ABSTRACT
The people of the Czech Republic in the twentieth century experienced a series of upheavals, including the Soviet invasion in response to the Prague Spring of 1968, returning what was then Czechoslovakia into a communist satellite. Patocka's late career can be viewed as a response to the Soviet occupation and more significantly to the philosophical frame of mind that allowed it to persist. F. W. J. Schelling had referred to this frame of mind as a pneumopathology, which can be translated as a spiritual disorder. The spiritual person who has been shaken in this way has three choices. She could withdraw from public life, living entirely in private or creating isolated little communities with others in the hope of remaining pure in their spirituality. This three-movement process will bring the spiritual person into loose allegiance with likeminded comrades in a “solidarity of the shaken”. The “shaken” speak with a spiritual authority, consistent with the anthropological principle stated earlier by Voegelin.
