Introduction

The conversation between pragmatism and phenomenology remains one of the ongoing debates in the modern phenomenological research. While the ‘pragmatic turn’ in phenomenology includes various authors (from the first-generation phenomenologists such as Scheler (Davis, 2017) to the well-known interpretations of Merleau-Ponty (see Dreyfus, 1998 or Švec, 2020)) and a wide range of topics from absorbed coping to neuroscience (Pollard, 2014), arguably the most programmatically important status is still reserved for Heidegger. Particularly, his investigation of understanding, everyday intelligibility and what he describes as Das Man, everyday normativity that prescribes what one does and says. Heidegger’s conceptual apparatus, argumentative and methodological strategies made possible a productive turn to the investigation of practices, their status and significance in human understanding. In turn, this has resulted in developing a new brand of pragmatism described by various authors as phenomenological or Heideggerian (Wrathall, 2017). Dedicated to the investigation and development of such a pragmatism, this work has three basic goals and three corresponding sections.

First, I will outline the most important differentiating features of this pragmatism, which raises a specific variation of the primacy of practice thesis that can be described as the primacy of practices thesis. In the second section, I will argue that the Heideggerian disdain in regards to the everyday intelligibility, and the consequent attempt to liberate Dasein from its fall in the world, hampers and limits the basic claims of phenomenological pragmatism, invoking the criticisms of J. Patočka. The very same problem remains present in later generations of scholars who are trying to explicate and develop the pragmatic motives in Heidegger’s thought. In the last section, I will proceed to the main goal of this article: demonstrating how Patočka’s own ideas regarding the three movements of human existence provide a much more flexible and acceptable foundation for phenomenological pragmatism.

One methodological consideration that I would like to make clear from the beginning is that my analysis of Heidegger’s and Patočka’s texts will not be aimed at the extensive reconstruction of their thought but will concentrate on those aspects that can be useful in the context of pragmatic turn in phenomenology.

From the Primacy of Praxis to the Primacy of Practices

Drawing upon Being and Time, and more specifically, paragraph 13 of Being and Time, W. Blattner (2007) offers his often-quoted definition of the primacy of praxis thesis (henceforth TPP): “the intelligence and intelligibility of human life,” says Blattner, “resides primarily in precognitive practice, and that cognition is derivative of such practice” (Blattner, 2007: 10). This formulation captures the point that is integral to the most pragmatic projects: pragmatically-oriented authors tend to start with the investigation of human comportment as the condition of our access to the world and only then investigate the accessed ‘objects’ as the subject of ‘theoretical’ interest, an approach that Blattner sees as a descendent of Kant’s transcendentalism (Blattner, 2007: 13). Be that as it may, this formulation opens up more questions than it resolves. First of all, by subordinating the theoretical attitude to the praxis, we bind ourselves with the task of clarifying what we mean by “praxis” in the first place.

One way of explaining the notion of “praxis,” which has become more and more significant in the past two decades, is based on the resources provided by what is broadly conceived as existential phenomenology and, more specifically, based on the phenomenological conception of intentionality. Following Švec and Čapek (2017), for example, we can describe the primacy of practice thesis as based on the idea that “[i]ntentionality is, in the first and fundamental sense, a practical coping with our surrounding world” (p. 1).To flesh out the primacy of praxis in terms of intentionality in such a way means, first and foremost, to stress that intending or accessing an object (the domain of ‘knowing-that’) rests upon a corresponding act (the domain of ‘knowing-how’) that is performed by a being whose being consists of relating to beings that it is not, i.e., of finding itself in the world. Accessing an object, in this sense, implies its existential significance for a being who accesses it: the object matters to me being presented in a certain ‘how’ that discloses its relevance to me. Okrent (1991) has described this basic pragmatic idea by saying that “beliefs and desires must be ascribed together” (p. 64). While this formulation is, in a sense, confusing (as it relies upon a non-phenomenological vocabulary of beliefs and desires, whereas phenomenological analysis finds it preferable to talk about “solicitations” and “non-thetic” awareness), it grasps the basic motive of phenomenological thinking, stressing the integral link between the accessibility of objects (i.e., ‘beliefs’ we can have about them) and our ability to be in the world (i.e., ‘desires’ in the context of which we can have ‘beliefs’). Recognition of the fundamental interest that accompanies intentionality (which Okrent even describes as the fundamental “narcissism,” a description we will critically assess later) constitutes one of the basic pillars of TPP.

Then, of course, there is a question of what those ‘desires’ are, how they are adopted and formed. Okrent has offered, more recently, another useful tool distinguishing two ‘camps,’ two general ways of explanation (Okrent, 2013: 134). The first refers to American pragmatism represented most notably by Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Noe and Okrent himself (Okrent, 2013: 134) (Rouse can also be added to this list). According to this approach, the general ability to disclose entities as relevant to us is ultimately based on evolutionary selection, which explains how and why the “organic instrumental practical interests of the agent” are formed. The second approach, which he ascribes to Heidegger, is based on the assumption that accessing objects in a meaningful way is dependent upon socialization that would teach us some “socially articulated ends, means and properties” (Okrent, 2013: 134) in light of which the meaningful treatment of something as something becomes possible. This distinction is convenient and, apparently, grasps some part of the truth. But ultimately, it must be neglected for several reasons.

First, this is because Merleau-Ponty cannot be situated in the naturalistic camp having much more in common with Heidegger and other phenomenologists than with Dewey (see Koloskov, 2021). The issue of whether or not (and, if yes, to what extent) the phenomenological approach is compatible with naturalistic principles is still unresolved and lies outside the scope of this paper; what we should emphasize, however, is that existential-phenomenological program points towards one shared presupposition common to a number of authors, as different as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Patočka, Todes. All of them share a similar intention to stress a certain cleavage between human existence and any kind of explanation by objective factors. All of them (although to a different degree) are trying to outline the constitutive role that negativity plays in human existence that escapes or negates worldly deterministic influences.Footnote 1 As Patočka (1989) sums up, human existence “has the negative character of a distance, of a remove, of an overcoming of every objectivity, every content, every re-presentation and every substrate” (Patočka, 1989: 196). So, the explanation of being of the subject must reserve some space for spontaneity or freedom: the ecstatic process of finding oneself in the world must sooner or later appeal to the indeterminability or spontaneity of human existence. Of course, different phenomenological projects have different ways of accounting for how such freedom for one’s own possibilities is realized, ranging from Merleau-Ponty’s late theory of institution to Sartre’s analysis of fundamental self-choice. Here we can agree with Okrent concerning the fact that Heidegger’s answer to such a question contains a distinct and original contribution for TPP.

