Jan Frei
SUMMARY
On the Relation of Patočka’s Philosophy to the Philosophy of Karl Jaspers
In the first part, the author sketches the problem of human existence as it appears in the texts of both philosophers. The second part enumerates all Patočka’s texts mentioning Jaspers as well as all of the works by Jaspers that we know Patočka reflected on. The third part traces in more detail Jaspers’ book Philosophical Faith, in which Patočka, in his own words, found “great stimuli”, and shows several links between Patočka’s own philosophy and the book (especially four themes: the relation between philosophy and science; between philosophy and revealed religion; between philosophy and “non-philosophy”; between philosophy and history). The fourth part traces the idea of the origin of the free human act, which was explored by both Patočka and Jaspers. Finally, the article shows that despite similar or even identical lines of thought on certain topics – including a topic as fundamental as human freedom –, the authors offer two fundamentally different visions of reality that could be labelled as “ontology vs. metaphysics” or “the totality of the world vs. extra-worldly transcendence”.