"I myself have actually undergone such a transformation. When I was young, I also thought that people could be made to live in a more just way, in a more just society. But today I am convinced that it cannot be done. You just can't force people to do anything. Everything has to happen spontaneously and you can't force people to do anything. And in retrospect, I realize the inappropriateness of the whole coercive system. The coercion took the form that every department head had to be in the party. That was a sort of guarantee that things would be sort of all right politically. Of course, there was really no guarantee. It was a system of guarantees. Every head of a department had to be in the party, and of course the head of a university department even more so. This was to guarantee the political profile of the students. And of course, nothing was guaranteed at all."
"We went to Patočka's seminar. Patočka let the seminar participants know that there would be no seminar, but two participants did not find out, and that was me and Stanislav Sousedík. We met at Patočka's apartment and Patočka told us that there would be no seminar because he was being prosecuted by the police. I didn't understand the seriousness of the situation, so I said something like that it would pass, but I had no idea of the seriousness of the situation and that Patočka would not actually come out, that he would not get out of it. I didn't think of that at all." - "So he didn't look sick?" - "He didn't look sick."
"I tried to lie about [not] signing the cooperation. But you know, there was no cooperation with State Security. Because by some incredible twist of fate, they forgot about me and in 1956 they removed me from the list of informants on the grounds that I had moved to Prague. But I had already moved to Prague in 1954. That means they didn't know about me at all. This played a big role in my life development. At first, I considered it lucky, or as they said then, I lucked out. I lucked out, they just forgot about me. Then I started to consider it a grace of God, it's a kind of a path to religion. I gradually became a deeply religious person who believes that behind everything that happens in the real world, there is a deeper happening that mysteriously interferes with the real. And in a way it sort of organizes it and makes it come out. And I came to this conviction, among other things, by simply looking for a deeper meaning of what really happened. And of course, the fact that I signed it - but as I say, I was removed in 1956 - I consider that a great shame of my life. And it still weighs on me."
Professor Milan Sobotka was born on 23 July 1927 in Olomouc. His father was a teacher in Kojetín and the mayor of the Kojetín Sokol. In 1940, the family moved to Ivaň near Tovačov, where his father began teaching at the town school, and this probably saved his life during the war, when the Germans were arresting Sokol officials en masse. Before the move, Milan Sobotka attended the grammar school in Kroměříž, then moved to the classical grammar school in Prostějov, where he gained his first knowledge, which later predestined him for a philosophical academic career. In the seventh year of grammar school, he was taken with other boys to the Technische Nothilfe, i.e. forced labour - at the Prostějov airport they filled in craters caused by bombing - from which Milan Sobotka escaped on the basis of a medical certificate and lived with his family until the end of the war. He graduated just after the war, in 1946, and when the Palacký University in Olomouc was restored in the same year, he began to study philosophy, which he completed in 1951 and became an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy. A year before completing his studies, he met Professor Patočka for the first time. He sympathised with the rural proletariat, which led him to join the Communist Party, but the February 1948 coup took him by surprise. At the beginning of the 1950s, he signed an interrogation agreement with the State Security Service (StB), but it did not last long - in 1956 he was removed from the list of informants. In 1953, when the announcement came that the teaching of philosophy would be cancelled, he taught his last year in Olomouc and in 1954 he left, also as an assistant professor, for the Faculty of Arts in Prague. When Professor Patočka was translating Hegel’s philosophical work The Phenomenology of Spirit (published in 1960), he gave the manuscript to Milan Sobotka for revision before its publication and they met at Patočka’s apartment seminars. After the entry of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, the faculty underwent a vetting process, which Milan Sobotka passed thanks to an article published on the 150th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. Throughout the rest of his life, he devoted himself to Hegel, Descartes, and other great philosophical thinkers. Also, thanks to this little changed in his career after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 - classical philosophy dating back to the early 19th century is, in his words, not subject to political regimes. In 2023, Milan Sobotka lived in Prague. He died on 22 March 2024.
