Abstract
This article is a brief overview of Jan Patočka’s early interpretation of phenomenology in his academic writings based, on the one hand, on his 1931 doctoral dissertation and his 1936 habilitation thesis, and, on the other hand, on his first critical revision and his own conception of transcendental phenomenology put forward in an important group of manuscripts written between 1940 and 1945, which have recently been published in his Collected Works. The article examines these texts closely and focuses on Patočka’s attempts to link phenomenology with a philosophy of life. Important motifs that shaped Patočka’s philosophy beginning in the early 1940s were his reflections on the sources of evidence in life, the unity of the world in the life of transcendental subjectivity and a “deeper life-correlation” with nature.
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Notes
- 1.
The terms “natural concept of the world” or “natural world” are associated with the influence of Richard Avenarius on the development of phenomenology in the work of its founder Edmund Husserl or with the evolution of the concept of the “natural world” in the work of authors who followed Husserl, from some of his former assistants, including Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink and Ludwig Landgrebe, to Aron Gurwitsch, Alfred Schütz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Klaus Held today.
- 2.
Recently translated into French (Patočka 2016a), and into English for the first time in 2016 (Patočka 2016b) by Erika Abrams. Her translations have been the main source of Patočka’s international reception, thanks to which Patočka is part and parcel of the corpus of contemporary phenomenological philosophy.
- 3.
Studies on the Concept of the World (Patočka 2014, pp. 17–173) was the title of the most extensive manuscript of the group. As regards both synoptic interpretations of Patočka’s phenomenological philosophy and partial studies on individual topics, the secondary literature is relatively rich, and this is also true (though to a lesser extent) of the interpretation of his works published in the 1930s. However, the early works and reflections of Jan Patočka—such as Studies on the Concept of the World—which survived in manuscript form and have only recently been published (Patočka 2014, pp. 9–327), are quite naturally only beginning to be interpreted. See an updated overview of the secondary literature at the Jan Patočka Archive web site, http://www.ajp.cuni.cz.
- 4.
However, other authors have mentioned Husserl’s lectures and publications in the territory of the former Czechoslovakia, such as professors František Krejčí and Jan Blahoslav Kozák at Charles University, professor Vladimír Hoppe at Masaryk University in Brno, and professor Josef Tvrdý at Comenius University in Bratislava, among others.
- 5.
“Phenomenology cannot tell us what is real, but only what reality is, what conditions must be fulfilled in order for something to be considered as real” (Patočka 2008, p. 118).
- 6.
This demand could find a ready answer in Husserl’s late genetic phenomenology, though Patočka would not be more closely acquainted with it until he became a direct student of his in 1933, when he arrived in Freiburg with a Humboldt Foundation scholarship.
- 7.
Although Patočka only refers explicitly to one of Husserl’s manuscripts on the issue of horizonality (Patočka 2008, p. 2016, note 213), he had dozens of them at his disposal. The list of all the manuscripts in Prague that Ludwig Landgrebe transcribed in the mid-1930s, a large portion of which were preserved at the Cercle philosophique de Prague and transferred to Patočka’s “Strahov estate,” is documented by Hans Rainer Sepp (Hagedorn, Sepp 1999, p. 206). On Patočka’s “Strahov estate,” see Filip Karfík (Karfík 2006, pp. 31–63).
- 8.
In addition to an article by Eugen Fink for Kant-Studien (Fink 1933), he also cites Fink’s Transzendentale Methodenlehre—i.e., the Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Fink 1988), though he finds the issue “still at the very beginning of its development” (Patočka 2016b, p. 48). Considering the synoptic nature of this article, however, it is not the place to deal with Patočka’s interpretation of the theory of transcendental reduction in detail. Cf. Novotný (1999a, b).
- 9.
From the point of view of his interpretation of the phenomenology of the natural world, it is important to mention the theme of moods or attunement that Patočka touched on in this context and which does not make substantial reference to Husserl. Patočka characterizes it here without reference to any particular author, so that a mood is “always one’s own, inner ‘state,’ but also at once colours our material surroundings, as if they were participating in it” (Patočka 2016b, p. 197). Heidegger is cited in Patočka’s habilitation thesis in five places, in other contexts. Cf. also Ludwig Landgrebe’s own originary habilitation thesis from 1932 Der Begriff des Erlebens (Landgrebe 2010), in which moods play a significant role and which has survived in Patočka’s Strahov Estate.
- 10.
“For Bergson a sensed quality is a merging of the movement of one’s own life and that of an other,” Patočka notes in “The World and Objectivity,” a manuscript dating from the early 1940s (Patočka 2014, p. 62). Patočka also orients his own investigations beyond the framework of Husserl’s phenomenology in this direction. See the third part of this paper, below.
- 11.
See footnote no. 3 above. The English translations of excerpts from these manuscripts presented in this paper are by Ivan Gutierrez.
- 12.
As regards another of Patočka’s systematic projects, beginning in 1934 he begins to reflect on the philosophy of history, which would constitute another, no less central line in his life’s work. Martin Heidegger had an undeniable influence on these reflections. (Cf., for example, Novotný 1995, 2012, pp. 103–137 and Karfík 2008, pp. 171–193.) However, our paper, in keeping with the conception of this volume, is limited to the reception of phenomenology in the narrower sense.
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Acknowledgments
Translated from Czech by Ivan Gutierrez. The translation was supported within the framework of institutional support for the Long-Term Development of Research Organizations provided by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports to the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University (2018).
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Novotný, K. (2020). Life and the Natural World in the Early Work of Jan Patočka (1930–1945). In: Płotka, W., Eldridge, P. (eds) Early Phenomenology in Central and Eastern Europe. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 113. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39623-7_11
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