TheBodyattheFront:CorporeityandCommunityinJanPatokasHeretical EssaysinthePhilosophyofHistory

TheBodyattheFront:CorporeityandCommunityinJanPatokasHereticalEssaysin thePhilosophyofHistory

byDarianMeacham

Source: StudiaPhaenomenologica(StudiaPhaenomenologica),issue:VII/2007,pages:353376,on www.ceeol.com.

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STUDIA PHNOMENOLOGICA VII (2007), 353-376

THE BODY AT THE FRONT

CORPOREITY AND COMMUNITY IN JAN PATOKAS HERETICAL ESSAYS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Darian MEACHAM (Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
Abstract: This paper investigates the relation in Patokas thought between the concepts of the front and the solidarity of the shaken, which we find in the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, particularly the sixth essay, Wars of the Twentieth Century and The Twentieth Century as War, and the phenomenological analysis of corporeity that we find in Patokas work from the late sixties, namely, The Natural World and Phenomenology (1967). We argue for a reading of the front and the solidarity of the shaken that emphasizes the importance of the body and intercorporeity. Based on this we argue for an interpretation of Patokas absolute as lifes transcendence of itself. Key Words: boundary, body, intercorporeity, life, front, solidarity of the shaken, movement

Introduction
Jan Patokas sixth and final essay of the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War1, presents several challenges to the reader. It is a dense piece, written with a notable sense of urgency, and perhaps as a result both the tone and the prose of the essay are hard to decipher. Amidst references to military tactics and mysticism, the essay veers from a deep sense of pessimism about the worlds future to a salvaging of some sense of optimism and hope in the formation of a new community, a community-to-come that Patoka calls the solidarity of the shaken. However, even this slim hope leaves the reader confused and without firm ground; it is a community of silence, wordless, its role
1 Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as war in J. PATOKA, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, translated by Erazim Kohk, edited by James Dodd, Open Court, Chicago, 1996 (cited hereafter as HE).

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is to whisper no! to the mobilization towards war, hardly what would seem the most obviously effective approach given the scale of the challenge. Yet, Patoka explicitly precludes positive projects, declarations, or institutions on the part of this solidarity, raising the question of just what sort of community this is meant to be. Secondly, it is a community (if we continue to call it that) that is born out of the most horrible of experiences, that of war and of the battlefront in particular. The life that awaits those who enter this solidarity is one that is constantly at the front, a life in battle, not the most enticing prospect for the hope of humanity. The task of the solidarity of the shaken is thus somewhat paradoxical it is a community which is formed and which lives constantly on the front, first in the literal sense of the battlefront, and then in the figurative sense of the ontological self-awareness of relation to the whole, an awareness that life is always lived on a boundary with death and non-being. Its task, in short, is to live on this boundary so that the literal return to the front might be avoided. However, even the very possibility of this community emerging seems unlikely; humanity must first take itself to the brink of destruction and succumb to a radical loss of sense before this solidarity can be formed. And yet, as Patoka points out, this has happened twice in the past century, and still humanity remains locked into objectifying, exploitive and ultimately destructive relations with both itself and with the planet as a whole. Then there is the issue of the prose that Patoka uses to express his point. References to Teilhard de Chardin and Ernst Jngers descriptions of battlefront experience risk a misinterpretation of Patokas intentions as a glorification of war, which is certainly not the case. It is easy to get caught up in these descriptions and miss the subtlety and nuance with which Patoka addresses the concepts of conflict and warfare. There is another question which arises from a reading of the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History in general, and Wars of the Twentieth Century in particular: where has the body gone? The centrality of corporeity or embodied being to Patokas thought seems diminished in these essays, especially the sixth. Is the body the heuristic key that is needed to decipher some of the more opaque points of the essay and bring it into relation with Patokas other late work where corporeity remains a central focus? What we propose to do here is to read Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War with special attention to the possible role or place of the body in the analyses of the front.2
The term front first appears in the Heretical Essays on page 125 in a quote from Teilhard de Chardin.
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In order to do this we must first look at the role that the concept of front plays in this essay and then examine the place of the body at the front, as well as what role, if any, is played by corporeity in Patokas thinking of the solidarity of the shaken. All of these themes point to another larger question in Patokas thought, one that we will not fully address here, but which should be on our minds when reading the Heretical Essays: what is the relation between Patokas phenomenology of life and his politics? In other words, how is the idea of life employed in these late essays in a double sense, both as a biological concept subject to political control, and as a full phenomenological and existential concept of life? This question as much as any other speaks to Patokas great relevance to contemporary discussions both in phenomenology and political philosophy. The potential in Patokas work is to make some progress in uniting and understanding the relation between these two important discourses.

