Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 79/2017, p.

499-515

approaching the absolute in

jan patočka’s phenomenology
by Martin Ritter (Prague)

In this article, I seek to elucidate two closely connected topics: how

the absolute is conceived in Jan Patočka’s phenomenology and how the
relationship between finite human existence and the infinite is fatho-
med by the Czech philosopher.
Whereas Patočka’s early phenomenology requires a turn to the infi-
nite ‘creative subjectivity,’ his late phenomenology is less demanding and
more realistic. There, phenomenology is unable to disclose, and a phe-
nomenologist is unable to access, the principle of the world appearing.
Rather, the phenomenologist is able to analyse appearing because she is
a part of it. Yet she is a conditioned and finite part of it, unable to
transcend her own finiteness.
Nevertheless, Patočka never abandoned his early idea that, as will be
explicated below, “the absolute is not outside but within us.” To clarify the
exact meaning of this idea, the paper considers Patočka’s concept of the
movements of existence, according to which the human being is ontolo-
gically based in three fundamental, world-disclosing movements. As will
be shown, Patočka effectively restricts the human relationship to the

Martin Ritter (1977), PhD, is Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, Prague
(http://ufar.ff.cuni.cz/10/martin-ritter-phd), and Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the
Czech Academy of Sciences. His main areas of teaching and research are phenomenology, critical
theory and contemporary philosophy. He has edited and translated into Czech three volumes of the
Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin and participated in the editing of Jan Patočka’s Collected Works.
He has translated other significant philosophical books into Czech, such as those written by Adorno,
Bhabha, Rorty, or Žižek.

doi: 10.2143/TVF.79.3.3271933
© 2017 by Tijdschrift voor Filosofie. All rights reserved.
500 Martin RITTER

a­ bsolute to the domain of the third movement identifying its performance,

specifically, with a communication of humans in the service of Being.
Yet, Patočka also identifies the true movement of existence with the
movement of love. The paper elaborates on this idea to demonstrate
that the relationship of the finite human being to the absolute does not
need to be interpreted as the relation to the unconditioned, whether
conceived as the absolute consciousness, Spirit, or Being. Instead, it can
be understood as the relation between conditioned, finite human beings:
infinity is to be ‘found’ in finite relations. This infinity is reflected by
phenomenology and manifested by a concrete human being.

1. Turning to Creative Subjectivity and to the Field of

Phenomena

According to Patočka’s early phenomenology, as it is presented in his

dissertation on the concept of evidence, we gain access to appearing by
turning to the absolute consciousness. It is only there that one can
acquire evidence: “Consciousness is the sphere of absolute positivity
where everything gives itself in the way it really is.”1 To articulate this
sphere, there is no need to make any constructions; one just sees essen-
tial structures. Accordingly, phenomenology can be called “true positi-
vism or empiricism”2 because it does not construct but only observes
things giving themselves.
However, the object of this seeing is not the consciousness of any
particular human being. The articulated subjectivity is not worldly but
non-worldly, not created but creative subjectivity. In other words, phe-
nomenology — similarly to Hegelianism — “proceed[s] from absolute
Being. The phenomenological field is something like intellectus dei
infinitus.”3 Phenomenology analyses this creative subjectivity: it passes

1
  Jan Patočka, Pojem evidence a jeho význam pro noetiku, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Jan Frei, Sebrané
spisy 6: Fenomenologické spisy 1 (Prague: Oikúmené, 2008), 106. If not stated otherwise, all the trans-
lations are my own.
2
 Ibid.
3
  Ibid., 118.
approaching the absolute in jan patoČka’s phenomenology501

“[f]rom that which is given us beforehand […] to the structures of

transcendental subjectivity in which reality is formed.”4 As one can see,
the step outside the world is not a turn away from the world but a turn
towards its principle, to the world in its essence: “the transcendental
[…] subjectivity is the world.”5
To better understand Patočka’s early concept, we must read the afore­
mentioned propositions in the context of Patočka’s emphasis on life,6
which “by its own sovereignty dictates itself tasks, determines values
and laws. This autonomous life is deity fighting its own dangers.”7 As
one can see, the absolute cannot be identified with consciousness; it
should rather be identified with life. And it is of crucial importance that
the dangers of the absolute are not only its dangers but our dangers
because autonomous life, or the absolute, is not outside of us: “the abso-
lute itself is wholly contained within the finite; the world itself is
nothing other than the absolute in its naïveté. One cannot rely on the
gods because the absolute is not outside but within us.”8
The exact meaning of this ‘within us’ is the key problem of the present
paper. In accordance with the previous explication, the absolute can be
identified with the absolute life with which our life is somehow identical.
But the notion of life complicates the idea of phenomenology sketched
above, i.e. the idea of phenomenology as a turn to the infinite conscious-
ness. Even the early Patočka stresses the difference between that which is
accessible through the analysis of the transcendental consciousness and
life. The phenomenology of consciousness can reveal the system of non-
empirical meanings, but these meanings cannot be identified with the

