The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) - Hardcover

Patocka, Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810133628 ISBN 13: 9780810133624

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2016

Synopsis

The first text to critically discuss Edmund Husserl’s concept of the "life-world," The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem reflects Jan Patocka's youthful conversations with the founder of phenomenology and two of his closest disciples, Eugen Fink and Ludwig Landgrebe. Now available in English for the first time, this translation includes an introduction by Landgrebe and two self-critical afterwords added by Patocka in the 1970s. Unique in its extremely broad range of references, the work addresses the views of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap alongside Husserl and Heidegger, in a spirit that considerably broadens the understanding of phenomenology in relation to other twentieth-century trends in philosophy. Even eighty years after first appearing, it is of great value as a general introduction to philosophy, and it is essential reading for students of the history of phenomenology as well as for those desiring a full understanding of Patocka’s contribution to contemporary thought.

About this title

About the Author

JAN PATOCKA (1907–1977) was a Czech philosopher, phenomenologist, cultural critic, and one of the first spokespersons for the Charta 77 human rights movement in the former Czechoslovakia. He was among Edmund Husserl's last students, and he attended Heidegger's seminars in Freiburg.

IVAN CHVATIK is director of the Jan Patocka Archive and codirector of the Center for Theoretical Study at the Institute for Advanced Study at Charles University and the Czech Adademy of Sciences in Prague.

L'UBICA UCNIK is Professor of Philosophy at Murdoch University in Australia.

ERIKA ABRAMS is an award-winning translator and freelance writer. She coedited Jan Patocka and the Heritage of Phenomenology, and has translated and edited fifteen volumes of Patocka's writings in French.

LUDWIG LANDGREBE (1902–1991) was an Austrian phenomenologist and close associate of Edmund Husserl.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem

By Jan Patocka, Ivan Chvatík, L'ubica Ucník, Erika Abrams

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2016 Jan Patocka Archives, Prague
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3362-4

Contents

Foreword, by Ludwig Landgrebe, 
Introduction, 
1. Stating the Problem, 
2. The Question of the Essence of Subjectivity and Its Methodical Exploitation, 
3. The Natural World, 
4. A Sketch of a Philosophy of Language and Speech, 
5. Conclusion, 
Supplement to the Second Czech Edition (1970): "The Natural World" Remeditated Thirty-Three Years Later, 
Afterword to the First French Translation (1976), 
Translator's Note, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Stating the Problem

The problem of philosophy is the world as a whole. This thesis, in agreement with historical fact, arouses immediate resistance in us who have been educated by modern science. The sciences have partitioned the world among them, and specialized scientific thought alone is regarded as exact, rigorously controllable and, therefore, theoretically significant. The thinking of the whole, classical ontology, has exploded under the pressure of criticism, but nothing consistent has taken its place in our cultural awareness. It is, indeed, typical of modern existence that there is no definite worldview proper to our way of life and that, unlike antiquity and the Middle Ages, modern society has no one total image, or idea, of the order of reality. Such hints of a unified view as there are are of a considerably negativized and simplified complexion in comparison with other worldviews: the closure of the ancient and medieval world has been ruled out, life and mankind dislodged from the center of understanding, the lifeless has supplanted the living, God is no longer accepted as an explanatory concept. It can, of course, be said that all these changes in our picture of the world have a single aim, and, hence, one and the same orientation: the disanthropomorphization of the world. Things in the world are not to be understood in the same way as we understand other beings analogous to ourselves, fellow men or living creatures in general; on the contrary, this mode of understanding should be distrusted on principle. What has changed is not merely the picture of the world but rather the very principles of understanding things. And the change affects also our overall relationship to reality. Ancient or medieval man, theoretically reflecting on the world, did not doubt that his thinking referred fundamentally to the same set of things present to him in naive, theoretically unmediated sense-experiencing. We ourselves have lost this certainty, or at least it is lacking in our present society as a whole. — Can we, in this situation, still practice philosophy, and what meaning can philosophy have for us? Can our consciousness of reality be unified by something other than the fundamental rules of the natural-scientific method? Can philosophy, in this situation, also hope to have some social effect?

The answer to all these questions is yes, on two conditions: that unity is something we need and something we can bring about — in philosophy — by our own efforts. The need for unity is, of course, a practical requirement. The need for philosophy is profoundly related to the praxis of human life, and today's man does not come to philosophize through mere wonder, thaumazein, but rather on account of the inner difficulties of his spiritual life, on account of his general life-attunement. We propose here to explore in this way, with respect to the existential misery of our time, the birth of one of the trends of modern philosophy. Let it be said straightaway that our interpretation of the situation does not spring from any romantic appreciation (or depreciation) of the present; it is merely an attempt, based on both historical findings and psychological analysis, at reconstructing the ideal type of the present nihilistic mood. We regard as the fundamental constituent of this mood, or life-feeling, man's overall relationship to reality, the way he comes to terms with the milieu in which he lives. There is in this relationship a peculiar duplicity, which must first be described. In order to do so, we shall have to introduce certain fundamental concepts.

