19. On Beingness
The culture of the Roman world looks at first glance like the translation and large-scale distribution of a multitude of Greek contributions.15 Its language feeds on numerous Hellenic roots and turns of phrase. Its mythology and religion, political organization, technological setups, bodies of knowledge, and of course its literary works, exhibit fewer original motifs than they do extensions or transformations of themes and structures directly inherited from Greek cultures. If one steps back from their acquired familiarity, one can only be surprised how much the Aeneid or Seneca’s plays disclose this dependence and this systematic pattern of borrowing.16 This brings up a question: what exactly does Rome collect in Greece, so as to translate and distribute it? How are we to think about the kernel or inmost resource of this Hellenicity that the omnipotence of Rome recognizes at the source of its culture? Or further, how are we to name the “essence” of Greece’s contribution, propagated by Rome, which will enable European history to unfold?
To this Husserl provides a precise answer: the Greek singularity is to be understood as a “new sort of attitude of individuals toward their surrounding world,” leading to the “breakthrough of a completely new sort of spiritual structure, rapidly growing into a systematically self-enclosed cultural form; the Greeks called it philosophy” (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 276).17 Philosophy is what is new, what the Greeks supply that is original (or originary). This is what sparks off the initial shake-up of European history—the shake-up of History, and historicity, as the history of Europe. Husserl knows that his thesis is audacious: “In the breakthrough of philosophy in this sense . . . I see, paradoxical as it may sound, the primal phenomenon [Gm., Urphänomen; Fr., proto-phénomène] of spiritual Europe” (ibid.).
What is the “systematically self-enclosed cultural form” called “philosophy” to which this “completely new sort of spiritual structure” [Gm., geistige Gebilde] leads? The answer, again, is explicit: “Correctly translated, in the original sense, that means nothing other than universal science, science of the universe, of the all-encompassing unity [Gm., Alleinheit] of all that is [Gm., alles Seienden; Fr., de tout l’étant]” (ibid.). Philosophy: universal science, science inasmuch as it is universal, science of beingness. It is this “philosophy, the one science” that later “branches out into many particular sciences” (ibid.). But what else? What makes the jump so radical, so new, in relation to earlier forms of knowledge? Philosophy (science) does not spring up after nothingness. There were formulations in different words before it. What singularity marks this discourse that is the foundation of Greek singularity, and thus of European history, that is, History?18
Let us skip through the stages of the argument (ruthlessly reducing Husserl’s subtle exposition): science (or philosophy) displays the singularity of the theoretical attitude (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 282), which is the concern for truth, and the will for truth as truth, that is to say, unconditional or unconditioned truth (pp. 278, 287, and 350),19 free from any attachment to practical interests—practical needs and conditioning, practical ambitions and intentions in the surrounding world. Science is the concern for the true, unbound from the useful praxis that belongs to the “natural attitude” (p. 282). The theoretical attitude sets off the singularity of a pure way of looking [Fr., regard pur].
Let us illuminate first of all the remarkable, peculiar character of philosophy, unfolding in ever new special sciences. Let us contrast it with other cultural forms already present in prescientific mankind: artifacts, agriculture, domestic arts, etc. (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 277)
The theoretical attitude, though it is again a vocational attitude [Gm., Berufseinstellung], is totally unpractical. In the sphere of its own vocational life, then, it is based on a voluntary epochē of all natural praxis. (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 282)
Man becomes gripped by the passion of a world-view and world-knowledge that turns away from all practical interests and . . . strives for and achieves nothing but pure theōria. In other words, man becomes a nonparticipating spectator, surveyor of the world [Gm., Überschauer der Welt; Fr., un regard (gaze) jeté sur le monde]. (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 285)
The theoretical attitude distinguishes itself by this tearing away from the spontaneous facts of natural life that structure one’s participation in the surrounding world through praxis—practical interests and behaviors, practical finalities. The natural attitude is spontaneous for humans—everywhere.20 The Greeks produced its epochē, suspension, or rise. The gaze takes off: the spectator’s nonparticipating, disinterested passion substitutes for the practical interests.21
Now, this tearing away from natural interests, thus defined, soon turns out to be a tearing away from the national. The theoretical attitude drives one to prefer “truth-in-itself” to “everyday truth” (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 286), and thus keeps one from accepting a truth that might be subjected to a local or territorial determination.