4
  Jan Patočka, The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, trans. Erika Abrams (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern Univ. Press, 2016), 20.
5
 Ibid.
6
  The importance of the notion of life in Patočka’s early philosophy has already been emphasized
e.g. by Karel Novotný, “Dějinnost a svoboda: Heidegger a Patočkova raná filosofie dějin,” Reflexe 14
(1995), 2.1-2.36, esp. pp. 27-30.
7
  Jan Patočka, “O dvojím pojetí smyslu filosofie,” ed. Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba, Sebrané
spisy 1: Péče o duši 1 (Praha: Oikúmené, 1996), 83. (Cf. in French “Des deux manières de concevoir
le sens de la philosophie,” trans. Erika Abrams, Jan Patočka and the European Heritage (Bucharest:
Humanitas, 2007), 71-88.)
8
  Jan Patočka, “Some Comments Concerning the Extramundane and Mundane Position of Phi-
losophy,” ed. and trans. Eric Manton and Erazim Kohák, Living in Problematicity (Prague: Oikú-
mené, 2007), 26.
502 Martin RITTER

absolute. “The ideal world is, so to say, the system of coordinates in

which the process of real being takes place. This process can be descri-
bed by these coordinates but cannot be reduced to them. […] Everything
which is and can be experienced has a certain place in the realm of
meaning; but […] there is more in life, there is a realisation of choices
which from the immense number of possibilities weave reality.”9 Life
seems to be the essence of the process of being: life is “that realising, that
activity which is the true reality we incessantly experience and whose
part we are at the same time.”10
In his dissertation on the concept of evidence, paradoxically, Patočka
defines the phenomenological field as something like infinite spirit
while simultaneously rejecting idealism.11 But by the time of his habi-
litation on the concept of the natural world, he accepts “the hubris of
transcendental idealism.”12 Due to this acceptance he can formulate the
task of interpreting “the whole world process on the basis of the funda-
mental structures of possible subjectivity.”13 The phenomenological “sci-
ence of constitution” should be able to offer an interpretation of the
world as “creative evolution” or the articulation of “all existence from
the inner sources of life itself.”14 In this concept, phenomenology might
be turned into metaphysics by, to put it simply and vaguely, ‘fusing’
Bergson’s ideas with those of Husserl.
There is neither need nor space to analyse in detail the development
of, and the alterations to, Patočka’s transcendental phenomenology.15
Instead, I turn attention directly to Patočka’s elaborate criticism of
­Husserl’s subjectivism and Cartesianism from the 1960s and 1970s.
This criticism can be read as a thorough refutation of the approach
described above based on transcendental phenomenology supposedly
making the absolute consciousness accessible.

9
  Jan Patočka, Pojem evidence a jeho význam pro noetiku, 47-48.
10
  Ibid., 48.
11
  Ibid., 29.
12
  Jan Patočka, The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, 52.
13
 Ibid., 114.
14
 Ibid.
15
  See Filip Karfík, “Die Odyssee des endlich gewordenen Absoluten,” in Id., Unendlichwerden
durch die Endlichkeit (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2008), 36-54.
approaching the absolute in jan patoČka’s phenomenology503

The scope of this paper does not allow, however, any detailed analy-
sis of Patočka’s effort to make phenomenology a-subjective. In brief, this
kind of phenomenology takes neither consciousness nor life as its point
of departure. The field of appearing is not constituted by a (living)
subject. On the contrary, a sum comes to realize itself through the field
of appearing: “not us but a phenomenological being indicates the pos-
sibilities of our being.”16 To put it more precisely: the field of appearing
is “the project of being in the whole, i.e. included ego sum as sum: as a
centre that relates to itself through all the rest.”17
Non-Cartesian, a-subjective phenomenology must deal, besides others,
with two fundamental questions: (1) What is appearing if not the field
constituted by the absolute subjectivity? (2) How to conceive of pheno-
menological reflection that makes the analysis of the appearing possible?
Preliminarily, it can be said that (1) the field of appearing is identical with
the world as the process of the appearing of beings; this world needs a
‘subject’ as someone to whom the appearing appears, though it is not
constituted by it; (2) phenomenological reflection as the articulation of
the world is not a turn to the absolute subjectivity by which a human
being overcomes its finitude and interest in the world; it is rather the
articulation of finitude and the clarification of interest.

