Abstract
This paper addresses the topic of life in its intertwining with the one of mortality as well as with the political dimension in the reflections of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. This topic is addressed focusing on two perspectives, which in Patočka's meditation are ultimately thought together: the relation of 'bare' life as prolongation of itself, and existentially meaningful life; and relation between individual life and the broader dimension into which individual life may be integrated.
The paper points at the aspects of continuity - and discontinuity - between Husserl's and Patočka's thought. In the late Husserl, the passage from a life oriented towards finite and everyday interests, to a life which integrates a broader and philosophical dimension, coincides with the integration of individual life into 'life' as transcendental, intersubjective dimension and movement.
After a brief reference to Patočka's text Supercivilization and its inner conflict, which develops an analysis of the rationalization of modern society that allows for a comparison to the contemporary notion of biopower, I will take as main point of reference the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Patočka's reflection in this work can be interpreted from the above-mentioned perspectives and compared with the above sketched Husserlian thoughts.
While the technological society appears as a gigantic structure aimed at the prolongation of life, the confrontation with problematicity and finitude opens up the possibility of a movement towards a more meaningful dimension of life, which integrates the assumption of mortality with the opening of an authentic political dimension. This movement shows a parallel to the Husserlian one of an integration into the intersubjective transcendental dimension, but Patočka, through his reception of Heidegger, Fink and Arendt, transforms its understanding into a thought of finitude and the political.