ancient Greece and, 4; Christendom and, 5; Christianity and, 4; classical sources of, 7–8; cultural exchange as part of, 4; development of, 3–4; economic exchange as part of, 4; European exceptionalism, 50–51; European west and, 6; after First World War, ix, 176n29; in Grand Narrative, 7; ideal of reason and, 7–10; idea of,

196

Index

49–53; imperial authority and, 4; intellectual exchange as part of, 4; Latin as common language, 4; Patočka on, 95; Roman Empire as influence on, 4–5; Roman law and, 4; spiritual shape of Europe, 49–51; Weber and, 7–8 Euroscepticism, 25–26 faith: Buckley on, 83, 85; crisis of, 15; God and, 84; Husserl on, 81–86; lack of, 85–86; after Second World War, 121; transcendence through, 118–19 fascism, irrationality and, 97 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 175n14 fideism, 23–25 Findlay, Edward F., 106, 131, 138 Finkielkraut, Alain, 22, 24 First World War (WWI): as crisis of idea of Europe, 13, 47, 170n44; destruction of Europe as idea after, ix, 176n29; Husserl’s political philosophy influenced by, xii Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl), 65 Frankfurter Schule, x, 12 freedom: of democracy, ix; Patočka on, 135; of speech, ix Fukuyama, Francis, 18–19 fundamentalisms, 22 Galileo, Galilei, 63 Gasché, Rodolphe, 110, 116, 175n6 Gauchet, Marcel, 109 Geisteswissenschaften (humanities), 175n3 German Idealism, 23 Germany: European culture influenced by, 2; Geisteswissenschaften in, 175n3; after Holocaust, 26; national identity for, 26; Weimar, 170n43. See also Nazi Germany Gibbon, Edward, 21 God, faith and, 84

Grand Narrative, for Europe, 3, 167n1, 170n44; Ancient Greece in, 2; Eastern Europe excluded from, 2; Europe as idea in, 7; flaws of, 2; Holocaust as end of, 12–13; liberal democracy in, 31; secularisation in, 39; as subtraction story, 8; Taylor on, 8; teleology of, 19; in twentieth century, 15 Gray, John, 30, 174n41; agonist critique of liberal democracy and, 42–45; on democracy, 43; on liberalism, 43; modus vivendi for, 43–45; on pluralism, 43, 45 Greece. See Ancient Greece Gress, David, 167n1 Guénoun, Denis, 5 Habermas, Jürgen, xiv, 30; agonist critique of liberal democracy and, 40–41, 45; on concept of the political, 60; critique of phenomenology, 40; on European symbolism, 19–20; on liberal consensus, 34–40; on liberal doctrines, 36–37; on life-world, 89; on modernity, 39–40; on privatisation of political views, 38; rationality as normative status, 90; on rational politics, 34–40; on teleology of secularisation, 39 Hagedorn, Ludger, 117–18 von Hardenberg, Georg Friedrich Philipp. See Novalis Hart, James G., 81 Hayek, Friedrich, 32 HE. See Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, on reason, 9 Heidegger, Martin, 42, 182n9 Held, Klaus, 63 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 23 Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (HE) (Patočka), 150–52; care

Index

of the soul in, 107–12; Christianity in, 114, 116, 118–20, 122–23; Cold War in, 97; meaning in, 138; myth in, 100; negative Platonism in, 123–24, 126; problematicity in, 99–101, 116, 118–20, 122–24, 126, 128–29, 131–32; soul as political project in, 102–4 Hitler, Adolph, 12. See also Holocaust; Nazi Germany Hobbes, Thomas, 32, 44 Holocaust, 170n44; Auschwitz Camp, 12–13, 26; as contested term, 169n32; European integration influenced by, 26; Fukuyama on, 18–19; German identity after, 26; Grand Narrative’s end with, 12–13 Honig, Bonnie, 30, 41 Horton, John, 44 Hua. See Husserlania humanity: in CE, 57–58; in CM, 59; in Hua, 57–59; Husserl on, 57–61; rationality and, 58–59; Rawls on, 60; Schmitt on, 58–59, 61; in Vienna Lecture, 66–67 Hume, David, 21 Hus, Jan, 121 Husserl, Edmund: Ancient Greek philosophy as influence on, 175n6; on community of love, 88–89; on crisis of the idea, 61–68; Eurocentrism of, 51, 56; on European crises, 13; on European exceptionalism, 50; on faith, 81–86; First World War as influence on, xii; Formal and Transcendental Logic, 65; founding of phenomenological theories, xii; on humanity, 57–61; on idea of Europe as an idea, 49–53; on idea of world, 53–57; Ideas, 48; on infinite task, 53–57; on life-world, 67; life-world for, 66–68; Patočka as student of, 96–98; on political as concept, 57–61; on practical reason, 81–86; rationality