1. The Naive Life-World and the World of Science

Before an explicit theoretical interest is awakened in man, he has already acquired an image of the world, which takes shape without any conscious elaboration on his part. This image itself has two components: one that can be called "givenness," the other a complementary element of explanation or interpretation. The element of givenness comprises all formed sense-material, all past and present intuitive experience of one's own and of others; we include in the explanatory element all naive and spontaneous extension of the domain of genuine experience in quasi-experiences. This naive extrapolating cannot be termed theorizing, or only cum grano salis, for the theoretical tendency has not yet crystallized and become differentiated from other tendencies, and the critical exigency remains dormant. Yet there is here already spontaneous thought production, which goes beyond the limits of practical utility. Before all explicit thinking, primitives and children form, on the things of the world, opinions that they are often unable to distinguish from givens, and which, as personal development progresses, may automatically give way to clearer, more elaborate views. Of course, the structure of this interpretive element differs for people at various stages of the historical process; and many believe that even the categorial structure of the element of givenness shows essential differences. Yet the fact remains — and it alone interests us here in exposing and formulating the problem — that prior to all theorizing in the sense of the explicit positing of theoretical problems, objectivity is already given to us through multifarious sorts of experience, and that we imagine that we have immediate access to this objectivity and a certain freedom in disposing of it on the basis of our personal aims and decisions; life in this naive world is life among realities, and though our anticipations are frequently corrected, that in no way modifies the overall character of our living with things. Since this entire domain of realities is given naturally, i.e., without our explicit theoretical intervention, calling on no theoretical efforts or skills, we call it the "natural" or naive world; its most characteristic feature is precisely that it is there for us without any act of our free will, by virtue of the mere fact of our experience, prior to any theoretical attitude. We call the attitude of this simple, naive experience the "natural" attitude; traditionally, it is also termed the natural worldview or world-concept.

It must be said here, with regard to a currently very widespread life-feeling, that man who has experienced modern science no longer lives simply in the naive natural world; the habitus of his overall relationship to reality is not the natural worldview. This, however, is not to be attributed to the fact of theorizing; theorizing had been going on long before man abandoned the natural worldview with its way of seeing immediately given reality and life in the heart of the real. There had, of course, been Parmenides of Elea, but also Aristotle, whose ingenious synthesis of idea and reality "saved the phenomena" for over a thousand years. The reason why modern man, i.e., man having gone through the tradition of the main ideas of modern natural science, no longer lives in the natural worldview, is that our natural science is not simply a development but rather a radical reconstruction of the naive and natural world of common sense. It has often been pointed out that the tendency of modern natural science, in particular physics, has something in common with Eleatism. However, the analogy lies not only in the conception of being as an eternal, omnitemporal thought-object, but also in the human consequence of splitting the life-milieu in two, between life in a world of truth and life in a world of mere appearance. The naive world is similarly devalued in both cases. Descartes's struggle against "confused ideas" is not merely a fight against Aristotelianism; the historical opposition here conceals a deeper one — the conflict between the scientific world and the naive world. What had hitherto been deemed reality is real no longer; reality, at least in its ultimate root, is something else — above all it obeys mathematical laws, it is to be understood sub specie of a formal mathematical model. All concepts and principles contrary to this model must be — and progressively are — barred from the reflection on true reality. The one and only thing that comes into account is mathematical mechanism, the "opus quod operatur Deus a principio usque ad finem, summaria nempe naturae lex," the mathematical structure of what happens. What then is to become of the natural attitude and the world corresponding to the natural view? The question, of course, still arises. The first and, still today, most widespread interpretation is causal-psychological. The naive world is the result of a causal connection (in a broad sense that does not exclude "psychophysical parallelism") between certain "physical" and "psychical" processes; it is the subjective phenomenon of objectivity. There is a certain degree of conformity between the objective and the naive world, but it is a purely structural (having to do with the structure of relationships), by no means a qualitative conformity. What is important for us, though, is the orientation of this explanation: going back from the results of natural science to "subjective givens," which are lawfully correlated with them.

