Abstract

n the 6th paragraph of the Krisis, Husserl bemoans that an engherzige Vernunft (“a narrow-minded reason”, or literally a “small-hearted reason”) has established a monopole over the meaning of reason, reducing it to its technical significance and plunging the humanity that lives according to it (that is, the European humanity in a larger sense) into a drastic dismay. The remedy to this situation does not lie in a relinquishment to reason as such, but rather in the rediscovery of a grossherzige Vernunft, a reason capable not only in advancing from a discursive sequence to another, but equally able to give an account of its own emergence. The radical account he gives on the crisis of the “European humanity” leads Husserl to question the appearance of reason as such as well as its ambiguous relation to the world-life that precedes it. The way Husserl envisages to surpass the “technical” (that is engherzige) sense of reason is through a Ruckfrage (question-in-return), that aims to grasp and therefore to re-actualize the emergence of reason out of a world that does not include it. The European crisis is therefore a crisis of its reason: a reflective relapse to its origins appears to be the only way out. The purpose of our enquiry is to lay out Jan Patocka’s criticism of this Husserlian position. The core of his argument can be summarized as follows : not only had Husserl maintained a restricted meaning of reason in as much as he relates it solely to the achievements of science, but the concept of world he puts forward is also biased by his subjectivistic position. For Patocka, the main consequence of Husserl’s characterization of science as the only field where reason (even in its grossherzige meaning) can be deployed is the adhesion to a refined form of Euro-centrism: as if, “the ideal of the European ratio represents the universal entelechy of humanity” . The underlying assumption of this thesis is the conviction that the depth of the world cannot emerge unless it is captured in a process of idealisation, unless it is related to a subjective form of infinitisation. Quite the contrary, for Patocka, “the mystery of the world can shine wherever life, in its simplicity and inexhaustibility arises” . It is this enlarged sense of the world that makes possible not only to reactivate the “forgotten traditions” , but also to shape a sense of reason that encompasses also its scientific meaning.