Twentieth Lecture:
Personal Spatiality, Husserl, Heidegger

by Jan Patocka

(cfr. traduzione italiana)

Let us now briefly, schematically glance over the journey we have traveled. We set out from the observation that something like a personal region, personal relations and traits, is something philosophically recent, appearing explicitly only in modern philosophy, though here it comes to appear so fundamental, that, as philosophically relevant, it becomes the center of reflections, what is essential, belonging to the nature of what is simply because it is. Aristotle's philosophy is a philosophy in the third person, that is, though the personal is not wholly absent, is not thematized, it remains concealed. The third person belongs in principle together with the first and second person, that is, a philosophy starting out > l the world in the third person is not apersonal at all. For instance: Aristotle describes the world as a living being in the third person, attributing to it traits of our orientation in the world: up-down, right-left, near-far, personal relations. Antiquity obscures the personal dimension inasmuch as the expressions so central to modern philosophy, starting with Descartes and culminating in German classical philosophy, terms like "I," do not appear in ancient philosophy at all. For Plato and Aristotle, a philosopher's interest revolves around the existent in its existing, but it never occurs to them-not even when they arrive at the nature of existence in its most intense form, as spirit-that the nous could refer to itself as I. This pure reality, this pure actuality which contains not even a trace of potentiality, of something that has not been realized, something that would not be an act in the strong sense, Aristotle never even thinks of characterizing by expressions taken from the human situation, such as "I."

The word situation has to do with situs, emplacement. A situaion is the mode of our emplacement among things. At the start ve showed, in a historical perspective, how Descartes discovered he personal. That appeared within philosophical reach already in Christian philosophy, in Augustine. There, though, it was distinctively linked to the tradition of antiquity so that the entire thrust of this link led not to a philosophical grounding of our knowledge of ourselves and of the world but rather into a morally and soteriologically theological realm. Philosophically speaking-it was Descartes who first made the concept of the personal the basis of philosophy. We did not go into the way he did so, focusing only ,)n one aspect, precarious for him-our situatedness in the world. ^,1 philosophy founded on ego cogito cogitatum, on self-knowing consciousness, comes to grief on the question of my situatedness in the world. The personal beginning proved not to be radical enough. Descartes 'attempted to go directly from the personal starting point to the third person and so generated an apersonal :philosophy which surpasses the apersonality of antiquity-a phi-losophy of an impersonal res extensor, of mathematical nature. It is a nature into which humans are integrated in a purely objective manner. There is no room here for situational concepts or for situatedness generally. Our lived experience, as we live it and as we grasp it in reflection, is subjected to a new interpretation from _his impersonal perspective. Descartes's start from the I, from something fundamentally personal, remains stillborn.

We need to delve beneath this layer of the impersonal and bring out the originary personal experience. The experience of the way we live situationally, the way we are as personal beings in ;pace. We cannot rest content with the trivial conception which sees our body in a dualistic perspective-contained in the res extensa as a thing among things and objective processes, with which subjective processes are coordinated as their reflection. Even those need to be objectified in turn, transformed into impersonal entities which we can impersonally coordinate with ^-hem. Impersonal nature, impersonal subjective processes, impersonal coordination-what has become of that original element rom which we started, where is the original grasp and analysis of the foundation on which this kind of philosophy is conceivable?

So we asked how it is that we are in space. Are we in it as a thing among things? Is such a conception thinkable? We sought to show that just the opposite is the case, that knowledge of things that are solely next to each other, in purely objective relations, is possible only if there is a being that is in space differently, not just one of the things, indifferently next to them in space, but is rather in space by existing in it, that is, by relating to itself, to its life, through relating to things. That means, a being who can act out its life, comport itself with respect to its life in various ways simply in relating to other things and so finding a place in the world of things. We are not indifferent neighbors of things. Our relations are not external, indifferent. Our nonindifference to our own being, that it matters to us, that we are not indifferent to our being-all that is expressed in the typically human expression, for the sake of: we do something for the sake of something. Therein lies the nonindifference of our mode of being. That for the sake of entails being integrated into the world. For the sake of signifies the means to a particular end, means provided for the most part by the things around us. There is a continuity between what is projected for the sake of and such means. That means that our being among things is not a mere indifferent being next to, a juxtaposition of things in space.

We then sought to characterize this being from various aspects as an oriented being, aiming at things, ordered to acting among things, acting and in that action co-acting with others, oriented not just to things but also to the world of other persons. Our original drive toward things turns back on itself as a relation to others in which we first see ourselves. That is the natural reflective tendency of our drive into things. Given the typical way humans place themselves among things, this emplacement is a part of the structure of their being in the world, external, a mere next to, indifferent to their being; being in space among things is a part of our nonindifference to things and to ourselves.