1. The front
When the term battlefront, or just front, is introduced in Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War it is meant in a literal sense. It would be a mistake to reduce the significance of this term to only a metaphorical use.3 Patoka makes this clear in utilizing descriptions of battlefront experience from the First World War, specifically the descriptions of trench warfare, provided by Ernst Jnger, Teilhard de Chardin, and Karl Lewin.4 However, the appearance of the front is the concretization of a theme that had already emerged in the second of the Heretical Essays, The Beginning of History, i.e., the
Though there might be other instances or examples of the front experience, perhaps less violent or extreme ones, the actual battlefront of war is, for Patoka, the paradigm of this experience. 4 The First World War is of special significance to Patoka and is used as the example here for a number of reasons: the sheer unprecedented scale and intensity of trench warfare, and also Patokas belief that the First World War was the culmination of a process of shifting from an ancient conception of life as care to be, to a modern conception as care to have, which began in the sixteenth century with the rise of mechanical natural science. Hence, war and world war in particular presented the most intensive means for the rapid release of accumulated forces (HE 124). The specific reference to war in the form of the front raises an interesting question of the specificity of Patokas analysis: when we speak of war and the accompanying radical loss of sense does this only refer to trench warfare, and not to other more modern or current forms, and also when we speak of the loss of sense at the front, the experience of the front, does this necessitate the reference to violent military conflict, or are their other empirical examples of this utter loss of sense?
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border or boundary experience which inaugurates the shift from prehistorical to historical humanity and with it the birth of the political and of philosophy.5 These two terms, front and boundary, are also intertwined with a third term that is one of the central themes of the Heretical Essays and of Patokas philosophy of history in general: shaking, a term which Patoka uses to designate the experience of the radical loss of received meaning, or the sedimented meaning of tradition. The boundary experience is thus always the experience of a loss of meaning horizon and in a more radical sense it is an encounter with loss of meaning altogether, or we could say, following Hans-Rainer Sepp, it is an encounter with the other of meaning.6 This idea in turn constitutes Patokas notion of history in a proper sense, as opposed to the pre-historic, which is exactly the sedimentation of meaning that we would normally call historical. History, Patoka writes, is nothing other than the shaken certitude of pre-given meaning, and nowhere is this shaking accomplished in such a dramatic fashion as in the absurdity of the battlefront.7 Yet this utter break with sense that occurs in the rot of the trenches is not itself without meaning, the person on the front line is gradually overcome by an overwhelming sense of meaningfulness, which would be hard to put into words.8 It is this silent or wordless meaning that is the positive counterpart to the initial radical negation that is history in the proper sense for Patoka. We might be audacious enough to call this a lgoj (of the world), always not yet spoken. Most significantly perhaps, the boundary experience that Patoka introduces in The Beginning of History is understood as a relation not with individuated things, but with the prevenient whole of the world, what Patoka calls in The Natural World and Phenomenology, the primordial non-sensory givenness of the whole and the global horizon of the world.9 Let us look at the description Patoka gives of the boundary experience in The Beginning of History:
5 Hans Rainer Sepp points out that there are two different definitions of the border or boundary at work in the Heretical Essays: Patoka adopts Heideggers solution of the ontological difference, but adds another border to it: the referentiality to meaning proper to this difference is confronted with the absolutely meaning-less. It is thus this second border, the border of meaning itself which we will focus on here, and which manifests itself at the front. Cf. H. R. SEPP, On the Border: Cultural Difference in and beyond Jan Patokas Philosophy of History, in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy III (2003), p. 170. 6 Ibid., p. 163. 7 HE, p. 118. 8 Ibid., p. 126. 9 J. PATOKA, The Natural World and Phenomenology, in E. KOHK, Jan Patoka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989, p. 253 (cited hereafter as NWP).

