The shattering of meaning. Jan Patočka and his triple concept of history
Résumé
My paper aims at laying out the main tenets of Patočka’s unusual and highly provocative
position with regard to the question of history, drawing essentially on his
Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History, while also gathering insights from
other works such as Eternity and Historicity and Europe and post-Europe. In the
first part, I set in place the overall framework of this analysis, and show that three
distinct, yet entwined concepts of history are operative in Patočka’s work: the understanding
of history as a specific regime of meaning, as an existential possibility of
the human Dasein, and as a “epochal” dynamic. In the second part, I reconstruct the
criticism Patočka mounts against the classical philosophies of history and indicate
that his rejection of a teleological account of history is compatible with the attempt
of establishing an intrinsic correlation between meaning and history. In the final
part, I stress the importance acquired by the experience of the “shattering of meaning”
for Patočka’s threefold understanding of history and argue for the possibility of
crafting a unitary framework which would encompass his analysis.