2.  Movement in the World

More concretely, the articulation of appearing must proceed “from

an understanding of the three fundamental ecstases of temporality and
of the movements of existence anchored in them.”18

16
  Jan Patočka, “Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Forderung einer asubjektiven Phä-
nomenologie,” ed. Klaus Nellen and Jiři Němec, Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz (­Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 1991), 307: “daß nicht wir, sondern das phänomenale Sein uns zu bedeuten gibt, was
für Möglichkeiten unseres eigenen Sein da sind”.
17
 Jan Patočka, “Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer ‘asubjektiven’
Phänomenologie,” 283: “Es ist ja ein Entwurf des Seienden im Ganzen, d.h. ego sum einbegriffen, und
zwar als sum, d.h. als ein Zentrum, welches sich auf sich selbst durch alles Übrige hindurch bezieht.”
18
 Jan Patočka, “‘The Natural World’ Remeditated Thirty-Three Years Later,” in The Natural
World as a Philosophical Problem, trans. Erika Abrams (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press,
2016), 127.
504 Martin RITTER

In each of the three movements,19 corresponding to the three temporal

dimensions, the world appears differently. Nevertheless, the human being
lives in all these disclosures simultaneously, being past, present and future
at once. To understand this statement correctly: it does not mean that the
human being has not only its present but also past and future experiences
but rather that the world is experienced in three different ways while the
human being turns, or is turned, to what the world brings about by the
temporality of the past, of the present or of the future. In this sense,
human existence, and the world with it, has three different ‘faces.’
The first movement, corresponding to the temporal dimension of the
past, is usually called by Patočka ‘the movement of rooting.’ The
medium of this movement is affectivity, which is connected with the
past because affectivity turns, or even throws, the human being back
to itself: through this movement, the human being experiences itself
and the world as what they already are. It is this past disclosure, the
always ‘present’ past disclosure, which roots us in the world: by this
‘affective movement’ the human being is immersed in “an all-embracing
context of landscapes which address us in a certain wholeness, and a
priori make it possible for the human being to have a world, not only
individual entities.”20 In accordance with that, “[i]n all that is cosmic
about our world […] our world is determined precisely by this region.”21
Although Patočka utilizes Heidegger’s analysis of ‘Dasein,’ he q­ uestions
the idea that the world is disclosed primarily by understanding the pos-
sibilities through which beings (other than human beings) speak to us
as practical entities in the context of our activities.22 It is exactly the
appearing of the first movement that demonstrates the limitedness of
the idea that the disclosure of the world is primarily practical. The first
movement, which is the medium not only of sympathy but also of
­disharmony, makes us remember that practical coping with the world

19
 In this article, it is impossible to articulate Patočka’s concept of movement of existence in
detail. An elaborated justification of the present interpretation is to be offered elsewhere.
20
  Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court
Publishing, 1998), 149.
21
 Ibid.
22
  Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: suny, 1996), 134-39.
approaching the absolute in jan patoČka’s phenomenology505

presupposes an elementary contact with the world and rootedness in it.

Without this elementary (dis)harmony there would be nothing to cope
with, and by coping with the world one does not overcome the past
‘dimension’: (dis)harmony remains the presupposition of this coping.
Patočka associates the practical, and the pragmatic, dimension of the
world with the second movement of existence. Corresponding to the
second movement is an active relation to the world as the totality of
things or, to be more precise, of possibilities regarding what can be
done. The temporal medium of this movement is the present because
these things or possibilities appear as possibilities offered by the present
(or appear negatively as presently non-present, lacking).
Through the second movement, the world does not show its ‘cosmic’
nature. Instead, it appears as the sum of individual things. Here, the
‘face’ of any thing is defined by the whole which that thing is a part
of,23 and the whole seems to be synchronic despite the fact that it never
gives itself all at once. Hence, the notion of the world as the totality of
things, the totality graspable as a-temporal,24 arises here. The whole
world is, according to the logic of appearing, suggested by the second
movement, the present totality of beings.25
Patočka describes the third movement in various ways.26 In one
account, the third movement opens a possibility for humans “to conceive
the idea of a new earth — the earth as revelation of a new realm, which
is not dependent on them but coming to them, a realm whose meaning
does not spring from things but nonetheless touches them in their core
— the realm of spirit and freedom.”27 One might interpret the third