To demonstrate this specificity of Heidegger’s project, let me first sum up very briefly Heidegger’s account of inauthentic and authentic existence before proceeding to Dreyfus’s pragmatic reconstruction of Heidegger’s philosophy. First of all, we should recall why Heidegger introduces these categories. Being and Time’s basic goal is to clarify the question of being based on an investigating of a way of being (Sein; an ontological level of analysis) of a being (Seiende; correspondingly, an ontic level of analysis) for whom its own very being is at issue. Heidegger designates this entity as Dasein and defines its way of being as existence – Dasein exists “as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the being of those beings which it encounters within its own world” (Heidegger, 1927: 56). Starting from these assumptions, Heidegger’s early analysis is mostly restricted to ‘existential analytic’ and is located on the ontological level. He wants to emphasize “existentials,” that is, structural aspects of Dasein’s relation to the world without which there can be no relation at all. This analysis is opposed to the ontic level, which takes into account something that Dasein happens to be related to and which is not structurally necessary for the relation. As Heidegger puts it, the “essential determinations” of Dasein, which is conceived as a relation, “cannot be accomplished by ascribing to it a "what" that specifies its material content” (Heidegger, 1927: 12). But he is also convinced that the existential analytics is “ontically rooted” (Heidegger, 1927: 13): something like a structural aspect of the relation to the world can only be found in the concrete and ontic fact (“der Tatsache”) (Heidegger, 1927: 56) of Dasein.Footnote 2 And by addressing this fact, Heidegger realizes that it can either obstruct the task of existential analytics by not being itself and concealing its existential structures or, on the contrary, facilitate the analysis by being itself and manifesting its existential structures explicitly.

So, what does it mean not to be myself? Heidegger uses the term Das Man, sometimes translated with the idiomatic what one does, to describe the all-encompassing corpus of norms that inconspicuously but relentlessly guide most individuals in the course of their lives. Heidegger shows that Dasein, for the most part, remains attentive and submissive to this tacit normativity of what things are to be done and how they are to be done, as it stylizes itself for the way one behaves. This normative dimension, whilst not being devoid of certain ‘creative’ resources as Heidegger’s notion of distantiality (Abstandigkeit) indicates (Egan, 2012), strives for anonymity by creating the impression that accepted norms follow from the ‘objective’ state of affairs. They are what needs to be done rather than something I do. In everydayness, says Heidegger, it remains unclear who authentically made the decision (Heidegger, 1927: 268). In order to avoid the need to make one, Dasein tries to flee from itself pretending to be what it is not—an occurrent entity whose determination would be ‘thingly’ determinations: Dasein wants to be as little responsible for its being-a-teacher/mother/citizen as a table is responsible for its being-round. Pretending that there are self-obvious ways of doing and saying things helps to alleviate the sense of responsibility for ourselves and mimics the way of being of occurrent entities.

The fundamental motive that stays behind such an unownedness or inauthenticity is Dasein’s attempt to escape the recognition of its own essential mortality. Facing the imminent certainty of its own death, Dasein realizes that one does not die and that no one will die for it, which throws Dasein into what Heidegger describes as uncanniness (Heidegger, 1927: 170) of the world: it realizes the norms of Das Man do not exhaust Dasein’s being. This brings the recognition of its essential nullity or negativity: the only reason why it can relate to things and events is that it is not those things and events; this not is a structural determination of Dasein (Heidegger, 1927: 283). As Heidegger further describes it, the “nullity belongs to the being-free of Da-sein for its existentiell possibilities” (Heidegger, 1927: 285). In this sense dying as a possibility of no longer relating to the world appears as a more ‘inherent,’ “ownmost” possibility than any kind of relation to something in the world. Trying to avoid this terrifying recognition, Dasein seeks to obscure its way of being by mimicking the way of being of the objects.

Now, an important thing is that there is this tension between ‘everyday’ and ‘authentic’ intelligibility. Authentic disclosure introduces an element that has been covered up by everyday disclosure (Heidegger, 1927: 130). While inauthenticity is constituted by the “neglect” (Heidegger, 1927: 268) of a kind of being that Dasein is, authentic disclosure saves Dasein from its “lostness” in the world. Explicitly recognizing its own way of being, Dasein also realizes that its being-free for existentiel possibilities means that none of those possibilities is inscribed into its essence as necessary; nothing particular that it can do and say is ‘proper’ to Dasein because Dasein itself exists as a relation. And this, in turn, gives Dasein the ontic possibility to ‘own' the norms: accentuating the distance between its negative way of being and norms, Dasein realizes that doing and saying things always rely on Dasein’s own decision that no one can make instead of it. It obtains the possibility of an ‘explicit choice’ of its possibilities instead of being merely “grow[ing] up in them”.

By introducing this new element, however, authentic Dasein does not depart from everydayness completely. It still remains dependent upon the possibilities it has grown into. Dasein merely reveals their incompleteness. Everyday disclosure is characterized by the “loss of a ground” (Bodenlosigkeit); authenticity, on the contrary, discloses the ground of everydayness. It shows that norms of everydayness can only mean anything for the sake of Dasein’s ability-to-be. In this sense, authentic disclosure manifests being-whole of Dasein as opposed to the dispersion of Dasein in ways of doing and saying things. The typical example of such complementation is Heidegger’s analysis of silence: authentic Dasein does not depart from everyday language but realizes that it doesn’t have to talk and that silence that accentuates a decision to say something is a condition of possibility of speech. So, authentic Dasein might have the same existentiel content (Heidegger, 1927: 297) as an inauthentic one. The difference lies in the way authentic Dasein picks up this content; one way or another, authentic Dasein does so based on an “explicit choice,” in “choosing to make [one’s own] choice”.

