Drawing on Husserl’s redefinition of lifeworld as “world of praxis,” Patočka encourages us to situate such a universal correlation between fundamental movements of our existence and the articulation of the world that we experience while acting upon it. between aspects of the world and acts of consciousness. Such a pragmatic turn in phenomenology will therefore entail abandoning several of Husserl’s presuppositions according to which the meaning of phenomena is fundamentally constituted by the consciousness of transcendental subjectivity.ģ Husserl defines in the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology the central task of phenomenology as the elaboration of “the universal a priori” between the transcendent being and its subjective modes of givenness, i.e. Second, emphasizing the primacy of practice reveals the fundamental dependence of all sense-making on both our bodily belonging to the world and the shared sphere of norms that are not of our own making. Replaced in this existential context, the primacy of practice implies, first, that human beings encounter things as correlates of their practical possibilities and not as objective correlates of their inner representations. Patočka extends such analysis further and claims that the manifestation of all beings is correlative to the self-movement performed by the living being that each of us is. As we know from Sein und Zeit, such performances carry their own kind of understanding or sight, called “circumspection” by Heidegger, which grasps things in light of the work to be done, in the light of the project with which we identify ourselves. In other words, our cognitive capacities (judgment, intuition, representation and other propositional attitudes) are embedded in the competent performance of practical tasks. (Patočka 2016b: 190)Ģ Against Husserl’s appeal to the primacy of intuitive evidences, Patočka argues that our practical concern with things constitute a necessary background for understanding how it is possible for us to judge, to state, or to represent how things are. It is not the practical that should be understood on the basis of intuited presentations but, on the contrary, the attitude of disinterested contemplation whose genesis we should attempt to understand on the basis of the interested and engaged understanding proper to human being in its finite life. If the first encounter of “things ” is possible in principle only in the form of handling pragmata, it would seem inevitable that the problem of the phenomenon, the problem of appearing, will be profoundly affected by this fact.
The primacy of practice and its link to the way the things manifest themselves is explicitly announced by Patočka in the following passage: Insofar as we accomplish the movement of our existence within the world – understood as an open field of possibilities –, its features unfold primarily as solicitations to actions. Not only Jan Patočka endorses Heidegger’s claim that things appear first and foremost as correlates of our concerns and practical involvements, but he invites us to reformulate the Husserlian question of appearing as such in terms of motion. 1 In my paper, I will ask how the primacy of practical over theoretical understanding in Jan Patočka’s philosophy transforms the traditional approach to the problem of phenomena.
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