Hannah Arendt and Jan Patočka on the Ambiguities of Sacrifice

The aim of this article is to compare Hannah Arendt’s and Jan Patočka’s reflections on the meaning of sacrifice. In her study of totalitarianism, Arendt discerned how the concept of sacrifice was misused and manipulated by totalitarian regimes, which is why she was more skeptical about it than Patočka for whom it was a central philosophical term. Patočka took note of such distortions and introduced the important distinction between authentic and inauthentic sacrifice, the instrumental, depersonalized sacrifice utilized by ideological regimes. And yet Arendt’s concept of the political would be inconceivable without self-sacrifice, although she usually refrained from using the term itself, opting instead for the semantically close concept of courage. I argue that for both thinkers, self-transcendence was the core of self-sacrifice—the readiness to leave one’s private interests behind and enter the public realm where the common good and broader existential questions become central. Self-sacrifice was thus a way for both Arendt and Patočka to challenge the dominant technoscientific worldview of modernity. However, to avoid totalitarian excesses and manipulations, self-sacrifice had to be embedded in an ethical framework, and it was to meet this challenge, I conclude, that Arendt and Patočka formulated their own distinctive notions of political ethics.