It is important to stress, however, that this tension between authentic and inauthentic disclosure takes place on the existenitiel level. Only here can Heidegger describe the authentic disclosure as a sort of liberation from Das Man, as something that “frees [Dasein] from the lostness” (Heidegger, 1927: 264). On existential level, however, there can be no tensions: both authentic and inauthentic Dasein have the same existential structure that makes it possible for them to relate to anything at all. In a crucial passage, Heidegger writes, for example, that “authentic being-one’s-self does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating “I”. And how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness, is authentically nothing else than being-in-the-world” (Heidegger, 1927: 298). Only holding this in mind we can understand why Heidegger claims at the same time that authenticity is an existentiel modification of everydayness and that everydayness is an existentiel modification of authenticity (Heidegger, 1927: 317): both those modalities presuppose the same existential structure. The difference between them is inessential: while authentic Dasein recognizes its own way of being and builds its existentiel orientation in accordance with its own existential structure, inauthentic Dasein conceals it (while presupposing it) and thus, is unfit to phenomenologically demonstrate Dasein’s way of being. Again, existentially speaking, the structure of being-in-the-world presupposes both possibilities ‘that we have grown into’ (something that we can ‘authentically’ choose or just overtake implicitly) and the choice (even if this choice is not to choose).

Further developing and creatively appropriating Heidegger’s texts, Dreyfus managed to explicate why exactly the notion of Das Man should be not only be analysed on existentiel level in a sense of a criticism of the public world. We should also analyse its existential function taking it as an indication of the fact that the “source of intentionality” (Dreyfus, 1991: 87) or the “source of intelligibility” (Dreyfus, 1991: 95) is no longer located within a private logical domain, but refers us to the shared practices of being-in-the-world (existential level). What one does, i.e., the normal way of doing and saying normal things, not only conceals the truth about our being but also functions as a condition of the meaningful access to entities: the only reason why I can deal with such entities as cars, tables and bank accounts is that I undertake a range of conventional cultural goals and corresponding conventional ways of reaching them. Even though the tendency to conform might be caused by the desire to conceal the truth about one’s own way of being, it eventually results in abandoning the pre-normative immediacy of one’s own experience and discloses for the very first time the normative dimension that makes it possible for us to approach entities meaningfully. Here, Dreyfus sees Heidegger as being committed to one of the most basic pragmatic maxims: our normative access to entities (i.e., ‘following a rule’) is not something we can do privately but rather a form of intersubjective praxis; this is a behaviour that we learn to perform rather than information that we learn to know.

The crucial point here is that those ways of doing and saying things, the basic “agreement in ways of acting and judging” that Dreyfus also describes as the “average background practices,” cannot be seen as any sort of intentional result of subjective activity but itself is “presupposed by the intentionalistic sort of agreement arrived at between subjects” (Dreyfus, 1991: 95). The background practices, in other words, are not belief systems that we can explicate and justify because any kind of meaningful belief becomes possible in the context that has been established not by beliefs but by skills, by something we do. Those skills themselves are nothing but contingently established forms of life, the “habits and customs, embodied in the sort of subtle skills which we exhibit in our everyday interaction with things and people” (Dreyfus, 1980: 8) which have no further foundation. There is nothing ‘behind’ our ways of acting other than “our average comportment” (Dreyfus, 1991: 95) forged by the need to conform to something. Here, Dreyfus speaks of the last stage of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” Dreyfus, 1991: 96) that realizes the only deep-hidden truth about human existence is that there are no such truths; the ground of intelligibility itself remains groundless and contingent. So, when explaining our ways of doing things, we have to eventually resort to ‘this is just how it's done/said’ kind of argumentation, admitting that there is nothing behind our ways of doing things other than conformism. As Wittgenstein (1998) states, "[g]iving grounds [must] come to an end sometime" (Wittgenstein 1998: 110). And by showing the dependence of our ability of making sense of things on our ungrounded conformist behaviour, Heidegger puts “the last nail in the coffin of the Cartesian tradition” (Dreyfus, 1991: 88), which locates the source of such an ability in a private, subjective domain.

To illustrate this line of thinking, Dreyfus refers to our linguistic behaviour: “If I pronounce a word or name incorrectly others will pronounce the word correctly with a subtle stress on what I have mispronounced, and often I shape up without even noticing” (Dreyfus, 1991: 93). Why do we get corrected? Those grammatical, pronunciational, syntactical and syntaxial structures are not justified in a strict sense within the world (there might well be other accents or grammatical structures), yet we feel that others are entitled to correct us and that we should take up those corrections. This is because for a language to be functional, there, quite simply, must be certain agreement over the normal usage of grammatical and phonetic structure, idiomatic baggage etc. And the notion of Das Man demonstrates that something like an agreement in regards to our linguistic skills becomes possible because, for us, it is more important to conform rather than to conform about something particular. As everyone tends to ‘look over one’s own shoulder’ searching for the normal ways of saying things, a community might arrive at an agreement in a form of life, thus disclosing the normative access to entities. So, by saying that “we are norm-following creatures,” Dreyfus is stressing that the intelligible, meaningful behaviour would be impossible unless there is this common sense of gravity that gathers us around the same what-it-is-there-to-be-done norms of behaviour.

We can therefore see that the TPP takes a special form here. The ‘goals’ and ‘desires,’ in light of which entities are accessed, point back to contingent ways of action that we have assimilated in the course of our socialization. Those ways of action do not refer to any other foundation and have no explanation other than our need to find something that is to be done or said in our lives. We can describe the variation of TPP that locates the source of intelligibility in contingent ways of acting as the Primacy of Practices thesis (henceforth, TPP(s)).

Patočka’s Criticisms of Heidegger and Heideggerian Pragmatism

In this section, I will demonstrate that this development of Heidegger’s thought remains stalled because it overtakes Heidegger’s distinction between the inauthentic fall into the world and an authentic “purification” from such a fall. I will start by outlining Patočka’s criticism of Heidegger with the sole goal of demonstrating how those criticisms are valid if we endorse the TPP(s) thesis. After this, we will proceed to Patočka’s own version of TPP(s) in section three.

In the afterword to the Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, Patočka notes that Being and Time’s tendency to treat everydayness as inauthentic leads to overlooking the essential part of everydayness; namely, in Being and Time “we do not see the source of the opposition between “at home” and “at the workplace” (Patočka, 2016: 183). Indeed, Heidegger’s phenomenology of everydayness has absurd implications if applied to the caring setting of a family home. How can we analyse the child-parent relation in terms of interchangeability and anonymity of Das Man? There is no doubt that the anonymous normativity, ways of being a mother/father/daughter, play a crucial role here as well; but there is also little doubt that this situation is different from the public world where actors are treated as a kind of dispensable resource. One’s own child is not interchangeable with any other child in the same way as one’s employee is. At home, says Patočka, we are not so much concerned with common activities but rather with being-together; what we do here (games, walks, travels) is a way of bringing us closer to each other, which is why the anonymous interchangeability here does not exhaust the content of human relations. This warmth, the desire to share the world with our close ones “transform[s] the dread and anxiety of the uninhabitable into a possibility of acceptance” (Patočka, 2016: 187). Heidegger’s system does not have the conceptual resource to reflect upon this important distinction; he remains inattentive to what Patočka describes as “eros” of our being-in-the-world, the simple immediacy of the bliss of acceptance and the pain of rejection that can be influenced by the anonymous normativity but not exhausted by it completely.