23
  In Heidegger’s words: “There always belongs to the being of a useful thing a totality of useful
things in which this useful thing can be what it is.” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 64.)
24
 The progress of the world in time can be conceived, then, as the (causal) sequence on the
empty line of ‘time.’
25
  Similarly to Heideggerian ‘falling prey,’ the second movement in itself is not a negative phe­
nom­enon but it can easily become one if perceived as the appearing of the world as such.
26
  An important criticism of the third movement is presented by Pavel Kouba, “Le problème du
troisième mouvement: En marge de la conception patočkienne de l’existence,” in Jan Patočka: Phé-
noménologie asubjective et existence, ed. Renaud Barbaras (Paris: Mimesis, 2007), 183-204.
27
  Jan Patočka, “On the Prehistory of the Science of Movement: World, Earth, Heaven and the
Movement of Human Life,” trans. Erica Abrams, in Dis-Orientations: Philosophy, Literature and the
Lost Ground of Modernity, ed. Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback and Tora Lane (London: Rowman
and Littlefield), 72.
506 Martin RITTER

movement, then, as the movement realizing the presently accessible truth

of Being. Such an interpretation, however, would not do justice to the
fact that the medium of the third movement is the future.
Accordingly, the aforementioned ‘conceiving the idea of a new earth’
must not be reduced to the present (theoretical) conceiving or (practical)
acting because the most essential ‘part’ of this movement is the revea-
ling or becoming of ‘something’-to-be. Although it might be possible ex
post to explain the process of the world as the presentation of spirit, the
happening of the world or, more precisely, the becoming of what is
realized in the world by human beings through the third movement
cannot be conceived as the worldly presentation of spirit.
Rather, the third movement “discovers […] a fundamental dimension
of the natural world which is not given.”28 The third movement discloses
the future, and thus opens no givenness but, as shall be described below
in more detail, the possibility to fulfil human existence. And although
the future offers no given data, attention can be turned to historical reac-
tions to its ‘appeal.’ This is exactly what Patočka does, I think, by inter-
preting some religious ideas, especially the myth of the God-man.29
Of course, Patočka usually emphasizes the openness of the future as
the openness of nothingness, or death,30 and stresses, following Heideg-
ger, the confrontation with human finitude. The same emphasis, h ­ owever,
must be put on the openness of the future as the openness of “eternal
life”. In his two “Studies on Time” from the 1950s, Patočka explains that
the “future in the true sense is the full future, i.e. future fulfilled, even
overflowing with meaning,”31 and accordingly, “to believe in life is essen-
tially to believe in eternal life.”32 Not incidentally does Patočka identify

28
  Patočka, ‘“The Natural World’ Remeditated Thirty-Three Years Later,” 179-80.
29
  See, for example, ibid., 178-79.
30
  “That the third basic relation to the other is also a temporal one follows from its relation to the
future, to non-being, to death.” Jan Patočka, “‘The ‘Natural’ World and Phenomenology,” ed. and
trans. Erazim Kohák, in Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), 266.
31
  Jan Patočka, “Studie o času I,” ed. Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba, Sebrané spisy 1: Péče o duši 3
(Prague: Oikúmené, 2002), 640.
32
  Jan Patočka, “Studie o času II,” ed. by Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba, Sebrané spisy 1: Péče o
duši 3 (Prague: Oikúmené, 2002), 647. Regarding the two studies on time, cf. Pavel Kouba, “Time in
‘Negative Platonism,”’ in The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Respon-
sibility, ed. L’ubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams (Dordrecht: Springer 2015), 79-88.
approaching the absolute in jan patoČka’s phenomenology507

the third movement with a life, “in a certain sense, everlasting.”33 Is it

possible then not only to believe in eternal life but to really live it?

