Politics, Morality and Nothingness: On the Coherence of Jan Patočka’s Reflections on Sacrifice

Abstract

One of the most perplexing notions in Jan Patočka’s philosophy is “sacrifice for nothing”, a form of self-sacrifice with no positive content that transcends every particular thing, object, goal or ideal. This concept is puzzling since Patočka was a dissident and one of the spokespersons of Charta 77 movement, providing philosophical and ethical substance to dissidents’ actions. In his “Charta 77 texts” and other overtly political texts, Patočka formulated an ethico-political conception of sacrifice, arguing that authentic politics is defined by a strong commitment to unconditional moral principles, such as justice, freedom and human rights, and that these principles are things for which it is “worthwhile to suffer”. However, in his mature phenomenological reflections on sacrifice and war Patočka appears to distance himself from ethical and political considerations, moving into the Heideggerian territory of nothingness, Being and confrontation with one’s finitude. What is the relationship between Patočka’s ethico-political and existential-ontological reflections on sacrifice? In this paper, I argue that they are internally consistent, the latter serving as an indispensable philosophical grounding of the former. The unifying element of these diverse explorations of sacrifice is Patočka’s comprehensive critique of modernity and technoscience.

Keywords: Patočka, sacrifice, solidarity of the shaken, politics, morality, war, nothingness