Authors

Discussion

In the fifth of his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka presents a diagnosis of the crisis of modernity, emphasising that modern civilisation does not simply suffer from its own contemporary flaws, but from the failure “to resolve the entire problem of history.” At stake in Patočka’s thought is the relationship between the historically particular and the philosophical universal, as he believes that it was the emergence of philosophy itself that gave birth to history. Insisting that the very problem of history must not be resolved, but instead must be “preserved as a problem,” Patočka cautions that the danger today is that in “knowing so many particulars we are losing the ability to see the questions and that which is their foundation.”

With its apparent concern with perennial problems, Patočka's philosophy appears to be precisely the kind of approach to the history of ideas that the contextualist movement in intellectual history was developed to dispel. This paper will argue, however, that an appreciation for Patočka’s perspective provides an avenue to fruitfully re-examine the theories of meaning upon which contextualism as a methodology is predicated. Specifically, this paper draws upon the appeal Quentin Skinner makes to R.G. Collingwood in his influential 1969 essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” Concerned with demonstrating why historians of ideas must approach the meaning of past expressions in terms of their use, Skinner evoked the strict correlation Collingwood identified between propositions and the questions to which a thing said or written was meant as an answer. Collingwood argued that a proposition could not simply be the answer to either a vague or generalised question, but to a question “as detailed and particularized as itself.” “If my car will not go,” Collingwood wrote, “I may spend an hour searching for the cause of its failure. If, during this hour I take out number one plug, lay it on the engine, turn the starting-handle, and watch for a spark, my observation ‘number one plug is all right’ is an answer not to the question, ‘Why won’t my car go?’ but to the question, ‘Is it because number one plug is not sparking that my car won’t go?’” Recalling Patočka’s warning about the dangers of being overly concerned with particulars and losing sight of “the questions and that which is their foundation,” this paper picks back up the question of “why won’t Collingwood’s car go” and looks for the foundational questions to which particularised answers might still be addressed.Ultimately, the purpose of this paper is to motivate Patočka’s critique of modernity beyond the immediate historical context in which it was developed and refined—i.e. Gustav Husák normalized Communist Czechoslovakia—drawing upon trends in global intellectual history concerning untimeliness and temporality, and non-exhaustive approaches to contextualism.