La phénoménologie du monde naturel dans les premiers travaux de Patočka

Abstract

The Phenomenology of the Natural World in the Early Works of Patočka

The ambition of this text is to examine the “natural world as a philosophical problem”, which was the title of Patočka’s habilitation thesis in 1936. The natural world is not just a scientific problem, it is also a philosophical problem, which corresponds to the thematic of Crisis and Lifeworld described by Husserl in his Prague Lecture in 1935. As a result of the very strong influence of Husserlian phenomenology on his early thought, Patočka identified in the first sentence of his thesis the origin of problems that his own philosophy would unceasingly renew: “The problem of philosophy is the world as a whole”. Man is a finite being but relates infinitely to the whole of the world. Our guiding research hypothesis is as follows: In order to explore the justification, implications and limitations of this problematic, we want to emphasize the early works of Patočka and show that his approach bears phenomenology, through its own means, to the threshold of a new definition of the natural world as the activity of creative life. World is not the whole of existing things but the phenomenal connectedness of things, their way of referring beyond themselves to a constitutive whole. The aim of Patočka is to obtain the autonomy of the natural world by freeing the transcendence of the world from every form of objectivity and freeing the existence of the subject from every form of immanence.

Keywords: Phenomenology, Husserl, Patocka, natural world, givenness, lived-experience, objectivity, existence