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Life on the boundary is an encounter with what there is, on the boundary of all that is, where this whole remains insistent because something other than individual entities, interests and realities within it inevitably emerges here [] the world opens itself to it for the first time it is no longer an involuntary background against which that which concerns us shows itself; rather, it itself can now stand forth, as the whole of that which opens up against the black backdrop of closed night. This whole now speaks to humans directly, free from the muting effect of tradition and myth [] all the pillars of the community, traditions, and myths, are equally shaken.10

This boundary experience is (in the Heretical Essays) immediately related to the political. The life that is lived on the boundary in this relation to the whole is expressly the political life. Political life, which we may also take to be synonymous with historical life, is marked by a lack of foundation and a permanent uprootedness. There is no appeal in the political to any sense of generative community, be it founded on tradition or blood any such recourse would be for Patoka decidedly pre-historical, and hence pre-political. As such the political is a state of being fully in touch with human beings radical contingency and aware of the precariousness of its existence. This state of uprootedness and foundationlessness is also a free life according to Patoka, and this sense of freedom, which is intimately bound up with responsibility, will reappear at the front. The uprootedness or lack of foundation that characterizes the experience of the boundary does not paradoxically imply that the political life is divorced from the community; rather the lack of foundation is transferred to the entire community. The firm permanent structures of work and home, which constitute the homeworld, are only made possible by the existence of the community. Thus a reciprocal double movement is established, on the one hand political life, i.e., life in the plij, is made possible by the establishment of a homeworld; on the other hand this homeworld cannot exist without the political community, which protects it from both internal and external threat.11 It is this double movement which, in the properly political plij, potentially facilitates the boundary experience and allows humans to come into contact with the whole. The other fundamental characteristic of political life is that it is future oriented, hence its constant sense of urgency. Patoka describes it as life in a time to. The openendedness of this sentence is deliberate, indicating that the political is, despite or perhaps because of its urgent nature, still open. It is precise10 11

HE, p. 39. Ibid., p. 38.

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ly an openness to being shaken, to the loss of meaning. Patoka refers to this urgency and openness as a constant vigilance over itself, over the boundary experience and the possibility of the appearance of the whole. This future orientation however is precisely what makes the political life, regardless of its lack of firm ground or foundation, a responsible one and not some sort of nihilistic a-historical free for all. As Ivan Chvatk points out: the novelty of political life lies in the fact that it understands that free life can only be maintained in a community where the free do not kill one another, but where they create and preserve for their struggle an open space, an open space in which the whole can appear in the space created by the interaction between political actors.12 In our brief exposition of Patokas understanding of the boundary experience as a relation to the whole, or the world, several important issues have emerged that will have to be dealt with as we proceed with our investigation of the idea of the front and the role of corporeity within it. First of all Patoka has given us two seemingly problematic descriptions of the whole, on the one hand as horizontal: a global horizon, or a horizon of all horizons, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty; on the other hand the idea of a border of meaning itself would imply a certain a-horizontality.13 Secondly, Patoka has spoken of the political life as a life that is always uprooted, but uprooted from what? This notion proves problematic because as we shall see Patoka tells us that humans, as embodied, are first and foremost rooted creatures. Finally, we get from these passages a sense of the political life as a special kind of life distinct from mere biological existence, if not in fact decidedly opposed to it. The motif of the front picks up the idea of the boundary experience and applies it in a concrete setting; the battlefront thus becomes on the one hand the paradigmatic historical and political experience. On the other hand, while the boundary experience is portrayed as intense, and potentially overwhelming, the front line is by its very nature unbearable. In his continuous movement (in the text) between the phenomenological account of the front and the empirical Patoka points out that it was estimated to be impossible to survive at the front for longer than nine days.14 As such the front is an experience of mortality, con12 I. CHVATK, The Heretical Conception of the European Heritage in the Late Essays of Jan Patoka, in Phainomenon, Revista de Fenomenologia, no. 8, Primavera de 2004, Lisboa, p. 60. 13 NWP, p. 253; M. MERLEAU-PONTY, Phenomenology of Perception, English translation by Colin Smith, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1962, p. 330 (cited hereafter as PhP). 14 [] the front line is horrifying and everyone in the trenches is eager for rotation (even according to the general staffs, surely not over sensitive it is not possible to last longer than nine days), HE, p. 126.

