Lubica Ucnik

Our experience of the present is defined by numbers, graphs and, increasingly, an algorithmically calculated future, based on the mathematical and formal reasoning that began with the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today, this reasoning is further modified and extended in the form of computer-executed, algorithmic reasoning. Instead of fallible human reasoning, algorithms—based on mining databases for ‘information’—are seen to provide more efficient processes, offering fast solutions. In this paper, then, I will follow Jan Patočka, who suggests that we live in an age of supercivilisation, one in which human reasoning has become self-sufficient, ceasing to depend on the supernatural or cultural traditions that previously guided human lives. My argument is that Patočka’s analysis of supercivilisation can open up a different way to reflect on the ‘spiritual foundation of our times’. As Patočka says, to reflect on our situation does not mean that we can change it, but reflection can give us a new understanding that will open up different ways to think about our human future.

In this paper, I will argue that Patočka’s decision to become a signatory and one of the spokesperson of Charter 77 was both deeply informed, and in fact necessitated, by his whole philosophical understanding. I will suggest that the importance of Patočka’s contribution to Charter 77 goes beyond the original aim of the declaration, pointing to the broader significance of the moral and political crisis in a society reduced to the sphere of instrumental rationality. For Patočka, to think about humans and their existence in the world is irreducible to instrumental rationality...

Over the last 30 years, we have witnessed the impact of “neoliberalism” – a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspect of existence in economic terms – that has contributed to the redefinition of the role of university academics. Rather than being facilitators of knowledge, reflection and critical engagement with ideas, academics have instead become part of a system that has increasingly privileged economic considerations over curriculum. Academic work has been transformed into economically calculable “outputs”, which are forever changing. Academics and students are reconfigured on the model of “human capital” that they must perpetually improve in order to be ready for the next change of rules. Education becomes redefined as “training” for future economic entrepreneurs learning to pursue unattainable economic goals. To reflect on these changes, we will also consider the Enlightenment idea of education. We conclude that the logic of neoliberal governance cannot be confronted on its own ground, since, in this model, institutions are “hollowed-out” – maintaining the shell but emptying the substantive content in order to reconfigure the whole in economic terms. We must return to the task of critically and historically assessing the logic of neoliberalism by shifting the ground of the inquiry, combined with a resistance to the neoliberal reckoning by arguing that it is not the only way to reason – there is an alternative.

In this paper, I propose to return to Jan Patočka's question from 1970 and ask again what the spiritual foundations of life are in our times, to reflect on the changes in modern societies after the turn to what we now call neoliberalism. My claim is that Patočka's analyses concerning the turn to scientific rationality is now a defining feature of our times that 'colours' the whole of our understanding. According to Patočka, these changes started with the turn to modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, slowly changing our thinking, framing it through the ideas of formalisation and subjectivity that we simply and unquestioningly accept. I will extend Patočka's analysis of 'rational Supercivilisation' to argue that its 'radical' version now defines our present. The outcome is the privileging of formalised rationality that undermines other forms of reasoning, whereby human 'subjective' meaning becomes homeless.

In The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, Ľubica Učník examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl’s final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patočka. For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing irrationalism that threatened to undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary “life-world”: the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl’s concerns in today’s context, Učník first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Patočka. Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. Učník provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.

The first text to critically discuss Edmund Husserl’s concept of the "life-world," The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem reflects Jan Patocka's youthful conversations with the founder of phenomenology and two of his closest disciples, Eugen Fink and Ludwig Landgrebe. Now available in English for the first time, this translation includes an introduction by Landgrebe and two self-critical afterwords added by Patocka in the 1970s. Unique in its extremely broad range of references, the work addresses the views of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap alongside Husserl and Heidegger, in a spirit that considerably broadens the understanding of phenomenology in relation to other twentieth-cen tury trends in philosophy. Even eighty years after first appearing, it is of great value as a general introduction to philosophy, and it is essential reading for students of the history of phenomenology as well as for those desiring a full understanding of Patocka’s contribution to contemporary thought.

In this paper, I will discuss the neoliberal construction of the subject as an entrepreneurial self, based on the economic notion of ‘human capital’. I will argue that this framing of the self is a fiction that has become accepted as everyday reality: this reduces the political space to that of the marketplace, the state to a corporation, and education to a vocational training ground, producing compliant subjects for a risk-driven present defined by corporate logic. I will revisit Jan Patočka’s paper on ‘Super-civilisation’ to offer a possible understanding of this new configuration of society. Patočka’s consideration of the changes to modern society is an extension of his concern with the ‘responsibility of the subject.’ I will sketch his argument in opposition to the notion of ‘responsibilisation’ of the neoliberal subject, which is the outcome of the changes I have outlined above. The neoliberal subject is configured on the entrepreneurial model, whereby the social and political become reduced to the personal risk of the ‘responsibilised’ neoliberal subject.