3.  The Service of Being and True Love

As indicated above, in some of his descriptions of the truly human

existence, Patočka comes close to Hegel’s idea of Spirit realizing itself in
the world. One might also interpret his re-reading of Husserl’s phenome-
nology in this light: “The goal Husserl meant to attain with his pheno-
menological reduction as a fact achievable in philosophical reflection is
in reality a result of the communication of existences: their transcending
into a chain of beings united not merely by an external link, of beings
which are not mere islands of life in a sea of objectivity, but for whom
things and objects emerge from the ocean of being in the service of which
they commune.”34 But, Patočka certainly intends to reinterpret Husserl’s
idea of the transcendental universe of monads in a more ‘realistic’ way.
Indeed, speaking of existences, he does not mean ‘entities’ defined by
their consciousness or ego; he means those whose “determinations consist
in [their] situation and [their] acting.”35 And the communication of such
‘entities,’ as will be demonstrated below, should not be conceived of as the
worldly presentation of the non-worldly present spirit.
In fact, the very idea of ‘being in service,’ of acting as a servant of
Being, might easily become misleading and should be cautiously inter-
preted. In my reading, one must fully appreciate that “the absolute is
not outside but within us.” Consequently, a human being that is in the
service of Being does not serve something outside itself. Rather, it serves
its own (possibility of) transcendence. As was described above, Patočka
connects this transcendence with the future. Yet, this does not mean

33
 Patočka, “‘The Natural World’ Remeditated Thirty-Three Years Later,” 179. (In the Czech
original, Patočka uses the collocation ‘život věčný’ which should be translated into English, due to
its obvious Christian meaning, as ‘eternal life.’)
34
 Ibid.
35
 Patočka, “Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer ‘asubjektiven’
­Phänomenologie,” 283.
508 Martin RITTER

that “the realm of spirit and freedom”, “not dependent on them [i.e.
humans] but coming to them,” is simply and “unilaterally” coming
(from the future) but also that one must turn to it. Through such a
turn, the future is here or, as Patočka puts it, “the kingdom of God
[has] already come, [is] already among us — but in such a way that each
must accomplish his conversion to it.”36
Particularly, “the kingdom of God” is neither (in terms of time) in the
future nor (topologically) elsewhere; it is ‘among us,’ yet only through our
turning towards it. But, to understand how this “kingdom” can become
manifestly present, one should focus, in my reading, neither on Patočka’s
descriptions of “conceiving the idea of a new earth” nor of the commu-
nication of existences in the service of Being. Instead, one must turn
attention to Patočka’s idea of the third movement as the movement of
love. The connection of the third movement with (true) love may seem
striking since love is essentially a kind of feeling, a kind of sensitivity, and
sensitivity seems to be in the “domain” of the first movement. True love,
however, answers the question of how to realize human life, and this
question arises rather from the disclosure of the future.
In other words, the idea of “the communication of existences […]
whom things and objects emerge from the ocean of being in the service
of which they commune,”37 must not overshadow what the concept of
true love can teach us concerning the relationship between the finite
human being and the absolute. It can teach us that the third movement
need not be in the service of something other than existent beings, i.e.
Being. It can be conceived as the movement between fellows, between
concrete finite beings who realize themselves truly and fully thanks to
true love as “a movement that positively presents the essential — as life
universal, giving birth to all in all, evoking life in the other, a self-
transcendence toward the other and with him again to infinity.”38
To put it otherwise, the idea of the third movement can be made more
concrete considering it as a movement presenting the essential, i.e. life.

36
  Patočka, “‘The Natural World’ Remeditated Thirty-Three Years Later,” 179.
37
 Ibid.
38
  Patočka, “The ‘Natural’ World and Phenomenology,” 263.
approaching the absolute in jan patoČka’s phenomenology509

In this reading, the third movement cannot be reduced to the intersub-

jective service to Being. Instead, this ‘service’ must be (re)interpreted as
the movement manifesting life, manifesting it through the relation of the
finite to the finite. Not incidentally do we find here the idea of ‘all in all’
suggesting a fundamentally different relationship between the part and
the whole than that evoked by the second movement. The relation of the
finite human being to the infinite is not to be looked for in the relation
to the whole, but rather in the relation to the appearing individual entities
whose identities cannot be presently delimited. They are the possibilities
to set out into the infinite.

4.  Infinity through the Finite

Before elucidating more concretely the human relationship to the

infinite as realized through the relation to other finite beings, I would
like to put this topic, or this problem, into a broader context of Patočka’s
effort to overcome two flaws of his phenomenological predecessors.
Firstly, the already mentioned flaw of Husserl’s transcendental pheno-
menology and of Patočka’s own early approach, i.e. of “subjectivism
which sees in man ultimately the absolute itself.” Secondly, the defect
of Heidegger’s thought of “the irrationalism of that prevenient [B]eing
at whose mercy the meaning of being human then is.”39 To put it sim-
ply, to avoid both of these flaws Patočka demonstrates that infinity is
to be found between human beings, i.e. ‘among us.’
Describing the movement of true love, Patočka explains that by
“devoting myself I gain the awareness of myself as essentially infinite.”40
In the view of the just mentioned criticism of Husserl, this idea cer-
tainly cannot be interpreted as suggesting that the human being is in
itself and by itself infinite. The infinity of which I am ‘aware’ in the
act of self-giving, or rather the infinity I manifest by this act, is the
infinity between me and you. This infinity, which is between me and