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tingency and finitude. This relation applies in a number of senses: empirically in that the chances of survival at the front for any extended period were very low; existentially in that the encounter with the enemy at the front at least initially is an encounter with an existential threat that not only resists but threatens ones own horizon of life or homeworld and thus must be repelled; and ontologically such that the absolute loss of sense at the front, coupled with the impending possibility of physical death, is not only an encounter with the other of meaning, but with death or non-being. Accordingly Patoka calls this experience of the front, not (only) an immediate trauma, but a transformation of human existence. However in this theatre of the absurd par excellence, this utter and complete loss of sense (in every sense of the word), Patoka, referring to Jnger and Teilhard de Chardin, locates what he calls something deeply and mysteriously positive, a sense of meaningfulness that overcomes the front line participant.15 The question of the front is the question of this paradox: what is this overwhelming sense of meaningfulness that accompanies the loss of all meaning? Patokas answer to this question is vague: life, which up to this point in the essay had received a rather negative treatment as that which drives war through its claim to be the highest and only value Those who cannot break free from the rule of peace, of the day, of life in a mode that excludes death and closes its eyes before it, can never free themselves from war now becomes the name for that mysterious meaning which emerges at the front.16 What are we to make of this reversal? Life in the first sense is understood as a merely positive conception of biological life, what we might call mere survival. As the preceding quote shows this concept of life excludes death. Life reduced to mere biological survival becomes a means of war waged against an empirical and existential threat. The threat to this notion of life is used as a mean of submission, body and soul, of all individuals to relations of power and domination.17 The appearance of life in the second sense is the most profound discovery of the front line according to Patoka. It also brings together the themes of the front and the border, but more than this we are given
15 The front line is absurdity par excellence. What we had only suspected here becomes reality: all that humans hold most precious is ruthlessly torn to shreds. The only meaning is that of a proof that a world capable of producing something like that must disappear; and in the previous paragraph: The person on the front line is gradually overcome by an overwhelming sense of meaningfulness which would be hard to put into words. Ibid. 16 HE, p. 129, emphasis added. 17 Ibid.

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a concept of the phenomenon of life. In this context we can speak of life appearing as originary negativity, for which the positivist metaphysics of the mechanical natural sciences (the day) cannot account. It is worthwhile to examine the full passage:
Thus the most profound discovery of the front line is that life leans out into the night, into struggle and death, that it cannot do without this component of life which, from the point of view of the day, appears as mere non-existence; the transformation of the meaning of life here trips on nothingness, on a boundary over which it cannot step, along which everything is transformed.18

This passage is significant for another reason as well: it points us in the direction of the body as the means by which to understand this experience of the border. The experience of the front as the paradigm of the border or boundary experience is decidedly a corporeal one. There are two reasons to argue this point. Firstly, in the 1968-69 lecture series from the Charles University, published in English under the title Body, Community, Language, World, Patoka insists, in the last of the nineteen lectures, that the experience of the boundary is made possible by corporeity. He tells his students:
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 are not only beings of distance but also beings of proximity, rooted beings, not only inner worldly beings but also beings in the world.19

This direct evidence of the relation between corporeity and the front is complemented by the description of the experiences of a front line cannoner that Patoka introduces in Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War. Immediately after the above quoted passage announcing the discovery of life at the front, Patoka (referring to psychologist Kurt Lewin) writes:
The topographical character of the landscape changes so abruptly [at the front] there is an end to it and the ruins are no longer what they had been, villages and so on, but have become what they can be at the given moment, shelters and reference points, so the landscape of lifes
Ibid., p. 131. J. PATOKA, Body, Community, Language, World, English translation by Erazim Kohk, edited by James Dodd, Open Court, Chicago, p. 179 (hereafter cited as BCLW).
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fundamental meaning had been transformed, it has acquired an end beyond which there can be nothing further, higher, more desirable.20

How are we to understand this striking passage? It is a vivid description of the extreme experience of being shaken and the loss of a meaning-horizon or homeworld, but what is equally striking is that this description focuses on the corporeal relation with the landscape, or natural world. This does not mean that we are only dealing with a relation to the earth, the ground, the physicality of the terrain itself. The cultural landscape is tied up here with the natural one, the body relates to them in one and the same movement. In this case the cultural landscape is related to via the mode of absence, its sense has been obliterated, its objectivities vanished. The meaning horizon that accompanies villages and towns with their names, monuments, traditions, etc., is subjected to a radical negation. History in the normal sense of the word gives way to the historical in Patokas sense. What remains at the front after this massive experience that Patoka calls a transformation of the landscape of lifes fundamental meaning? It seems that what we are left with is a primordial corporeal relation. It is only through our corporeity that the battlefield is transformed into reference points, by which the soldier at the front reduced to the most basic existence can prolong his survival; that the cultural history, which had given names and significance to what is now ruble, gives way to the depth of our natural being. And thus the landscape of the front acquires an end as it brings us up to the border with the night, or nothingness, the insistent world, beyond which we cannot go. Here we encounter an example of the tension between the horizontal and a-horizontal understandings of the border. If we are to maintain the centrality of the body in the border experience, which I think both the descriptions of the front and the references to the 1968-69 lectures indicate we should do, then it would seem that the experience should be a horizontal one, as it is because of our embodiment that all experience is perspectival, oriented and horizontal. However, at the same time the passage above would seem without question to point to an a-horizontal experience, an encounter with an absolute. These are problems that are not resolved and which we will have to return to, but for the moment we will focus on the corporeal aspect. The movement that Patoka speaks of seems to be a pre-intentional relation to the landscape, the body moves with the landscape in search of shelter, rather than in opposition to it. As Patoka says elsewhere, the
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HE, p. 131.

