Adam Pašek

My name is Adam Pašek and, thanks to the Bakala Foundation, I study the second year of Master of Philosophy at Parisian University Panthéon-Sorbonne, after I finished the first year of Master’s degree in Fribourg in Switzerland. Although my daily journey by Underground to the faculty library reminds me of the life I led when I lived at dormitory Jiřího z Poděbrad, and although the Parisian plane trees recall me of Karlínské náměstí all the time, it seems that my life is, for some years now, about a journey away. I first set on this adventure with Erasmus scholarship in 2015. I loved enormously what it felt like to slip into a foreign language and to live in it. You remark suddenly that an ordinary everyday experience demands quite complex competences that you do not think of most of the time. After a few days, it is not a problem to order a coffee of course. But to do that with all the proper politeness on one hand and without appearing artificial on the other, that is a task worth attention. And again, from Switzerland, Europe appeared quite different, its inner coherence started to make a different sense. It was at that time that, thanks to Professor Karfík, I started to read in detail Patočka’s writings. I have decided to write the Master thesis in Paris when I made acquaintance with the works that Professor Renaud Barbaras devoted to Patočka’s philosophy. I go to his lectures on Thursday evenings and on Friday mornings. I don’t know if you are familiar with what it feels like to see the thinking taking place before you, when the lecture is not just a transmission of knowledge ready beforehand but an event of thought. On Friday mornings, the subject is the search for a way to characterize the world in such a manner, that we can understand, how “to be” means necessarily “to be in the world”. Such a definition of the world must show us also what means for each different being “to appertain to the world”. In a sense, we are not far from the question of what it means for Europe. And because for Patočka, the specificity of Europe resided from the beginning in a certain understanding of this appurtenance, a second question is posed for us immediately, namely, what it means for Czech Republic to appertain to Europe?