At the crossroads: Patočka and Althusser on the idea of modern science

In this article, I examine the points of confluence and dissonance in Jan Patočka and Louis Althusser’s respective theories of the idea of modern science, focusing on two texts from 1965, Patočka’s “Conférences de Louvain” and Althusser’s Lire le Capital. I argue that while Patočka’s diagnosis—which he shares with Husserl—of the “abyss” lying between the empty schematism of modern scientific formalization and an engaged concern for the přirození svět or “natural world” (broadly analogous to Husserl’s Lebenswelt) remains a variously inflected constant in his thought, Althusser’s reading of Capital offers an objective correction or supplement to Patočka’s diagnosis. In this view, it is Reading Capital that first presents Marx’s Capital as a scientifically precise yet historically and socially determined and “concerned” (to use Patočka’s term) logical formalization of the contemporary, capitalist world. While Patočka’s few passing references to the young Marx throughout his kompletní dílo uniformly present the latter as a thinker of the post-Hegelian humanism of labour and productive subjectivity, I argue following Althusser and Alain Badiou that in Capital, Marx constructs an asubjective science of the necessary forms of appearance of all things in a historically specific world, a logical and scientific formalization of the historically specific “life world” Marx defines as the capitalist social form.