Martin Ritter

Does it make sense to read Bernard Stiegler as an ethical and/or ecological thinker? I argue that we can and should do both, together. Stiegler offers one of the best analyses of the current state of the world, or more precisely of life on Earth, and also presents a sophisticated outline of how we can transform the Anthropocene into what he calls the Neganthropocene. This paper focuses both on his analysis and his proposals, with particular attention to their ethical and ecological elements. I argue that Stiegler’s general organology, and specifically his pharmacology and neganthropology, are inherently ethical concepts. Stiegler identifies negentropy as a value for which we should strive. However, I question his claim that the entropization or proletarianization of human beings is the cause of the entropization of life on Earth in general. We need to focus on the entropic effect of technology not only in relation to humans but simultaneously in relation to life in general, which means we must focus on its environmental impact. Hence, the environmental must be integrated into our thinking about the ethical task of humankind, and Stiegler’s general organology has the power to do this.

In this commentary on the paper “Understanding Philosophical Media: From Philosophy of Technology to ‘Technologies of Philosophy’”, I praise Giacomo Pezzano and Marco Pavanini for drawing theoretical attention to the fact that philosophy is technologically mediated. First, I discuss their categorization of basic media through which humans can express their ideas, emphasizing the need to focus more on how these media enable such expression. Second, I voice some skepticism regarding the authors’ assertion that we should reconstitute philosophy in line with the different media context of the present. Finally, I argue that acknowledging language’s primacy as a philosophical medium is not necessarily a form of conservative technological determinism. My comments are not intended to diminish the importance of the paper. Quite the contrary, they aim to contribute to further research on the topic.

In the first part of this chapter, I focus on how Patočka’s late phenomenology drew inspiration from Husserl, Heidegger, Fink, and Merleau-Ponty, insofar as these thinkers can be connected with different ideas of how phenomenology shall proceed and what is it capable of. Making use of this survey, I seek to identify tensions in Patočka’s late ideas on asubjective phenomenology. I draw attention especially to the relation between phenomenology and ontology. Patočka does not want to deny the ontological claims of phenomenology; but the idea of appearing as coming into being can be based only on speculation. In this context, I critically asses Barbaras’ speculative interpretation of Patočka and demonstrate that Patočka implicitly excludes the possibility for the theory of appearing to account for cosmos (or physis). I also pay attention to the tension between universalist claims of phenomenology and the acknowledgment of its historic limits. Finally, I indicate the reasons for re-turning to Patočka’s concept of the movement of existence.

The chapter analyses Patočka’s book-length study Eternity and Historicity from the middle of the 1940s, which offers an interestingly contextualized polemics with Husserl’s phenomenology while developing an important concept of the dialectic of appearing. This dialectic implies a quite fundamental transformation of phenomenology in comparison with Patočka’s war manuscripts. Moreover, Patočka’s considerations in Eternity and Historicity not only anticipate but rather necessitate the concept of “negative Platonism.” In contrast to the war manuscripts, Patočka sees no possibility of spirit’s being in harmony with the world. He deprives the given of any positive value so that he can claim that the negative reaction of (the human) spirit to objectivity is a fundamental position or “plus,” i.e. “being in the full meaning of the word.” Hence, in contrast to the concept of “negative Platonism,” Eternity and Historicity presents a radically subjectivist form of absolute humanism: in the last instance, it is the human being itself in its transcending activity that is the meta-physical in this concept.

This chapter identifies asubjective elements in manuscripts written by Patočka in the first half of the 1940s. After explicating the key concept of inwardness, with which Patočka substitutes Husserl’s notion of the ego, I elucidate the world-disclosing performance of inwardness as irreducible to world-constituting activity. After this explication, the chapter inspects Patočka’s method: Although the war manuscripts factually point to, and call for, the desubjectification of phenomenology, Patočka’s methodical focus on the acts of an ego does not allow for it. This focus prevents the desubjectification of phenomenology despite Patočka’s reflections on nature and on the relation between inwardness and the “things” bearing witness that the appearing of the world cannot be “constituted” only by transcendental subjectivity. Generaly put, (the principle of) appearing presupposes also “something” beyond subject-object dichotomy.