39
  Ibid., 271.
40
  Ibid., 263.
510 Martin RITTER

you, is neither in me nor in you. Despite Husserl’s attempt “to show

that the true approach to the absolute is a descent into subjectivity,”41
the absolute cannot be found here. In fact, it cannot be found at all. It
can only be realized, again and again, in the movement that has its
‘place’ in inter-subjectivity.42
But, as was already indicated, Patočka identifies only the communi-
cation of existences in the service of Being as the true intersubjective
movement whereas the intersubjective activities in the first and the
second movement remain finite. The first two movements are “move-
ments of finite beings which self-realize fully within their finitude,
wholly plunging into it and therein surrendering themselves to the rule
of a power — of the Earth.”43 Only the third movement as the move-
ment of existence in the true sense is “an attempt to break through our
earthliness.”44 Patočka draws a line strictly separating the earthbound
from the true existence; it is only in the third movement that human
beings can realize their freedom.45 In accordance with that, it is unim-
portant, from the truly human point of view, what is manifested through
the first and second movements.
This underestimation of the first two movements seems to be condi-
tioned by the ambiguity of the concept of ‘infinity.’ On the one side, it
is the opposite of finitude conceived as boundedness (associated by
Patočka with the first and second movements); only the third move-
ment, then, is infinite as the movement that overcomes finiteness and
boundedness. Nevertheless, this infinity can be conceived, and is con-
ceived by Patočka himself, differently: as that which is manifested

41
  Patočka, “On the Prehistory of the Science of Movement,” 72.
42
 Karfík rightly emphasizes that in an intersubjective contact each subject appears as deficient:
“Die gegenseitige Bereicherung kann nur deswegen gelingen, weil den jeweiligen Polen dieser Wech-
selbeziehung etwas fehlt, was erfüllt werden kann. Die Ich überschreiten und erweitern in der wech-
selseitigen Fremderfahrung sich selbst.” (Filip Karfík, “Unendlichwerden durch die Endlichkeit:
Transzendenz und Bewegung der Hingabe an die anderen,” in Id., Unendlichwerden durch die End-
lichkeit, 79.)
43
  Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, 151.
44
 Ibid.
45
  Or, to express it otherwise: it is only in the third movement that people can “care for the soul,
i.e. for that in a human being which transcends the sphere of the preservation of life.” Jan Patočka,
“Die Epochen der Geschichte (Skizze),” in Id., Ketzerische Essais zur Philosophie der Geschichte und
ergänzende Schriften, hrsg. Klaus Nellen (Vienna: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 194f.
approaching the absolute in jan patoČka’s phenomenology511

through finite relations between me and you, thus appearing in them.

We are finite, not infinite beings, but this does not exclude — but pro-
vides for — the possibility of our living in the infinite.

5. Love

Is there any need to exclude human living in infinity from the first
and second movements? It seems so when one conceives the third move-
ment as a relation to ‘something’ other than what is given in the world,
i.e. to Being as opposed to beings. Yet, in my reading, the movement
of love should not be conceived as the relation to something other than
beings in the world but rather as movement related otherwise exactly to
these beings. We are, or can become, loving beings not through our
relation to Being, but rather through our participation in life, through
our being part of life. As Patočka puts it in one of his very last articles:
“Being is not what we love, but that through which we love, what gives
us to love.”46 Of course, a finite loving being is, in a sense, related to
something other than the beings of this world insofar as it is a part of
love. But this participative relation is not actualized by relating to Being
or Life, but rather by relating lovingly to the beings in this world, thus
fully actualizing one’s own, and others’, being.
To put it differently, love, or rather our capability to love, is a gift. Yet
it is not simply given to us:47 to receive the gift of love, one must give love
(to others). It is given (by Being) only as accepted (by a human being)
through its realization (in the world in personal relation to others).
Importantly, the self-giving love, in its power to manifest eternity,
shares some fundamental characteristics with faith as described by
Patočka in the 1950s. Patočka connects faith with “[t]he conception in