197

as normative status, 90; replication crisis, 176n34; on spiritual shape of Europe, 49–50; on subjectivity, 98; on supranations, 58; teleology use by, 83–84, 91; universalism for, 61, 70; Vienna Lecture, 62, 65–67. See also Cartesian Meditations; The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology; phenomenology Husserlania (Hua) (Husserl): Ancient Greek influences in, 52; ‘crisis of the idea’ in, 62–63; eidetic phenomenology in, 48; humanity in, 57–59; idea of the world in, 53–55; life-world in, 71, 73–75; metaphysics in, 49; phenomenological results in, 87–88; practical reason in, 81–86 ideal: life-world and, 69; phenomenological establishment of, 69–80 idealism, 37; politics and, xv; teleological, 54 ideality: philosophical, 86–87; reality compared to, xi, 70. See also ‘Europe as an idea’ ideal of reason, 7–12; alienation and, 10; breakdown of, 10–12; Novalis, 10–11; Rousseau on, 10–11 idea of the world: Ancient Greek influences on, 53–56; in CE, 53–56; formality of, 56–57; in Hua, 53–55; radical demytholigisation in, 54; teleological idealism and, 54 Ideas (Husserl), 48 ideation, for Kant, 50 illiteracy, in Europe, 2 imperfect crises, 14 inequality, social and political, in Roman Empire, 108 internationalism, 175n14 intersubjectivity: in phenomenology, 78, 80, 89; transcendental, 79 irrationality, 59; fascism and, 97

198

Index

Islamic world, 4; Europe threatened by, 5; since 9/11, 27 Jaspers, Karl, 175n6 Judaism, crisis as concept in, 169n40 Jünger, Ernst, 122 justice, Rawls on, 36 Kaizo (journal), 48, 83 Kant, Immanuel: denial of knowledge by, 22; ideation for, 50; metaphysical views of, 37; postulates theory, 83; republicanism for, 175n14; unsocial sociability and, 9 Ketzerische Essais zur Philosophie der Geschichte und ergänzende Schriften (KEE) (Patočka), 93; care of the soul in, 109–11, 113; problematicity in, 101, 128; soul as political project in, 103, 106 knowledge, Kant’s denial of, 22 Koci, Martin, 118–19, 188n65 Kohák, Erazim, 117 Koselleck, Reinhart, on crises in Europe, 13–14 Laclau, Ernesto, 142, 177n41 Latin, as language, idea of Europe and, 4 law. See Roman law Lefort, Claude, x; conceptualisation of democracy, 136, 146–47 LGBTQ+ populations, right for, 1 liberal consensus: Habermas on, 34–40; private spheres and, 38; public spheres and, 38; Rawls on, 34–40 liberal democracy: agonist critique of, 40–46; development of, 30; in Grand Narrative, 31; modern republicanism and, 31; Patočka’s critique of, 146–47; pluralism and, 31; political neutrality and, 32; problematicity and, 142–49; reason and, 31–34; universalism and, 31. See also rationalist politics

liberalism: classical, 173n11; democracy in conflict with, 34; Gray on, 43; neutralism of, 35–36 Liebnizianism, 37 Life in Balance, Life in Amplitude (Patočka), 96 life-world: Ancient Greeks and, 73; in CE, 70–75; in CM, 79; in contradiction with itself, 74; ‘crisis of the idea’ and, 66–68; as cultural world, 69, 72; establishment of ideal and, 69; Habermas on, 89; as homeworld, 86–87; as horizon, 69–70, 73–74, 78; in Hua, 71, 73–75; rationalist teleology and, 74; relativism and, 73; scepticism and, 73; as single world, 72; structure of, 73–74; thematisation of, 71 logic, of European crises, 20–21 Lyotard, Jean-François, 167n1 Machiavelli, Nicola, 21 Maistre, Joseph de, 172n29 Marchart, Oliver, 147, 149 Marcuse, Herbert, 149 Marder, Michael, 177n41 Marx, Karl, 32 materialism, 37 Meacham, Darian, 105, 132, 137–38 meaning, in HE, 138 meaninglessness, 130–31; significance and, 132. See also nihilism meaning of meaning, 130 Meillassoux, Quentin, 22–23 Mensch, James, 139, 188n7 Merkel, Angela, 26 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, x metanoesis, 150; Christianity and, 116–23 metaphysics, Kant on, 37 Middle Ages: Christendom era during, 3; organization of society during, 9 Miettinen, Timo, 56, 58, 83–84, 87 moderate overcivilisation, 110–11 modern Europe. See Europe