In this chapter, I explicate fundamental elements of Patočka’s concept of the movement of existence. After introducing Patočka’s project to renew the ontological concept of movement, I reconstruct his description of subjective movement to outline the structure of the world of a (moving) existence. I focus on the ontologically decisive part of Patočka’s concept: his radical reinterpretation of Aristotle’s concept of movement as a possibility being realized through the “lens” of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein. I demonstrate as crucial the question of the source of possibilities without which movement would be impossible. Identifying this source with the so-called “Seinsverständnis,” I specify how, to fully understand Patočka’s concept of the movement of existence as the core of his late asubjective phenomenology, existence is to be interpreted as the place of this understanding. Patočka specifically interprets existence as disclosed primarily due to time: We are opened by time to time and the three ecstases thus become three fundamental dynameis of human existence.

In this chapter, I explicate how Patočka’s early concept of phenomenology, as presented in his dissertation, was inspired by Husserl. I clarify why Husserl’s phenomenology was attractive for Patočka: Phenomenology as a transcendental theory of experience discovers conditions of the possibility of all reality, and it proceeds as a pure science because its method is not constructive but intuitive, observing. Summarizing Patočka’s analysis of the epistemic process, I explicate his early idea of the relation between finite consciousness and reality. I pay attention to the tension between Patočka’s rejection of absolute idealism and his idea that phenomenology has its point of departure in “something like intellectus dei infinitus.” Finally, I discuss the ontological limits of Patočka’s early transcendentalism.

Patočka’s phenomenology, as presented in The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, creatively transforms Husserl’s concept of Lebenswelt. The chapter demonstrates the originality of Patočka’s approach. I summarize Patočka’s analysis of the natural world to focus on the concept of transcendental subjectivity. How can this subjectivity be achieved by a finite consciousness and, even more importantly, what is this subjectivity? Elaborating on Husserl’s transcendental idealism, Patočka identifies the concrete concept of constituting subjectivity with that of “monads” intermeshing with one another. I suggest interpreting this concept as pointing to trans-individual process of life embodied by the monads ontologically grounding the world.

In “Negative Platonism” Patočka decidedly separates the philosophy of existence from humanism, yet he grounds philosophy in the analysis of existence demonstrating “the experience we are,” or the experience of freedom, as the fundament of metaphysics. According to Patočka, the topics and issues traditionally dealt with metaphysically were not mere pseudo-topics or pseudo-issues insomuch as the experience of freedom, as the experience of “idea,” is not a fiction. I clarify the “idea,” firstly, as reducible to freedom, and, secondly, as the “no-thing” experienced in freedom. I critically evaluate Barbaras’ attempt to read Patočka’s concept as a form of “henology.” Finally, discussing the problem that nothing can be positively said about Idea, I interpret Patočka’s “Negative Platonism” as proposing a transcendental approach, which forsakes the one-sided apotheosis of spirit by highlighting human, or “spiritual,” experience as based on Idea.

In this chapter, I interpret the long study “Space and its Problematics,” in which Patočka offers another explication of the lifeworld. He clarifies space, or the lifeworld, by describing human being inside, while this being inside is transcendentally determined by the so-called law of personal pronoun. I argue against Barbaras’ interpreting Patočka’s concept of inside as offering a more developed explication of the first movement of existence than Patočka’s later texts. I pay attention to the concepts of building, sacral transubstantiation, and the emptiness of heart. This emptiness is not an arbitrary feeling; on the contrary, it essentially conditions space (as experienced by the human being). As such, it transcendent(al)ly structures the world, which is ontologically cofounded by the body, and not only by a living body but also by the body as an object in the world.

This chapter weighs the importance, or the fundamentality, of the body in Patočka’s phenomenology. After summarizing Patočka’s interpretation of Husserl’s approach to the body, I turn to the mind-body problem as discussed by Patočka in his war manuscripts: analogically to the approach presented in his late lectures on Husserl, also there Patočka takes for granted that “what takes place in the body through the body belongs to my I.” But, in his late studies, Patočka presupposes neither the methodological priority of the I nor the gap between the I and the world to be bridged by the body. Critically assessing Barbaras’ and Novotný’s interpretations of Patočka’s late concept of the body, and taking into account the concept of the movement of existence, I emphasize that not all activities of the human being should be conceived of as being centred around and performed by the body, and hence that one can meaningfully distinguish between the body and “the soul.” The body bestows the I with its life, thus making possible its being, but this being transcends the body. Simultaneously, however, the body eludes existence.

