Abstract

The task of my inquiry is to lay out the inner articulation of Patočka's phenomenological project. In the first place, I attempt to clarify the role subjectivity assumes within Patočka's a-subjective phenomenology. I maintain that while subjectivity is a constitutive dimension of the field of the appearing, it is bereft of any constitutive privilege. I further examine the relation between the appearing (which is an essentially non-real dimension) and the real. While the specific domain of phenomenology – the phenomenal field, the appearing as such – can be brought to light only through bracketing any thesis about being, it remains that phenomenology cannot avoid the question of the inscription of the appearing in the world. Phenomenology cannot shed some light on this relation without exceeding its own limits in the direction of a philosophical cosmology and of an “ontic theory of the existence”.