Clearly, on the other hand, [philosophy’s] tendency to spread is not limited to the home nation. Unlike all other cultural works, philosophy is not a movement of interest which is bound to the soil [Gm., Boden] of the national tradition. Aliens [Gm., Fremd-Nationale; Fr., étrangers], too, learn to understand it and generally take part in the immense cultural transformation which radiates out from philosophy [Gm., an der gewaltigen Kulturverwandlung, die von der Philosophie ausstrahlt; Fr., à cette mutation culturelle violente qui émane de la philosophie]. (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 286; emphasis added)
It is no accident that the two developments are consecutive in the text: it is because the theoretical attitude tears one away from the interests of natural life, from practical needs and behavior, that it tears one away from the national. Philosophy, an immense cultural transformation, breaks with a certain relation to the surrounding world, precisely subjected to the natural, native—and thus, logically, national—attitude.22
This double emancipation orients the theoretical toward the infinite. The surrounding world’s natural grasp is a grasping of finitude.23 Science produces expressions [énoncés] (idealities), with each one providing access to another one at a higher level, without any limit, thus constituting a program of “infinite tasks.”24 The Greek opening is an opening to the infinite. It is the opening of historicity as such (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 277), hence of a new type of humanity, which is none other than humanity itself, opened to the infinity of its own essence.25
To follow Husserl and Jan Patočka (and to return to the questioning that has driven this reading), let us say that what Rome transports and generalizes, what it spreads to the limits of its world, is thus the theoretical attitude; it is philosophy—all at once the epochē of the practices of the surrounding world, the upheaval of the natural attitude, and the transgression of nativism (of the national). In this sense, that which Rome transports and distributes, from the starting point of Greece, is the tearing away, that is, transport itself—with a new attitude in thinking about it: this tearing away is no longer a loss, but instead the conquest of an opening without boundaries. Patočka sees in Democritus the inventor of the idea of infinite empty space—empty, that is to say, where a world can come about.26 We can sense the consequences: if the tearing away no longer (or not only) amounts to a loss, if transport does not only lead one astray—to roam or to err—one may then not be forced to expect or seek the return. If exiting, moving across, and opening are what the Greek moment brings, then the way (the sense) of life is not the return. The return is not that which gives a direction and sense—not necessarily. We can make out the sense of a way ahead, of that which goes out, opens, and goes on. Supposing (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe)27 that the Greeks bequeathed to the West the Odyssean form of the directional sense as the sense of return—a constraining and difficult form of life as that which comes back; returning life, coming back to its origins, to the lost fatherland, to one’s home, to the wife who was left there and is waiting (and to the dog)—then one has to say, at least, that the Hellenic legacy is double: comprising the return and the crossing, the Odyssean lesson and the philosophical lesson, epic as well as theoretical materials. Like Patočka, I believe that the epic is common to the cultures of the world (and the return as well), while the theoretical is the peculiar posture that seems only to appear there.28 Accordingly, if Rome feeds its world with specifically Greek materials, it is inasmuch as Rome transports the transport, rather than the “natural attitude,” which preexists—everywhere.
Patočka takes up and inflects the propositions of Husserl’s “Vienna Lecture”; among all his important contemporaries, he is no doubt the one who proposes the most elaborate philosophical idea about Europe.29 Patočka also situates in classical Greece the locus and the moment of a kind of break, or rather an initial shake-up [ébranlement] from which the history of Europe—and, through it, History—ensues. But he identifies the charge of this break as being precisely the emergence of care of the soul—or concern or solicitude for the soul.
The Greeks, the Greek philosophers in whom the Greek spirit is expressed most sharply, expressed human freedom by the term: care of the soul. (PE, p. 13)
In this is the peculiar stamp and distinctiveness of European life, in this is also its continuity, that this possibility arose here. In this sense I will try to show you that Europe as Europe arose from this motif, from the care of the soul. (PE, p. 70)
The care for the soul is thus what gave rise to Europe—this thesis we can hold without exaggeration. (EH, p. 83)
Now, the care of the soul is an essential determination in philosophy, a position of its essence: “the soul forms the center of philosophy, Philosophy is the care of the soul in its own essence and in its own element” (PE, p. 91). Indeed, this is saying that philosophy—its irruption and production—is the agent of the shake-up of Europe’s history—and thus of historicity.30 What is the soul, then, and why is the care for it capable of triggering this shake-up?
