The Life-Movement and the World

Karel Novotný

The new interpretation of the concept of the natural world in J. Patočka, introduced by R. Barbaras, as opposed to the interpretation of his philosophy as the synthesis of the philosophy of consciousness or reflective philosophy in E. Husserl, and of the thinking of being in its historicity in M. Heidegger, is grounded in Patočka’s references to a deeper starting point – life in the sense of phusis or nature – which represents a basis of a world-formation dynamics and which, at the same time, which Barbaras perhaps may not have considered enough, eludes this dynamics itself. These references result in the concept of the natural world as the “pre-historical” world, in the first Heretical Essay on the Philosophy of History, and follow from the concepts of “pre-everydayness” and “pure nature” in Patočka’s manuscripts from the early 1940s.