Au seuil de l’histoire: le monde de la vie comme monde pré-historique. Lecture des Essais hérétiques de Jan Patočka

This article aims to address the problem of the pre-historic world as it is present in Jan Patočka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. It puts forth the claim that these Patočkian reflections on history – its advent, beginning, meaning – cannot be understood unless we reinscribe them into the more general ambition of refounding phenomenology. The phenomenological grounding of a conception of history, as it structures the development of the Essays, will be accordingly, and as a first step, examined (1). This will enable us to get a better grasp of the stakes and difficulties of this precipitous path towards history where understanding the true Patočkian heresy, that of the constitutive problematicity of the historical world as a unifying factor of the “disturbance” of accepted meaning, presupposes having portrayed the fundamental background which incited its emergence and which, for this very reason, will be of interest to us insofar as it could be called a phenomenology of the pre-historical world (2).