46
  Jan Patočka, “On Masaryk’s Philosophy of Religion,” trans. Jiři Rothbauer, The New Yearbook
for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14, ed. Ludger Hagedorn and James Dodd
(London: Routledge, 2015), 109. Cf. Ludger Hagedorn, “Fatigue of Reason: Patočka’s Reading of
The Brothers Karamazov,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14,
188-90.
47
 Cf. Nicholas de Warren, “The Gift of Eternity,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy 14 (2015), 161-80 (p. 178).
512 Martin RITTER

which the future takes priority” and conceives it not only as “the belief
that no decision is ultimate and irrevocable” but also as the already
mentioned “belief in eternal life.”48
In my reading, by elaborating the concept of love, Patočka effectively
concretizes what it means to live in faith or to practice faith.49 And this
is certainly not the only rationale for tracing and examining Christian
motifs in Patočka’s thought.50 Yet, this analysis should be complemen-
ted by scrutinizing philosophical appropriations of Christianity that
Patočka might have relied on. Especially Kierkegaard’s thought, in both
its philosophical and religious dimensions, could be revealing in this
regard. The abovementioned idea that “no decision is ultimate and irre-
vocable,” as well as the concepts of surrender and love, could surely be
clarified by using Kierkegaard’s reflections.51
Is there any need to exclude human living in infinity from the first and
second movements? In compliance with Patočka’s own intentions, Hage-
dorn suggests interpreting Christian “belief of gaining (eternal) life through
death” non-theologically: “Human life is ‘unfree’ as long as it clings to
something in the world, as long as it is preoccupied with beings.”52 But,
as already indicated, this idea must be carefully interpreted, if not declined.
Through love one clings to ‘something’ in the world, i.e. to some other
living being, not to Being. The question then is: can one relate lovingly to
others performing the first and second movements?
Patočka explicitly excludes true love from these movements: con-
necting the first movement with biological love, he conceives it as

48
  Jan Patočka, “Time, Myth, Faith,” trans. Ludger Hagedorn, The New Yearbook for Phenome-
nology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14 (2015), 9. Regarding the concept of faith, cf. Ludger
Hagedorn, ‘“Christianity Unthought’: A Reconsideration of Myth, Faith, and Historicity,” The New
Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 14 (2015): 31-46 (pp. 34–36).
49
  Hagedorn rightly connects, I think, the life of faith with Patočka’s concept of the care for the
soul: “A life that exposes itself to the problematicity of its foundations, a life of self-examination and
inquiry, is for Patočka […] precisely a life of faith.” Hagedorn, ‘“Christianity Unthought,”’ 36. Of
course, this similarity deserves further analysis.
50
  Besides the above-mentioned papers written by Hagedorn and Warren, cf. also Eddo Evink,
“The Gift of Life: Jan Patočka and the Christian Heritage,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy 14 (2015): 47-63.
51
  Importantly, some of the fundamental thoughts of Heidegger’s Being and Time are based on
the reconsideration of Kierkegaard’s ideas.
52
  Hagedorn, ‘“Christianity Unthought,”’ 36.
approaching the absolute in jan patoČka’s phenomenology513

“merely an incomplete and inconsistent metaphor of this [i.e. of the

third movement] true and final love,”53 while in the second movement,
there is no place for love insofar as other human beings appear, and are
approached, as atomized and objectified competitors through it. More-
over, by closely connecting, or nearly identifying the third movement
with philosophy and politics (and history),54 Patočka not only connects
it with some activities but also separates it from others, namely from
‘private’ (or ‘biological’) and economic activities.
In the face of Patočka’s own emphasis on love, however, such a sepa-
ration seems doubtful. It is justified to conceive true love as based, in a
specific manner, in something other than that which is revealed by the
first and second movements. But, it is hardly justifiable to reduce its
performance to the separated sphere of either the political, the spiritual
or the historical. True love must not be reduced to opening of a new
sphere; it makes our approach to the world, or rather to others in their
concrete existence, different. True love, in its openness to the future, is
realized in the world ‘already’ opened by the first and second move-
ments: truly loving, one turns to others in their concrete (affective)
situation of (present) practice. Thus, this openness moves in the world
while opening something “to-be.”55

6.  The Human Condition Reflected and Fulfilled

Similarly to the movement of love, the activity of a phenomenological

philosopher, which is realized through reflection based on epoché, is not
a self-contained activity proceeding in an independent sphere of the

