Becoming Socrates: Five elements of the consecration process and the case of Jan Patočka

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenon of consecration, which, so far, has been neglected by sociologists of intellectuals. Contrary to the common Bourdieusian approach to consecration, which conflates it with legitimization, consecration is conceptualized as a process of the symbolic elevation of a figure, or an object, to the level of sacred symbols relevant to a particular community. Five analytically distinctive elements are identified that constitute the consecration process and a proposed framework is applied to disentangle the consecration of the Czech philosopher, and martyr of anti-communist dissent, Jan Patočka. In this analysis, original data are used to uncover repressed facts about the life of this intellectual icon.

Keywords

consecration cultural sociology Czechoslovakia dissent intellectuals Patočka

Modern intellectuals often portray themselves as thoroughly rationalized beings who spend their lives in communities that are hierarchically structured proportionally to individual noetic excellence. But while intellectuals are outstandingly reflexive actors, their worlds are, just like other spheres of social life, held together by ties of solidarity spawned by devotion to shared symbols and agendas (Bloor, 1976), fuelled by collective rituals (Collins, 1998) and articulated in mythological narratives. These grand narratives have their heroes and villains, entangled in trite stories of eccentricities (Foucault’s drug experiments), struggles (Weber’s breakdown), and even tragedies (Benjamin’s suicide) that circulate the networks of intellectuals, inspiring enquiries into the moral consistency of their work and life (Abbott, 2019). This article explores the mechanisms of the emergence and maintenance of a legacy of such intellectual heroes. To better understand this phenomenon, I propose to innovate the concept of consecration, highlighting its connection to sacred symbols of the community, and its processual nature, and construct an analytical framework to ponder its structure. I will then use the framework to disentangle the consecration process of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, uncovering in the course of this article repressed facts about the life of this intellectual icon.

Jan Patočka (1907–77) was a philosopher who, within Czech discourse, has attained ‘a semi-saintly status’ (Tucker, 1996: 199) and had a ‘decisive influence over several generations of philosophers and thinkers’ (Tucker, 1996). Besides his intellectual prowess, Patočka’s fame is due to his role in Charter 77, an initiative that criticized the violation of civil rights in communist Czechoslovakia, and his subsequent persecution by the state authorities which, supposedly, led to his death. After Patočka, as one of the three initial spokespersons of the Charter (along with Václav Havel and Jiří Hájek), met the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Max van der Stoel, in Prague on 1 March 1977, the 69-year-old philosopher was repeatedly subjected to stressful police questionings. Returning from an 11-hour-long inquiry on the evening of 3 March 1977, Patočka was taken to hospital with chest pains and, ten days later, on 13 March 1977, died from a brain haemorrhage.

In the following months and years, Patočka’s life and death have been extensively mythologized by other dissidents who cast him as a martyr of anti-communist resistance: a man of extraordinary intellectual qualities and moral purity. Importantly, they paralleled Patočka’s fate with that of Socrates (Szakolczai, 2005), the ur-intellectual of Western philosophy who reputedly embodied both noetic excellence and moral consistency and, when sentenced to capital punishment by his fellow citizens for his pursuit of truth, chose death rather than escape from prison. According to this myth, Patočka ‘like Socrates, lost his life for holding up the mirror to the violent arbitrariness of the state power’ (Prázdný, 2017), and just like the Greek philosopher, was a man with a consistent moral attitude to life, whose sacrifice in the name of the civil rights was the apex of his philosophical quest.

Currently, there is no counter-narrative to this ‘Socratic’ myth that legitimizes Patočka’s saintly status. The exception is Bolton’s work that examined how the initial interpreters of Patočka’s death omitted the ten days between his last questioning and his passing, which led them to represent the death as a direct result of the police abuse (Bolton, 2012). While the stress caused by the police interrogation surely did not help, the role of his age and pre-existing heart condition cannot be dismissed. This article follows up on Bolton’s work and supplies further biographical and historical details that problematize the link between Patočka’s real life and the symbolic representation, spawned in the process of his consecration. Importantly, the ultimate goal is not to defame the philosopher – but rather to recast him as a real historical actor who took up political activism not because his whole life was a premeditated philosophical project but rather because he was morally sensitive enough to be seized by the power of a historical moment.

Theories of intellectuals between social dependence and performative craft

The field of the sociology of intellectuals is divided into two epistemological positions: one highlights the social-structural conditions of idea production, and the other emphasizes a cultural approach and focuses on their performative dissemination (Bortolini and Cossu, 2019). Throughout the twentieth century, theorists who have analysed this elusive phenomenon have proposed predominantly social explanations of intellectuals’ activity. They viewed intellectuals as an objective social category that exists either as a relatively autonomous social group (Mannheim, 2015 [1929]) or a stratum emerging within the existing system of classes (Gramsci, 1989). Intellectuals were understood through their relation to the centre of social and political power (Baumann, 1989; Coser, 1997 [1965]; Shils, 1958), divided into ‘those who have succeeded in securing a post at the manger of the state’ (Michels, 1915 [1911]: 197) and those who ‘assaulted the fortress without being able to force their way in’ (Michels, 1915 [1911]), sometimes even considered a stratum that itself might take control of society (Konrád and Szelényi, 1979). Their very ideas were explained by their social situation, since, in Mannheim’s words, ‘individuals do not create the patterns of thought in terms of which they conceive the world, but take them over from their groups’ (1971 [1927]: 270). This strain of thinking culminates in the network approach (Collins, 1998) and Bourdieu’s influential sociology of academia (Bourdieu, 1984; 1990), which cast intellectuals as either inescapably entwined in their milieus or determined by their habitus of ‘the dominated fractions within the dominant class’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 186).