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world and man are in a mutual movement.21 We are in a sense reduced (if we can pardon the use of this weighty term for the moment) to a primordial relation with the landscape, what Patoka would call our initial corporeal rooting. To speak of the experience of the front as prepersonal or pre-individuated seems appropriate here. Not only does Patoka refer to the loss of meaning horizon, into which we would situate our personal or individuated selves, but the description of the relation to the landscape of the front also suggests a togetherness that precedes separation or individuation. Several other comments lead the reader to approach the experience of the front via what Patoka refers to as primordial affectivity or the elementary proto-fact of harmony with the world that extends to others as well as the landscape itself. Patoka describes the experience of the front as bringing about a sense of authentic transindividuality.22 True, the idea of a transindividuality seems to suggest a post-individuation rather than a pre-individuation, but the transcendent movement that Patoka is referring to here makes its return to the natural world as the ground for all other experience. In the final lines of the essay when Patoka reintroduces the term plemoj we again find that the language, though in a different idiom, and perhaps context, brings us back to the proto-fact of empathic harmony with the world that we associate with Patokas more phenomenological writings. Plemoj, he writes, is nothing one-sided, it does not divide but unites; adversaries are only seemingly whole, but in reality they belong to each other in the shaking of the everyday.23 Even the references to Ernst Jnger, which open the essay to so much misinterpretation, point to an understanding of the primordial experience of the natural world that we find elsewhere in Patokas work: and Jnger writes at one place that the combatants become two parts of a single force, fusing into a single body, and adds: into a single body an odd comparison. Whoever understands it affirms both self and enemy, lives at once in the whole and in the part.24 We will have to return to this very important intersubjective element which forms the basis of the solidarity of the shaken, but first it is necessary to turn our attention to Patokas phenomenological analyses of the body and the natural world, so that we may better decipher the experience of the front.
NWP, p. 269. HE, p. 131. 23 Ibid., p. 136. 24 Ibid., p. 137. The quote from Jnger is taken from Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922) in Smtliche Werke, Zweite Abteilung, vol. 7: essay 1: Betrachtungen zur Zeit, Klett Cotta, Stuttgart, 1980.
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2. Rooting
The intention in Patokas analyses of the role of the body, which we find examined in detail in a number of texts (including The Natural World and Phenomenology from 1967, and the 1968-69 lecture series from the Charles University, Body, Community, Language, World), is to try and comprehend a more primordial manner in which we are in and of the world before individuation (BCLW, p. xxvii). In Patokas view all aspects of human being indicate both a corporeal situatedness and a feeling of an originary or primordial proximity to things that is expressed in our bodily being, a primordial affectivity. It is this account of bodily insertion or rooting in the world that Patoka argues sets him apart from Heidegger, who he thinks failed to take the animal or childlike aspects of human being fully into account. It is also this account that Patoka argues (in the 68-69 lectures) brings him closer to Merleau-Ponty.25 Indeed the analyses of the body that we find in Patokas writings from the late sixties display a remarkable proximity to Merleau-Pontys own intentions in the Phenomenology of Perception and the later lectures from the Collge de France, The Concept of Nature, 1959-1960, wherein he undertakes the task of examining the pre-personal or natural life of the subject, and the operative intentionality that accompanies this pre-individuated and anonymous existence.26 Through these aspects Patoka understands human experience of the world primordially as a sort of universal sense of empathy.27
25 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-Pontys 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. (BCLW, p. 176) 26 Cf. for example, PhP, p. 254: my personal existence must be the resumption of a pre-personal tradition. There is, therefore, another subject beneath me for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body, not that momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens upon this or that world, but the system of anonymous functions which draw every particular focus into a particular subject. Also: R. BERNET, The Subject in Nature, in P. BURKE and J. VAN DER VEKEN (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Context, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1993 pp. 53-69. 27 BCLW, p. 133; Merleau-Ponty says much the same thing in his Nature lectures wherein he states, Before trying, we notice that the body as corporeal schema, the esthesiological body, the flesh, have already given us the Einfhlung of the body with perceived being and with other bodies. That is the body as the power of Einfhlung

