Abstract
The chapter analyses Patočka’s book-length study Eternity and Historicity from the middle of the 1940s, which offers an interestingly contextualized polemics with Husserl’s phenomenology while developing an important concept of the dialectic of appearing. This dialectic implies a quite fundamental transformation of phenomenology in comparison with Patočka’s war manuscripts. Moreover, Patočka’s considerations in Eternity and Historicity not only anticipate but rather necessitate the concept of “negative Platonism.” In contrast to the war manuscripts, Patočka sees no possibility of spirit’s being in harmony with the world. He deprives the given of any positive value so that he can claim that the negative reaction of (the human) spirit to objectivity is a fundamental position or “plus,” i.e. “being in the full meaning of the word.” Hence, in contrast to the concept of “negative Platonism,” Eternity and Historicity presents a radically subjectivist form of absolute humanism: in the last instance, it is the human being itself in its transcending activity that is the meta-physical in this concept.
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Notes
- 1.
I only touch on other important topics, such as the question of (the end of) metaphysics or the systematically relevant problem of the “place” of Socrates and Plato in Patočka’s interpretation of (the history of) philosophy. These issues have been addressed (unfortunately only in Czech) by Ritter 2008 and Ritter 2013, Jíra 2010, Sladký 2010 and Sladký 2015.
- 2.
The different meanings of metaphysics and the relation of “metaphysics” to “philosophy” in Patočka’s thinking in the 1940s are discussed by Sladký 2015: esp. 59–62.
- 3.
Mediated by French appropriations (esp. by Sartre) and interpretations (esp. by Kojève) of Hegel.
- 4.
Patočka likens this duality to the “inner temporal horizon” of consciousness with its two non-actual dimensions: on the one side, there is the “dimension of a postulated ‘higher being,’ of that which we are awaiting, longing and fighting for”; on the other side, there is the “dimension into which all of the present necessarily falls, into which objective reality disappears” (Patočka 2007: 106). In this duality, time is “an image of our basic movement to true being, to being in the true sense: on the one side, the affection of an object by a negation, its depreciation and emptying; on the other side, a plan and an élan toward pure positivity” (Patočka 2007: 106).
- 5.
It can be said, preliminarily, that the basic difference between Eternity and Historicity and “Negative Platonism” consists in the different answering of the question from where does this idea (of another being) “come.”
- 6.
“Mere outer-ness is pure abstraction; … even pure matter may have a certain inwardness, albeit only remotely analogical to our own” (Patočka 2007: 106).
- 7.
In Czech, Patočka uses the word indiference, and not the nerozlišenost of the war manuscripts (I have translated this as “undifferentiation”). Whereas “indifference” here means, to put it simply, to be indifferent to (one’s “own”) being, “undifferentiation” meant being beyond (or “before”) subject-object dichotomy.
- 8.
Regarding Heidegger, cf. already in Patočka’s war manuscripts: Patočka 2014b: 125.
- 9.
“The inevitability of death is the dominion of the object over that which protests against it” (Patočka 2007: 111).
- 10.
Furthermore, admitting that the given is dependent on the non-given (spirit), one might justifiably conclude, I believe, that the negativity described above is not the negativity of the given but rather of spirit itself. At this point, it is possible to ask the question: how to decide, when spirit experiences “negative affection,” whether the ontological weakness is to be ascribed to the given or to spirit, to its, to put it more ethically, concrete, and changeable, way of life? Is the problem, the deficiency, inevitably on the “objective” side?
- 11.
Not only does he not specify this struggling process of inventing values, but he positively states that, unsurprisingly, the negative principle, which is the fundamental motor of the course of events, offers no positive values. It gives only negative directives which prevent the human being from identifying itself with any “given, empirical determination of the human being” (Patočka 2007: 114). His concept is evidently, and explicitly, inspired by Socrates (cf. Patočka 2007: 23–24).
- 12.
And as soon as spirit is identified with the human, there is no place for nature (as “the given”) to have its own meaning, albeit less valuable than that of the human being.
- 13.
Patočka states that his concept shall offer “an ethics of orders, of duty” (Patočka 2007: 114), yet he does not specify these orders or even the logic of this duty. The only duty here can actually be the spirit’s duty to be (faithful to) itself, i.e. to transcend all objectivity, and especially not to conform to any given rules or values. As Patočka puts it, only if the activity of spirit is based on nothing objective, can its “fruit … be being in the full meaning of the word” (Patočka 2007: 113). Not only can the activity of spirit be objectively ungrounded, it in fact must be without objective grounding if it is to be really “pure.”
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Ritter, M. (2019). Basically Negative Being in the World. 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_5
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