There are two fundamental problems with this approach. First, it neglects any form of individually structured creative agency and ability to reflectively explore the structure of the field or discourse in which they participate. Second, this socially-oriented approach crucially underplays the question of individual success, the construction of charisma, and the maintenance of intellectuals’ legacies. To understand these phenomena, sociologists have more recently turned to cultural explanations, delving into the meaning-making processes deployed by intellectuals.

An important recent example is the work of Baert who, with Morgan, confronted ‘the idea that the sociological study of intellectuals should focus mainly, if not exclusively, on the structural factors that explain why certain ideas or interventions came into being’ (Baert and Morgan, 2018: 323). In his biography of Sartre (Baert, 2015), the author develops a theory of positioning, which illuminates the strategies by which intellectuals seek their place within discourses and achieve success thanks to historically-conditioned resonance with their audiences. Similarly, the problem of resonance between actors and their audiences is at the centre of Bartmanski’s work, which situates the phenomenon of intellectual success at the intersection of charismatic performativity, social instability and the sacred/profane coding (Bartmanski, 2012). Expanding on these ideas, Alexander has recently elaborated on the logic of cultural coding, arguing that intellectuals succeed if they ‘identify contemporary social arrangements as dangerous and polluting and conjure up utopian alternatives, antidotes that promise to purify and save’ (2016: 344). Bortolini, on the other hand, usefully distinguished the success of intellectuals and their works (2012), clarifying how the work’s reputation eclipses that of its author, and, with Cossu, has highlighted the role of interdisciplinary fluency in intellectuals’ achievement (Bortolini and Cossu, 2019).

My approach follows this trend by highlighting the aspect of meaning-making in the success of intellectuals. I draw especially on the approach developed by Alexander (2016) and Bartmanski (2012), who emphasized, consistently with the Strong Program agenda (Alexander and Smith, 2001), the role of performative enactment of the sacred/profane binary in cultural texts. The problem is that the approaches to the intellectuals mentioned above miss the mark on intellectual success by scrutinizing merely the meaning-making which occurs on the side of the producers of ideas rather than focusing on the emergence of a lasting representation of the intellectuals among their audiences. This, however, is what success ultimately amounts to. Bortolini’s account comes close, emphasizing the role of the collectively created ‘avatar’ (Bortolini, 2012: 202) that eventually becomes more influential than the flesh-and-blood intellectual. What remains unclear in, is the nature and the structure of the process that generates and maintains these vicarious figures. Similarly, Baert notes that while Sartre’s success waned with the transformation of the cultural Zeitgeist and institutionalization of social science, he nonetheless remained present in the discourse – as an archetype of an engaged intellectual, as well as a negative reference point (2015: 176). But how do intellectuals arise as archetypes in the social world, and how are these archetypes maintained?

The emergence and perpetuation of intellectual celebrity can be captured by the concept of consecration. This concept, understood as the ‘legitimate definition’ of an actor in a field, has been central to Bourdieu’s work (Bourdieu, 1996: 225) and explored in the studies of cultural production (Allen and Parsons, 2006; Cattani et al., 2014; Dubois, 2011; Lizé, 2016; Solaroli, 2016) but insufficiently accounted for in the sociology of intellectuals. Sociologists of intellectuals did explore the recognition of theories in various fields (Lamont, 1987) or, on the other hand, their failure to attract it (McLaughlin, 1998), but seem to have misunderstood that lasting intellectual fame or even iconicity (Bartmanski, 2012; Inglis, 2018) is a qualitatively different phenomenon. People do not pay the £4 fee (MacDonald and Erheriene, 2015) to visit Karl Marx’s grave because he was recognised as a legitimate participant in nineteenth-century intellectual discourse. They do so because Marx remains a cultural phenomenon that has been sacralized by social movements, individuals, and political regimes.

To account for this difference, I distinguish the concept of consecration from that of legitimization, which collapse into one another in Bourdieu’s work (Bourdieu, 1993; 1996) and in post-Bourdieusian sociology of evaluation or valorization (Lamont, 1987; 2012; Lizé, 2016) by emphasizing the aspect of the sacred, which lies at the etymological root of the term ‘consecration’. Social actors who participate in various fields of human activity often need to be recognized as having the right to participate in the relevant discourse (e.g. acquiring a particular form of education). There is, however, only a limited number of actors who become embedded in the shared structures of knowledge as central figures of the discourse and the community which constitutes it. They are the geniuses (Heinich, 1997) and founders – the model participants in the field. They emerge as phenomena that are qualitatively different from merely legitimized participants. In this respect, the consecration of intellectuals resembles that of artists or writers, but it might draw on a different set of symbols, specific to the parlance of the community (e.g. progress, science, but also mentorship qualities, etc.).