Second, analysing Dasein in terms of the authenticity/inauthenticity opposition leaves the possibility of reconsideration of “limits” of “human situation” (Patočka, 2016: 186) unclarified. Activities of an artist and a thinker deal with the everyday intelligibility neither in a sense of inauthentic fall into it nor its authentic ‘enowning’. Unlike owning one’s own situation or unowned absorption in it, these activities take a step back in order to “change” the situation by disclosing a “non-everyday human possibility” (Patočka, 2016: 186). Heidegger of Being and Time is indeed little interested in the dynamics of everyday intelligibility; an investigation of the development of existentiel intelligibility belongs to the task of anthropology, sociology and other sciences. He, on the contrary, is only interested in existentiel dimension and its dynamics as long as it gives an insight into existential structures of Dasein. Patočka, however, suspects that this lack of interest hides a problem. For him, it is unclear where exactly should we situate reconsideration of human limits: just like it seems wrong to describe it as inauthentic; at the same time, it seems equally wrong to distance it from everydayness.

Of course, those are very general objections. There are plenty of recent interpretations of Heidegger, which seek to demonstrate how exactly can Heideggerian authenticity leads to the possibility of reconsidering the human situation (one could think of Crowell (2014) or McManus (2019) to mention but a few examples). Although I do believe that Patočka would eventually have a point here as well, it would go far beyond the scope of the paper to demonstrate the validity of Patočka’s concern in all possible cases. For the goals of this paper, I would like to argue that subscribing to TPP(s) would make the aforementioned problem much more explicit: a consistent analysis of the disclosive role of everyday practices renders any kind of supplementation by authenticity excessive.(In “Patočka’s Version of TPP(s)” section, we will argue that TPP(s) presupposes instead the continuity between everydayness and authenticity.)

Surprisingly enough, early Dreyfus’s account almost explicitly confirms Patočka’s objection. Claiming the average practice function as a source of intelligibility, Dreyfus remains convinced that there is nothing like non-everyday intelligibility. Recognizing one’s own way of being brings awareness of one’s own contingency and the ability to manipulate the everyday normativity in a freer fashion switching identities and goals under certain circumstances (e.g., when one is no longer able to continue a career in sports after an injury, he can easily switch to something else). But Dreyfus also stresses that, one way or another, Dasein remains dependent upon overtaking this or that particular cultural for-the-sake-of-which, i.e., set of goals and identities that are pursued for their own sake and that have been generated by the everyday intelligibility. Structurally binding the origin of meaningfulness with inauthenticity, Dreyfus leaves the question of reconsidering the limits of human action untackled. More recently Dreyfus (2004) and like-minded philosophers (in the first place, people like Blattner (2013), Taylor (1992), Carman (2003), Wrathall (2017) and others) attempted to demonstrate how authentic disclosure can help us to revise and reconsider practices. However, I am convinced that such attempts are inconsistent.

Let’s take, as an example, the most recent article by M. Wrathall that in many ways sums up preceding efforts to improve the TPP(s). In the article “Making Sense of Human Existence,” he offers us two possible ways of how the Heideggerian approach can lead to a change in one’s own situation. The first is described as existential irony. Consider first Wrathall’s description of what constitutes the inauthentic existence based on an example of a college professor:

She goes to all the right conferences and publishes papers in the right journals. She works hard on her classes (even reading and implementing the suggestions of various books on pedagogical technique) and is rewarded with glowing student evaluations. She is a good departmental citizen, faithfully attending graduate student conferences even on a Saturday afternoon and actively participating in faculty meetings and faculty senate committees. (Wrathall, 2017: 228)

What can an ironic attitude change about such a situation? First, Wrathall stresses that the ironic distance does not change the situation completely. Even after attaining the ironic attitude toward the intelligibility of the corresponding social role, the professor still considers herself a college professor. It’s just that she now realizes that this intelligibility along with its particular shape is not necessary; understanding that no existentiel possibility is inscribed into her essence in an occurrent-like fashion, she understands also that it is her decision to accept such intelligibility or to neglect it. And this realization ‘loosens’ her commitment to being a professor, giving her the necessary flexibility for reconsidering the practice. Because this particular segment of intelligibility no longer appears fixed and necessary as it is, she can first clarify for herself the motivational structures that led her to accepting such a goal (a certain “erotic ideal,” i.e., the affectively immediate goal of the “life of the mind” that she pursues for its own sake) and can rely more resolutely on them. Namely, she can appropriate the everyday norms so they would correspond to what she thinks is essential about being a college professor. But of course, changing the practice is an achievement that happens at the cost of becoming less intelligible in terms of everyday intelligibility, so the department chair and dean “grow concerned” (Wrathall, 2017: 228).

A more radical way of reconsidering one’s own situation is described as “existential revolution”. A revolutionary not only attains an ironic distance with regard to a practice and appropriates it; she recognizes that the accepted corpus of practices as such no longer corresponds to one’s own goals at all and decides to leap towards marginal practices, or triers, to develop a set of “workable practices” (Wrathall, 2017: 239) on her own, which is a project that remains completely unintelligible according to the current standards of intelligibility. Wrathall uses the example of T. Leary who dropped his job in Harvard’s Department and became a major figure in the “movement of psychedelic communities” (Wrathall, 2017: 229).

What is common to both those examples, says Wrathall, is that they are not only subordinated to the currently existent standards of intelligibility but also realize that the intelligibility is itself only intelligible on the background of “a sense that motivates our commitment to the practice in the first place” (Wrathall, 2017: 229). Wrathall explains this ‘sense’ of human existence that ‘nourishes’ and ‘feeds’ the everyday intelligibility (Wrathall, 2017: 237) in the following way. Only because human existence as this integral ecstatic movement is trying to find itself in the world by attaining certain goals and settling in certain practices (i.e., searching for sense), particular frames of ‘intelligibility’ become intelligible as such. For the same reason, this existential attempt to find oneself cannot be exhausted by any such particular frame: the “sense” of being-in-the-world cannot be deployable within the context of stale, ‘happened’ intelligibility, but also includes the possibility of attaining, alternating, and creating new goals and practices. The two examples above are meant to demonstrate that although our search for sense might occasionally appear unintelligible, it is, in fact, the (everyday) intelligibility that is not intelligible without the sense.

