Translators' Preface

The essay presented here, in English translation, has its origins in a conference paper delivered by Jan Patocka on 3 June 1968, at the Evangelic Academy of Hofgeismar in West Germany. The historical context in which this event took place is of particular importance and thus deserves our attention. For Patocka and his entire nation, 1968 represented a moment of hope and rebirth: a season of political reforms had culminated in the election of Alexander Dubcek as the new secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party on 5 January, and what followed was a period of political change and liberation which became known as the Prague Spring. Patocka, who had experienced first-hand the harshness of the first years of real socialism in his country, welcomed this new political climate with great expectations. In particular, this gave him a chance to restart his activity as a professor at Charles University, from which he had been banned in 1949, one year after the communist takeover. Moreover, the improved political situation also gave him the chance to recommence travelling on a regular basis to Western Europe, where in 1968 he held a series of public lectures, of which the text we present here is an example.

Looking at the content of these lectures, two distinct lines of thought can be identified. On the one hand, Patocka took the opportunity to present his phenomenological research to an international audience, as he did on the occasion of the lecture 'Phänomenologie und Metaphysik der Bewegung'. On the other hand, he also gave another lecture, titled 'Czech Philosophy and Its Present Stage', in which he addresses an altogether different topic, namely the cultural and philosophical situation of his country, with clear references to the ongoing political upheaval. Some months later, at a turbulent moment in which the reform movement in Prague was encountering its first serious obstacles, Patocka had another chance to address these topics in the text that we present here. On this occasion, his attention is entirely focused on the figure of the intellectual and on the task that they are asked to fulfil in the present historical situation.

In discussing the problem of the intellectual in society, Patocka does not aim to propose any straightforwardly elitist conception of politics in which a small, closed group of intellectually superior citizens would alone hold the reins of society. Indeed, the conception of the 'intellectual' which he advocates is not that of the modern specialist who, thanks to their intellectual skills, aims at becoming 'the new leading character of human spirituality', just as the figure of the religious clericus was in the Middle Ages. What Patocka has in mind are rather the young intellectuals – primarily students – who in the late 1960s, in Czechoslovakia as well as in Western Europe and North America, strove to reform the social and political system by entering into an active relationship with all its inner forces. Although it could be objected that even such a conception is nevertheless elitist because it still privileges a small group of society, it should also be noted that Patocka does not focus on the young intellectuals of Western capitalist societies (whom he actually criticizes), but rather those of Eastern socialist societies. Looking beyond the corrupt reality of those societies at the time, at least in principle, the universities in countries such as Czechoslovakia were accessible to all citizens. There were no 'poor' people who could not afford to send their children to universities (only 'enemies of the state' whose children were blacklisted, but the eradication of such corruption was precisely part of the hope placed in the reform movement). As such, this category of intellectual is something much more open than what we usually associate with the term. Indeed, the Czech term inteligence can mean both the 'intelligentsia' and the 'intellect/intelligence' as a fundamental human faculty. In this broad sense, then, we could see the 'intellectual' to whom Patocka appeals as essentially a member of that group of human beings who utilize their faculty of intelligence, and, in 1968, the clearest manifestation of that phenomenon was to be found in the student movements.

Patocka's emphasis on the figure of the intellectual acquires a specific meaning if we take into account the role that intellectuals had played in Czechoslovakia during the years leading up to the Prague Spring. In that particular context, because of the total lack of a legitimized political elite, or of any other social group that could have been able to usefully represent the majority of the population, the voice of the intellectuals acquired a peculiar power and their action started to be seen as a reference point and as an example. It is not by chance that one of the fundamental events which set the tone for the Prague Spring was the Fourth Congress of Czech Writers that took place between 27 and 29 June 1967 in Prague, and to which Patocka referred one year later in his lecture.

The issue of the role of the intellectuals before, during, and after the Prague Spring cannot be further developed here. What we would like to do is simply to look more closely at this particular text of Patocka, whose editorial history can reveal better than any other description the author's complex...