The consecration process and its elements

In rethinking consecration, I take a cue from Bourdieu’s emphasis on its processual nature (Bourdieu, 1996). Consecration is a social process that unfolds as a spiral of acts occurring both in parallel and consecutively, informing and feeding one into another. These acts involve explicit or implicit interpretation and re-interpretation of the life of a particular figure in the light of currently available symbolic resources and narratives, resulting in the symbolic elevation of the figure to proximity to the sacred symbols of the community. This is achieved by directly or indirectly affording these figures a place in the community’s central narratives. Consecration, therefore, is not merely a re-framing (Lamont, 1987) of intellectuals’ lives and oeuvre but a process that entails a fundamentally creative and mythopoetic ‘imaginative story-telling’ (Leonard, 2008), in which actors inventively seek to persuade their audiences of the intellectual excellence and moral purity of the objects of consecration. Importantly, the consecration process must be maintained and innovated by the actualization of the meanings associated with the figure to argue its relevance in the changing systems of cultural symbols. Without active engagement, the process fades, and the figure is no longer consecrated.

This creative nature of consecration is subject to social control, which delimits the plausibility or acceptability of new interpretations. The level of control depends on diverse variables. It tends to be low in the initial stages of the consecration process, when the actors who engage in this process need a special degree of inventiveness to concoct effective symbolic representations, as well as in the moments when consecration is relaunched and the meaning needs to be innovated. Social control increases when the place of the figure in the shared narrative is established and the connection to sacred symbols is extremely powerful, as well as when the consecration process is explicitly policed by a close group of followers.

Available taxonomies of consecration, however, resemble Foucault’s famous Chinese encyclopaedia, which divides animals into those belonging to the Emperor, those that are fabulous, those having just broken the water pitcher, etc. (Foucault, 2001: xvi). An example could be Bourdieu’s ‘inauguration of statues or commemorative plaques, attribution of street names, the creation of commemorative societies, introduction into university courses and so forth’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 225) or Sapiro’s ‘academies, literary prizes, festivals’ (Sapiro, 2016). I propose a different approach: to analytically disentangle the process of consecration into five elements based on the structure of social interaction, public involvement, and the form of its outcome. The consecration process lasts and is effective if we can identify at least one of the following elements: ceremonial, performative, aesthetic, institutional, and interactional. In social reality, these elements are intertwined in the consecration process.

The ceremonial element refers to the social form of ritual or ceremony. In the case of intellectuals, ceremonial consecration usually commemorates a particular figure or achievement (Abir-Am, 1999). During commemorations, intellectuals in Western science are often recast as ‘personal incarnations of scientific progress and historical authenticity’ (Abir-Am, 1992: 323). Ceremonies further exert social power over participants, draw them closer and confirm their sense of collective identity as adherents to an intellectual agenda or members of a scientific network. An example of such a ceremony was the Marx200 Conference, which took place in May 2018 in Berlin to commemorate the classic figure’s bicentenary.

Performative consecration is an act of an individual or collective performance, usually a text or a speech, which offers focused recognition of an intellectual and their work. Performative consecrations come in different genres, from fully-fledged literary biographies and hagiographies (Terrall, 2006) to celebratory panegyrics and obituaries (Chan and Macfarlane, 2014). Performances reconstruct the meaning of lives, careers and gestures to fit existing narrative schemes as well as innovate them.

The aesthetic elements of the consecration process involve acts and objects that entrench the intellectual in collective memory by way of aesthetic representation. Here, I refer to monuments, busts, effigies, paintings, memorial plaques, and we can include also photographs and movies (feature biographical films as well as documentaries). Unlike ceremonies, for example, aesthetic objects are enduring symbolic representations enshrined in lasting material form. An example could be the recreation of Adorno’s writing table, exhibited at Goethe University in Frankfurt – which, indeed, feeds into the stereotype of an intellectual, consumed by their work.

Institutional consecration refers to the creation of relatively stable institutional arrangements symbolically associated with an intellectual and often demonstratively devoted to the continuation of the culturally mediated noetic or moral project of the figure. Moreover, institutions may further facilitate collective maintenance of the intellectual’s legacy and control possible interpretations. Institutional elements in the consecration process provide a durable form of recognition and examples entail veritable establishments such as the Max Planck Society.

The interactional element of the consecration process covers the field of mundane social intercourse. The maintenance of the sanctified position of intellectuals, as well as its innovation, unfolds crucially in the course of everyday communication. Social and cultural systems are upheld on a daily basis through social interaction. To emerge as a collectively shared consecrated symbol, intellectuals must enter the shared systems of references; their oeuvre and lives must be discussed by others. The interactional element of consecration, by its less controlled nature, facilitates criticism and innovation, including explicit mystification.

The maintenance of a consecrated status requires continuous creation and re-creation of symbolic representations of the intellectual in a consecration process that involves one or more of the elements above. The combination of elements involved and the shape of individual acts, which constitute the unfolding process, define the volume and resonance of the consecration process. With increasing time, as well as structural and cultural transformations, this process tends to fade. What remains, often, are the durable aesthetic elements of consecration, encountered as statues and plaques that echo a waned process of consecration, that wait for the ongoing changes in a society’s cultural system and its generational dynamics to render them meaningless.