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Though in human sensibility this empathic harmony is transcended, it is still retained, not in the sense of a layering wherein the human is arrived at through a hierarchical process of addition (animality plus reason), rather it is preserved yet modified as Patoka puts it, or intertwined (Ineinander) in Merleau-Pontys vocabulary.28 This primordial sense of togetherness with the world and with others is co-originary with our perceptual encounter with the world, which is by nature oriented and situated, and as such involves the aspect of horizontality. In other words this empathic whole is construed through the interaction of presence and non-presence in perceptual being, and this points us to the body. This oriented existence comes about through the body.29 Specifically, it comes about through the movement of the body, which in turn requires an unmoving referent, the earth, as the constant substrate of all movement.30 The earth, Patoka writes, is something in whose context I move together with other things.31 While the world as a whole may be divided into spheres of essentially near and essentially distant, or home and alien worlds, the earth as the substrate of all movement is always (though not exclusively) essentially near. There is no part of the earth that is alien to us as corporeal beings, no part that I cannot in theory touch or approach. In part this is because it is the earth that sustains us, and thus holds power over life and death. It is through the earth, through our corporeity that we are, like all living creatures, needful beings, and it is through the earth first and foremost that these needs are met. It is precisely these needs however which necessitate the practical coherence, the focus on individual things in their use values, which in turn causes the sense-perspectival givenness of the earth (and the sky) as the horizons of all our doings to be overlooked. The practical understanding of the world, which corresponds to our selfpreservation and self-projection, i.e., individuation, is what Patoka refers to as the second movement of human existence, with the first movement being the primordial rooting or anchoring, and empathic harmony. In the 1968-69 lectures Patoka takes a more dramatic approach
is already desire, libido, projection-introjection, identification. M. MERLEAU-PONTY, Nature: course notes from the Collge de France. Compiled with notes by Dominique Sglard, English translation by Robert Vallier, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2003, p. 210 (cited hereafter as N). 28 BCLW, p. 139; N, pp. 208, 273. 29 NWP, pp. 254-255. 30 The immobility of the Earth belongs to the primordial orientedness of the world. The earth is that on which an oriented and self-orienting action rests. We can never act except as resting on the firm foundation of our shared life situation. Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 256.

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arguing that the confrontation between the two movements shatters the instinctual-affective sphere, constituting the repression of this sphere.32 Though our needs and instinct for self-preservation in fact necessitate the emergence of the sphere of work, it is also here that relations of power and domination between humans and the earth, and between humans themselves emerge.33 This second sphere, however, in as much as all individual entities and thus all practical understanding is dependent first of all on the possibility of a horizontal consciousness and a prevenient world, is itself dependent on the first movement which it represses. In its most severe form this repression manifests itself as a feeling of what Patoka calls homelessness, in that it is an alienation or separation from the primordial and corporeal movement of the natural world that makes a home possible.34 The counterpart to the earth is of course the sky. It is the essential distance to earths essential nearness. As such the sky is the horizon of all things beyond human reach; Patoka writes that it encloses our horizon without closing it in.35 As a referent that is essentially distant, the sky as a horizon addresses us as seeing creatures. It is the provider of light and clarity, and hence the provider of knowledge. As home to the passing of day and night the sky provides the corresponding when to the earths where, though Patoka adds that by bearing unchanging celestial marking the sky is equally the giver of where in the eminent sense.36 In this aspect the sky is the seat of measurement and precision, compared to the earths all encompassing embrace. These two horizontals are thus in constant contact, a continuous interpenetration. As perceptual beings, for whom our encounter with the world is oriented and perspectival, having a near and far, the sky and earth as the two referents of our natural world are mutually dependent. The intersubjective aspect of the first movement is also absolutely central to Patokas account of the natural world. Contact with others is at the very center of our world, endowing it with its most intrinsic content, but also its most important meaning, perhaps all its meaning.37 This contact is also first and foremost a corporeal relation to the other, an inter-corporeity which institutes the natural world from the beginning. Patoka writes, our space is a human space in its entire construcBCLW, p. 148. NWP, p. 261. 34 The greatest homelessness, however, is in relation to nature and ourselves, HE, p. 115. 35 NWP, p. 256. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 258.
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tion from the ground up, because though its entire central and centered structure stems from me it ends in thee.38 The intercorporeal aspect is what allows me to have a world and thus an existence in the first place, i.e., the fact that the world and its objects are not just oriented and perspectival to me but to others as well, and that my perception is first of all aimed, in a non-objective manner, at the other with whom the perceptual field manifests itself, leads Patoka to say that it is only in the primordial, non-objective, sense encounter with the other that we encounter ourselves: it is this structure of the other, as nearer to us than we ourselves and correspondingly near to himself through us, that this foundation on which the most important aspect of the entire drama of life is set.39 In other words, it is only as my experiences are integrated with others that the world can become a real world that surrounds me, and includes that which is non-present. Intercorporeity is then something of an a priori; only by taking a detour through others do I arrive at myself, and my world.40 Patoka likens this initial interdependence to the mother-child relation, which as it falls into the category of human relations and specifically intercorporeal relations becomes the exemplar of the teleological orientation towards others. What is significant about this relation is that it is passive, and this initial passivity is attributed to the body.41 This sinking or rooting of the self in the other is not only our primordial experience of the world, but Patoka also calls it the chief dimension of human life which mediates all other dimensions of our experience the others are our original home.42 This initial rooting or anchoring (Patoka uses both terms) has a temporal modality as well. Our rooting in others and in the world takes place in the dimension of passivity, and of exposure. We can speak of it in the sense of a primordial openness, and its corresponding temporal modality is that of the past, a primordial past, in the sense of a past that has never been present, which provides the depth to our corporeIbid. Ibid. 40 Ibid., p. 259. 41 A child does not project its feeling into the mother but rather experiences a smile or a fondling as a significant situation in which both partners participate according to the schema of one sending out the other receiving. Initially we have no inner experience to project into the expressions of the other person; there is rather an overall situation that has its poles and is interpreted, as in a mirror, from the viewpoint of both participants. Thus we do not at first grasp ourselves or the other as an I, but as two active components of a situation [] the primordial starting point is the bipolar meaning situation in which two analogical corporeal poles play complementary roles.; The other and I discover ourselves in the unity of a meaningful situation. Ibid., pp. 259, 260. 42 Ibid., p. 260.
38 39