2. The Impact of the Scientific Worldview on Our Life-Feeling

Our purpose here is not to elucidate the genesis and essence of scientific explanation in modern times but rather its influence on our feeling of life. As is clear from the foregoing, the first and strongest effect is to mark our naive world as nonoriginal, derivative. This is not to say that we are aware, at every step, that its qualities and structures "de facto" do not exist, that they are mere "phenomena"; but the whole of our lived-experiencing of things and of ourselves is branded with a character of nonoriginality and semblance. It is a life remote from the true, creative world forces, distrustful of its own immediate understanding. To be sure, man himself, in his true essence, is also part of nature, part of an existent geometrical system obeying — though its composition often changes in concreto even in the eyes of science — a principle of comprehension that remains essentially the same and is merely purified from historical dross. As part of nature, man is viewed in relation to the system of possible actions he can receive and perform, i.e., of changes he can undergo and bring about, and these actions, in turn, are studied as to their objective lawfulness, in order to obtain an objective rule of the forces governing and constraining man without his awareness. From the standpoint of this understanding, the subjective feeling of freedom has no noetic value, it is a mere effectus non efficax. The frequently stressed contradiction between the feeling of freedom and the objective assessment of man is basically, for modern humanity, a conflict between the two worlds, the naive and the scientific. From the standpoint of scientific objectivism, of course, there is no conflict, since naive life has a priori, in competition with the principles of the scientific reconstruction of reality, no noetic value. The naive world, conceived of as a partial (albeit structural) image of nature's reality, can contain nothing that cannot be objectively categorized and explained, it can never count as an argument against objectivism. The question is, however, whether it can indeed be conceived of in this way, and whether this conception itself does not always do violence to our original, natural life-feeling, which is a distinctive experience and, as such, may have a noetic claim worth considering. Important here is the feeling and recognition that, on the basis of the objectivist explanation of humanity, I ought in fact never to feel free; at least, freedom does not have the meaning attributed to it by naive man, it is not spontaneity of decision and liberty in disposing of my possibilities of cognition and choice but rather, e.g., independence from outside constraint. It is important then that, in this peculiar conflict without contact, the scientific view can induce a profound change in the very foundations of the life-feeling; man lives in the fundamental apperception of his unfreedom, he feels himself the agent of objective forces, perceives himself not as a person but rather as a thing. Without our explicit awareness, there has been a substitution of our lived-experiences, a confusion that can then easily blind us to their deeper nature. Without going outside himself, man has become reified, alienated from his natural life-feeling; he becomes — at least at the surface of his being — what he holds himself to be. We shall call this reification, this conception of man as a thing, as a complex of objective forces, self-alienation. Out of it follows yet another phenomenon: self-abdication. Self-abdication is a reliance on "nature" where man directs neither himself nor others from a personal standpoint but rather gives himself up to the impulses that carry him. Since he does not live out of himself — rather life is something he receives — the question of the overall meaning of life lacks all real significance; "meaning" here means following impulses, which is done automatically in any case. Reflection has no fundamental importance for life; it is wholly in the service of action, as every personal decision follows from a vis a tergo, a natural necessity underlying lived-experiences. Work and activity are not so much a means toward a freely grasped goal as rather, on the one hand, a means of satisfying natural or, better, nature's tendencies, and, on the other hand, an escape from the vanity of reflection and other of life's temptations: partly a vital necessity, partly a distraction. The lowered sense of self carries with it a weakening of the feeling of the threat posed to man by objective forces and of the uniqueness of life, a spreading of the objective barrenness into our very lived-experience. It is as if all the diversity of life were ringing with an unvaried tone of indifferent nothingness which makes all things equal and does justice to life's pure seeming with its uneven distribution of interests and disinterest, lights and shadows. — The fact that even such consciousness of abdication leaves room for a stabbing anxiety (about the finitude of existence) is simply more evidence of the inner conflicts in which human self-alienation becomes entangled. Alienated man finds it difficult to enter into the spirit of his self-prescribed role, or rather, the role prescribed to him by the objectivist view of his essence; life within him flees this graveyard reconciliation, and as he is unable to free himself from his self-apperception, he endeavors at least to turn a blind eye and forget his situation in the thousand distractions so abundantly offered by modern life.

There is no need to further portray the consequences of this conception. Man is, to a certain extent, pliant, and he can attempt to live even in defiance of the natural order of his own being; but when this gets him entangled in dispiriting conflicts, it is clear that he does need unity. This then provides a first indication for our problem setting, showing the need for philosophy as a unity function for our splintered consciousness, blundering from the naive to the scientific world and back, living out its unfortunate existence in between the two positions experienced as opposites. The unity function has in itself a practical significance; it is clear that the conception we have just described is far too tolerant of the grosser tendencies of human nature and does not appear as suitable ground for the genesis and development of a strong self.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem by Jan Patocka, Ivan Chvatík, L'ubica Ucník, Erika Abrams. Copyright © 2016 Jan Patocka Archives, Prague. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810133628
• ISBN 13: 9780810133624
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Chvatík Ivan, Ucník Lubica