If viewed from a closer perspective, both of those examples remain deeply problematic. Wrathall’s discussion of irony, for example, seems to rely on the intentionally obscured description of what constitutes the everyday praxis of a college professor. First, there is hardly a professor that decides to publish in the ‘right kind’ of journals, attend meetings just out of conformity. There are always good reasons why it is desirable to publish papers where one normally publishes them (such as being read, quoted, obtaining prestige, bonuses, developing one’s own career etc.); that Das Man eventually points out to ungrounded ways of acting does not mean that every comportment has nothing but general and empty conformity to appeal to. Consequently, the ironic attitude is not normally expected to resolve the real practical complexities and contradictions (even a hardened ironist is likely to understand that it might not be a good idea to make a department chair concerned, and publish a paper in a ‘good journal’ every once in a while). Irony gives us a momentary relief from such complexity, but only to embrace it in the end, which is a kind of situation where the irony seems to obtain its very content. Furthermore, both recognition of practical complexities, i.e., the distance between the ‘romantic’ ideal and ‘bitter’ reality, and the corresponding ironic attitude seem to be integral parts of everyday intelligibility, something that actors are normally expected to understand and master. Other parts of Wrathall’s description just seem to be plainly wrong, or at least speculative: for example, one can reasonably doubt whether philosophy professors are normally afraid of being corrected by their students (on the contrary, one normally wants to be corrected as it would mean that students are engaged). And the reason why Wrathall has to rigidify and caricaturize everyday intelligibility is simple: without taking away its habitual aspects, he won’t be able to ascribe any tangible content to the authenticity conceived as a liberation from the dominance of the everyday intelligibility.

The problematic nature of pragmatic use of the Heideggerian notion of authenticity is further accentuated by the second example of the existential revolutionary who, as Wrathall points out, “goes into unknown,” searching not only for a freer manipulation with available ends and practices but for “a new ideal and a new set of practices” (Wrathall, 2017: 239). Consequently, his behaviour becomes completely immeasurable by the current standards of intelligibility and is proclaimed “insane” (it only becomes averagely intelligible retrospectively when the new set of practices is accepted). The problem here is that most existential revolutionaries (if defined this way) would, as a matter of fact, be insane. The dominant number of deviations that seek to reconceptualize intelligibility in new terms are justly characterized as inadequate: schizophrenic delusions, sectarian and ideological thinking, conspiracy theories or just plainly absurd beginnings do not normally hide a richness of alternative ways of existence. As the saying goes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and deviant behaviour is nothing but a deviation, a failure of socialization. We need a more substantive criterion than an indirect reference to potential success in developing something like “workable practices” (since we can easily remember successful practices that remain insane nonetheless and unsuccessful practices that are much saner than many successful ones (e.g., practices of mass extermination)) or a general appeal to the eros, goals that are pursued for the sake of themselves (since, again, we would need a criterion that distinguishes sane eros from the insane one (e.g., the goal of inflicting suffering upon other people)). Developing such a criterion would have to start with acknowledging that revolutionaries break away from current standards of intelligibility only because they take up a challenge from those standards. A revolutionary differs from an average individual by the scope of his vision and the depth of his understanding that makes it possible for him to start doing things differently, not by his ability to break free from everyday intelligibility as such. The escape itself is only a by-product, a collateral effect, which doesn’t do any kind of explanatory work: it is because the revolutionary takes up real practical challenges, sourced from real practical complexities, that he becomes capable of reconsidering his own situation. Acknowledging this would mean that authenticity remains essentially bound to the everyday intelligibility. In this sense, authenticity becomes a function of everydayness; practices offer us the possibilities of being authentic that we must learn to reveal by immersing into the practical life (which is a claim that Heidegger despite his emphasis on the existential character of Das Man would never endorse).

This means that Heidegger’s contempt with regard to the publicity along with the desire to shake off its mastery is an odd partner for something like TPP(s), which identifies the contingently established ways of acting and judging as the source of intelligibility. The partnership that is proposed by Heideggerian pragmatism results in cutting off the authentic disclosure from any kind of productive impact over practices, which renders the practical authentic self empty of any tangible content. By locating the source of meaningfulness in inauthenticity and claiming that that authentic self somehow operates as a ground of meaningfulness, pragmatic readers implicitly take away the ground from authenticity from which it normally pushes off. In the next section, we will see that by abandoning the vocabulary of fall into the world and liberation from it, Patočka arrives at a position that can be seen as a more acceptable version of the TPP(s).

Patočka’s Version of TPP(s)

Initiation into Practices

In order to understand the context of Patočka’s criticism and his potential contribution to the formulation of TPP(s), we need to start with briefly outlining Patočka’s conception of existence as a movement. This conception, on the one hand, seems to be a recapitulation of the basic insights of Heideggerian phenomenology in ‘kinaesthetic’ terms. Subjectivity, says Patočka, presupposes “the direct, active contact with its surroundings that is the agency of all our activities”. Subjective ‘states’ are kinaesthetic in a sense of being aimed at the world: every subjective state has its own coherent bodily-situated meaning starting somewhere and reaching satisfaction somewhere else. This directedness is not a ‘possible’ state of subjectivity that occasionally becomes unsatisfied; rather it constitutes the very being of subjectivity. As Barbaras claims, this emphasis of Patočka’s dynamic phenomenology stresses the primacy of movement with regard to its possible objectification (Barbaras, 2007). In a similar vein, Petříček (1997) argues that Patočka does not talk about “the movement of a thing from one place to a different place, but a movement of self-creating” (Petříček 1997: 122). In other words, if the movement is abstracted from subjectivity, the subjectivity as such becomes unintelligible: our openness or self-relatedness to the world is what constitutes the very fabric of our existence. And as such an openness, the subjectivity is at the same time undeducible from the world and dependent upon the world where it can be realized as a movement. At the same time, the world appears to us as long as a counterpart of the movement “into the world” (Ritter, 2019) that we perform. In this sense, Barbaras notes that “the primary meaning of appearance [of the world] is not intuitive but “praxical”” (Barbaras, 2021: 87).(Already at this point we can notice something like a primacy of practice that stresses that appearance of the world and the very possibility of intuition remains dependent upon a certain kind of activity that we perform.)