The care of the soul is the opening of history because “the conceptualization of the soul in philosophy from its Greek origins consists in just what is capable of truth within man” (PE, p. 27). Now, truth does not emerge with philosophy. Myth—Patočka asserts this forcefully—is already involved with truth: “myth is true. Real myth is truthful” (PE, pp. 42–43). “The uncovering of the whole world by Greek philosophy is the continuation of this myth” (PE, p. 49). Where then is the break that came—Patočka keeps asserting—with the emergence of philosophy? Here it is: the care of philosophy no longer bears only on truth, but on that which is capable of truth within man.31 Philosophical concern is displaced from the true to the soul and its sake, and thus “invents” the soul, as interiority. The interiority of the soul, the soul by itself, the care of the soul in itself, are productions of philosophy, and of Platonism in particular,32 through this migration of its care from what is true to being capable of truth. A dis-objectivation of the truth occurs, and a loss of its objective rootedness (one could almost say a loss of its objectal fixation),33 an uprooting,34 a taking-apart of the bond [dés-amarrage], a takeoff [démarrage] of the truth: this is what Patočka calls its reaching forth [Fr., essor] (HE, p. 38).
This is why philosophy lodges essentially within matters of appearance—not of that which appears (of that which appears and offers itself to sight), but of appearance itself inasmuch as it appears, of the manifestedness of the manifestation, of the being of apparition.35 Paraphrasing an astonishing passage in Heretical Essays,36 one could say that apparition as the essence of the showingness of what shows itself is an uncovering of the nakedness of the world. Not of its objectivity (its objectality), its supposed reality in itself, but its baring, its stripping, its nakedness itself. The baring of the world is a forcing, a breaking-in, or a shake-up of its given visibility, of its visibility as a sense already-given,37 a sense organized and built from practical exigencies, myths, and traditions—the very thing, no doubt, that Husserl called natural world. The baring of the world in the essence of its apparition, in the phenomenality of its phenomenon, is a shake-up of given sense, or accepted sense.38 It is a nonacceptance of the previous (mythical, ritual, or practical) sense—or, according to Patočka’s strong expression, it is a sobering [Fr., dégrisement] (PE, p. 134). It occurs in the regime of problematicity,39 the opening of the soul to the loss of accepted sense. Being (that which is) is stripped bare. And it follows that philosophy is indissociably care of the soul and thinking of the phenomenality of the world. The baring shakes up the seeing.
Such life does not seek to escape its contingency, but neither does it yield to it passively; since it has glimpsed the possibility of authentic life, that is, life as a whole, the world opens itself to it for the first time—it is no longer merely an involuntary background against which that which concerns us shows itself; rather, it itself can now stand forth, as the whole of that which opens up against the black backdrop of closed night. This whole now speaks to humans directly, free of the muting effect of tradition and myth, only by it do they seek to be accepted and held responsible. Nothing of the earlier life of acceptance remains in place; all the pillars of the community, traditions, and myths, are equally shaken, as are all the answers that once preceded questions, the modest yet secure and soothing meaning, though not lost, is transformed. It becomes as enigmatic as all else [Fr., il devient problématique, aussi énigmatique que tout le reste]. Humans cease to identify with it, myth ceases to be the word of their lips. In the moment when life renews itself everything is cast in a new light. Scales fall from the eyes of those set free, not that they might see something new but that they might see in a new way. It is like a landscape illuminated by lightning, amid which humans stand alone, with no support, relying solely on that which presents itself—and that which presents itself is everything without exception. It is the moment of creative dawning, “the first day of the creation,” mysterious and more pressing for enfolding and bearing with it the astonished [Fr., embrasse celui qui s’étonne, l’implique et l’emporte]. (HE, pp. 39–40)40
Such is the fate of the astonished: dawn embraces them, enfolding them and carrying them away. Patočka (when he reads Plato, for example) always links these two motifs. On the one hand, the coming of light, the advent of seeing, which determines apparition and phenomenality as such; the opening and the display of the world to the newness of a gaze, as a gaze looking into what is.41 On the other, carrying away: because the soul works by displacement and moving. Furthermore, the soul is movement, by essence. Further still, it is the essence of movement, of all movement, the origin of all setting in motion. What moves the soul and makes it the movement that it is is the care and the concern for itself. The care of the soul is movement itself.