The Socrates of Prague: post-mortem consecration of Jan Patočka

The following section applies the outlined framework of the consecration process to the emergence of the intellectual iconicity of the Czech phenomenologist, Jan Patočka. The data were collected in the course of my doctoral research, which concerns, more broadly, the field of Czechoslovak unofficial philosophy before 1989. It includes 15 interviews with former participants (anonymized), archival research of the files created by the Czechoslovak secret police (23 personal dossiers) and an organization supporting unofficial Czech philosophy from Britain (the Jan Hus Educational Foundation), a recording of an unofficial philosophy seminar convened by Ladislav Hejdánek in 1987 (acquired from Libri Probiti library), and a wide array of samizdat journals and edited volumes published unofficially before 1989, as well as more recent published recollections by former unofficial students.

The minute of silence before roaring at the funeral: the ceremonial elements of Jan Patočka’s consecration process

The first ceremonial consecration of Jan Patočka occurred on 15 March 1977, two days after his death, during a cross-disciplinary seminar organized at the psychiatric clinic in Legerova St., Prague, which Patočka frequented. As one of the participants, Jiří Polívka, described it to the secret police:

Entering the room, I noticed that there were more people than usual, they sat or stood around the room. There was muffled music playing in the room, which was common also during other seminars. Several minutes after me, MUDr. Němec entered the room, did not take his coat off, and walked into the middle of the audience. He announced (…) that prof. PATOČKA, (…) died on Sunday and asked the audience to commemorate him with a minute of silence. Then (…) police officers entered the room, asked the participants for documents, and terminated the seminar. (KR-669186 MV: Jiří Polívka)

This account is corroborated by one of Patočka’s students who, however, in our interview maintained that the musical accompaniment was anything but usual:

We really had that Tuesday seminar, and we turned into a commemoration ceremony. I brought amplifiers, they had a small turntable, and we played Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass. Jirka Němec had a speech, Petr Rezek had a speech, and the police broke it up, we weren’t there for long. The police were there before we started but let us meet. (interview 1)

Although brief and ad hoc, the ‘minute of silence’ was a ceremonial consecration par excellence, involving impromptu staging (‘walked into the middle of the audience’) as well as basic preparation (bringing amplifiers). The police entrance itself played a part in the consecration, especially as the participants were aware of its presence beforehand. As an unwanted audience, the police participated in the meaning-making process, and their presence was an expression of what was seen as the fear of the philosopher’s legacy.

But it was only on the next day, 16 March 1977, that the police played the central role in the ceremonial element of Patočka’s consecration process – during his funeral at Břevnov cemetery in Prague. The funeral attracted over 900 mourners, as well as dozens of police officers and agents (Placák, 2017). The police used a helicopter, which flew over the mourning crowd and had a team of motorcycle racers drive around a nearby stadium (Placák, 2017), producing an ear-piercing noise. It is this raucousness of the police presence that created the most dramatic aesthetic dimension of the ceremony and has been extensively noted in contemporary obituaries as well as recent retrospectives (Boreš, 2017; Pospíchal, 2017).

Specifically, the accounts contrasted the roaring of the state’s machines, that could not be ignored, with the silence of the mourning crowd: ‘it was a wrestle of silent dignity and courage with loud and obnoxious arrogance’ (Pospíchal, 2017). Sound is crucial to the efficacy of ceremonies: it may facilitate the experience, as well as hinder it. Often, silence accompanies the most sacred moments. At the funeral, the social and technological assemblage, which emerged due to the focused attention of the state apparatus, produced a special aural setting: one that encouraged a moral interpretation and recast the funeral as one of the foundational moments of the dissent.

After the collapse of socialism, which controlled the public celebration of Patočka, the consecration process re-gained the ceremonial element in regular public commemorations. Anniversaries are specifically important and used to confirm the meaning of Patočka’s legacy. This was the case in 2017, when the Czech public witnessed an anniversary concert in one of Prague’s most prestigious venues, Carolinum, with an introduction by the former prime minister and ex-dissident Petr Pithart. Additionally, there was a recreation of Patočka’s meeting with van der Stoel, organised in the Hotel Intercontinental, where the original meeting took place, with an introduction by Frans Timmermans and the Czech ex-prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka.

Obituaries and appraisals: the performative element

The most important and mythopoetically creative performances, to set the tone for the next few decades, occurred in the collection of obituaries published in samizdat under the title, A First Sketch for a Portrait [První skica k podobizně] in 1977 (reprinted in 2017). The collection is introduced by Patočka’s essay ‘Heroes of our time’, advising the readers against creating personality cults. Rather than hindering mythopoesis, this seems to have served as a legitimization of the myth-making project undertaken by his admirers in the collection.

In his obituary, Ludvík Vaculík rhetorically minimized the effect of Patočka’s long-term health issues, writing that while he ‘died from a fatal disease’, it was not ‘the disease of his heart, about which he already knew and knew how to handle it’ (2017: 37). What caused his passing was the ‘disease of civil liberties, the law, and statesmanship’ (p. 38). In a dramatic conclusion, the author warns that ‘if we will continue wanting what we want’, meaning civil liberties, ‘we may all die like this’, thus re-signifying the dissidents as both Patočka’s followers and as gravely endangered by the state.

