Patočka’s Socrates and His Socratic Politics

This paper gives an account of Jan Patočka’s reception of the figure of Socrates. Patočka sees as Socrates’ most important insight his knowledge of ignorance – the fact that we lack knowledge of the most important things in life, but we merely have opinions of them. Socrates then questions and examines such opinions, his own as well as those of others, and this practice of questioning thinking is what Patočka calls care for the soul, and which he understands as the general form of all genuine philosophic questioning. The mature Patočka understood the entirety of Plato’s thought as rooted in his account of the self-moving soul, and this account as arising from reflection on Socratic questioning. Finally, I argue that Patočka’s decision to actively engage with the Charter 77 movement was explicitly motivated by the example of Socrates.