“Unresting Death, a Whole Day Nearer Now”: Parfit and Patočka on Death and False Consolations

Abstract

Jan Patočka opens “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” by indicating that philosophers always tend to focus on questions about the mortality or immortality of the soul when thinking about death, and that he wants to take a different route focusing instead on the phenomenology of the afterlife and the ways the diseased others live in us. And this is what the major bulk of the text focuses on. But as Patočka’s unfinished text is about to end, he leaves us with a peculiar addendum that signals that a return to the more traditional questions – about death as mine – is necessary. In this text, I seek to elucidate what the phenomenology of afterlife brings to the traditional discussion about death as mine (and about my “soul”). One of the more prominent and well-developed modern theories that discuss death as mine is Derek Parfit’s. Thus, the effort in this text is to find out what Patočka’s phenomenology can teach us about Parfit’s theory.