Crisis – represents a novel way in terms of philosophical method and doctrinal contents. For Patočka, however, Husserl's idea of philosophy and philosophical rationality as universal scientific reason is an old one: it represents "one of the last links in the chain of typically European perspectives on foreign cultures and their worlds. That which is "European' is placed above all other conceptions for seemingly "objective' reasons, on the basis of its "universal rationality'; the higher validity of the European principle, its necessity as opposed to the contingency of the other paths followed by human development, is naively presupposed, rather than proved." Indeed, it is well known that Husserl in the Crisis treats other great civilizations, such as those of India or China, as a "merely empirical, anthropological type." In his opinion, only "the Europeanization of all other civilizations" could avoid "a historical non-sense of the world." Patočka was quite aware that such an attitude, full of Eurocentric overtones, "cannot provide the basis of understanding between different human worlds, cannot pave the way to universal human contact, but only to the destruction of the fundamental humanities through a generalized evacuation of the world-mystery." Emphasizing "humanities" in the plural, Patočka proposes in one of his last private seminars, Plato and Europe, a backward questioning more radical than Husserl's: going back not only to the idea of Greek philosophy (as did Husserl), but further beyond, to the situation in which Greek philosophy was born: its pre-reflective mythical environment, or mood. If Patočka still understands the task of philosophy as the self-responsibility of humanity, he conceives of it no longer in the Husserlian terms of universal rational science, but rather in terms of care for the soul. By a heroic interpretative effort, Patočka invites us to go back to the Greek mythological framework in order to outline a philosophical anthropology which understands human existence as capable of truth and justice. Such an anthropological sketch has a double merit. Vertically it can serve as the basis for an ontology of the phenomenalization of the world. Horizontally it can provide elements for a dialogue with the conception of human existence of Mencius' Confucianism, one of the most representative and influential schools of the Chinese tradition of moral and political philosophy. For Mencius, the defining elements of being human are nothing other than the faculties of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom. These four terms are arguably Chinese variants of the concepts of justice and truth." /> Patočka's concept of Europe - Lau Kwok-Ying | sdvig press