Interpretations offered by others emphasized Patočka’s moral purity, authenticity, intellectual and moral consistency. Václav Černý describes him as ‘absolutely truthful, there were no lies, no deception, no cunningness’ (2017: 42), his ‘strongest motivation [being] the concept of natural rights, dignified and full humanity’ (p. 42). Baumann links Patočka’s political endeavour to his philosophical expertise, emphasizing the existential nature of philosophical inquiry: ‘like his teacher Husserl, he did not only live like a philosopher but died like a philosopher as well’ (2017: 35). By such fusing of intellectual and moral qualities, the author reinterpreted Patočka as a philosopher par excellence who became a model actor by, actually, overstepping the remits of academic inquiry into the sphere of moral struggle and political activism.

Zdeněk Pinc, Patočka’s student, follows this link when writing that ‘true philosophy is born in the synthesis of the thought and the experience of life’ (Pinc, 2017: 96). Pinc also emphasizes the deemed similarity to Socrates when he writes that ‘Patočka’s step into the sphere of politics is truly a Socratic initiative, which should remind the society of…the very existence of its fundamental values’ (p. 98). The author strengthens the Socratic parallel by noting how Patočka reminded him of ‘the old Socrates who…did not defend himself and his own life but the truth of his life’ (p. 100). Finally, he recalls Patočka’s ‘cordial, slow tone…with which, resembling the patience of Socrates from the Meno dialogue, he tirelessly strove to bring insular minds to discover principles much more important and evident than the Pythagorean theorem’ (p. 100).

This collection is likely the first instance of the consolidated ‘Socratic myth’, the representation of Patočka’s life as a parallel to that of the premier icon of Western philosophy in their common devotion to the truth and their undeserved demise. Importantly, this narrative connects Patočka’s life and work, arguing for moral consistency and considerable reflexivity of the philosopher who, supposedly, became the Charter 77 spokesperson to finalize his lifelong intellectual pursuit. Still a decade later, in 1987, the commemorative document of the Charter 77 reads:

Jan Patočka, guided by his conscience of a European intellectual, stepped out from his solitude and spoke to the endangered community as well those who were endangering it. By this step, he did not abandon philosophy; by this unexpected…moral gesture, he imbued [philosophy] with universal responsibility of the spirit, and, by this gesture, purified the mission of philosophy, which has been forgotten for many years. (Charter 77, 1987a: 856)

The Socratic myth remains alive until today in the works of his original followers (see Palouš, 2013) as well as non-Czech scholars. Tucker, for example, writes that Patočka ‘decided to face the Hegelian choice between overcoming the fear of death or accepting slavery’ (1996: 213). According to Szakolczai (2005), ‘by launching with Charter 77 the Czech dissident movement, Patočka…put his existential reflections into practice’. Učník reiterates this by writing that ‘Patočka’s decision [to sacrifice himself as a Charter 77 spokesperson] was both deeply informed, and in fact necessitated, by his whole philosophical understanding’ (2018: 51). Recently, Tava (2018) claimed that

maintaining the authenticity of sacrifice means rejecting any misuse or violent appropriation of it. It is therefore the example of non-violent political dissent, which characterized the final days of Patočka’s life as a spokesperson for Charter 77, and which mirrors his understanding of politics as a realm of freedom and truth, that represents the true idea of sacrifice that he most likely had in mind.

It is fitting to note an important moment in Patočka’s trajectory that undermines this image of his consistent life-project. Among dissidents, it was well known that the philosopher had been extremely careful all throughout his life, avoiding explicit involvement in political matters. As his former student Ladislav Hejdánek put it in a 1987 unofficial seminar,

[Patočka] was no fighter. He wasn’t without aggressive moments but only when he had a clear advantage, over students for example, [especially] after the war. He was a person not only incapable of contrarianism, but a person who knew it about himself, and that rendered him yet less capable than if he didn’t know it.

It is less known that throughout almost the entire year of 1976, the philosopher was planning to leave the country. As noted by a secret police officer in a document created on 20 May 1976, located in the police dossier of his son-in-law, Jan Sokol:

In the course of a discussion with the son of Dr Patočka Jan, the Source found out that his father is considering a move to West Germany and takes the necessary steps [to achieve this]. Supposedly, he was informed by competent employees of the West German Embassy that the German government will in due course ask to make Patočka available for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg where he would take up the chair after professor FUNKE¹…Patočka keeps this information from the public and relies on the German authorities to take care of this transfer at the highest level, and the only thing he will eventually have to do is to accept it. (KR-816042 MV: Jan Sokol)

In late August 1976, the police further noted that ‘Patočka takes specific steps to accomplish his goal of moving to West Germany’. And still on 29 October 1976, a police officer wrote that Patočka, clearly dissatisfied with the lack of progress on his application, ‘thinks that one of his younger colleagues – philosophers – in one of the departments of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences is personally interested in jeopardising PATOČKA’s application [for the permit to leave Czechoslovakia]’ (KR-816042 MV: Jan Sokol) . Yet again, on 22 November 1976, approximately less than a month before he agreed to become the Charter’s spokesperson,

[Patočka] went recently to the Security in Břevnov (passport office), to ask if his travel will be approved…Because it’s already winter, PATOČKA would like to make the trip in the spring months of the next year. If the trip will not be permitted, he will write an appeal to the Minister of Interior c. [comrade] OBZINA. (KR-816042 MV: Jan Sokol)

This fact is almost entirely repressed in the historical discourse on Patočka, at best, neglected as inconsequential for the biographical narrative (Blažek, 2017; Blecha, 1997). But clearly, it is important: Patočka was not preparing to become the philosophical martyr of human rights all his life. He seemed, instead, to have firmly decided to accept the position in Freiburg, where he could continue his lifelong pursuit of academic philosophy, something he was unable to do in Czechoslovakia. When Václav Havel offered the spokesperson position to Patočka, he offered it to a person who had been actively seeking escape from the authoritarian regime. Rather than gravitating to becoming the Charter’s spokesperson, Patočka seems to have made the decision in the last moment. The following backlash and persecution from state authorities then dramatically swayed his life course.

