Albert Dikovich

The European project sees itself as Europe’s lesson learned from the devastating mistakes of its own history. This lesson includes a particular sensitization to political violence and a break with traditions of thought and imaginaries that are seen as responsible for the violent excesses of the 20th century. The current war in Ukraine has plunged this self-understanding into a deep crisis. The moral self-commitment to non-warlike political means and the imperatives of self-assertion appear to be incompatible. The project, drawing among others on Jan Patočka’s political thought, aims to develop a phenomenologically inspired political-philosophical understanding of the normative significance of the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century with the concept of the pathic limitation of the political. Furthermore, it aims to examine, from both a historical and a problem-oriented philosophical perspective, tensions arising from the contact and confrontation with the political outside world, but also inner processes of moral depletion in time regarding values and norms that are founded in the traumatic experience of excessive violence. The former is subsumed under the term pathic difference—the fearful notion of a morally different constitution of the other. The latter is understood as a problem of political boredom.