The soul that takes care of itself is then in motion from immediate uncertainty to circumscribing, delimiting reflection. And philosophy is in this motion, and this motion is something actual. (PE, p. 94; emphasis added)
Cosmology has shown where the soul stands in the whole of existence; it is the origin of movement, it can only be understood in movement. The movement of the soul in its most proper sense of the word is precisely care for its very self. (PE, p. 124; emphasis in the first sentence added)
We have already said that in Plato the soul is the principle of movement, and movement is fundamentally the movement of the care of the soul. (PE, p. 126; emphasis added)
The care of the soul is a look into what amounts to movement—setting in motion, principle of motion. It is one and the other, indissociably. It is one because it is the other: a looking-in, into that which is, because of the changing of place, being carried away. It is this duality that the concept of the shaking or shaken [Fr., ébranlement] answers, and it is central for Patočka (particularly in Heretical Essays). The care of the soul, philosophy—they shake things up: they tear one away from given and secure meanings and senses; they shake up traditions and myths; they upset beliefs (shaking beliefs), and unsettle; pull away from immobility; open up motricity; push one along the way, or down the road. Immobility is suitable for suicides—the poet does not speak of “the dead,” but of “suicides.”42
The will to permanence is essentially sacral and ritualistic, having to do with a fundamental characteristic of prehistoric truth, i.e., the cosmic-ontological metaphor. . . . The point of history is not what can be uprooted or shaken, but rather the openness to the shaking. (HE, pp. 35 and 44)
One thus has a basis for saying that the Greek event is the one that tears away [l’arrachement]—from the myth, from the given and accepted meaning of the nearby native environment. Literally, Patočka does not put it this way. But what he says allows one to do so: that historic behavior insofar as it is open, is movement, by essence; a movement itself comprising a plurality of partial movements at the core of which
only one of these is oriented to the theme of openness, manifestation, unconcealment, and its transmission. Others focus on the rooting of humans in the open realm [Fr., district] of the common world of humans and on the protection and preservation of that world. (HE, pp. 10–11)43
History is this composition of partial histories (or stories), micro-histories, minimal movements, among which only one is open and historic (which is to say, oriented toward manifestation and unconcealment, as the text puts it). The others, which are more frequent, numerous, and natural, lead to being rooted and to the support and defense of the realm [Fr., district] delimited by the practice common to (prehistoric) men. It is these dominant movements that myth expresses, opposing home and foreignness, saying that the “near world is the world of good,” and the outside amounts to a threat, which reaches into the near world by way of the unusual, the unheimlich, which does not fall “into these forms of rootedness” (PE, p. 54).44On the contrary—Plato and Aristotle have said it and Patočka repeats it—philosophical thought (and history by way of it) is based on astonishment and wonder, on the surprise and amazement of the dis-covery of the world.45 Now, what does this amazement contain? It is the baring of the world’s strangeness. Philosophy, the opening of history, upsets the security of that which is near, discovering the world as a foreign land. Philosophy, history: things found by travelers. About life that is “freely human,” Patočka writes, “That, however, means life on the boundary” (HE, p. 39).
. . .
Here, a decisive articulation takes place, for this invention is found to be (by itself, without intervention) political in nature. In this, Patočka is veering away from Husserl, according to whose “Vienna Lecture” the invention of philosophy has political consequences: “The conservatives, content with tradition, and the philosophical circle will struggle against each other, and without doubt the battle will carry over into the sphere of political power. At the very beginning of philosophy, persecution [conséquence in the French translation—Trans.] sets in.”46
For Patočka, the invention of philosophy is an event that is intrinsically political, its political reach being indissociable from its unfolding: “That means that the renewal of life’s meaning in the rise of political life bears within it the seed of philosophical life as well” (HE, p. 40); “History arises from the shaking of the naive and absolute meaning in the virtually simultaneous and mutually interdependent rise of politics and philosophy” (HE, p. 77; emphasis added). How can we understand this solidarity? It has to do with the care of the soul, a constitutive trait of philosophy, which is carried out as a project of true life, or life in truth. Now, life in truth is probably the other name of justice.47 Justice is what relates the soul to itself inasmuch as it is truthful and clear. Philosophy “sees justice and all other ἀρετή as the internal relation within man himself, between distinct moments from which man is composed, from which is composed his ψυχή (soul). . . . To establish such precise relations signifies justice” (PE, p. 106). Socrates, who initiates the care of the soul, invents and implements this inner operation. It is on this account that he is put to death, as one of “the just and the truthful” (PE, p. 97).
