In his 1936 lecture on the topic of “The Radical Life-crisis of European Humanity”, Edmund Husserl identified “a crisis which developed very early in modern philosophy and science and which extends with increasing intensity to our own day”. His erstwhile student Jan Patočka developed the thematics of Husserl’s analysis in applying a unique historical schema to the phenomenology of crisis. I will put forth a radical reading of Patočka’s historical schema culminating in crisis as a reaction to the burden of historic problematicity and, in turn, claim that historical existence itself had emerged in opposition to the burdensome conditions of pre-history. Using Illich’s term, I label this process of oppositional reactions generating new (existential-historical) conditions which bear within the seeds of their own counter-reaction ‘iatrogenic’.
I will begin by discussing Husserl’s uncovering of our crisis, and then show how Transcendental phenomenology fails in his aim to resolve the crisis he had identified. Subsequently, I introduce Patočka’s notion of problematicity to reframe the crisis in its historicised unfolding. The concept of problematicity and its historicised origins is crucial to understanding Husserl’s crisis as a historical phenomenon. I will argue that, for Patočka, this crisis is that of an inauthentically de-problematised experience of life. I will then show how Patočka’s division of time into the ‘non-historic’, ‘pre-historic’ and ‘historic’ indicates the conditions under which crisis is generated and sustained.
This proves very productive for our consideration of crisis, and the question of its contemporary (non-)resolution, because, I argue, for Patočka, the crisis is resolvable only inasmuch as historical problematicity remains irresolvable. In considering the iatrogenic origins of crisis, therefore, our abilities to recognise and critique its contemporary manifestations are renewed and expanded.