Abstract
This chapter identifies asubjective elements in manuscripts written by Patočka in the first half of the 1940s. After explicating the key concept of inwardness, with which Patočka substitutes Husserl’s notion of the ego, I elucidate the world-disclosing performance of inwardness as irreducible to world-constituting activity. After this explication, the chapter inspects Patočka’s method: Although the war manuscripts factually point to, and call for, the desubjectification of phenomenology, Patočka’s methodical focus on the acts of an ego does not allow for it. This focus prevents the desubjectification of phenomenology despite Patočka’s reflections on nature and on the relation between inwardness and the “things” bearing witness that the appearing of the world cannot be “constituted” only by transcendental subjectivity. Generaly put, (the principle of) appearing presupposes also “something” beyond subject-object dichotomy.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter has already been published as “The Life of Inwardness. Asubjectivity in Patočka’s War Manuscripts” in Interpretationes. Studia Philosophica Europeanea, 2017, 47–59.
- 2.
Both a complete list of the manuscripts and their general interpretation is presented by Karfík (2006: 31–63).
- 3.
The essential part of these reflections has been published in German in Patočka (2006).
- 4.
Patočka’s shorter essays on these topics have been translated into German and published in Studia Phaenomenologica VII: Jan Patočka and the European Heritage (2007). The more extended and most systematic studies, however, are available only in Czech. So far as I know, this part of the manuscripts has been discussed (in print) only in the Czech Republic. See Puc (2009), Ritter (2010, 2011), Frei (2010).
- 5.
- 6.
Hence it is too risky, I believe, to say that Patočka “follows Heideggerian motifs with Husserlian means” (Karfík 2008: 37).
- 7.
Already here, Patočka explicitly connects this idea of movement with Plato’s definition of the soul as self-movement.
- 8.
Patočka emphasizes the very same idea in his study on space from 1960.
- 9.
Patočka concedes that poetic, moral, and religious depictions of inwardness can be not only inspiring but also quite apt. For the same reason, psychoanalysis is attractive in its offering a much more “active and dramatic” image than older psychology. However, according to Patočka, there is still one essential weakness of psychoanalysis: the dynamic of inwardness is depicted there as “a drama of mighty forces which … does not differ fundamentally from a drama offered by natural catastrophes” (Patočka 2014c: 38). The problem is, fundamentally, that psychoanalysis attempts to capture the non-objective through objective principles.
- 10.
Rather, “[t]he intentionality of singular objective ‘acts’ is an outcome of simplifying the function performed by the original non-topicality, by the hiddenness of the proper performative nature of intentional life” (Patočka 2014c: 43).
- 11.
As will be explicated below, it is primarily through the concept of life that Patočka accounts for the possibility of inwardness to understand other beings not only as objects but as subjects as well. Santos justifiably considers “Phänomenologie der Lebendigkeit” as the most original feature of Patočka’s war manuscripts (Santos 2007: 17).
- 12.
Both these concepts are negative ones also insofar as they point to a “non-being in itself, a non-resting of oneself in oneself” essential to inwardness; accordingly, inwardness is “a kind of rising out of oneself together with being bound to oneself: an unrest and interest, and the tension arising from it” (Patočka 2007b: 56, 2014a: 20).
- 13.
According to Patočka, “inwardness perceptible from the outside” is a “universal pre-signifying” of “a synthetic process of perception” (Patočka 2014f: 102).
- 14.
One can suspect here, reading “of a pure nature, of a pure indifference of subject and object, of an indifference enclosed in itself” (Patočka 2007a: 46, 2014d: 64), two different kinds of processes as an anticipation of Patočka’s later proposal of renewing the concept of physis as different from the concept of inwardness as humanly singularizing performance.
- 15.
Accordingly, Patočka emphasizes that the phenomenologist must be specifically, and rather un-theoretically, well-equipped to be able to understand human inwardness: “The meaning, and hence the content of the inner life can be clear only to one who, at the utmost risk of oneself, alone seizes meaning [dobývá smyslu] in the end” (Patočka 2014c: 48).
- 16.
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Ritter, M. (2019). Life of Inwardness. 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_4
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