Pohyb života a svět. O fenomenologii a metafyzice světa u Jana Patočky

Summary

A new reading of Jan Patočka's concept of the natural world, proposed by Renaud Barbaras, challenges the standard view that Patočka's philosophy synthesizes Husserl's phenomenology of consciousness and Heidegger's historical thinking of being. Instead, Barbaras grounds Patočka's thought in a deeper starting point: life understood as phusis or nature, which forms the basis of world-formation dynamics. However, this natural basis itself eludes that dynamics, a point Barbaras may not have fully considered.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The new interpretation of the concept of the natural world in J. Patočka, introduced by R. Barbaras, as opposed to the interpretation of his philosophy as the synthesis of the philosophy of consciousness or reflective philosophy in E. Husserl, and of the thinking of being in its historicity in M. Heidegger, is grounded in Patočka’s references to a deeper starting point – life in the sense of phusis or nature – which represents a basis of a world-formation dynamics and which, at the same time, which Barbaras perhaps may not have considered enough, eludes this dynamics itself. These references result in the concept of the natural world as the “pre-historical” world, in the first Heretical Essay on the Philosophy of History, and follow from the concepts of “pre-everydayness” and “pure nature” in Patočka’s manuscripts from the early 1940s.