imuza

“In memoriam Jan Patočka”

Jan Patočka, Czech Philosopher, first speaker of Charta 77, being prosecuted by the secret police. He died after one of tough police examinations in 1977. In his essays he was searching for human freedom and found it in the art.

Art seems to be crucial point in human societies throughout ages. Creative process appears like a human need even more like a leisure activity. Patočka said: “Human need of creation of new artworks is the last proof of human freedom.” Freedom is a primary condition of any existence to manifest its authenticity while authenticity can be pointed out as an identity of this particular being, but even more as a true basis of particular existence that makes this existence as such. Through ages people needed to express their existence, to somehow record their life and world. They often used an artistic expressions as a record, as a manifestation. Art drew an inspiration and content form human area and created some kind of a comment or rather a „source of definition on human affairs“. In 20. century, the power of definition was fully taken over the conceptual thinking such as mathematics and other natural sciences. Patočka says this is probably the historical milestone where art has lost the function of “human mirror” providing trustworthy information about the world. However the triumph of nominal sciences provided the art new possibilities. Instead being the reference quality, art became rather a source of searching for new meanings. According to Patočka, the meaning of the new artwork is not given in advance, but emanates from it after the creation. This would mean that the new art is searching for its meaning itself. Still it is us creating the artworks, it is still our world providing us inner inspiration getting out through new art. So how could the art lose its power of record? Is it that we have lost our trust in artistic evidence or we more do not understand the shapes that emanate from our new art as a records of our „new being“ in this „new world“?

In 20. century we provided primary evidence to natural sciences. By these, being purely rational, countable and measurable, we alienated from our authenticity and let ourselves become the objects of measuring. On the contrary the nature of human being is to be purely personal to himself or herself, because we do not mean ourselves naturally as numbers and measures, and being reduced to object is felt as an act of injustice and misunderstanding on a deepest existencial level. We are objects within the outer world, while within the inner space we stay personal to ourselves. We still express ourselves through art, but we no more give art socially satisfied „notification“ respect. We are taught to trust the measures and numbers more and this habit starts occupying also our inner world. I dare that new art provide space of trustworthy notification as in the past, it still is a mirror, just the contents that come out of this mirror differ. Who are we humans now within this nice working new world constituted by science and digital conveniencies? We built a barrier made by precise racionalitation and „objectivation“ of the world and now on the way to find the way back to ourselves we must overcome this distance to get to something that should be the closest and most natural quality in our lifes. We bound ourselves to slavery of being objects and voluntarily awarded our freedom to cold unpersonal entities…

Anyway, we need to be free to do art, but we even more need art to be free. Paintning the colours to touch ourselves, singing music to hear ourselves, do the art to meet ourselves on human basis. We simply need this freedom in a pure meaning of essential condition of human existence.

Jana Kubankova