Abstract
In this chapter, I interpret the long study “Space and its Problematics,” in which Patočka offers another explication of the lifeworld. He clarifies space, or the lifeworld, by describing human being inside, while this being inside is transcendentally determined by the so-called law of personal pronoun. I argue against Barbaras’ interpreting Patočka’s concept of inside as offering a more developed explication of the first movement of existence than Patočka’s later texts. I pay attention to the concepts of building, sacral transubstantiation, and the emptiness of heart. This emptiness is not an arbitrary feeling; on the contrary, it essentially conditions space (as experienced by the human being). As such, it transcendent(al)ly structures the world, which is ontologically cofounded by the body, and not only by a living body but also by the body as an object in the world.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Dragos Duicu, by contrast, seeks to identify all of the three movements in Patočka’s study on space (see Duicu 2014: esp. 232–235).
- 3.
In a similar context, Pavel Kouba has emphasized that the question of the “meaningfulness of experience” cannot be answered by “social activities, whether intersubjective or inter-objective” because the world must be experienced by someone “who is the subject of this world. Only the subject of the lifeworld can adopt a stance which has a clear and simultaneously changeable meaning” (Kouba 2010: 131–132).
- 4.
Patočka seems to rethink here Heidegger’s idea according to which the specificity of the human being, as a being which is “inside,” consists in its touch-ability. Cf. Heidegger (1996: 51–52): “It is true that, at times, we are accustomed to express linguistically the being together of two objectively present things in such a manner: ‘The table stands ‘next to’ the door,’ ‘The chair ‘touches’ the wall.’ Strictly speaking, we can never talk about ‘touching,’ not because in the last analysis we can always find a space between the chair and the wall by examining it more closely, but because in principle the chair can never touch the wall, even if the space between them amounted to nothing. The presupposition for this would be that the wall could be encountered ‘by’ the chair. A being can only touch an objectively present being within the world if it fundamentally has the kind of being of being-in.”
- 5.
In the study on space, Patočka presupposes (human) corporeity. I disagree both with Barbaras’s interpretation that “the body is not required but created by rooting” (Barbaras 2007: 70) and with his general idea according to which Patočka, thanks to his emphasis on movement, somehow explains, in contrast to Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, embodiment (Barbaras 2007: 45, 61). One can claim, of course, that Patočka demonstrates the indispensability of the body, yet he does not explain its genesis. I will come back to this problem in Chap. 10.
- 6.
Let me recall here that Patočka’s inquiry into space seeks to find that which “founds [co zakládá] that relational scheme which makes possible the overall capturing of realities … in their lawful order” (Patočka 2016a: 33).
- 7.
See above, Chap. 5.
- 8.
In Barbaras’ reading, the distance between me and you, constitutive of space, is assured by the emptiness of the heart by giving rise to desire (Barbaras 2007: 88). The concept of desire does seem applicable here especially because Patočka conceives the fundamental personal space also as an affective space; yet, Patočka does not develop his concept in this direction. Let me add that desire plays a crucial role in Barbaras’ own philosophy of life as he develops it in explicit connection with Patočka’s thought; cf. e.g. Barbaras (2011a, b).
References
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Ritter, M. (2019). At the Heart of Space. 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_7
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