From Jan Patočka Archive to Jan Patočka’s University: the institutional element of consecration process

Jan Patočka’s name has been associated with several institutional arrangements. The first is the Jan Patočka Archive, which preserves the philosopher’s manuscripts and other documents. Its history reaches back to 1977 and attests to the mythopoetic nature of the consecration process. Immediately after Patočka died, his former students Ivan Chvatík, Miroslav Petříček, Jiří Polívka and Jiří Michálek, fearing that police might confiscate Patočka’s manuscripts, decided to secure his legacy. As Chvatík recalled in 2007,

[They] decided that there was a danger that the police could somehow imperil Patočka’s works: secure, confiscate, destroy it. But we also figured it was a Sunday, and that it could take time until someone issues the order, and that we could use this time to attempt to save his bequest…, we selected the most important things, his manuscripts, roughly numbered them and packed them in boxes. We were done by midnight. Jiří Polívka drove it to an unknown place, to a friend of his, who had nothing to do with our philosophical pursuits and would not be suspected by the police. Since the beginning, we obeyed the [basic] rule of conspiracy that no one should know everything. (Chvatík, 2007: 7)

Patočka’s students clearly acted on a rational impulse: they were aware of other cases when the work of dissidents had been jeopardized, such as that of the philosopher, Karel Kosík, whose confiscated manuscripts were never returned by the police. The extent to which we can say that Patočka’s work was endangered is, however, questionable. As Chvatík himself acknowledges, eventually, ‘the police had no interest in Patočka’s flat’ (2007: 8), so the archivists ‘decided to move the archive back [to Patočka’s place] rather than further endanger someone uninvolved by storing these materials, certainly very problematic in the eyes of the police’ (Chvatík, 2007).

But were these materials actually problematic if the police never came looking for them? Moreover, the police files suggest that, although Chvatík later ‘found a new, safer storage’ (Chvatík, 2007: 8), the police were fully aware of the emerging archive. A document concerning Rudolf Kučera, another dissenting philosopher, mentions that both ‘Ivan CHVATÍK…and Jiří POLÍVKA…were authorised by Jan PATOČKA junior to edit the manuscripts of the deceased prof. PATOČKA and further work with Ludvík VACULÍK prepared PATOČKA’s edited volume’ (KR-761997 MV: Rudolf Kučera).

In other words, although Patočka’s students feared possible police interference, the state apparatus, clearly knowledgeable about those who owned and were editing the manuscripts, never tried to acquire them. Although the philosopher’s admirers deeply believed in his importance, the police seem to have thought otherwise – indeed incorrectly, given the philosopher’s influence over dissidents’ thinking. While I do not underplay the selfless effort of Patočka’s students, it is necessary to point out that this institutional consecration rests on a myth of Patočka being both endangered and dangerous. It remains an important foundational symbolic structure that underpins the sustained existence of the Jan Patočka Archive, officially established on 1 January 1990, and directed by Ivan Chvatík until today.

The police, however, were evidently interested in another institutional arrangement contributing to the consecration process: the Patočka University. Throughout the entire communist era, but especially after the purges, which followed the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, non-conformist intellectuals, especially in the humanities and social sciences, were marginalized from academic life and their children were often denied higher education. To remedy the situation, dissenting philosophers organized seminars privately, in their flats, supported by Western institutions such as the Jan Hus Educational Institution at Oxford University (this connection, of course, was seen as especially dangerous by the police).

After Patočka died in 1977, several existing seminars decided to cooperate and establish a comprehensive university-like system. According to one of the initiators, the philosopher Ladislav Hejdánek, among the names suggested ‘were sumptuous titles such as “Patočka’s academy”, “alternative university” or “anti-university”’ (Hejdánek, 1980). And although Hejdánek notes that the project was ‘a profound failure’, due to police interference, Patočka’s name became a colloquial term for some cycles of unofficial seminars, used both by the police and the participants. In the dossier of the philosopher, Zdeněk Kratochvíl, for example, we can read that he ‘meets, according to the information by TS “RAK”,² with RnDr. Radim PALOUŠ who teaches at the so-called “University of Jan Patočka”, and also assists with preparation of materials [for this project]’ (KR-698275 MV: Zdeněk Kratochvíl).

Not only was Patočka’s name appropriated for this project, but also the devotion to the maintenance of his legacy became a part of the logic behind some seminars. As Daniel Kroupa, one of Patočka’s former students, wrote in his stipend application to the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in 1988,

[he] decided to organise a seminar that would offer basic philosophical education necessary for the independent study of academic literature, translation, and participation in expert seminars. I began with a one-year course on the history of philosophy, continuing later with lectures and commented reading of the works of E. Husserl and M. Heidegger, as necessary erudition for the independent study of the philosophical works of J. Patočka.