53
  Patočka, “The ‘Natural’ World and Phenomenology,” 268.
54
 See e.g. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court, 1996),
40-41.
55
  By tending to separate true love from our boundedness and finiteness, Patočka also runs the
risk of conceiving the supposedly loving relation to others as a rather distanced relation of respect.
As Petr Rezek puts it, in the concept of “the communication of existences” the other existences are
conceived as “generalized others,” and hence “the inner relation [between concrete individuals] is
utterly lost.” Petr Rezek, “Třetí životní pohyb u Jana Patočky jako problém intersubjektivity,” in Id.,
Jan Patočka a věc fenomenologie (Příbram: Jan Placák – Ztichlá klika, 2010), 121.
514 Martin RITTER

absolute consciousness or Spirit. Phenomenology must respect our

human condition, and must reflect it to clarify our given situation,
which is intersubjective and historical. This is the way phenomenology
turns human beings back to themselves through reflection on the events
of appearing. Thus, the medium of phenomenology is a concrete human
being reflecting its a-subjective condition of life.
Considering Patočka’s explicit reference to Hegel mentioned in the
first part of this paper, it is possible to read Patočka’s criticism of Hus-
serl and of his own early approach from the Feuerbachian perspective
as follows: To identify the principle of the world with consciousness (or
spirit) is to absolutize, to make infinite one side, and only one side, of
a finite human being. The following sentences describing Feuerbach’s
(rather projected than realized) philosophy are, in my opinion, in accord
with Patočka’s own mature approach. In fact, his image of “the ocean
of being” sounds like an echo of Feuerbach’s “vivifying and refreshing
waves of the ocean of the world”:
Desire not to be a philosopher if being a philosopher means being different
to man; do not be anything more than a thinking man; think not as a t­ hinker,
that is, not as one confined to a faculty which is isolated in so far as it is torn
away from the totality of the real being of man; think as a living, real being,
in which capacity you are exposed to the vivifying and refreshing waves of
the ocean of the world; think as one who exists, as one who is in the world
and is part of the world, not as one in the vacuum of abstraction, not as a
solitary monad, not as an absolute monarch, not as an unconcerned, extra-
worldly God; only then can you be sure that being and thought are united
in all your thinking.56

Of course, the movement of true love cannot be identified with, i.e.

reduced to, the performance of philosophy. True love does not reflect
the human condition but rather fulfils it. And here again, both Feuer-
bach’s and Kierkegaard’s ideas on the human condition, as developed
against Hegel, are worth mentioning. According to Patočka, the move-
ment of true love opens “the kingdom of God” that has “already come,

56
  Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, in The Fiery Brook: Selected Wri-
tings, trans. Zawar Hanfi (New York: Doubleday, 1972), § 51, https://www.marxists.org/reference/
archive/feuerbach/works/future/future2.htm.
approaching the absolute in jan patoČka’s phenomenology515

[is] already among us — but in such a way that each must accomplish
his conversion to it.”57 As a matter of fact, this idea allows for (at least)
two fundamentally different interpretations. Are we supposed to inter-
pret it as denying anything transcending humans, and thus indicating
another ‘hubris’ different to that of transcendental idealism (­Feuerbach)?
Or rather as affirming that humans are conditioned by that which
founds them by fundamentally transcending them (Kierkegaard)?
Patočka’s concept suggests, I think, that only the movement of true love
itself as the movement related to others in the given world of our con-
crete affective situation can ‘answer’ this question.

Key-words: Jan Patočka, absolute, appearing, Being, finitude, infinity, life, love.

Summary

The paper elucidates the relationship between a finite human being and the infi-
nite in Jan Patočka’s phenomenology. Whereas the early Patočka conceives phe-
nomenology as a turn to absolute consciousness, in his later concept a phenomenol-
ogist can analyse appearing thanks to being a conditioned and finite part of the
appearing, unable to transcend its own finiteness. Nevertheless, Patočka never
abandons his early idea that “the absolute is not outside but within us.” To clarify
this idea, the paper considers especially Patočka’s concept of the movements of
existence. Although Patočka inclines towards identifying the human relation to the
absolute with the service of Being, he also conceives the true movement of existence
as the movement of love. The article elaborates on this idea to demonstrate that the
relationship of the finite human being to infinity does not need to be conceived as
the relation to the unconditioned (absolute consciousness, Spirit, Being) but as the
relation between conditioned, finite human beings. This infinity is reflected by phe-
nomenology and manifested by a concrete human being.

57
  Jan Patočka, ‘“The Natural World’ Remeditated Thirty-Three Years Later,” 179.