At this point the singular connection that Patočka makes between politics and philosophy is established. In Plato’s Republic, following discussion of this inner relationship of man with himself, the construction of the city-state is introduced as a development of the question “What is a just man?” (see PE, pp. 100ff.).48 The political articulation is unexpected: justice is not posited as a relation to the other or others (as a relationship of complicity, agreement, and innocuousness). On the contrary, this notion is strongly refuted.49 Justice is a relation of man with himself and with truth, with himself insofar as he is open to the truth, and in another context, the figure of Socrates (and his comportment in the face of death—of injustice) personifies this. Justice does not reside between humans but in them. This is why the introduction of the political in the Republic occurs, surprisingly, by way of a kind of analogy: the city is analogous to man, but larger, and the relationship of justice has to be more evident in it, for reasons of size and measure (PE, pp. 116ff.). The political connection is homogeneous in relation to the connection that is internal to everyone, and can thus be seen as its extension and enlargement. Justice is internal to man; it is nonconventional, or non-“social,” as it were, and this interiority is the opening of the political, because this is what men have in common. What is common among men is interiority—and not exteriority, which appears to connect them. If politics emerges with philosophy, and care of the soul with it, this is because the just community is the community of this internal relationship with oneself that makes up justice. “Because care of the soul is possible, the state is also possible, and the community is also possible” (PE, p. 121). For Plato, the primary political question is therefore education, paideia.50 “You see, then, that the question of the polis and its constitution, its constituting, is again the question of the soul, its character and its examination—care of the soul” (ibid.). The institution of the polis springs up in the very movement that gives birth to philosophy, in the movement that is philosophy as movement of the soul: the shake-up that makes history and sets history into motion. And this is how Patočka defines the political community: it is the community of those who live this shake-up; the community or “unity of the shaken” (HE, p. 43).
This passage into history,51 as a political event (the event of the political; the coming, invention, and production of the political as such), is featured in Patočka’s first two Heretical Essays, “Reflections on Prehistory” and “The Beginning of History.” Here he leans on Hannah Arendt’s analyses of labor so as to articulate work—within the framework of the natural world and the traditional way of life—as a participating element in the “bonding of life to itself” (HE, p. 15). Work is thus construed fundamentally as non- or anti-historical. “If we understand work in this sense, then work proves to be not only a nonhistorical factor but actually one working against history, intending to hold it at bay” (HE, p. 16). This reference allows Patočka to produce a new determination of the historical difference—of the emergence of historicity. Indeed, the “world of work” calls for a certain corresponding socialness (a structuring of the community, as it were), the household. “The world in which the bonding of life to itself takes place on the basis of a concealed freedom is the world of work; its protocell and model is the household, the community of those who work to assure their sustenance” (HE, p. 15; emphasis added).
This world carries away (by way of metaphorization, extension, or prolonging of its essence—this is not clear, here) a certain structuring of power: “The great empires of the ancient world, the first high civilizations and cultures, were in this sense monumental households” (HE, pp. 15–16). Indeed, the “household” is the schema of a world: it posits at the same time the community relation that work implies, which is bound to it (bound to its own bonding, as bonding of life to itself), as well as the form of the power of “great empires,” and thus the form and the boundaries of the world itself: “Thus there is no sharp boundary between the world and the ‘great household’ of the empire” (HE, p. 36).
