The Review of Metaphysics

This first printing of the paperback edition of Patočka's work, originally published by Open Court in 1996, should secure for it a wider readership, but a strong caveat is first in order. This is not a beginner's introduction to Husserl's thought, insofar as it presupposes familiarity with the works Husserl published during his lifetime, in particular the early works up to and including Ideas I (1913). The book could fruitfully be understood rather as an introduction to Patočka's highly original appropriation of Husserlian methodological themes or, as the translator Kohák aptly suggests, a study of the fusion of "Husserl's rationalism with Heidegger's romanticism."

Kohák argues that the main question that occupies Patočka throughout the book is "the question of how faithfully Husserl can be read through Heideggerian eyes." Although Heidegger is never mentioned by name, his influence on Patočka is evident in the opening and closing chapters. There one can discern at least three questions that Patočka considers decisive for contextualizing the achievement of Husserl's phenomenology: (1) How does Husserl help explain to a 20th century audience a renewed sense of the Greek notion of world as kosmos? (2) Can Husserl's method investigate all the relevant senses of horizon—temporal, perceptual, intersubjective, and historical—that point to a phenomenological appropriation of the Greek kosmos? (3) Finally, does the relative lack of explication of the subject's relation to the Other, considered both corporeally and historically, point to the ultimate limits of Husserlian phenomenological method?

For Patočka, an ontology of the ordered whole should not be considered as a subjective conferring of meaning (Sinngebung) onto the world. In this light, Patočka's interpretation seeks an asubjective phenomenology that eschews the residual Cartesianism in Husserl's phenomenological method. According to Patočka, the world is self-concealing and thus calls [End Page 396] for a free act of transcending of the objects in the world for the self to have access to cosmic significance. To begin his analysis, Patočka devotes much attention to how the original problematics discussed by Husserl in the Philosophy of Arithmetic motivate the new beginning of the Logical Investigations and their elaboration of a descriptive psychology (chapter 2). From there Patočka goes on to understand the move to the bracketing of the world in the epochê as a move of "factual freedom" that breaks free of "mere givenness as such." For we live "in principle in horizons which first bestow full meaning on the present and [thus] … we are beings of the far reaches." In thus seeing from the depths into further depths, one can grasp that experience is understood as teleological through and through, insofar as each experience contains a reference to another experience.

Also notable throughout the book is Patočka's relating of Husserl's notion of an a priori correlation of subject and object to "Fichte's attempt at understanding the world from the mind and its own essential structure." Such attempts are bound to fail because they start "from the prejudice about the primacy of subjective being." This prejudice leads to the "immanentization, that is, a subjectivization of being." In addition, Patočka argues that Husserl fails to take into consideration "the dialectical structure of reflection" that presupposes a self-alienation—"a distantiation from ourselves"—insofar as what is capable of being thematized as the "dialectical visibility" "of relations even beyond the region of positive and objectival content." Thus it comes as no surprise to see Patočka conclude that he "can hardly see in [Husserl's phenomenology] anything more than a partial contribution to the questions of a historical … perception of the relations of humans and the world."

Noteworthy in its own right is chapter 7, entitled "Analysis of Internal Time Consciousness," for its lucid exposition of Husserl's notions of retention, the now moment, and protention, as...