Abstract
The article comments on Patočka's letter to Ludwig Landgrebe of 4 April 1974 and the texts following it, namely the afterword to the French edition of The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem and the preparatory manuscripts for it. First, I attempt to clarify, in light of the changes in Patočka's thought in the 1970s, what exactly the formulations in the paragraph of the letter where Patočka indicates how he intends to conceive of the natural world in the Afterword can and cannot mean.
Second, I draw attention to an interesting feature of the doctrine presented in the Afterword - Patočka has here introduced two irreducibly different possible movements of the breakthrough of alienated everyday life, thereby abandoning one of the fundamental features of the vast majority of his reflections on human existence, namely the postulation of the possibility and fundamental importance of a movement of existence in which the one true source of all meaning - if perhaps ungraspable in positive terms - is revealed to us. I suggest how this shift apparently occurred in the course of work on the preparatory texts.