Abstract
Patočka's readers are often puzzled by his concept of the soul. In the Heretical Essays, the Czech philosopher often speaks about the "care for the soul" without, however, explaining what the "soul" might be that is the object of such care.
The mystery deepens when we realize that at the time of the writing of the Heretical Essays, Patočka was developing his "asubjective phenomenology." This is a phenomenology that dispenses with the modern concept of a subject. Its elimination signifies that the soul, whose care makes "makes humans just and truthful," cannot be understood as a subject.
What, then, is its conception? Patočka, in fact, goes back to Aristotle's definition of the soul as the functioning of our embodied being. Doing so, however, he radicalizes its conception such that the care of the soul becomes the care for the three "motions of existence" that define our functioning.
The article concludes by relating this conception of the care of the soul to the notion of human rights.