As a participant in Kroupa's group recalled, acquiring the erudition necessary to study Patočka, and thus maintain his legacy (as well as control over interpretation of his philosophy), was the underlying moral commitment of this seminar: ‘Daniel wanted to introduce us especially to the work of his teacher Jan Patočka, and, for that, it was necessary to read some Husserl (Cartesian Meditations) and Heidegger (Being and Time)’ (interview 2). Today, this educational focus of the institutional elements of Patočka’s consecration process remains dominant. Two examples of its lasting presence in the current discourse may be the Prof. Jan Patočka’s Grammar School in Prague, and the Jan Patočka Fellowship, awarded annually to Czech scholars by the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna.

The grave, the plaque, and the memorial: the aesthetic element

Before 1989, Patočka’s memory could not be publicly enshrined in any material or aesthetic form. Despite the lack of police interest in his works, he remained well known to the state apparatus as an icon of dissent. The role of the aesthetic memorial was, therefore, cast on his gravesite, which became a place of further creative consecration. According to an essay in the 1977 obituary collection, at the end of the funeral ceremony, ‘a young man in a black sweater and jeans laid a thorn crown on a pile of earth next to professor Patočka’s grave’ (Boreš, 2017: 77). The laying of thorn crowns, in reference to the suffering of Jesus as well as a similar gesture of the Czech writer Božena Němcová, who laid the crown of thorns on the casket of another Czech intellectual icon, Karel Havlíček Borovský, in 1856, next to the graves of dissidents or repatriated émigrés is a practice documented in Hejdánek’s seminar ten years later – when one student condemns it as absurd. And as a British academic visiting Prague in the 1980s remarked during our interview, even six years after Patočka’s death, he ‘was led to his grave’ (interview 3), which suggests that the gravesite was also shown to Western visitors as a monument to the dissidents’ struggle.

After the regime fell, Patočka’s memory returned to the public discourse. One of the symbols of this process was the creation of a commemorative plaque in his hometown, Turnov, which was unveiled on 1 June 1990 (Patočka’s 83rd birthday) by Václav Havel, his former co-spokesperson and, at that time, the new president of Czechoslovakia. The plaque, affixed to the house of his birth, is accompanied by Patočka’s bust and describes him as a ‘Czech philosopher and a defender of human rights’. This aesthetic consecration not only materially enshrines the philosopher in collective memory and eternalizes his physical appearance but also serves as a sign that designates his exact birthplace as a special site of Czech history.

Another example is the memorial created in 2017, devoted to Patočka’s meeting with Max van der Stoel in March 1977, rather than to the philosopher himself. The artwork, created by the artist Dominik Lang, has the shape of a tree shadow and is located in the municipal district of Prague 6. Commemorating this particular event, the artwork feeds into the mythological interpretation of the philosopher’s life, re-casting the meeting with the Dutch minister as the pinnacle of his life, which, as the myth has it, led to his demise.

Besides public artefacts, there are a number of aesthetic objects, in particular, documentary films that represent Patočka’s life and death. The most recent one, produced for the 40th anniversary of his death in 2017, is entitled The Socrates of Prague, perpetuating explicitly the myth of Patočka’s similarity to the foundational figure of Western philosophy. Its focus, indeed, is entirely congruent with this myth and it emphasizes, again, the last years of the philosopher’s life and his demise.

Patočka in seminars and conversations: the interactional element

There are strong indications that Patočka remained the matter of everyday debate in unofficial philosophy seminars. As revealed by a volume of 1983–84 unofficial seminar transcripts (Voegelin & Patočka), published in Britain by Patočka’s student, Radim Palouš, under the nom-de-plume T. R. Korder [the recorder] (Korder, 1988), the deceased philosopher was actively interpreted and reinterpreted as a fundamental figure in the Czech intellectual canon. Actors strove to pinpoint what ‘Patočka understood’ in his philosophy, what ideas he ‘confronted’ (p. 15), what were the contexts in which ‘his formulations are meaningful’ (p. 19) or, for example, whether he knew the works of Helmut Kuhn (p. 123).

That Patočka’s name also appeared spontaneously (outside of debates explicitly concerning his thought) is clear in Hejdánek’s recorded seminar on ethics. Here, a student repeatedly, over several sessions, uses the discussion to comment on how ‘Patočka is being used by the Charter…in a very cheap way’ and inquires whether Hejdánek, who knew Patočka well, thinks that the myth is true and that his death was ‘the eventual completion of his life’. Clearly, the semi-public mythos, constructed in rituals and performances, was accepted by the members of the community. Informal settings with a low level of social control, such as seminars, however, sometimes gave way to suspicion and criticism. Yet, whether in critical or panegyric modes of consecration, Patočka remained an active symbolic representation in the discourse and was recognized as a central figure.