Which empires? They are the “high Near Eastern civilizations” (HE, p. 23), the ones producing the narratives of the first annalists “in the Near East, Egypt, ancient China . . . in complex and massive social formations, in grand empires with complicated hierarchies and bureaucracies” (p. 28), “theocracies with divine rulers or rulers in the role of managers of divine households.” “For that reason there can be no substantive separation or difference between the empire and the universe. Pharaoh . . . the Emperor of China . . . the great king of Persia” (p. 34). In a word, it is about Asia itself. Granted there could be others: the description and the concept would conceivably apply to the great American Indian households (conceived of as “Indian,” on an Asian model, by anthropologists). Now, in the Greek consciousness, Asia is the anteriority from which Greece was born; elsewhere means earlier. Birth tears away and transports. The empire is “essentially no more than a giant household or aggregate of households gathered around the central cell of the royal house” (HE, pp. 28–29), and the invention of the political comes as a break with this, driving the household back into the domestic space. The production of history commenced when, as Arendt pointed out, “the sphere of the house ceased to be the core of the world as such, becoming simply a private domain alongside and juxtaposed to which there arose, in Greece and Rome, a different, no less important public sphere” (HE, p. 23; emphasis added). The role of the house in life shrank from imperial to domestic. In the space of the world that this withdrawal frees up, a new sphere opens: the public sphere—the political.
. . .
Let us sum things up. The great (Asian) empires are the organization of accepted life in the [Asian] “high civilizations.”52 This is the organization of “great households,” work communities bound to the bonding of life to itself, which constitute a world, as a natural world, a world nearby, familiar or familial, circumscribed within the district of a native space. Employing an inadequate Latinism, one might call it basically domestic, given that the strictly preferable Greek term (oikonomia) is anachronistic.53 The irruption of the politico-philosophical—the production of history—breaks with this world regulated by the oikos, domestic rule.
History switches “worlds.” What follows the “world-of-work” presents itself hesitantly and problematically to the new gaze into what is,54 to the soul inasmuch as it is motivated by care of itself. The soul is that which is “capable of this world” [capable de ce monde]55—here I’d say: able to direct this look upon being (upon that which is). What shows itself, then, and bares and discloses itself, is properly speaking the beingness of beings as apparition or manifestedness, the phenomenality of which sets in motion free life and history,56 and thus Europe as such. Europe is the opening to the bare phenomenality of what is, to the essence of this phenomenality as the inmost movement of apparition.57 History (politico-philosophical history, inaugurated in Greece) is a movement toward beingness, this very movement that carries us toward what is—to the edge, the limit, the boundary of being—and renders life in truth a life at the boundary. The Greek opening opens onto the transcendence of beingness, or rather, as the French translation puts it, to transcendence toward the world [transcendance vers le monde]—to be understood here as transcendence toward beingness.58 Transcendence toward: a welcome phrase, which prevents one from understanding transcendence as the exteriority of a being-that-is-beyond, giving back to the term (in accordance with its etymology) the connotation of movement-toward-something, of reaching out, and of direction: transcendence is toward beings—it is an orientation. Transcendence is not a quality; it is a way, a directional sense.
The commonality of humans is their aptitude for this. The political opens by means of this breach, and it is a community of souls, community of humans who are just and true, capable of going for the borderline, “alone, with no support” (HE, p. 40), heading for the transcendence of that which is—within this very reaching, takeoff, transport, transfer—transcendence as transcendence toward that which is or beingness. This is the essence of the polis as the community of men in accordance with justice and truth. The constitution of the city-state is transferred to the Roman state, to the empire, and through it to the sacrum imperium of Christianity—and further still to the states, all the states whose ancestor it is, to such a degree that we are the heirs of this.59 Does this not lead to idealizing the Greek city—and hence our states, its inheritors?60 Was the Greek city truly like this? Is this not the idea of a properly divine city? Of course. But here again, Patočka’s parry is unexpected. Who in fact describes the city in this way? It is Plato. And when? When the polis is collapsing under the blows of tyranny and war, thus after the catastrophe. What we have inherited, then, is the shattered, devastated, and wrecked Greek city.61 This congruence of thought with the political collapse generates the constitution of metaphysics.62 In this sense, Patočka describes a movement that evokes (and probably demarcates) the movement of historiality as Heidegger thinks it: it is not purely the Greek opening and its transmitted legacy, tradition, and translation that bring about metaphysics; it is the withdrawal, or retreat, a backlash at the opening, starting with Greece itself, from the very beginning—erasure of the origin, which has reached us as retreat or removal within the origin, through the text of metaphysics and its history. But the difference between Patočka and Heidegger is considerable. What produces this retreat and this backlash for Patočka is the catastrophe of the polis—the political catastrophe. And just as the constitution of the polis assertively brought this opening as well as political freedom63 (to simplify, the era of democracy),64 this catastrophe is the collapse of democracy, and of the city’s freedom.
