Summary
Jan Patočka: Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History
In his Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History one of the most significant Czech and European thinkers of the 20th century primarily addresses technical civilization. Despite its enormous pretensions and undeniable successes, that civilization did not solve the great internal problem of man - its own main problem: how not only to live, but to live in a humanly authentic way to the greatest extent possible, as history shows us. Worse: it has made solving that problem more difficult insofar as its concepts are flattened, weaned from thought in the basic sense of the word. The process of depersonalization that leads to the anonymity of the government, which oppresses and swallows each of us, this process constitutes a unique and universal movement: it is an essential dimension of the entire modern civilization, argues Jan Patočka, offering us to think about the Eastern European experience, which should be viewed as a global crisis of that same civilization.
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