In this chapter, I elaborate on Patočka’s concept of the care of the soul. Starting from Patočka’s affirmative presentation of Aristotle’s criticism of Plato, I question the Platonic idea of caring of the soul and develop an alternative notion, putting emphasis on action in the world. Connecting the concept of the soul with that of the movement of existence, I demonstrate the impossibility of identifying the care of the soul/existence with the third movement, whether exemplified by philosophical theory or political action. I elucidate how, or in what sense, the three movements of existence can be interpreted as three souls. Finally, putting emphasis on Patočka’s rather implicit reinterpretation of the self (auto) in the very definition of the soul as self-movement (autokineton), and following both Aristotle’s and Arendt’s emphasis on action, I outline such a concept of the care of the soul where the soul is identifiable, paradoxically, with the very caring.

This chapter argues for connecting Patočka’s phenomenological concept of the movement of existence with non-phenomenological approaches to human being in the world. More specifically, I outline the possibility of deepening phenomenology by “fusing” it with an approach which I find akin to it, namely that of media philosophy: a human being can be conceived of as concretely mediated through the three movements as three mediums implying cultural techniques conditioning this being who through them realizes itself. Such an approach allows for analyzing how existence is conditioned not only by subjects but also by objects in the world and by objective processes. Discussing, and appropriating, the concepts of cultural techniques and tacit knowledge, I seek to interconnect cultural techniques theory with Patočka’s phenomenology to think existence in both a less subjectivist and less anti-humanist manner, or to acknowledge it as both free and objective.

At first, this chapter reconstructs Patočka’s interpretation, in the 1950s, of the present world as that of supercivilization. Indicating Patočka’s reasons for not accepting liberalism, I analyse his idea of the solidarity of the shaken as the way out of the crisis and indicate why it is unable to do justice to what is going on in the world. More concretely, I question Patočka’s emphasis on spirituality, and suggest de-spiritualizing freedom as defining existence. We need to overcome the duality of technology and spirituality implicit in his concept and accept the irreducible technicity of existence. To concretize this approach a bit, I distinguish it from Suzi Adams’ “sociological” reading of Patočka: there is no trans-singular subject of history, yet the concept of the movement of existence allows for analysing the trans-subjective factors conditioning existence.

In this chapter, I reconsider Patočka’s concept of the movement of existence in its contribution to understanding (the movement of) history. Having explained Patočka’s principal ideas regarding the history of the world and the role of Europe in its current crisis, I argue against Patočka’s drawing a firm line between a free, truly historic way of life, and unfree, earthbound living. Connecting Patočka’s historic and political reflections with his ontological thought, and paying special attention to the concept of polemos, I accept neither an onto-polemical nor a moral interpretation of his (political) philosophy. I do not question Patočka’s emphasis on freedom, but I call for thinking existence as being free, and historic, through each of its movements. On the basis of such a reinterpretation, Patočka’s concept provides a framework for understanding human being in the world, or its living through the world (as) crisis.

This final chapter elucidates Patočka’s absolute emphasis on intersubjectivity, his “localizing” infinity into the relation between “subjects.” After paying attention to Patočka’s early ideas on the relation of a finite being to infinite life, I turn to his late thought focusing on the third movement of existence as identified with the movement of transcendence. I accentuate Patočka’s idea of self-transcendence toward the other, by which “the kingdom of God” is among us: the movement of self-transcendence is the movement of love. This idea allows for thinking the finite-infinite relation as the relation between finite being who by de-limiting themselves live in infinity. I indicate why we should not expel love from the first two movements of existence. Finally, I localize Patočka’s concept of the finite-infinity relation in the context of related reflections of Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

This introductory chapter explains why I find a comprehensive, in-depth, and critical presentation of Patočka’s phenomenology in English to be a missing but indeed necessary addition to the scholarly literature on Patočka. In the first half of the book, I seek to provide a succinct reconstruction of Patočka’s phenomenology throughout its evolution. Besides this reconstruction, I also intend to demonstrate how Patočka’s phenomenology is relevant for contemporary thought. Hence, in the second half of the book, I focus on Patočka’s concept of the movement of existence, which I find the most promising part of his asubjective phenomenology. I do not only interpret this concept but rather rethink, and appropriate, it to make it useful for analyzing contemporary existence.

