auto-immunity or transcendence
In the end, you have this with all the Christian thinkers. St. Paul starts
with this, the sofia tou kosmou [wisdom of the world]: the more you
strain, the more futile it is, and what Man cannot do is easy for
God — therefore we must believe.... But he knows about this
problematicity, this desire to escape is based on it.^17It is, as if the two thousand years of Christian history and the Western
metaphysical tradition are contained in those three little dots. And in
a move similar to Nietzsche’s return to the age of tragedy, Patočka
suggests jumping back over these three little dots and recovering the
original Christian input and its abysmal deepening.
The second powerful loan from Christianity concerns the movement
of transcending. It is set within the frame of the self-affirmation and
self-overcoming with and through the other already outlined. There-
fore, it is no surprise to where this movement leads. But, ultimately,
Patočka gives it a well-known name: “The strength of the transub-
stantiation of life is the strength of a new love, a love yielding itself
unconditionally to others. Only in this love does individuality become
itself without maintaining the other in a self-alienation.”^18
Love is the ultimate name for the transubstantiation of life that is
brought about with the third movement of human existence. This love
is obviously not meant as an objective set of rules and values, not as
ordo amoris in the sense of Scheler, but more of a lived through
discovery of a new horizon. It is an answer that is not pre-given but
gained in the exposure to meaninglessness and nihilism. It is an
authentic overcoming of finitude that is more of a religious metanoia
than of a philosophical intuition, “for we know in part, and we pro-
phesy in part” (1 Cor. 13.9). In this sense, the reference to Christianity
means the acknowledgement of its disruptive force, of its challenge to
the philosophical order that it exceeds, thwarts, and provokes as the
“other” of reason. The consequence would be an understanding of
transcendence that does not see it as a threat to autonomy (human
being as adonné), but as thought provoking. In one of the Nachlass
manuscripts from the time of the Heretical Essays Patočka writes:
- Patočka, Living in Problematicity, 67.
- Patočka, Philosophy and Selected Writings, 267f.