We asked further about the essential reach of our reflections. Our goal was to reach such a level of description, of grasping of the originary phenomenon, that we would reject all objectifying models of human life, preceding the personal, human integration in a world. That led us to reflect on two phenomenologies, two conceptions of phenomenology. Phenomenological thought which either builds no constructs or does it only as last resort, sticking to what appears, what presents itself of itself However, such a conception of appearing, of self-presentation, is nothing obvious. It is not enough to open our eyes and to accept whatever. presents itself: the crux of phenomenology lies precisely here, in the quest for a way to that originality. We have compared Husserl's and Heidegger's conception. In Husserl's conception we sought to show modern Cartesianism in its most extreme and most sophisticated form. Its personal starting point is in the ego cogito and it seeks to remain in the personal, that is, in what Husserl calls transcendental intersubjectivity as the ultimate ground to which the phenomenological reduction leads, an intersubjectivity for which the world is the basis of communication. The personal world is not a set of islands amid an impersonal nature, rather, impersonal nature becomes a mere objective pole of unified intentionalities of harmoniously living monads that make contact through this objectivity. The access to it is reflection, self-grasping in pure originality and self-certainty.

Still, this conception is problematic. On the one and, it is immensely attractive in the perspectives it opens on the subjective streams of lived experience beyond life's banalities, the possibilities of insight, of analysis and depth. There are, however, problems beyond that attractiveness. There is, for instance, the question of the absolute reflection which once more transforms our personal, that is, finite lived experience into an absolute object which is there only for observation, an absolute one, to be sure grasping in absolute completeness adequacy, originality but objectifying nonetheless. Reflection transforms a living and lived life into a contemplating and contemplated one.

Husserl avoided many shortcomings of Cartesianism, for instance the ludicrous dualism which makes it impossible to find a substantive relation between res extensa and res cogitans and does not make it possible to explain that we have a body, the phenomenon of corporeity and our situatedness in the world through corporeity. Why, though, do not these flaws show up in Husserl? Because Husserl's conception is not a dualism but an idealism of transcendental intersubjectivity. An object, nature, is the unitary pole of unitary intentionalities, something sustained as the unitary object of our intentions, but without that living reality which belongs only to a living subject. Thus we can say that Husserl's phenomenology did overcome Cartesian dualism in a sense, though it is not clear that it was not in a direction which continues to preserve a certain kernel of Cartesianism, a certain Cartesian impersonality.

To be sure, Husserl himself emphasized and sensitively analyzed the phenomenon of the subjective body. Yet in his work the meaning of the corporeal subject is never clearly brought into continuity with absolute reflection. Willy-nilly, we must ask why, ultimately, subjectivity is always an embodied subjectivity. In a sense, the way Husserl sees it is that the embodiment of subjectivity, the subject's corporeity, is a necessary condition of our living together, not in isolation, but as beings in mutual contact. Yet that assumes that the proper significance of our subjectivity, the inmost core of our I, of the personal, is really not what is personal but what we note after the reduction, namely what is given in absolute reflection as a stream of experience. The ultimate foundation is not personal, rather, it is subjectivity: something that may constitute both our persons and other things in the world in its acts but that is not itself a person in the world in all its fundamental nature.

What is the ultimate ground of absolute reflection? It stands on itself. There is no further theory, no deeper explanation, no further reason or basis. Absolute reflection is the foundation of all philosophy, there is no theory about it. It is the ground to which all else needs to be reduced. Here it seemed to us that such a theory sunders the Gordian knot of reflection instead of untying it. Is there, need there not be found, a theory of reflection which, without rendering impossible the achievement of truth, of the clarity, of all that Husserl's transcendental phenomenology provided, would yet remain a theory of finite reflection, continuous with the finitude of human life?

Here a second conception of phenomenology comes into play, Heidegger's, starting out from existence, from overtly personal being, that is, from one which is not indifferent to its own being, and, since not to its own, neither to being generally. At the basis of Husserl's theory, we could again sense an impersonal foundation, an existent which merely notes itself, which is given to itself purely for observation. There is, though, an alienation in observation, a distance, a mere juxtaposition. In Heidegger, there is a conception of an existent living in its own possibilities and relating to them. We have shown, arising from that, a conception of the world as a context of references in which our world-dwelling life lives its for the sake of, which it itself projects and gives to itself. A world not as an aggregate of entities but as a context belonging to our own intrinsic structure, to the structure of our being.

We have shown that Heidegger was able to stress very sharply the finitude'within the basic structure of our living, the finitude of reflection flowing from our original preoccupation with things and with ourselves and from the need to react against it. Reflection is grounded in the innermost finitude of being human and in its relation to truth. Those, ultimately, are the reasons for reflection. What Husserl cleaves with the stroke of a sword, Heidegger only probes with inquiries. The need for truth, the possibility of truth are, for Husserl, rooted in our ability to grasp ourselves in the original in absolute reflection: we have ourselves in the power of absolute vision and, in that sense, we are absolute. Whoever would inquire further will get only one answer: that is how it is and no other-cogito ergo sum. That cogito, however, holds all the problems within it. Even the sum is problematic, it is the sum of a finite being. How can a finite being arrive at an absolute truth? In this respect, Heidegger is more human, though at the same time also more objective in seeing an essential fallibility about being human, the entanglement of a truthful being in untruth, in concealment, in deception, in secretiveness, in selfblindness, in deceiving oneself and others. For the universum of humans and for its interpretation, Heidegger's philosophical conception offers greater possibilities than the absolute which Husserl finds. Heidegger's inquiry is more profound, it is an inquiry into the ground of existence.

