Abstract
Patočka’s phenomenology, as presented in The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, creatively transforms Husserl’s concept of Lebenswelt. The chapter demonstrates the originality of Patočka’s approach. I summarize Patočka’s analysis of the natural world to focus on the concept of transcendental subjectivity. How can this subjectivity be achieved by a finite consciousness and, even more importantly, what is this subjectivity? Elaborating on Husserl’s transcendental idealism, Patočka identifies the concrete concept of constituting subjectivity with that of “monads” intermeshing with one another. I suggest interpreting this concept as pointing to trans-individual process of life embodied by the monads ontologically grounding the world.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter has already been published as “The Hubris of Transcendental Idealism: Understanding Patočka’s Early Concept of the Lifeworld,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 50(2), 2018, 171–181.
- 2.
Recently, Dermot Moran (2015) offered an interesting reconsideration of Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld.
- 3.
According to Ludger Hagedorn, reading Patočka’s book one realizes “that the ‘Crisis of Modern Sciences’ is not seen as the source and origin of a general crisis: on the contrary, the falling apart of the natural and the scientific world views is a mere indicator, the epi-phenomenon of a bigger crisis that is characterised by the general loss of meaning” (Hagedorn 2015: 97).
- 4.
Inspired also by Heidegger, in the 1970s Patočka emphasized the distinction between reduction and epoché. In his interpretation, to put it simply, Husserl degrades the meaning of epoché by reducing its reach to that which is accessible, and how it is accessible, by phenomenological reduction. Epoché cannot be reduced to reduction. Cf. Mensch 2016: 38–42 or Karfík 2008: 21.
- 5.
Since Patočka does not mean exclusively Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world,” the translation might be misleading: in the Czech original, one reads simply “being in the world.”
- 6.
For some indicia of this development, see Novotný 1999: 166–169.
- 7.
- 8.
Novotný himself is aware of the difficulties of this interpretation (see Novotný 1999: 163, n. 23).
- 9.
On these tendencies, some a priori structures of the world are based. The communicative tendency constitutes the category of fellow against the category of the thing of practical usage. The fellow is such a being “whose work we could do too” in contrast to categories of animal, plant, and, finally, nature in its three forms: nature as material, as an order, and as predominance. All these categories are “a priori; they occur in our experience due to the simple fact of our being-in-the-world, and they contain fundamental possibilities of human understanding of reality” (Patočka 2016: 82).
- 10.
- 11.
Cf. his likening of Husserl’s concept to the ideas of Fichte and Schelling: “Considering the productive character of its cognition and its typically extra-existential givenness, the I of the transcendental onlooker could be likened to Fichte’s absolute I. Schelling’s I, on the other hand … would be comparable to the full constituting flow” (Patočka 2016: 50). It seems worth recalling in this context that, according to Patočka’s dissertation, phenomenology proceeds similarly to Hegelianism. See also Karfík 2008: 16.
- 12.
It is no coincidence that Patočka closes chapter 3 of his habilitation with the following: “The passage through phenomenological reflection has thus made possible at least a cursory outline of continuity in various modern problematics of subjectivity, concluded here, after having reached by it, so to speak, the summit of the curve by a look back at our starting point” (Patočka 2016: 50). At its peak, we can see the whole path of the notion of subjectivity.
- 13.
The English translation (Patočka 2016: 48) omits an important part of the title of the 7th section of chapter 3. In the Czech original (Patočka 2008b: 185), the title reads “7. Námitka solipsismu. Transcendentální subjektivita jako prozatím dosažená etapa subjektivní redukce,” i.e. “The Objection of Solipsism. Transcendental Intersubjectivity as the Level of Subjective Reduction Achieved So Far.”
- 14.
Regarding this problem, an observation of Theodor Adorno seems worth mentioning: “The strange fact in Husserl … is that what gazes out at us when I extract the pure entities from the individuations or the individual phenomenon … that what gazes out is at bottom nothing but the good old concepts of classificatory logic” (Adorno 2008: 72).
- 15.
Of course, Heidegger’s own early concept, especially before the publication of Being and Time, puts strong emphasis on the notion of life.
- 16.
There seems to be an important dichotomy at work here, namely that of entities that are meaning-constitutive on the one side and of those that are only constituted but not meaning-constitutive on the other. Of course, this dichotomy has far reaching ethical significance.
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Ritter, M. (2019). Hubris of Transcendental Idealism. 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_3
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