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To Live After Death: Where? Patočka’s “Phenomenology of Afterlife” and Its Contexts

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Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death

Part of the book series: Contributions to Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 128))

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Abstract

Situating the study on the “Phenomenology of afterlife” within the whole of Patočka’s thought, one can find several threads or complexes of ideas that could provide a context for the study and a background for its interpretation: phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity, corporeity, temporality; the problem of the soul; the role of the other in our becoming ourselves; ways of dealing with our finitude. Surveying these contexts, I will try to find the reasons for the fundamental decision Patočka takes in his study on the afterlife: i.e., his decision to observe the afterlife only in our consciousness of – and in our actions inspired by – the other.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For existing interpretations, see Karfík 2008, Merlier 2010, de Warren 2017, and Sternad 2017.

  2. 2.

    The article will be discussed below. The year 1967 as a possible date for the study on the afterlife is considered (on the basis of dated manuscripts preserved in the same file) by Erika Abrams; at the same time, however, she points out that Patočka wrote to Walter Biemel about a work in progress on the afterlife in the summer of 1976. The text is sometimes dated to 1967 because in the autumn of 1966, Patočka’s wife Helena died, which may have prompted him to undertake this study; see Abrams 1995, 295.

  3. 3.

    The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation.

  4. 4.

    With this paragraph, I am trying to indicate the main points of Landsberg’s exposition of death (Landsberg 1966); for a comparison of Patočka with Scheler, see Sternad 2017; for the broader context, see Scherer 1979. The term “person” does not appear in Patočka’s study (unlike, for example, in his early lecture Der Geist und die zwei Grundschichten der Intentionalität (Patočka 1936), where it is the most common name for a human being).

  5. 5.

    I quote this passage here and below because it is part of one of Patočka’s most detailed interpretations of (Heidegger’s conception of) death.

  6. 6.

    Particularly Patočka 1996b (first published as a series of articles in 1965–66), and Patočka 1988a (first published in 1968 as an afterword to the Czech edition of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations).

  7. 7.

    In the lecture cycle itself (Patočka 1998), the formulations on reciprocity are not contained: the academic year ended before Patočka could come to them.

  8. 8.

    Specifically one of his theological texts from the Frankfurt period, Fragments on Religion and Love (1797/8). It was only in the second half of the 1960s that Patočka referred to this text; in his (still unpublished) two-semester lecture on the Phenomenology of Spirit from 1950, he only briefly touched on this early Hegelian interpretation of reciprocity.

  9. 9.

    In particular in Chap. 12 of Patočka 2011a (written in 1947) and in several places in his philosophical diaries from 1946–1950 (Patočka 2021).

  10. 10.

    For Husserl, see Patočka 1938. From the condolences see e.g. the letter to Otilia Utitz of February 14, 1956: Emil Utitz “war für uns alle ein Wahrzeichen und die Bürgschaft dessen, daß unser Lebenssystem und Lebensstil eine Kontinuität wahrt mit den höchsten Menschenidealen und Menschheitswerten, die je durch geistig Hochstehende erarbeitet und errungen wurden. Er war … einer der letzten Zeugen …, in deren Fußstapfen wir heutige zu gerne weitergehen möchten, es aber nicht mehr vermögen.” (Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences, thus far without signature).

  11. 11.

    The similarity of the two texts has already been pointed out by the editors of Patočka’s correspondence with Václav Richter (see Patočka 2001, 39, n. 2).

  12. 12.

    “We are sorry that he himself can no longer enjoy a mutual relationship …” (Patočka 2001, 39, n. 2).

  13. 13.

    Patočka 2001, 39. In the study of the afterlife, demands appear only in the form of the phenomenon of demands, i.e. as part of an indicative description of actual or possible agency: even after the death of the other, I can allow him to problematise me; I can develop his unfulfilled possibilities, etc. (see Patočka this volume, /142/)

  14. 14.

    See e.g. the tentative, almost hesitant, statement about divinity in the second half of the last paragraph of Patočka 2007b, or the explanation of the Idea, the key concept of Patočka’s Negative Platonism, given only in the last chapter of the main text (Patočka 1989b).

  15. 15.

    Life “gives rise to men who live and die in order to show their greatness and their might to themselves and to others” (Patočka 2007c, 24, italics added).

    “… man … lives turned away from his origin (which is normal: the origin sends us into the universe, among things...” (Patočka 1990, 171–172, italics added).

    “isn’t there something that … sets [our freedom] into motion? … [Our] capacity, the possibility of dis-objectification, … must lie in a potency other than our private subjectivity or also than subjectivity in general. This disembodying animator however, this factor that makes possible the act of … philosophical freedom, can never be an object in the universe. … It is therefore never possible to think of it as something being, much less as something real. … In philosophy, nevertheless, we are forced … to attempt … to think what is (directly) unthinkable, to objectify the non-objective and non-objectifiable” (Patočka 2000, 45–46).

    “… I understand what today’s theologians are saying, that God … [sees] us as mature beings, and for that reason He lets everything be as if He were not there at all, letting us show how we can or cannot help ourselves, i.e. how far we have matured for this, His, i.e. serious world of responsibility and tests” (letter to Milada Blekastad, December 18, 1974, Patočka 2011b, 110).

    In fact, Patočka uses these symbols to evocate what underlies and enables our freedom, our free acts that are always “new”, not explainable by inner-worldly circumstances. Trying to reconstruct how Patočka sees the position of man within the whole of the world, however, we can read these symbolism as expressing what underlies (and precedes) our existence as such.

  16. 16.

    One of the few places where this theme appears at all is in the already quoted reference to life being framed by “two chasms”. Another lone discussion is the wartime manuscript of the Studies on the Concept of the World: man is “a wave carried by the currents of life”; looking death in the face should be connected “with this nourishing idea of a lasting life on this earth, in this world” – but even here Patočka immediately adds: this life “cannot be participated in personally forever” (Patočka 2021, 101). And in The Spiritual Foundations of Life in Our Time he devotes several paragraphs to the problem of death and afterlife, saying e.g.: “phenomenologically speaking, neither reincarnation nor coming back to life in a purely internal personal world can be ruled out.” (Patočka 2022, 274).

  17. 17.

    This article was supported by the Czech Funding Agency (GACR)—project No. 20-26526S, “Czech Philosophical Humanism: An Open Question. Patočka, Masaryk, their Critics and Successors”.

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    Jan Frei

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Frei, J. (2024). To Live After Death: Where? Patočka’s “Phenomenology of Afterlife” and Its Contexts. In: Strandberg, G., Strandberg, H. (eds) Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 128. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_3

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