There is one point, though, where we sensed a need to be more honest and specific than Heidegger. That was the phenomenon of our emplacement within things by our corporeity (such emplacement would make no sense for a purely spiritual being). Heidegger does not deny corporeity, he does not deny that we are also objectively among objects, but he does not analyze it further, does not recognize it as the foundation of our life which it is. Following Merleau-Ponty's analysis, we showed that the ongoing self-integration into the world, which makes us spatial and in space, takes place by means of our subjective corporeity which is horizonal, manifesting itself as corporeity in the strongest sense of the word. In this brains we agree with the materialists, or would, if materialists were at all able to approach the phenomenon of the subjective body, the existing body which is the precondition of all experience of thing, of material nature.

On the basis of this criticism we demonstrated the possibility of interpreting existence as a triple movement. That we did using both an ancient and a modern idea. The modern idea was Heidegger's, that life is a life in possibilities characterized by a relation to our own being; we project that for the sake of which we are, that for the sake of is the possibility of our life; in the world a totality of possibilities is always open to us. The ancient idea-Aristotle's definition of movement as a possibility in the process of realization, not motion in Galileo's sense. For Aristotle, to be sure, movement is always the movement of a substance. Only conditionally could generation and perishing be understood, in Aristotle, as qualitative movement. An analysis of these three movements distinguished: (a) the movement of sinking roots, of anchoring in things, by which humans are beings for others, (b) the movement of self-prolongation, of self-reflection, in which humans live to need and be needed-in a world no longer fused by kin but in the harsh turmoil of the reality of labor and conflict, no longer shielded by the community of kin, (c) a movement in which humans do not relate to things in the world by means of the world but rather to the world as such.

This led us to ask for a conception of the world in a sense /more radical than that of Heidegger for whom the world is a world of ready-to-hand pragmata present in the context of practical significations. We asked for a^- conception of a world which is on the one hand what enables us to encounter particulars and, on the other hand, to live in truth. Humans are the only beings which, because they are not indifferent to themselves and to their being, can live in truth, can choose between life in the anxiety of its roles and needs and life in a relation to the world, not to existing entities only. This nonindifferent being (nonindifferent toward things as well as toward being in general) precisely here, in this region of explicit relating to what there is not as mere individual existent or as a sum of such, has its own domain, here it is irreplaceable, here it is at home with itself. Here is also what constitutes the special mystery, adding the depth and perspective which life lacks in contact with particulars, what slips through our fingers like the fool's gold in fairy tales wherever life itself dissolves into individual contacts. In contrasting Husserl's central conception of the non-reell correlate of our lived experience with Heidegger's conception of being which is no thing, we sought to exhibit that relation of humans to something that enables them to transcend all particulars and all sums of particulars while remaining with being, while being within it.

Here phenomenology touched upon something that all modern humanism neglected, what that humanism lacks. Modern humanism thrives on the idea that humans are in some sense the heirs of the absolute, an absolute conceived along the lines of Christianity (from which our humanism grew), that they have a license to subjugate all reality, to appropriate it and to exploit it with no obligation to give anything in return, constraining and disciplining ourselves. Here phenomenology touched upon the fundamental problem of humanism, that humans become truly human only in this nonindifference to being, when being presents itself to them and presents itself as something that is not real and so also is not human, something that challenges them and makes them human.

We arrived at the conclusion that the world in the sense of the antecedent totality which makes comprehending existents possible can be understood in two ways: (a) as that which makes truth possible for us and (b) as that which makes it possible for individual things within the universum, and the universum as a sum of things, to be. Here again the phenomenon of human corporeity might be pivotal since our elevation out of the world, our individuation within the world, is an individuation of our subjective corporeity; we are individuals in carrying out the movements of our living, our corporeal movements. Individuation-that means movements in a world which is not a mere sum of individuals, a world that has a nonindividual aspect, which is prior to the individual. As Kant glimpsed it in his conception of space and time as forms which need to be understood first if it is to become evident that there are particulars which belong to a unified reality. It is as corporeal that we are individual. In their corporeity, humans stand at the boundary between being, indifferent to itself and to all else, and existence in the sense of a pure relation to the totality of all there is. On the basis of their corporeity humans are not only the beings of distance but also the beings of proximity, rooted beings, not only innerwordly beings but also beings in the world.