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al being. What our corporeal situatedness shows us according to Patoka is that life is only possible as already entering a prepared warmth, in the passivity of being penetrated by the state of acceptance, and so only on the basis of a past that lets us lower an anchor, sink roots.43 In a broad sense we might also speak about this temporal depth in terms of the bodys habituating nature. This terminology is again closer to Merleau-Ponty than Patoka, but it may help to decipher the relation between the body and the front, how it is that we can say that at the front the body and the world are the same movement. The body as habituating is an erosion of the power of the subject over its own body.44 As such, it is also the provider of depth to our experience of the world through its return to the passivity of the pre-individuated spatial and temporal rooting that is accomplished precisely through our corporeal nature. As habit it is also the repetition of something pre-existing, a rooting in the past. Because we take habit here in the broad sense, as a predisposition towards habituating, it need not be the repetition of old projects or sedimented patterns of behavior, but rather a more profound sense in which the body, precisely as able to return to itself in habit, shows itself to be rooted in a past that as Patoka says is inevitably with us, such that all passivity from birth onward shows itself to be a certain habituation, precisely to our originary corporeal rooting, that precedes the bodys individuation from others and from the world. Our reflexes and pre-intentional responses to others and to the world, what Merleau-Ponty also calls an operative intentionality, as well as our capacity to take up the world and its objects into the bodys own intentional arc, all speak to this primordial habituation or rooting. As Merleau-Ponty puts it in the Phenomenology of Perception, habit body expresses our power of dilating our being in the world.45 What is also significant here is that this temporal depth bears within it a central vital core, a core of vital warmth.46 This idea is without doubt a way expressing the feel that we have for life as related to our primordial corporeal insertion into a circuit-of-empathy with the world.47 Patoka also goes one step further, rather than only referring to an initial empathic harmony with the world, he also adds an element
Ibid., p. 264. R. BERNET, op. cit., p. 61. 45 PhP, p. 143. 46 BCLW, p. 149. 47 This terminology is again Merleau-Pontys, in his 1959-60 lectures at the Collge de France he speaks of the body as being in a circuit with the world, an Einfhlung with the world, with things, with animals, with other bodies (as having a perceptual side as well) made comprehensible by this theory of the flesh. N, p. 209.
43 44