On the other hand, the kinaesthetic vocabulary implies a number of important differences. The most obvious difference concerns Patočka’s emphasis on the bodily nature of subjectivity and lies outside of the scope of this paper. A more subtle aspect that is relevant for us is that this approach also neglects the distinction between the self-deceptive fall into the world and a more primordial liberation from it. From the very beginning, Patočka denies that the ‘default’ condition of human existence is that of the self-loss and falling into the world. For him a certain ‘self-objectivation’ understood as anchoring, finding oneself in the world, can be seen as a fundamental motive of the ecstatic human existence; as he puts it, “the relation to the world is not negative in … [Heidegger’s] way but rather positive, it is not a self-loss but the condition of the possibility of self-discovery” (Patočka, 1998: 49). In a sense, Patočka wants to radicalize the mutuality between Dasein and the world stressing that “our relation to things is fully equivalent to our self-relation and otherwise” (Patočka, 1998: 50); for Patočka there cannot be such a relation to oneself, which does not include a relation to the world, that is, there cannot be something Heidegger describes as “non-relational” (Heidegger, 1927: 250) human possibility. By stressing polemically, against Heidegger, that “I do not create possibilities, but the possibilities create me” (Patočka, 1995: 122). Patočka denies exactly this possibility of ‘choosing the choice,’ which Heideggerian authenticity circumscribes.

This difference expresses itself already on the level of methodology. Patočka does not follow Heidegger in his systematic, step-by-step explication of existential elements of human existence that enable our relation to the world, distinguishing them against inessential existentiel elements. For him, it makes no sense to formalize the movement of existence up to the point where the worldly content, i.e., where this movement is realized, becomes bracketed as inessential. Instead, Patočka treats the subjective movement as a bundle of various movements toward the world investigating how they “become more precise, enlarge their domain, combine with others” (Patočka, 2016: 74). As he puts it, “to understand existence as movement means to grasp humans as beings in and of the world” (Patočka, 1998: 155). (Heidegger would probably have a problem with acknowledging the sense of belonging to the world expressed by the genitive (beings of the world)); the contingent world creates the possibility for the human movement. In a different place, Patočka also claims that the goal of movements of human existence is “….to integrate it concretely into the world, to understand it not only as a somewhat concretized subject but as a genuinely real process” (Patočka, 1998: 155)). The worldly content is not seen as a contingent realization of existential structures but as a dialectical counterpart of the movement of human existence that acquires richness and depth as a result of the complication of the movement.

While investigating human existence as a movement, Patočka breaks it down to the three most fundamental types, three movements that human life performs for the most part. Again, those movements are not static structures, in-built features of subjectivity, but exactly the “trinity of movements in which our life unfolds” (Patočka, 1998: 155)); all of them exist as performed. The first movement is labelled as the “movement of acceptation”. Acceptance could be seen as a sort of culmination of a series of the most basic bodily movements that situate us into the world of needs and satisfactions and that we partly share with other animals (in this sense, Patočka also sometimes describes this movement as “instinctual” or “affective” stressing the ‘erotic’ part of our existence). What differentiates human beings from animals at this stage is that the former from the very beginning “sense their strangeness”. Facing their peers and fellowmen, individuals recognize that they do not fit, and they seek to do so. From the moment of birth, human beings sense that it is the community, others who have the ‘right’ and they are ‘rightless’ with regard to it. Patočka here relies on the polyphonic sense of the Greek term ‘dixe,’ (δῐ́κη) that refers us to the Ur-phenomenon of order or custom. The community establishes the order of things by distributing roles, meanings and statuses; it efficiently organizes what one ought to do and who one ought to be. With regard to this organization, ‘rightlessness’ (adixe) of an individual who hasn’t yet been accepted means neither some totalitarian suppression by the community nor wrongdoing against it. The opposition here is an opposition between the right of the community and an individual who is yet to learn what it means to have ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs,’ to master social roles and public customs that bind and entitle; a rightless individual is yet to inhabit, to be situated in the world where there is a place for something like a ‘right’. What Patočka is talking about, in other words, is an Ur-phenomenon of normativity that gets encrusted into the movement of human settling in the world.Footnote 3

This encrustation, the attempt to acquire one’s own right, is linked to another crucial term “kindness,” i.e., the disposition to ‘come forwards’ to others and to meet them halfway (vstřícnost). Kindness is what reserves and maintains a place for a newcomer; it describes the time and efforts other spend to show the newcomer who he can be, what he can do leading him by the hand into the abundance of a given culture. A joyful waiting for the birth of a child, setting the room, buying clothes, is a perfect example of such “kindness:” even before his birth, the child is surrounded by expectations and care that would show them his way around the world; as Patočka says “descendants already born but of a preparation for them”. So, kindness here is not an occasional psychological inclination but an ontological category that explains how something like being-with becomes possible in the first place. By giving and asking nothing in return, kindness refracts the narcissistic world of a pre-socialized animal and introduces a whole new dimension of experience to it (here, again lies an important distinction between TPP(s) and more naturalistic versions of TPP that Okrent described as narcissistic and that are bound tighter to individual organisms); the world becomes welcoming, preserving of “the flame of life” (Patočka, 1996: 30).

Now, those descriptions can, in principle, be seen as fulfilling the similar pragmatic role that Dreyfus ascribes to Das Man and thus, as committed to the TPP(s). That we are able to make sense of things in a ‘proper’ way depends upon others teaching me those proper ways of judging and acting, a process that first introduces me into a normative dimension of “right”. Patočka stresses, in this regard, that unless others are kind enough to go through the trouble to correct us when we are in the wrong and unless we, from the very beginning, are open to the corrections seeking to obtain ways of doing and saying things that can be corrected, neither correctness nor a mistake is possible. The “right” is this normative dimension that is disclosed as a constant corrective accompaniment, a background against which our comportments make sense. To talk about movement in this regard also means to ally with pragmatism in saying that such an introduction into the normative dimension is a matter of what we do rather than what we can know and justify.Footnote 4 This means, in turn, that the instance of normative behaviour (i.e., the ‘source of intelligibility’) turns out to be contingent and ungrounded: being no longer seen as a result of the conscious activity of individuals, the contingent ways of acting and judging where I happened to be socialized have no further reason to appeal to, no further explanation; it is just what we do. Just like Heidegger, Patočka stresses that the desire to be accepted and to ‘obtain the right,’ i.e., to be introduced into normative orders of a community, is more fundamental than some specific content of normativity that we happened to agree about. Here we can also see the same fusion of conformity (the desire to be accepted) and contingency (there must be some form of life, some being-with that that makes possible the pre-intentional agreement).

