The natural world of Jan Pato?ka and the phenomenality of appearing: reflections on the consequences of modern solipsism

Abstract

Jan Pato?ka's natural world is circumscribed in three existential movements. These encompass self-defense (surrounds the basic condition established by community aggregation), self-sustainability (struggle for existence through an effort involving work that seeks recognition of another human being through entities), and transcendence (broader opening of meaning that integrates a radical attitude of existence involving not only subjectivity, but the critical transformation of the limits of individual freedom as encompassing a single possibility of truth). In this way, the article discusses the problems identified by the Czech philosopher of the accelerated overcoming of these movements to an orientation of consolidating the modern metaphysical project, that is, the universal assurance of the principle of technical calculability through a model of self-sufficient subject. Therefore, the discussion of this natural world is permeated by some thinkers who influenced him, such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, in order to understand what were the consequences of this project when establishing an absolutizing conscience that does not prepare itself for an important task: the judgment of its limits to otherness. The consequences, in addition to the designation of a horizontal line of “Human History”, are projected for dark futures such as wars, ecological problems and necropolitics.