An—actual—difference separates the Greek production of the opening (the “birth of history”) and its metaphysical reformulation, reworking, and figuration—that is to say, perhaps, its very idealization, its figuration as ideality. Just as, intrinsically, the opening was political (and it was impossible, in the opening of history, to dissociate the political from the philosophical as a movement of opening [of freedom]), the catastrophe, likewise, is political by essence, and so is, consequently, the advent of metaphysics. Metaphysics comes about as the backwash of the political catastrophe: translating all at once that which, in it, makes up the return (retreat, figure), and that which was born and has opened up, and for a while at least, closes up again (transport, shake-up, tearing away). The sway of the transcendence “of the world” is twofold: dis-covery, demythicization, transfer, or effective aptitude to go for the boundary of what is,65 through the shakeup of received senses; and also, and together, figuration, idealization, retreat: ideal transcendence, transcendence of beingness as ideality.
What reaches us—transmitted and transferred as the idea of the transcendence of beingness—is the opening and the collapse of freedom, as political freedom (of the political). This is the Greek legacy of which Rome takes charge. Opening and folding back. Transport and figure: the onward move and the returning move. The advent and the catastrophe. The transport is that which Rome transports—but going both ways. Patočka does not put it this way—not exactly.66 But he makes it possible to say it—at least as a hypothesis:
Rome transports and distributes, as the idea of the transcendence of that which is, the Greek invention of the political, and the catastrophe of its collapse. (h14)
. . .
This schema leaves some things in the shadows. The idea that Rome transports, extends, and generalizes the Greek contribution does not explain (at least not at first) why this contribution is somewhat immobilized (during the time of this extension): if, as Husserl thinks, the source and the kernel of the supplied Greek material are the invention of the theoretical (science and philosophy), it remains to be explained why the Roman era, which spreads this contribution worldwide, is itself so little “theoretical.”67 As if the theoretical had exhausted itself or become tired in the act of its invention; as if it had achieved its complete form—finished and ended—in the gesture of its production, as if it were in-separable from this initial transport—transportation of the origin, detachment, takeoff; and as if the process of invention should only start up again much later, with modernity: merely programming, up to this point, the transfer as its single task; carting the initial theorizing thus constituted all the way to the moderns. One would have to explain this disagreement between transport and production, linking a very intense transfer to a reduced inventiveness, with Rome and the Latins using their talent to bring the theoretical to the moderns, as if cryogenically frozen in the inaugural gesture of the theoretical’s invention. One would have to understand how Rome is able to transport so well while inventing so little.
For Rome’s relation to Greece is not merely a matter of inheritance, or else it includes all the conflictual ambiguity of filiation—and this makes for the strange equivocation of the imaginary foundation of the empire in the Aeneid.68 Indeed, the narrative is a reprise, an imitation, or a kind of Roman remake of the Iliad and the Odyssey.69 This makes it strikingly dependent on the Greek legends, since Rome invents for itself a foundation that repeats—in a time-delayed simulation—the Hellenic foundation, similarly drawing the images of its origins from the inexhaustible Trojan War.70 But while the Aeneid gives Trojan origins to Rome, it is, in the great war of foundation, on the side of the defeated. Rome is descended from Troy, which is to say, from those Greece defeated. The greatness of Rome sung by the Aeneid is a revenge against Hellenicity. We can see the ambivalence of the gesture, since it is only from the Greeks that we have the tale of the Trojan defeat, and by laying claim to this genealogy, the Aeneid invokes a (“historical”) non-Greek or anti-Greek ancestry, while calling on a “literary” Greek ancestry to express and to think this—a revenge against Greece, but formulated in the code of Hellenic history, in its own narrative framework; in a word, a kind of revenge of Greece against itself. Caught in such a snare, Roman transport remains captive of the equivocation: depending on the Hellenic legacy, and making claims against this dependence—a paralyzing filiation.71 In any case (if one momentarily suspends any knowledge of what happened later), Rome “alone” did seem incapable of rekindling the productivity of the history of the theoretical. Its extension was its exhaustion. Supposing that this matter were ever to start up again, Rome would need an uplift, coming from elsewhere.