Abstract
Like Levinas, Marion, Merleau-Ponty, and Fink – among many others – Jan Patočka was concerned to develop phenomenology beyond the restrictions imposed on it by its founder, Edmund Husserl, and only incompletely addressed by Husserl’s successor, Martin Heidegger. But unlike the other thinkers mentioned, Patočka sees himself as remaining in the tradition of transcendental phenomenology, identifying his own position as “a formal transcendentalism of appearing as such.” In this paper I explore some of the tensions that emerge in Patočka’s attempt to bring “cosmological” notions – of the “whole,” the “infinite,” “nature,” and so on – within the orbit of phenomenology while still adhering to the critical principle of “demonstration” characteristic of transcendental phenomenology. Specifically, I examine Patočka’s attempt to criticize Husserl’s concept of “reflection” – the locus of Husserl’s transcendental method – without abandoning its critical potential. This leads to an examination of his phenomenology of “appearing as such,” and to the question of how the laws or structures of such appearing are to be grasped in a methodological way. Given that such laws and structures are not causal operations but structures of meaning, a tension emerges between the goal of an “asubjective” phenomenology and the very idea of normatively structured laws of meaning. This, finally, provides a context for assessing the extent to which Patočka’s late theory of the three “movements of life” can provide a philosophically compelling transcendental account of our access to the “interval” of meaning that Patočka calls the “world.”
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Notes
- 1.
Erazim Kohák, “Translator’s Postscript,” in Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, ed. J. Dodd, transl. E. Kohák (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1998), p. 179. Future references to this volume will be given in the text, abbreviated BCLW.
- 2.
Jan Patočka, “Phänomenologie als Lehre vom Erscheinen als Solchem,” in Vom Erscheinen als Solchem. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, ed. H. Blaschek-Hahn and K. Novotný (Freiburg and München: Alber, 2000), pp. 162–163. Future references to this essay will be given in the text, abbreviated PLES. All translations from Patočka’s German texts are my own.
- 3.
On the idea of a “reliable differential responsive disposition” in contrast to “sentience” as “the capacity to be aware in the sense of being awake,” see Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 5. Both are to be contrasted with “sapience,” which is our “capacity for reason and understanding” and is invoked when we explain something’s behavior “by attributing to it intentional states such as belief and desire as constituting reasons for that behavior.” The issue that will concern us in the present essay might be formulated as the question of whether Patočka’s claim that sentience already has the normative character of sapience (“ideality”) can stand up to phenomenological scrutiny.
- 4.
Patočka’s own version of reflective method is meant to ward off such mixtures, since inscribed in the concept of reflection is a commitment, endorsed by Patočka himself, to “demonstration,” that is, to philosophical self-responsibility (BCLW 85).
- 5.
Contemporary phenomenology is far from doing justice to this question, but see, for instance, the essays Naturalizing Phenomenology. Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. J. Petitot et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Many of the essays in this volume bear the traces of an attempt, drawing largely on Merleau-Ponty, to resurrect a phenomenological “philosophy of nature” by sacrificing phenomenology’s transcendental character. Patočka’s work is interesting in this regard because he sees no tension between the transcendental and something like the “natural.”
- 6.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, transl. F. Kersten (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), p. 174.
- 7.
For an early statement of this point see Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” transl. M. Brainard, in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Vol. II (2002), p. 270: “Everything psychical that is experienced in this way [sc. in reflection] is thus, as we can likewise say with evidence, embedded in a comprehensive nexus, in a ‘monadic’ unity of consciousness, a unity that in itself has nothing at all to do with nature, with space and time, substantiality and causality, but rather has its completely unique ‘forms.’”
- 8.
Paul Natorp, Allgemeine Psychologie nach kritischer Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1912), pp. 190–191.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 32.
- 10.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas I, op. cit., p. 128.
- 11.
For a different elaboration of this argument see Steven Crowell, “Does the Husserl/Heidegger Feud Rest on a Mistake? An Essay on Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology,” in Husserl Studies, Vol. 18, no. 2 (2002), pp. 123–140.
- 12.
The concept of “bald naturalism” was introduced by John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 73.
- 13.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, transl. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 159.
- 14.
Even Heidegger embraced this conclusion. See ibid., p. 322: “Our question aims at the objectification of Being as such, that second essential possibility of objectification, in which philosophy is supposed to constitute itself as science.”
- 15.
The term “dative of manifestation” is not Patočka’s, but was coined by Thomas Prufer.
- 16.
On this point it is hard to see any difference between Patočka’s position on subjectivity and that of the neo-Kantians, for whom transcendental subjectivity (as distinct from the concrete psychological subject) was a purely “formal” principle of “consciousness in general.”
- 17.
It is worth mentioning that, for Patočka, laws of appearing cannot be logical laws either. He criticizes Hegel explicitly for reducing the transcendental to the logical (PLES 159).
- 18.
On conditions of satisfaction, see John Searle, Intentionality. An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
- 19.
On the normative status of being “beholden” to entities as a condition for their appearing as the things they are, see John Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism,” in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (eds.), Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity. Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Vol. 1. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 54–57, 75.
- 20.
John McDowell, op. cit., pp. 84–86.
- 21.
A full treatment of this theme would require – and will not receive here – an inquiry into Patočka’s relation to Eugen Fink’s cosmological turn. But as Karel Novotný writes in “Einführung. Struktur des Erscheinens und endliche Freiheit” (in Jan Patočka, Vom Erscheinen…, op. cit., p. 22): “Without doubt, Patočka’s own critique of the subjectivism of Heidegger’s conception of the world takes its point of departure from Fink. However, Patočka seems in a way intent on replacing Fink’s Cosmological Difference with the phenomenological difference between the field of appearing and what appears, so that the opposition ‘world-totality and human world’ is, through the appearing, once more phenomenologically mediated.” This raises the question of how far Patočka’s appeal to the infinite, to the world-totality, to cosmos and the like, can be considered phenomenological. Are these notions, as Patočka understands them, consistent with the demand – inherent in the concept of phenomenological reflection and accepted by Patočka – that phenomenology strive for “demonstration,” i.e., original access? Are these notions really hermeneutically uncovered “intentional implications” of the finite intentional objects with which we deal meaningfully, or are they crypto-naturalistic constructions deriving from an unholy mixture of the ontic and the transcendental? The tension in Patočka’s concept of the “human” suggests the latter answer.
- 22.
Only an infinite that already has normative significance will suffice – for instance, Plato’s Idea of the Good, or some notion of God. A “mathematical” infinite in Kant’s sense can provide no basis for normative laws.
- 23.
Each of the three movements of life has an “authentic” and an “inauthentic” mode. The inauthentic mode of the third is “being blinded by finitude.” It is here that Patočka locates the ultimate significance of the epoché, for he understands the general thesis of the natural attitude as the inauthentic mode of the third movement. In the natural attitude, with its “Ansichseinsthesis” (i.e., its characteristic naive realism), we are “lost” among things that appear, captivated by the world of finite things, oblivious to the transcendence or infinity that sustains it. The epoché, which Husserl describes as a negative gesture of bracketing, has in fact a positive motivation in certain “moods” in which the “repressed” infinity makes itself felt and a movement from inauthentic to authentic human being is inaugurated, a move toward what Patočka calls “freedom.” See Jan Patočka, Vom Erscheinen…, op. cit. Text VI: “Transzendentale Epoché und theoretische Haltung,” pp. 179–182.
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Crowell, S. (2011). “Idealities of Nature”: Jan Patočka on Reflection and the Three Movements of Human Life. In: Abrams, E., Chvatík, I. (eds) Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 61. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9124-6_2
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