Leben und Natur. Zur frühen Phänomenologie der natürlichen Welt bei Jan Patočka

The article focuses on Patočka’s early phenomenological thought developed around the concept of the natural world. More precisely, the aim of the article is to explore Patočka’s recently published manuscript studies and fragments, dating from the first half of the 1940s, in which Patočka attempts to establish a deeper living correlation between man and world based on a certain metaphysical conception of nature which is not, as for Husserl, just one of the horizons which experiencing creates around itself, nor is it just a basis on which the harmony of experiencing and its environment must develop, but in which nature also includes an aspect which is closed and alien to subjectivity. In this way, the article shows that Patočka makes a step beyond the bounds of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s schemes of a correlation of life and world, understanding and being. The article thus shows that Patočka’s early writings throw a certain amount of light on his later phenomenological work that had been most notably developed from the 1960s onwards.