But this formulation of TPP(s) also adds new elements to the formulation. The difference in pathos indicates that Patočka does not ignore the genetic side of the TPP(s); unlike Heidegger, Patočka also introduces the stage of socialization, the movement of initiation into practices before proceeding to the anonymity and the background agreement of our ways of “acting and judging”. Dreyfus, in this sense, proves to be quite an attentive reader indicating the lack of genetic dimension in Heidegger saying “[o]ne cannot ask: At what age does Dasein get socialized? Babies get socialized, but they do not Dasein [verb] until they are already socialized” (Dreyfus, 1991: 89). The distinguishing feature of Patočka’s approach is that he, in fact, can ask such questions because he investigates the specific logic of socialization that is different from the movement of maintenance, reproduction and everyday participation in social practices. As Patočka himself puts it, stressing this aspect, „[w]ithout acceptance, there is no human existence; man is not only thrown into reality, he is also accepted, he is thrown as accepted; acceptance is part of thrownness “ (Patočka, 2016: 187).

Furthermore, Patočka would agree that, in the end, our ability to understand entities as they are is dependent upon the ungrounded ways of action. Patočka, however, also explores the “erotic” affective dimension of our anchorage in practices. Ultimately, we return to the everyday intelligibility not simply because we know no other choice but because this is what makes us feel ourselves at home and places us in proximity to others. In Patočka’s formulation, the appeal to the ungrounded ground does not convey the sense of bewilderedness and uneasiness (“I don’t know why, I just do things this way, that’s all;” “…because that’s how things are done, stop being weird”) but warmth and meaningfulness (“this is how my parents did it”). Patočka’s TPP(s), in other words, does not express the empty attachment to some utterly contingent, indifferent and anonymous norms of behaviour but a fundamental sense of belonging: we ourselves make sense as belonging to particular practices. We can see, therefore, that the typical for TPP(s) emphasis upon the normative community that introduces individuals into normative orders is preserved, but it loses its violent, sinister connotations of almost mechanical imposition that hides us from our own way of being. Instead, those connotations are substituted with an idea of the empathetic guiding of an individual who is born lost and who seeks to find himself. We can also observe that Wrathall’s appeal to the eros that has been only partly compatible with the Heideggerian system aligns well with Patočka’s analysis that describes the first movement of human existence as the “ecstasy represented by eros” (Patočka, 1996: 31): we grow into loving certain goals and identities for their own sake, we learn to accept them because we, from the very beginning, search for the ‘bliss’ being accepted by others. Eros here shows how we grow into the everydayness instead of offering a potential way out of it.

Work and Truth in a Practical World

Having started with the movement of acceptance interpreted in such a pragmatic way, we can further proceed with the analysis of further movements. Again, it needs to be stressed that I will not aim at their exhaustive analysis, leaving a number of crucial aspects aside. Instead, I will concentrate on how those movements contribute to a better formulation of the TPP(s) thesis.

The second movement—the movement of defence—is a logical continuation of the first. Accepting newcomers, keeping place for them and redeeming the “engendered” (Patočka, 1996: 31) rightlessness is a costly business—it requires work. The second movement has to take care of sustaining the world first, and make sure that it is accessible for others: after learning what one’s own ungrounded goals and needs are, we proceed to learning how to satisfy them. As Patocka puts it, “[w]ork is essentially this self-disposal of ourselves as being at the disposal of others” (Patočka, 1996: 31). And while introducing others into our customs and roles, we ourselves must take those customs seriously, putting aside the questions and concerns we might have about them. The movement of initiation into practices, in such a way, is further complemented by the movement of unproblematic immersion into them: a working individual only cares for what is relevant to the always already accepted set of goals and nothing else; he is caught up in the work being referred from one necessity to the other, always too busy to stop and think about himself and the world he lives in. This, claims Patočka, amounts to a certain degree of self-overlooking: “[a]t this stage, we ourselves exist solely for the pragmata to be able to function” (Patočka, 2016: 172), our existence becomes concrete, identified with a specific set of goals that need to be done. This dimension coincides in many ways with the Heideggerian description of Das Man: the world of work, which we have ‘always already’ taken for granted, presupposes both interchangeability (anyone can take up a corresponding role) and anonymity (it is not anyone’s personal decision but an ‘order of things’). In this area of work, concludes Patočka, “[n]othing independently disinterested and dedicated, neither the authentic self nor an authentic undertaking, can develop…” (Patočka, 2016: 173).Footnote 5

The crucial aspect, however, is that neither this movement nor the movement of acceptation is thematically free, i.e., they are not “freely chosen”: first we receive the gift of acceptance by others and then we defend and pass it along. Here, life is simply reproduced as self-evident without any explicit self-understanding. This changes with the third movement, the movement of truth, which is an “authentically human movement” (Patočka, 1998: 159). According to Patočka, this ultimate possibility of human existence is not merely ‘practical:’ the movement of truth is not aimed at reaching some ‘always already’ accepted goals but seeks to “gain clarity concerning our situation and potentially even to transform it”. We, thus, come to the recognition that human existence can take a step back from pressing necessities of life and occupy a “resting point” (Patočka, 2016: 186) from where it can direct its attention towards “the limits that determine human situation,” i.e., not at what needs-to-be-done-today but at what is doable and sayable as such. Our naïve preoccupation with means for realization of particular, always already accepted goals is substituted with problematizing preoccupation with means-goals complexes, a switch from ‘that which has come’ to “that which is coming” (Patočka, 1996: 33). And by concentrating on such means-goals relation, the movement of truth attains “a proper relation to manifestation as such, that is, to that which makes manifestation possible…” The reason why things and events let themselves be accessed for us is that they become disclosed in a corresponding context of what is to be done and whom to be in our lives.

