Abstract
This chapter argues for connecting Patočka’s phenomenological concept of the movement of existence with non-phenomenological approaches to human being in the world. More specifically, I outline the possibility of deepening phenomenology by “fusing” it with an approach which I find akin to it, namely that of media philosophy: a human being can be conceived of as concretely mediated through the three movements as three mediums implying cultural techniques conditioning this being who through them realizes itself. Such an approach allows for analyzing how existence is conditioned not only by subjects but also by objects in the world and by objective processes. Discussing, and appropriating, the concepts of cultural techniques and tacit knowledge, I seek to interconnect cultural techniques theory with Patočka’s phenomenology to think existence in both a less subjectivist and less anti-humanist manner, or to acknowledge it as both free and objective.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Engell and Vogl (1999: 10): “The first axiom of the media theory perhaps might be … that there are no media, or in any case no media in a substantial and historically stable sense.”
- 2.
Although I do not intend to reduce Patočka’s phenomenology of existence to a merely anthropological concept, I agree with Othold and Voss’ idea formulated in the context of media anthropology that we should not, in contrast to most theories of media anthropology, “employ a hierarchical and often dichotomic preconception of the two poles of media-human relations, by analysing the operationalities and ontologies of the human and the media independently from one another” (Othold and Voss 2015: 75).
- 3.
In the context of media anthropology, Lorenz Engell and Voss point to the far-reaching relationality of human existing and draw attention to the dynamic between tendencies to centralize and decentralize (the concept of) existence (Engell and Voss 2015: 8–9). They connect these two tendencies also with different philosophical approaches opting for such an approach which analyses the (decentralized) human being in the mirror of that by which it is surrounded or to which it is linked. The question I ask here in relation to Patočka’s concept is: what kinds of “links” of the I to its “surroundings” are implied in the three movements?
- 4.
Regarding the concept of cultural technique, cf. e.g. Schüttpelz (2006) and Maye (2010). An invigorating interpretation of the place of this concept in the development of German philosophy is offered by Siegert (2013: esp. 48–54). One can also quote Geoffrey Winthrop-Young’s summation according to which, “originally related to the agricultural domain, the notion of cultural techniques was later employed to describe the interactions between humans and media, and, most recently, to account for basic operations and differentiations that give rise to an array of conceptual and ontological entities which are said to constitute culture” (Winthrop-Young 2013: 3).
- 5.
I do not suggest putting transhumanism on the agenda. The very idea of transforming the human condition by developing sophisticated technologies and technical tools to enhance human intellect and physiology misses, in my opinion, more fundamental layers of our being mediated.
- 6.
By speaking of “the impossibility of the medial outside” (Scholz 2015: 137), Scholz denies not only any primordial, non-mediated naturality but also assimilates technicity with mediality. So far as I know, the most elaborated reflections on the technical as medial, and in its mediality, are offered by Christoph Hubig, esp. in Hubig (2006: 143–171). Hubig also develops valuable reflections on various ways of possible differentiating between nature and culture (see e.g. Hubig 2011), and addresses the relation between technique and (Husserl’s idea of) the lifeworld (Hubig 2013).
- 7.
In their acquiring, mimesis perhaps plays a crucial role. Allow me to mention here the famous dictum of Walter Benjamin according to which “there may be no single one of their [i.e. of humans] higher functions that is not codetermined by the mimetic faculty” (Benjamin 1999: 694).
- 8.
Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp seem to be of the same opinion. According to them, cultural technique refers to “implicit know-how” or to “bodily habitualized and routine ability [Können], which is at work in everyday, fluid practices” (Krämer and Bredekamp 2003: 18).
- 9.
Other forms of culture technique theory, especially those programmatically outlined by Bredekamp and Krämer 2003, seem to be more easily compatible with phenomenology.
- 10.
Importantly, due to this “post-hermeneutic turn towards the exteriority/materiality of the signifier there is no subject area, no ontologically identifiable domain that could be called ‘media’” (Siegert 2013: 51).
- 11.
Analogically to Krämer, Petra Gehring also criticizes this idea; see Gehring 2017: esp. 148.
- 12.
- 13.
I cannot address here the undoubtedly crucial problem of language.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
Or to move “on one’s own” as stated here: “A biological organism becomes a real person in the moment when I can do something on my own (i.e., move)” (Patočka 1998: 25).
- 17.
Patočka might perhaps say: explicable by Nothing.
- 18.
Whereas the first movement allows for arising of a world-accepting being, through the second one a spirited I is “constituted,” and the third one presupposes the I not only as accepting but also as believing (in the future as different to, and non-predetermined, by the present). An analogy to Plato’s tripartition of the soul is not incidental. Cf. Ritter (2015).
- 19.
According to Siegert, “time as such does not exist independently of cultural techniques of time measurement” (Siegert 2013: 57).
- 20.
For the very same reason, I do not accept what I see as a reductionist tendency of (Siegert’s) culture technique theory. Existence is not simply produced by cultural techniques; these techniques rather shape the media in which our singular plural (to speak with Jean Luc-Nancy) movement proceeds its sensitive life.
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Ritter, M. (2019). Thinking (A)Subjectivity Through Mediality. In: Into the World: The Movement of Patočka's Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 104. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23657-1_12
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