Patočkovy úvahy o dramatu

Patočka’s Reflections on Drama The article focuses on Patočka’s thematization of drama and dramatic works, especially Greek tragedy. The first part discusses the basic thematization of this topic in Patočka’s writings from the 1940s (epic and tragedy as a pre-philosophical reflection of man’s relation to the whole of being; the mythical frame of Attic tragedy; the relation between the Greek conception of what it is to be a man and the ethos of modern man). The article then turns to Patočka’s works from the 1960s to the 1970s to show how he develops the topic, till it eventually becomes part of his philosophy of history (including his thoughts on drama as a part of the thematization of myth; myth as a way of keeping the world as meaning). Considerable attention is paid to Patočka’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone and to his critical thoughts on Aristotle’s Poetics – rethinking the terms mimesis, katharsis, phobos, and eleos, and connecting them with the nature and the tasks of modern dramatic art (which he sees as a part of ‘literature’, in new circumstances after the loss of narrative objectivity). The last part shows how the ‘dramatic work of art’ is a part of Patočka’s broader thinking on the arts and literature in particular.