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World and Appearing in Jan Patočka. Proximity and Distance to Edmund Husserl und Eugen Fink

Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2020

Abstract

The influence of Eugen Fink on Jan Patocka is undeniable. Fink was his first advisor in questions concerning the phenomenology of the late Husserl in the mid-1930s.

But as one can see in the correspondence between Patocka and Fink, there are also some hints to divergences, which this paper tries to make explicit, mainly on the basis of some later works and manuscripts by Patocka. They concern the status of the whole of the world (Weltganzes) as being different from the human lifeworld (Menschenwelt) and the double concept of appearing in the cosmology of Fink, which Patocka - in the early 1970s - confronts with a project of an "asubjective" phenomenology.

This project, introduced by an unambiguous criticism of the Cartesianism in Husserl, still maintains a certain proximity to Husserl, defining itself as a formal transcendentalism of appearing as such that is not divided into two modes of appearing as in Fink. It can be read as Patocka's radicalization of the originary Husserlian project of phenomenology, rather than as its cosmological abandonment in an accordance with Fink.