We need to stress here that Patočka’s characterization of the third movement as impractical does not mean incompatibility with TPP(s). The stress on impracticality is meant to demonstrate that human existence is not necessarily absorbed into the realization of particular, pre-established goals but is capable of problematizing and re-introducing the very goals-means complexes.Footnote 6 This means that the most fundamental truth that this movement yields is not some cognitive claim about this or that particular fact but concerns the truth about every possible revelation of the world. The movement of truth reveals that pragmata¸ social roles and customs are only binding insofar as I disclose them as such, and that I am free to disclose them just as much as I am free to disclose different goals and norms. There is nothing completely self-obvious or compulsory about our comportments. The truth of human existence, in such a way, reveals the fundamental role of freedom that has been implicit in the course of the first and second movements: freedom is the most fundamental truth, a truth that lies at the foundation of any other particular truth. As Patočka puts it “[t]his is why he is free, why freedom is the very ground on which the human relation to the universe of the existent is built; this is what makes the feeling of freedom fundamental for human life” (Patočka, 2016: 96). The possibility of self-recognition, of becoming aware of our finitude is a specific feature of human existence, the one that separates us from animals (Patočka, 1998: 160). This awareness by itself does not open a new way of life or a new set of practices but makes our practices self-aware, substituting implicit self-alienated freedom that remains too attached to what is disclosed with a less coerced spontaneous attitude towards it. Thus, Patočka acknowledges that “here, too, living in a possibility means grasping and realizing this possibility, it is a mode of praxis” (Patočka, 2016: 175) but this praxis is a re-structured, self-aware type of practice. As Mensch comments, “the third movement … concerns praxis in the Aristotelean sense. Like praxis, its focus is on action itself: at issue is what we should do” (Mensch, 2017: 113). We can conclude, therefore, that the third movement also allies with the TPP(s).

At first glance, Patočka seems to arrive at similar conclusion to Heidegger’s. It is our self-recognition as disclosers of the world that can be seen as a higher degree of disclosedness, the one that saves us from the naïve absorption in a particular disclosure and substitutes with a more flexible attitude. There is, however, an important conceptual difference: although the third movement disrupts the absorption of the first two movements, it also remains continuous with them. The movement of truth does not mean to introduce a new element to the first one (not even in existentiel sense); it rather unbounds the first two. The third movement is the culmination that counterbalances them and manifests the truth that has already been implicitly present; as he puts it, “[t]his turn [toward truth] is not accompanied by a loss of the world but, on the contrary, by its full discovery; it is, in a certain sense, a mundane turn, since the world here lives more deeply, a cosmocentric and luminocentric life” (Patočka, 2016: 178). So even though the movement of truth frees human existence from the naïve absorption, it does not put us before the “insignificance of the world” revealed in Heideggerian anxiety. Instead, it substitutes our orientation on the pre-established significance that has been narrowed down by the necessities of life with the orientation on significance as such that gets expanded beyond of what is pre-given, a substitution that lets our thinking wander about what is doable and sayable in one’s own life, and re-orienting us towards what is yet unforeseen.

As small as it may seem, this distinction makes the creative status of ‘authenticity’ much more solid (especially in the context of the ‘pragmatic turn’). Unlike Heideggerian authenticity, which defines itself on the background of the insignificance of the world and everydayness and appears as a ground of everydayness, Patočka’s third movement recognizes its dependency upon the practices (at this point, we can disagree with Ritter’s recent interpretation that critically suggest that Patočka should have emphasized the “positive meaning of anchoring and work” (Ritter, 2019: 158)). A “resting point” might let our thinking wander, but it remains motivated by the practical situatedness. The commitment to the accepted set of goals might be “shaken” in a sense of being deprived of its necessary and self-obvious status and becoming potentially replaceable with other goals. But this shaken status does not mean that practices become totally insignificant at one fell swoop. As Patočka stresses several times, “[w]here human life is confronted with absolute meaninglessness it can only surrender and give itself up” (Patočka, 1996: 59). The movement of truth makes it possible for us to doubt the necessity of particular practices and goals, potentially to substitute them with new practices and goals. But the need to stop and think about them follows from the real practical complexities and conflicts that occur in the course of our coping with the world and still presupposes further practices for granted. This means that although the result of the movement of truth, what it arrives at, is not correlated to any particular goal, it still remains bound by the motivational relations to the situation where it takes place; it remains dependent upon the bunch of practices within which it has accumulated its power. Švec, who has recently raised a similar argument, formulates this claim in the following way, saying that the movement of truth “is part of our practical insertion within the concerns of lifeworld and it bears its own consequences for ethical and political matters” (Švec, 2022: 7). Here the escape from the formative power of everydayness is exactly what it should be—a by-product of our ability to change our situation, not the goal in and of itself; and the change itself remains motivated by our situation. This line of thinking that remains fully compatible with TPP(s) explains much more adequately the possibility of creative reappropriation of tradition, as it recognizes that, one way or another, any kind of creative movement is dependent upon having a firm ground under one’s own feet.

Another crucial differentiating feature is that for Patočka the movement of truth is never an episode of our relation to ourselves; there is no way an anxiety attack—no matter how intense or primordial it is—can by itself lead a human being to the authentic self-recognition. Instead, this movement can by itself be seen as pointing toward such shared forms of praxis as philosophy, politics, art and religion. Švec compares this third movement of existence with Rouse’s pragmatic accounts of science where the theoretical explanation is seen as intelligible only insofar it is embedded in a corresponding practical field filled with instruments of various sorts, behavioural strategies (raising arguments, performing observations etc.), communicative acts etc. We can assume, therefore, that any kind of authentic self-recognition presupposes public places, the complex infrastructure within which something like “resting points” become possible, techniques of comparison, rhetorical skills, accumulation of data etc. This comparison further demonstrates that the first and second movement are not opposed as practical to the third theoretical one. We can say rather that whereas the first and the second movements are relying on practices that have been already disclosed, the third movement becomes thematically concentrated with the practices of disclosure; but all of them are ultimately seen as shared practices of being-in-the-world.

Conclusion

Even though Patočka (just like Heidegger) didn’t think of himself as a pragmatist, nor did he formulate an explicit version of TPP(s), his development of Heidegger’s philosophy can be seen as its further pragmatization, which is what makes Patočka’s thinking significant in the context of the pragmatic turn in phenomenology. Patočka expands the TPP(s) in both directions, covering the problem of initiation into practices and their prospective change and re-elaboration. At the core of this development lies Patočka’s attempt to dismantle the presupposition of Heideggerian phenomenology, which existentielly opposes the fall and liberation from the fall in the world and substitutes it with a more generous and accepting account of practices. This expansion makes it possible to preserve a number of crucial insights that have been developed by the phenomenological pragmatism over the past thirty years while offering a conceptual system that does not suffer from the same persistent problems, inherent hostility toward practices, and what Dreyfus has aptly described as the problematic confusion between conformity and conformism.