The primary aim of the article is to present posthumanism as an approach needed in the era of the Anthropocene. By posthumanism, I mean a way of thinking that overcomes the weaknesses of humanism and emphasizes the essential interconnectedness of human beings with their environment. With regard to this “ecological” dimension of posthumanism, I will focus on the relationship between humans and technology, drawing on Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler’s reflections show that in the era of the Anthropocene human beings have become an irrational force that pulls the rest of the living beings into a spiral of destruction through the technological system they have established in the shared terrestrial environment. This environment is an organ of the planetarily influential and at the same time planetarily dependent humanity, which must therefore assume responsibility for the Earth.

Characterizing the contemporary world as massively entropic and pointing to the proletarianization of human beings, Bernard Stiegler claims that we need to “bifurcate”. This paper clarifies what he means by bifurcation and examines the conditions necessary for its occurrence. After explaining how Stiegler’s general organology provides a framework for his assessment of our present, the paper focuses on how humans can become capable of producing bifurcations. Emphasizing that bifurcation must occur in relation to technology, the paper identifies it as an inventive dis-closure of a current system that transforms both technology and us through the creation of knowledge. It then shows that although the problem of our time is primarily one of automatization, we must deal with it through internalization rather than disautomatization. Our very humanity is being disrupted because we are not realizing the possibilities offered by the development of technology, and this can only be achieved if we internalize technology. The process of internalizing technology is itself bifurcative and enables us to overcome our proletarianization.

Studie tematizuje dva fenomenologické přístupy k tělu a poukazuje na jejich slabiny. Větší pozornost je věnována Husserlově výkladu těla v Idejích II: zejména analýzou teorie „lokalizace“ se snažíme ukázat, že Husserl nedoceňuje význam extenzionality těla. Merleau-Pontyho koncepce z Fenomenologie vnímání je poté interpretována jako takový přístup k tělu, v němž je tělo redukováno na neosobní dovednost, resp. mohutnost jednání. Studie dospívá k závěru, že fenomenologie nemůže pojmout tělo jako princip zjevování, jehož konstitutivní působení by dokázala artikulovat analýzou prožívání, nýbrž spíše je musí respektovat jako „sféru“ nezjevnosti, která se v prožívání a zjevování projevuje autonomním způsobem.The study interprets two phenomenological approaches to the body and underlines their weak points. More attention is dedicated to Husserl’s explication of the body in Ideas II: particularly on the basis of his theory of “localization“ we try to show that Husserl underestimates the extensionality of the body. Merleau-Ponty’s concept in Phenomenology of Perception is then interpreted as such an approach to the body that reduces it to an impersonal skill of our (bodily) actions. Our conclusion is that phenomenology cannot conceive the body as a principle of appearing, the constitutive role of which it might articulate through an analysis of experience, but instead it should respect it as an “area“ of the un-apparent that manifests itself autonomously in experience.

Technologies are undeniably having a decisive, transformative impact on Earth, yet the currently prevailing empirically orientated approaches in the philosophy of technology seem unable to get to conceptual grips with this fact. Some thinkers have therefore been trying to develop alternative methods capable of clarifying it. This paper focuses on Vincent Blok’s call for rehabilitating an ontologically oriented approach. It reconstructs the rationale of his method as well as its key elements and structure. Elucidating Blok’s emphasis on the experience of climate change, the paper clarifies his call for a terrestrial turn in the philosophy of technology. This turn is indisputably needed, but Blok’s conceptualisation of Earth is problematic: Apart from its speculative nature, it underestimates the impact of humans on Earth. Blok seeks to clarify how ontic phenomena, especially particular technologies, can have an ontological impact, but there is a friction between his Heideggerian concept of the world as grounding inner-worldly beings and the idea of technologies as founding a new world. Identifying the elements where the undoubtedly required ontological approach needs to be rethought, the paper suggests that we need more mundane conceptualisations of both Earth and the world, accompanied by more attention to ontic processes.

