Presence in the World

Pavel Kouba

The article shows the problematic character of Patočkasʼ concept of temporality as a stance at the edge between an already completed past and a transcendent, ‘wholly other’, future. This concept of the future shares some important traits with the view developed in L. Hejdánek’s “meontology”. In contrast to Hejdánek (and in line with Heidegger), Patočka maintains that temporality is intrinsic exclusively to man and that all other beings, animate and inanimate, are in time only mediately. The paper outlines an alternative perspective, partly adopted by Patočka himself in his explication of space, and indicates a more general problem arising out of the philosophical separation of the future from the past, time from space and thing from the world.