The Conversion in the Firing Line. The Polemological and Ascetic Pedagogy of Jan Pato?ka

Abstract

The affirmation of wars of annihilation and the progressive removal of the theme of death have led to a renewed relationship with otherness: the enemy must not be fought but eliminated exactly as the thought of the farewell step must be removed.

The tragic reality of war is often questioned by taking the perspective of peace. The sense of war itself is denied and focused on through a vision that tends to make it the bloody state of exception of irenic domination. But, as Pato?ka does not hesitate to affirm, it is from the daytime horizon of peace that the idea of ??war is carried forward. And it is precisely through the experience of the nonsense of the front, through the conversion of the gaze of those who have revised the life-death relationship from the trenches considering the ineliminability of the nocturnal in the diurnal, that absolute freedom can glimmer, the facing of the secret of the world. It is on the front line that «we encounter the abysmal realm of the ‘prayer for the enemy,’ the phenomenon of ‘loving those who hate us’» (Pato?ka, 1996, p. 131). The experience of the shaking of the front founds what Pato?ka defines the solidarity of the shaken, the survivors, an unprecedented way to rethink politics, man and his own educability.

The essay intends to state pedagogically the philosophy of the history of the Czech thinker showing how the polemological-nocturnal dimension (meant as ontological, ethical and political), of the constant turbulence (Havel), of the conflict and of the fall can take on an ethical-political and educational meaning.