Index

modernity: ‘crisis of the idea’ and, 62–63; development of, 22; Habermas on, 39–40; Novalis on, 19; philosophy of, 62–63; reason and, 22; secularism and, 39–40 modus vivendi, for Gray, 43–45 Montesquieu, 21 Moran, Dermot, 50 Mouffe, Chantal, 30, 136, 142–43, 145, 174n40, 177n41; on agonist critique of liberal democracy, 42, 45; on pluralism, 144 Müller, Jan-Werner, 148 mysterium tremendum, 117–18, 120; in “Negative Platonism”, 125 myth, mythology and: demythologised Christianity, xvi; in HE, 100; for Patočka, 100 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 147, 187n50; on meaning of meaning, 130; on signification, 129–30 national culture, in Europe, 19 nationalism, 175n14 National Socialism, Schmitt and, 61 naturalism, ‘crisis of the idea’ and, 65 natural sciences, ‘crisis of the idea’ and, 64–66 Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, The (Patočka), 96, 182n9 Nazi Germany: cold rationality of, 13. See also Holocaust negative Platonism, 186n38; central tenets of, 126–27; in HE, 123–24, 126 “Negative Platonism” (NP) (Patočka), 110; chorismos in, 125–26, 191n41; mysterium tremendum in, 125; problematicity in, 123–27, 131 neutrality, 172n3 New Age spirituality, 22 ‘New World’, European exploitation of, 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42, 124

199

nihilism: active, 124; Nietzsche and, 124; Patočka on, 123–24 9/11 terrorist attacks, Islamic world after, 27 Nisbet, Robert A., 13 Novalis, 10–11; on modernity of Europe, 19 Novotný, Karel, 96 NP. See “Negative Platonism” objectivism, ‘crisis of the idea’ and, 65 Orthodox Christianity, 4 overcivilisation: of Europe, 110; moderate, 110–11; radical, 110, 140 Overcivilisation and Its Inner Conflict (Patočka), 110, 112, 186n38 Palach, Jan, 122 Patočka, Jan: on biological-technical belief, 109; Charta 77 and, x, 95, 112, 150, 189n10, 191n56; on Christianity, 109, 114, 116–23; critique of liberal democracy, 146–47; on division of Roman Empire, 108; Eurocentrism and, 94; on Europe after Second World War, 112; on European crises, 13; on ‘Europe as an idea’, 95; on freedom, 135; Husserl and, 96–98; Life in Balance, Life in Amplitude, 96; on moderate overcivilisation, 13; myths for, 100; The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, 96, 182n9; on negative Platonism, 123–27; on nihilism, 123–24; on overcivilisation, 110–11, 140; Overcivilisation and Its Inner Conflict, 110, 112, 186n38; Plato as influence on, 105; on Platonism, 116–17; political philosophy of, 93–95; political theory for, 137–42; on preproblematical world, 11, 100–102; problematicity and, 99–102, 115–32; on sacrifice, 121–22; on Second World War, 110; Second World War

200

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as influence on, xii–xiii; on soul as political project, 102–6; subjective phenomenology and, 98; teleological position of, 96. See also Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History; Ketzerische Essais zur Philosophie der Geschichte und ergänzende Schriften; “Negative Platonism”; Plato and Europe Paxton, Marie, 146, 190n18 PE. See Plato and Europe Peace of Augsburg, 6 Peace of Westphalia, 6 perfect crises, 14 phenomenological philosophy, 48 phenomenology: in CM, 76–77, 79; eidetic, 48; epochē, 127–28; existential inadequacy of, 86–91; founding of, x; Habermas critique of, 40; intersubjectivity in, 78, 80, 89; introduction of, 48; justification of, 75–80; limits of, 75–80; metaphysics and, 49; methodological approach to, xii–xviii; objects of experience in, 75–78; philosophy of facticity, 48; political inadequacy of, 86–91; of problematicity, 127–33; pure, 48; reestablishment of ideal and, 69–80; subjective, 98. See also Husserl, Edmund; Patočka, Jan philosophical ideality, 86–87 philosophy: in Ancient Greece, 4, 175n6; Europe as philosophical project, xiv; of facticity, 48; as function of mankind, 57; ideality and, 86–87; of modernity, 62–63; phenomenological, 48; political, xii– xiii, 93–95 Pius, Antonius (Emperor), 5 Plato: Christianity influenced by, 184n4; as founder of European ideals, 106; Patočka influenced by, 105; SocraticPlatonic innovation, 101. See also Platonic Idea of the Good; Platonism

