Abstract
‘Life’ is the magic word for decisive currents of modern philosophy. Much of the tone for this debate over the last one and a half centuries has been set by Nietzsche . His early meditation on the ‘Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ might be seen as one of its rhetorical starting points. From the very onset until its most recent developments, the reference to the lived experience was also a core issue and main concern of phenomenology. Husserl ’s notion of the ‘life-world ’ (or the Natural World in Patočka ’s words) bears witness to this basic inspiration of phenomenology. The interpretation of the life-world , however, did find its primary setting within the confines of subjectivity . Despite being confident of its validity, Patočka ’s Natural World turns into a document for the dissolution of this subjectivist approach. Subjectivity itself becomes the ultimate explicandum.
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Notes
- 1.
Friedrich Nietzsche , Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, first published in 1874. There is a variety of English translations and, accordingly, of titles for this early work by Nietzsche . Some of them also try to emulate the alliteration of the original title, which is the resonant factor in German, with the help of rhyming, e.g. ‘On the Use and Abuse [or: Uses and Abuses] of History for Life’. See Nietzsche 1997a.
- 2.
Cf. “Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it is contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over” (Nietzsche 1997b: 61). NB in quotations throughout, emphasis is in original, unless otherwise stated.
- 3.
One is inclined to ask: what else, in a late 19th-century environment of historicism, when confronted with an ‘overkill of history’, and when, as a classical philologist, forced to deal with the seemingly irrelevant minutiae of one’s profession?
- 4.
René Descartes , Discours de la methode (1637); see Descartes 1960.
- 5.
In the very beginning of Part II of his Discours, Descartes states: “Thus it is observable that the buildings which a single architect has planned and executed, are generally more elegant and commodious than those which several have attempted to improve, by making old walls serve for purposes for which they were not originally built” (Descartes 2008 [1637]: Part II).
- 6.
To mention just a few that Nietzsche gives in one single sentence (Nietzsche 1997a: 63).
- 7.
All references will be given as chapter (Ch.), section (§), because the manuscript is currently unpublished. The Czech original appeared in 1936. It was the first book worldwide that was dedicated to Husserl ’s topic of the life-world ( Lebenswelt ) or, in Patočka ’s words, the ‘Natural World’. Patočka already had access to Husserl ’s Crisis manuscript, which came out in the same year, but incidentally only after Patočka had published his thesis. The Natural World was reprinted in 1970 and finally edited in Vol. 6 of Patočka ’s Collected Works (see Patočka 2008 [1936]).
- 8.
Ludwig Landgrebe ’s Introduction to the German translation of Patočka ’s book might serve as a good example of this (cf Landgrebe 1990). Landgrebe clearly points out these inspirations in Patočka ’s writing and also relates them back to the historical circumstances of that time (Husserl ’s visit to Prague, Landgrebe ’s life in exile, their common care for Husserl ’s Nachlass, etc.).
- 9.
These philosophers are Patočka ’s most important historical references in the Natural World, not Kant or Descartes as in Husserl ’s Crisis. Just this small observation already shows a remarkable difference between their approaches. Patočka ’s consideration of transcendental subjectivism starts with some of its most preeminent examples in the history of philosophy. The prefiguration of an all-encompassing subjectivity in German Idealism is reworked (de-constructed) with regards to Husserl ’s phenomenology.
- 10.
Out of many such phenomenological studies of his, one could mention the lecture series, ‘Body, Community, Language, World’, which also came out in English (Patočka 1998).
- 11.
It is not by coincidence that the Socratic motive of the care for the soul obtains such a crucial importance for Patočka ’s later philosophy. Care for the soul is like the practical or existential aspect of what ‘philosophy as a unity function’ means.
- 12.
This is quite remarkable, since in many of his articles published either before or after, Patočka indeed has manifold and intense references to Nietzsche , cf. e.g. ‘Some Comments on the Mundane and Extra-Mundane Position of Philosophy’ (1934) and ‘Life in Balance, Life in Amplitude’ (1939), both of them in English translation (Patočka 2007a, b, respectively).
- 13.
It is one of Patočka ’s main theses in his very last article, ‘On Masaryk’s Philosophy of Religion’ (1977) that Dostoyevsky’s literary work is an answer to Nietzsche ’s question of nihilism. This long article is planned to be published in English translation in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy in 2014. German translation: Patočka 2002.
- 14.
This label most often refers to philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Wilhelm Dilthey. Its most important forerunner and source of inspiration, nevertheless, is obviously Nietzsche .
- 15.
Cf. the following passage from the Natural World: “Moods and ‘states’ are dynamic: it is part of their essence to be from something and for something; every mood is a mood for a certain activity, be it idleness. The possibility of our activities lies in our moods and ‘states’ (in ‘how we are’, or ‘how we are doing’). Each and every life is characterized by a scale of moods…” (Patočka unpublished: Ch. III, §1).
- 16.
In his ‘Afterword’ to the Natural World, written 40 years after the publication of the main text, Patočka refers to the problem of bodily existence like this: “The body and embodiment belong essentially […] to what is revealed, uncovered by the illuminated, disclosed being in its being-in-the-world. […]The body belongs not only to the problem of one’s own spatiality but also to the sphere of one’s own possibilities. The body is existentially the totality of possibilities that we do not choose but into which we are inserted, those for which we are not free, those we have to be.” (Patočka unpublished: Afterword [1970], §II). The reformulation of ‘thrownness’ in terms of corporeality is indicative of his general attempt to take up philosophical impulses of Heidegger , but build them into a phenomenology of concrete phenomena.
- 17.
Once again, Patočka ’s choice of words is revealing. Despite officially holding on to the transcendental subject, there is a whole set of concepts entering his discussion that speak a different language: “transcendental life” (appears several times, first appearance: Patočka unpublished: Ch. II, §5); “transcendental field” (appears several times, first appearance: Patočka unpublished: Ch. II, §5 – a prefiguration of the “phenomenal field” that he will speak of in the 1960s); “transcendental preexistence” (Patočka unpublished: Ch. II, §5); maybe the most telling one, also mentioned a few times, “flowing life” (first appearance: Patočka unpublished: Ch. II, §5); then finally a combination of these concepts in the definition “the transcendental field appears as flowing life, presenting itself with the character of apodicticity; its contents include all and every object of our lived-experiencing, all and every being, grasped, of course, as a phenomenon” (Patočka unpublished: Ch. II, §6). Certainly, very similar formulations can be found in Husserl as well. But what, for Husserl , is taking place within the field of transcendental constitution is, in Patočka , coming closer to existential questioning and Socratic care for the soul.
- 18.
In the Natural World this is especially formulated as a critique of both Husserl and Heidegger , who, according to Patočka , severely underrate social life.
- 19.
This quote shows that the characterisation of a ‘more’ and ‘less’ than subjectivity shouldn’t be taken too literally. It is also not meant that both concepts would exclude one another. On the contrary, both indicate a certain reworking of the concept of subjectivity that might lead to a more refined, dynamised understanding. Patočka ’s theory of the “three movements of human existence” points into that direction: whereas the first movement is more passive and related to the past (“subjected to…”), the third one is active and future-oriented (“make oneself a subject of…”).
- 20.
This is already a prefiguration of his later “a-subjective” phenomenology and the notion of a “phenomenal field”.
- 21.
- 22.
Quoted from the online translation edited by J. Bennett (Descartes 2010–2015: 1f).
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Hagedorn, L. (2015). ‘Quicquid Cogitat’: On the Uses and Disadvantages of Subjectivity. In: Učník, Ľ., Chvatík, I., Williams, A. (eds) The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 76. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09828-9_7
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