A case of faded consecration: Jan Patočka contra Václav Černý

My framework also illuminates the difference between Patočka’s enduring fame and the faded renown of his contemporaries who, at some point, used to be more important in the dissent field. An example could be the literary theorist Václav Černý (1905–87) who, unlike the extremely careful Patočka, had been active in resistance movements during both the Nazi occupation and under the Socialist regime, and was imprisoned by both regimes. During the 1970s, Černý was a towering figure in dissent circles and had a significant influence over others, including Patočka. As Ladislav Hejdánek remembers in the 1987 unofficial seminar:

[Patočka] adored [Černý], he impressed [Patočka] very much. He [Patočka] was almost servile to [Černý] and used to confer with him. I was angry because [he would always ask] whether Černý signed [a document] or not. He…went to him again to confer whether he should take the position [of the spokesperson]. He had it approved by Černý because he had an unpleasant feeling that himself, Patočka, an absolute nobody, would take the role of the Charter’s leader, while, of course, there was the favourite number one, professor Václav Černý. He went to ask him for permission.

Patočka’s eventual acceptance of the spokesperson position and his death, as the central moments that spawned his sanctification, were clearly important. Černý died from illness at 82, and was lauded in the Charter 77’s obituary as ‘a figure whose personal moral purity and gallantry’ (Charter 77, 1987b: 904) were undisputable. His death, therefore, missed the historical coincidence – the momentum of the emerging civil rights initiative – that rendered Patočka outstandingly suitable for consecration. Likely due to his peaceful death and his relatively low involvement in the civil rights movement by the end of the 1980s, the mythopoesis never acquired the propulsion that would generate strong moral meanings and further facilitate the emergence of social control over his legacy. Even the Charter obituary does not shy away from calling the literary theorist a ‘controversial personality’ thanks to ‘caustic sarcasm or some of his generalisations’ (Charter 77, 1987b: 904), which became notorious among the dissidents after the publication of his acrimonious memoirs.

Looking at the consecration processes of the two intellectuals, it is clear that, compared to Patočka, Černý’s consecration has waned. He has two commemorative plaques but neither of them enshrines his physical appearance or conveys a story. Also, neither was unveiled by a high-profile public personality, although undoubtedly, he lacked none of the personal connections to ex-dissident politicians that Patočka had had. There are no documentaries, artworks or institutions that would make his legacy tangible. There are no annual or anniversary commemorations. The only literary representation is a solitary biography (Vanovič, 1999), which is perhaps superfluous due to Černý’s own extensive memoirs. Rather than an ongoing consecration process of considerable magnitude, such as in the case of Patočka, with Černý, we encounter a faded consecration process that, if he is to remain an active symbol within the shared structure of Czech discourse, will need a revival and innovation.

Conclusion

In this article, I have developed a novel understanding of consecration, one that, unlike the dominant Bourdieusian approach, does not conflate consecration with legitimization. In my understanding, consecration is distinct because it is a process by which actors or objects are symbolically elevated to the sacred position within the community and embedded in its foundational narratives. Consecration usually involves explicit moralization of noetic achievement – actors become model participants in their fields by being interpreted as more than just intellectually excellent, but also by being virtuous and extraordinary.

I have analytically disentangled the process into five elements, offering thus a functional framework to analyse and categorize the various ways in which individuals are consecrated. I believe that this approach will be useful to other researchers in cultural sociology, memory studies and sociologists of intellectuals, as it offers an analytical lens that may unearth the particularities of an individual consecration processes through exploring its composition and character. One such specific question could be, for example, which of the elements in a particular historical moment encouraged the most creative activity? This approach can be further expanded by integrating inspiration from other theoretical agendas in social theory, such as relational sociology and the network approach, which could, moreover, illuminate, for instance, how particular collectives take control of the consecration process and police it.

I applied this framework to the consecration process of the Czech philosopher, Jan Patočka. Patočka is a peculiar case, given the relatively crude mythopoesis, which often bordered on turning the philosopher into moral kitsch: a wise Czech Socrates ruthlessly murdered by the communist police. As I have shown, the Socratic myth of consistency was amiss, although sincerely believed by his students and admirers. The reality of the philosopher’s life, a large part of which he spent in two totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, was more complicated. Rather than the mythical Socrates of Prague, he was a historical actor faced with real choices, some of which were profoundly consequential. If there is to be a historically and sociologically valid understanding of dissent and the socialist era more generally, we have to start pondering its mythopoetic processes, consecration included, rather than rely on them as incontestable facts.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article benefited from individual feedback by Lisa McCormick, Ross J. Bond, Werner Binder, Jonathan H. Bolton and Derek W. Morris, and Arjen van der Heide. I am grateful also for the feedback received at the Cultural Sociology Workshop at Yale University, convened by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Natalie Aviles in September 2018, and the Theorising Our Work seminar of the Sociology Department at the University of Edinburgh, convened by Isabelle Darmon and Stephen Kemp in February 2019.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Dominik Želinský

Archival documents (Jan Hus Educational Foundation Archive,Brno)

Filosofické studijní semináře [Philosophy discussion seminars], Daniel Kroupa, 7 April 1988.

Secret police dossiers

KR-669186 MV (Jiří Polívka).

KR-698275 MV (Zdeněk Kratochvíl).

KR-761997 MV (Rudolf Kučera).

KR-816042 MV (Jan Sokol).

Recordings (Libri Prohibiti Library,Prague)

Ladislav Hejdánek (417 – PRES 0417, Side A).

Notes

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