Jan Patočka

"Body, Community, Language, World, here made available in English for the first time is Patocka's presentation of phenomenology as a living tradition - as a philosophical heritage that requires to be rethought and redirected in light of possibilities that it has itself uncovered." "Jan Patocka lived for most of his adult life in Communist Czechoslovakia where he was at times banned from publishing or teaching. Mentor of Vaclav Havel, Patocka defied the regime as one of the spokespersons for Charta 77, and died in 1977, following two months of police interrogation."--BOOK JACKET.

Patocka's celebrated Introduction, here made available in English for the first time, is not an introduction in the ordinary sense of the term. Patocka ranges over the whole of Husserl's output, from The Philosophy of Arithmetic to The Crisis of the European Sciences, and traces the evolution of all the central issues of Husserlian phenomenology - intentionality, categorial intuition, temporality, the subject-body; the concrete a priori, and transcendental subjectivity. But rather than attempting to give a tour of Husserl's workshop, Patocka is himself hard at work on Husserl's problems.

History begins inseparably with the birth of the polis and of philosophy. Both represent a unity in strife. History is life that no longer takes itself for granted. To speak, then, of the meaning of history is not to tell a story with a projected happy or unhappy ending, as Western civilization has hoped, at least since the French Revolution. History's meaning is the meaning of the struggle in which being both reveals and conceals itself. Technological society represents both the triumph of historicity and its implosion, since here humans turn from reaching for the sacrum imperium - life lived in the perspective of truth and justice - to the mundane satisfaction of mundane needs, to life lived for the sake of catering to life.

"Contemporary phenomenology addresses us and calls for a response. In a spirit of an existential responsibility, we recognize that the attestation of phenomenology can be recognized only by embracing the plurivocity of meaning, the witness of an unstable equilibrium between sympathy and suspicion. The collection of essays gathered by young Polish phenomenologists offers pertinent insights which fruitfully challenge Ricoeur's provocative statement that 'phenomenology in a broad sense is the sum of the works of Husserl and the heresies that derive from him.' The papers powerfully express the richness of phenomenological reflection 'to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself.' (Heidegger) The dedication of the volume to the memory of Jan Patočka and Roman Ingarden highlights the impact on phenomenology by Eastern European thinkers. By addressing the limits and limitedness of phenomenological reflection, the authors remind us of temporality, historicity, linguality, and finitude of being a human being. They emphasize the indispensability of description and interpretation with special attention to givenness, which 'finds itself erected as the self-justification of the phenomenon as such,' (Marion) and to 'clear and distinct ideas' which remain in-between concealment and unconcealment. By critically engaging Husserl and Heidegger's claim that for the phenomenologist 'higher than actuality stands possibility, and we can understand phenomenology solely by seizing upon it as a possibility,' the editors successfully engage and enjoin the readers on a genuine phenomenological path"--Page 4 of cover.