Plato and Europe (PE) (Patočka), 93; care of the soul in, 107–8; European rationalism in, 97; myth in, 100; problematicity in, 100, 102, 139–40; soul as political project in, 103–6 Platonic Idea of the Good, 101 Platonism: Christianity as distinct from, 119, 123; for Derrida, 117; negative, 123–27; Patočka on, 116–17 pluralism: agonist critique of liberal democracy and, 42, 143–44; Connolly on, 43–44; Gray on, 43, 45; liberal consensus and, 34–40; liberal democracy and, 31; Mouffe on, 144; in rationalist politics, 31; Rawls on, 36; universalism and, 31; value, 189n13; in Western societies, 37 polis, in Ancient Greece, 107, 141–42, 147 political, concept of: agonistic thinking and, 59–60; Habermas on, 60; Husserl on, 57–61; Schmitt on, 58–61, 141 political inequality. See inequality political neutrality, 32 political rights, 188n7 politics: idealistic approaches to, xv; methodological approach to, xii– xviii; problematicity and, 135–52; universalistic approaches to, xv postsecularism, 20 poststructuralism, 42 postulates, theory of, 83 practical reason: in CE, 81–83; crisis in, 82–83; in Hua, 81–86; Husserl on, 81–86; rationality in, 82 Prague Philosophical Circle, 96 preproblematical world, Patočka on, 11, 100–102 problematicity: agonist critique of liberal democracy and, 142–49; community and, 99; definition and scope of, 131–32; in HE, 99–101, 116, 118–20, 122–24, 126, 128–29, 131–32; institutionalisation of,

Index

141–42; in KEE, 101, 128; liberal democracy and, 142–49; in NP, 123–27, 131; objective side of, 131; Patočka and, 99–102, 115–32, 167n2; in PE, 100, 102, 139–40; phenomenology of, 127–33; political theory and, 137–42; politics and, 135–52; subjective side of, 131; transcendence and, 131, 139 proceduralism, 35 psychoanalysis, 42 pure phenomenology, 48 radical overcivilisation, 110, 140 radical relativism, 145 rationalism, rationality and: barbarity and, 15; of Christianity, 2, 21; ‘crisis of the idea’ and, 66–67; in Eastern civilisations, 7; in Europe, x, 25; for Habermas, 90; humanity and, 58–59; for Husserl, 90, 97; lifeworld and, 74; in Nazi Germany, 13; of overcivilisation, 110; in PE, 97; in practical reason, 82; Second World War and, 97; teleology and, 74, 80, 86 rationalist politics: authoritarianism and, 33; development of, 33; in Grand Narrative, 33; Habermas on, 34–40; instrumentalist view, 32; pluralism in, 31; Rawls on, 34–40; self-interest in, 32–33; totalitarianism and, 33; universalism in, 31 Rawls, John, xiv, 30; agonist critique of liberal democracy and, 40–41, 45; on humanity, 60; on justice, 36; on liberal consensus, 34–40; on liberal doctrines, 36–37; on nonpublic identity, 35; on pluralism, 36; proceduralism for, 35; on rationalist politics, 34–40 realism, 37 reality, ideality compared to, xi reason, as concept: in ancient Greece, 2; development of, 2; European

201

expansion of, 9; fideism and, 23–25; Hegel on, 9; ideal of, 7–12; idea of Europe influenced by, 7–10; liberal democracy and, 31–34; modernity and, 22; political function of, 29; practical, 81–86; purpose of, 3, 9; totalitarian consequences of, 29; truth compared to, 22–23; in twentieth century, 12–13; world as coherent totality and, 9 relativism: agonist critique of liberal democracy and, 44; cultural, 23–25; life-world and, 73; radical, 145 religion: resurgence of, 22; secularisation thesis and, 22; waning of, 22. See also Catholic Christianity; Christianity; Orthodox Christianity Renaissance, in Europe, 1 replication crisis, 176n34 republicanism, 175n14; liberal democracy and, 31 Ricoeur, Paul, 79 Ritter, Martin, 94, 101, 188n7 Roman Empire, 2; Byzantine Eastern Orthodox, 108; care of the soul in, 107–9; Christianity in, 4, 109; development of law in, 4; divisions within, 5; Europe as idea influenced by, 4–5; imperial authority in, 4; inequality in, 108; Latin as common language, 4; Patočka on ire, 108; Stoicism and, 107 Roman law, idea of Europe and, 4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on crises in Europe, 14; on ideal of reason, 10–11 Russell, Matheson, 90 Russia, Europe and, 1 sacrifice, 121–22 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 32 scepticism, of life-world, 73 Schmitt, Carl, xv, 42, 177n41; on concept of the political, 58–61, 141; on humanity, 61; National Socialism and, 61

