Abstract
In the first part of this chapter, I focus on how Patočka’s late phenomenology drew inspiration from Husserl, Heidegger, Fink, and Merleau-Ponty, insofar as these thinkers can be connected with different ideas of how phenomenology shall proceed and what is it capable of. Making use of this survey, I seek to identify tensions in Patočka’s late ideas on asubjective phenomenology. I draw attention especially to the relation between phenomenology and ontology. Patočka does not want to deny the ontological claims of phenomenology; but the idea of appearing as coming into being can be based only on speculation. In this context, I critically asses Barbaras’ speculative interpretation of Patočka and demonstrate that Patočka implicitly excludes the possibility for the theory of appearing to account for cosmos (or physis). I also pay attention to the tension between universalist claims of phenomenology and the acknowledgment of its historic limits. Finally, I indicate the reasons for re-turning to Patočka’s concept of the movement of existence.
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Notes
- 1.
At the beginning of the 1970s, Patočka wrote two papers explicitly containing in their titles the phrase “asubjective phenomenology.” Yet, of course, his efforts to make phenomenology asubjective can be traced back at least to his manuscripts from the 1940s. Novotný (2000: 12–18) offers a short survey of the “prehistory” of asubjective phenomenology in Patočka’s earlier texts.
- 2.
See esp. Chap. 15.
- 3.
See Chap. 11.
- 4.
- 5.
Cf. Barbaras’ interpretation of this fundamentality (Barbaras 2007: 32–37).
- 6.
Cf., besides others, Patočka’s letter to Fink quoted by Novotný (2000: 23).
- 7.
This does not mean, of course, that phenomenology must be based empirically.
- 8.
A short and concise explication of Fink’s concept and its comparison with Patočka’s ideas is offered by Kerckhoven (1998).
- 9.
In his lectures from 1968 to 1969, Patočka formulates a rhetorical question: “Is there not … within us some understanding – unclear, anticipatory, unobjectifiable – of this antecedent whole?” (Patočka 1998: 169)
- 10.
Novotný rightly emphasises other statements by Patočka in which the possibility of such an approach is called into question (cf. Novotný 2000: 22–23).
- 11.
I will come back to not only this problem in Chap. 10.
- 12.
See above, Chap. 6.
- 13.
I will come back to this in the following chapter.
- 14.
For Barbaras, it is by the first movement that a (human) being acquires its humanity (Barbaras 2007: 97).
- 15.
Cf. also Rodrigo (2007).
- 16.
This is also why I do not take into accout Barbaras’ more elaborated, and creative, interpretation developed in his second monograph on Patočka (Barbaras 2011). I do not argue against it, since it would take me too far from the line of thought I pursue here. To put it simply, Barbaras’ L’ouverture du monde is even more speculative than his first book on Patočka; and hence is incompatible with the approach, which is typical of Patočka himself, distinguishing between phenomenology proper and speculating philosophy.
- 17.
In this approach, the world is not only autonomous, it is autonomous exactly as the process ontologically individuating beings: “it gives them definiteness, determination” (Patočka 1991b: 260).
- 18.
“Phenomenological philosophy differs from phenomenology in that it wants not only to analyse phenomena as such but also to derive results from this; it wants to derive results, as is said, which are metaphysical” (Patočka 2002: 32–33).
- 19.
This conclusion might be in harmony with the idea expressed also in Patočka’s above-mentioned study on Fink that the world is “dark in the ground of its uniting” (Patočka 1991b: 260).
- 20.
- 21.
And another “old” problem again rears its head, namely the problem of freedom, which plays a crucial role especially in Patočka’s (re)consideration on “Epoché and Reduction” (Patočka 2015b). To put it bluntly, there would be no appearing in a true sense without freedom.
- 22.
According to Stanciu, phenomenology must exceed its limits “in the direction of a philosophical cosmology and of an ‘ontic theory of the existence’” (Stanciu 2017: 303).
- 23.
According to Novotný, Patočka developed his late asubjective phenomenology in three phases while finally, in contrast to an originally more Husserlian approach, he deepened his approach by Heideggerian hermeneutics of the understanding of Being (Novotný 2000: 11).
- 24.
- 25.
It is worth mentioning that Barbaras, at first, accepts the possibility of speaking of the transcendentality of the (necessarily also empiric) subject, yet he immediately adds that the very duality of the transcendental and the empiric must be abandoned (Barbaras 2007: 64).
- 26.
I do agree with Crowell that even in Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology “transcendental subject cannot be a mere empty position” (Crowell 2011: 19). Yet, Crowell’s conjecture that “Patočka came to understand this and tried to flesh out his conception of the subject by way of his theory of the three movements of life” (Crowell 2011: 19) is misguided: the concept of the movement of existence predates Patočka’s late asubjective phenomenology.
- 27.
Patočka names them “mute entities” (cf. Patočka 1998: 168–169). In the Czech original, he uses the term tupá to describe these beings. This word should rather be translated as “dull” or “obtuse” as it has more to do with “dullness” or “numbness.”
- 28.
Importantly in this context, Barbaras identifies the problem of life as a “blind spot” in Patočka’s (late) phenomenology (Barbaras 2007: 112, n. 1). Allow me to add that, as should be clear from the aforementioned, I cannot agree with Crowell that Patočka “sees no tension between the transcendental and something like the ‘natural’” (Crowell 2011: 9, n. 5). Rather, one can suspect Patočka, as Crowell himself insinuates, of “crypto-naturalistic constructions deriving from an unholy mixture of the ontic and the transcendental” (Crowell 2011: 20, n. 21).
- 29.
Simultaneously, it is exhilarating to read the unified interpretations, such as those of Barbaras or Karfík.
- 30.
Of course, this question plays a crucial role also in all the above-mentioned approaches of Patočka scholars.
- 31.
The very same duality seems to be spoken of also in this formulation from 1969: “Is not the antecedent whole of all that is an essential presupposition of mute entities as well as of entities such as we, who relate to being? Here, in the universal ‘content’ (containing all else) is the condition of the possibility of (i) the individualization of things and (ii) the appearing of existents in the light of being” (Patočka 1998: 169).
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Ritter, M. (2019). Asubjective Phenomenology. 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_9
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