This paper is a reading of Jan Patočka’s philosophy of history through the Husserlian figure of the Urgeometer from The Origin of Geometry. The Urgeometer is Husserl’s solution to the question of how ideal objects can have a temporal or historical origin. I will argue that Patočka’s philosophy of history can be fruitfully understood as an extension or elaboration of this model, with Socrates taking the place of the Urgeometer.
Patočka interprets Socrates as the discoverer of care for the soul, of the activity of questioning thinking that aims at an examined unity of all our views and opinions, and of the philosophic life as life oriented toward this activity (CW 2, 229–31/ PaE 91–3). It is no accident that Patočka describes him as the discoverer of the problem of measure for human actions – and of the solution to it (CW 2, 49–50; 3, 739). The origin of care for the soul, which is the perennial model of individual as well as communal good life, in Socrates thus has for Patočka the same kind of “exemplary significance” as the origin of geometry does for Husserl (OG 365/ 353).
Thereafter I will show that Patočka’s account of European history takes the Socratic-Platonic care for the soul as its standard by which political formations are judged. Care for the soul formed the spiritual core of pre-modern Europe, and its forgetting is the cause of the crisis of modernity as Patočka understands it; and the solution to this crisis is the recovery of Socratic-Platonic care for the soul. I shall conclude by arguing – against Patočka himself – that the Husserlian historical model is more suitable for Patočka’s historical-political thought than the Heideggerian radical historicism that is the avowed basis of Patočka’s philosophy of history in the Heretical Essays.