While up to the 19th century there were philosophers within Judaism, these sages neither perceived themselves as Jewish philosophers nor did the Jewish community categorized them under this term. This situation changed with the rise of historicism. The first academically trained scholars in Judaism faced a new challenge: almost all leading contemporay German philosophers operated with a concept of a Christian philosophy which left no room for an acknowledgement of Jewish contributions to the history of philosophy. Zunz was the first Jewish scholar who took issue with this Christian challenge when he coined the term Jewish philosophy. Zunz followed Boeckh when he drew a distinction between Philosophy within Judaism and Jewish philosophy. Zunz used the first term for the historical contributions of Jews in the history of philosophy. If the modern scholar does examine the Jewish sources properly with the historical-critical method, the conclusions will lead him to a Jewish philosophy. Since Jewish philosophy for Zunz did not represent the Jewish Volksgeist, he did not elaborate further upon it. After Zunz, Geiger preferred a different approach. Since Geiger understood himself as a theologian who was closer to Schleiermacher, he described an alternative dialectical relationship by confronting the histoical-critical examination of Jewish philosophical sources now with Jewish theology. Munk's Esquisse set the standard for all subsequent histories of Jewish philosophy. He was not interested in a contemporary Jewish philosophy but focussed exclusively on what Zunz had rendered philosophy within Judaism. His aim was to give back Jewish philosophy its rightful place as an integral part of the history of Western philosophy. Munk's groundbreaking studies were triggered by Ritter. Even though Munk's conception still has a certain heuristic value, the deficiency of this approach is obvious as well.

As a distinctive voice in the current philosophy of technology, postphenomenology elucidates various ways of how technologies “shape” both the world and humans in it. Distancing itself from more speculative approaches, postphenomenology advocates the so-called empirical turn in philosophy of technology: It focuses on diverse effects of particular technologies instead of speculating on the essence of technology and its general impact. Critics of postphenomenology argue that by turning to particularities and emphasizing that technologies are always open to different uses and interpretations, postphenomenology becomes unable to realize how profoundly technology determines our being in the world. Seeking to evaluate the postphenomenological ability to radically reflect on the human being conditioned by technology, I discuss the two most pertinent criticisms of postphenomenology: an “existential” one by Robert C. Scharff and an “ontological” one by Jochem Zwier, Vincent Blok, and Pieter Lemmens. Assessing the ontological alternative, I point to incapacity of Heidegger’s concept of Enframing to do justice to material technologies. Simultaneously, I acknowledge the necessity of speculating on technology as transcending concrete technologies. Such speculating would be instrumental in reviving Ihde’s idea of non-neutrality of technology in its full philosophical potency.

We live in a world where it is impossible to exist without, and beyond, technologies. Despite this omnipresence, we tend to overlook their influence on us. The vigorously developing approach of postphenomenology, combining insights from phenomenology and pragmatism, focuses on the so-called technological mediation, i.e., on how technologies as mediators of human-world relations influence the appearing of both the world and the human beings in it. My analysis aims at demonstrating both the methodological weaknesses and open possibilities of postphenomenology. After summarizing its essentials, I will scrutinize, first, its ability to turn to the technological things themselves and, second, the so-called empirical turn as realized by postphenomenology. By assessing its conceptual framework from the phenomenological perspective, I hope to demonstrate that postphenomenology needs philosophical clarification and strengthening. In short, it needs a more phenomenological, and less pragmatic, approach to technology in its influence on human experience.

Critically evaluating and synthesizing all the previous research on the phenomenology of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, the book brings a new voice into contemporary philosophical discussions. It elucidates the development of Patočka’s phenomenology and offers a critical appropriation of his work by connecting it with non-phenomenological approaches. The first half of the book offers a succinct, and systematizing, overview of Patočka’s phenomenology throughout its development to help readers appreciate the motives behind and grounds for its transformations. The second half systematically explicates, critically examines and creatively develops Patočka’s concept of the movement of existence as the most promising part of his asubjective phenomenology. The book appeals to new readers of Patočka as well as his scholars, and to students and researchers of contemporary philosophy concerned with topics such as embodiment, personal identity, intersubjectivity, sociality, or historicity. By re-assessing Patočka’s philosophy of history and his civilizational analysis, it also helps to better articulate the question of the place of Europe in the post-European world.

Jan Patočka’s early phenomenology, as presented in The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, does not merely adopt Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld. The paper demonstrates the originality of Patočka’s appropriation of this concept, but also its internal tensions and difficulties. Seeking to elaborate a concept of a phenomenology allowing for a theory of the lifeworld stricto sensu, i.e. of the life of the world, Patočka’s book effectively shows that there is no ahistorical, absolute or “natural” starting point for phenomenology. Truth, as approachable through phenomenology, is not given, but must rather be developed. Elaborating on the concept of transcendental idealism, Patočka’s early phenomenology thus suggests a vivid idea of “intermeshing” monads ontologically grounding the world.