202

Index

Schumann, Karl, 58–59 Second World War (WWII): as crisis of idea of Europe, 47, 170n43; destruction of Europe as idea after, ix; Europe after, 112; faith after, 121; Husserlian rationalism and, 97; integration of Europe after, 25–26; Patočka on, 110; Patočka’s political philosophy influenced by, xii–xiii; Universal Declaration of Human Rights after, 23–24. See also Holocaust; Nazi Germany secularisation thesis: in Grand Narrative, 39; religion and, 22; teleology of, 39 secularism, modernity and, 39–40 self-interest, in rationalist politics, 32–33 Sense of the World, The (Nancy), 187n50 Sepp, Hans R., 129, 145 signification, 129–30; meaninglessness and, 132 Smith, Adam, 9 social inequality. See inequality socialism, 42; internationalism and, 175n14 social logic: in agonist critique of liberal democracy, 41; Connolly on, 44 social rights, 188n7 Socrates, 101, 103, 106, 121, 146 Socratic-Platonic innovation, 101 Soffer, Gail, 80 Souček, J. B., 118 soul: in Ancient Greece, 104, 107; care of, 106–14; in CE, 107; in HE, 102– 4, 107–12; in Holy Roman Empire, 107–9; in KEE, 103, 106, 109–11, 113; in PE, 103–8; polis and, 107; as political project, 102–6 Soviet Union: dissolution of, 25; as geopolitical successor of Europe, 17 speech, freedom of, ix spirituality, mathematical approach to, 63–64 Staehler, Tanja, 63

Staiti, Andrea, 73, 177n42 Stalin, Josef, 12 Stalinism, in Eastern Europe, 26 Steinbock, Anthony, 88 Stoicism, 107; cosmopolitanism and, 175n14 subjective phenomenology, 98 subjectivity, absolute, 98 sub-Saharan Africa, European exploitation of, 7 subtraction thesis, 168n16 supranations: Europe as, 49–50; Husserl on, 58 Tava, Francesco, 105, 121–22, 132, 137–38 Taylor, Charles, on Grand Narrative as subtraction story, 8 teleology: of Grand Narrative, 19; Habermas on, 39; Husserl’s use of, 83–84, 91; idealism and, 54; idea of the world and, 54; for Patočka, 96; rationalist, 74, 80, 86; of secularisation, 39 Tengelyi, László, 78 theory of everything, 65 Toland, John, 21 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 11 totalitarianism, 111, 147; as political threat to West, 33–34; rationalist politics and, 33; reason and, 29 transcendence, 123; through faith, 118– 19; problematicity and, 131, 139 transcendental intersubjectivity, 79 Trump, Donald, 27 truth, reason compared to, 22–23 United States: Declaration of Independence, 24; as geopolitical successor of Europe, 17 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 23–24 universalism: of Christianity, 5; cultural relativism and, 24; in Europe, 25, 47; for Husserl, 61, 70; liberal

Index

democracy and, 31; pluralism and, 31; politics and, xv; in rationalist politics, 31 unsocial sociability, 9 US. See United States Valéry, Paul, 17 value pluralism, 189n13 Vienna Lecture (Husserl): ‘crisis of the idea’ in, 62, 65–67; humanity in, 66–67

203

Waldenfels, Bernhard, 67, 71 Warren, Nicholas de, 170n44 Weber, Max, on idea of Europe, 7–8 Weimar Germany, 170n43 Weischedel, Wilhelm, 124, 131 Wingenbach, Ed, 143–44, 146, 190n26 Wolin, Sheldon, 172n2 WWI. See First World War WWII. See Second World War

About the Author

Lorenzo Girardi received his PhD jointly from the University of Limerick (Mary Immaculate College) and KU Leuven. His work focuses on the phenomenological tradition, having published on authors such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jan Patočka. In particular, he is interested in the relation between phenomenology, metaphysics, and political philosophy. He also contributes to public debate as author and editor of the Dutch political platform Vrij Links.

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