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of empirical community to the primordial ontological sense, thereby in a sense preparing for the politicization of the ontological findings. Thus he speaks not only of a sense of sharing in the fact of our insertion into this circuit, but also of the actual sharing that occurs within a community, wherein relations of dependence on others develop on the empirical level. Our initial rooting in the other becomes manifest in the feelings of attachment, protection and sympathy that accompany insertion into the community. This insertion into the empirical community functions as compensation for the bodily and spiritual trauma of individuation that comes with the initial separation from the mother. Again here Patoka speaks of a warmth that is provided through the community, a warmth that is pre-prepared and which we passively accept and sink ourselves into. Once again we find a delicate double movement at work in Patokas writing. A home is both the place where we sink roots into the earth and into others, and the place where needs are met, which likewise occurs through the mediation of others. For modern humans this procuring of what is needed occurs through the mechanized functioning of technology and administrative processes. These processes by which our needs are met require a certain level of objectification of ourselves and others, and eventually lead to relations of submission and domination. Patoka writes:
The innermost circle is the anchoring in people; that is made possible by an anchoring in things as in the conditions of life as such; that in turn is made possible by assuming an external relation to people as the condition of this condition. Power relations, relations of coordination and subordination in concord and in opposition are ultimately those on which life rests.48

Which life is Patoka referring to here? It would seems that the relations upon which the preservation of life rests are precisely those which threaten to alienate or repress the initial rooting that make them possible in the first place. When Patoka speaks of crisis or homelessness this is precisely what he has in mind, a reformulation of the Husserlian sense of crisis as a disconnection of the sciences from their original rooting in the lifeworld. For Patoka, the objectifying relations which make the sustenance of life possible repress the pre-objective, fundamental and primordial relation to others and the natural world as a whole. This alienation from our primordial life alienates us as well from what Patoka takes to be the natural teleology of humans. He has already stated that
48

NWP, p. 261.

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our perceptual life has a teleological orientation towards others. Now it is added that the point of our existence is to reach from a merely given life to the emergence of a true life [...] a life universal, giving birth to all in all, evoking life in the other, a self-transcendence toward the other and with him again to infinity.49 This brings us back to the question of the core of vital warmth into which via the community and our corporeal rooting in the world we anchor ourselves. Though we described this warmth as the feel of life, Patoka is quick to assert that this is not a mere feeling which life can primordially unfold in order to become in time, a life of personally assumed and executed activity.50 To root oneself in the world, to spread ones existence into the depth of the world and to feel this vital core of warmth is also to enter into an erotic relation, it is to take up this life, this warmth, and return it. It is in this relation that Patoka says life truly feels itself. This awakening to life, or life awakening to itself is all the more lively and needed, the more that personal life had previously been mechanized and depersonalized to the point of a total absence from oneself51, it is a release from the instrumental body, which is why in the Heretical Essays Patoka relates this feeling of what is called a mysterium tremendum to orgiastic release and sexuality in general.52 It is through the erotic relation, the original corporeal rooting in the other that Patoka says we begin life anew, begin to feel life, regaining the pre-objective relation to life it acquires an unexpected attractiveness and intensity without loosing any of its impenetrability, its virgin depth and unreachable mystery.53

3. The body at the front

It is time now to return to the front and see what this detour through the role of corporeity in Patokas later thought has added to our underNWP, p. 263. NWP, p. 264. 51 Ibid. 52 HE, p. 101. As with many of Patokas terms there is a double movement here, the orgiastic which on the one hand Patoka argues needs to be brought into the realm of responsibility is on one side of the term and I think can be related to the erotic feel of life itself. On the other hand Patoka also uses the term orgiastic to describe the release of energy that comes about from the repression of the first movement of rooting, this orgiastic is essentially war, he writes in Is Technological Decadent, and Why, A new flood of the orgiastic is an inevitable appendage to addition to things, to their everyday procurement, to bondage to life (HE, p. 113), the life that this latter orgiastic refers to is the mere or given biological life, the other sense of the orgiastic is related to the full or true sense of life, though the relation is not a conscious one. 53 NWP, p. 264.
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standing of the enigma of the front. The analysis of the boundary experience and the analysis of the world in Natural World and Phenomenology make it clear that it is of extreme importance to Patoka that the world not be understood as a thing. Rather it is the prevenient whole, the background which makes all objectivities possible, against which things manifest themselves. This no-thing, which Ivan Chvatk reminds us the responsible thinker must treat as nothing, is what we are opened to at the front.54 This no-thing speaks to us.55 To this inventory of no-things we must also add the body, which we learned is always already inserted in a primordial circuit of empathy with the world.56 The result of this is that the body is not simply on the front; we can say instead that the body is the front. The body itself becomes this boundary with the world as originary nothingness. As the front is the annihilation of the order of the day, and with it the cultural and historical horizon in which the order was situated, the landscape of the front and the body which now form one It seems to me that one could show that the Front is not simply a line of fire, the interface of people attacking each other, but that it is also in some way the crest of the wave that bears the world of humans towards its new destiny57 become a no-where place between nature and culture/spirit. The body overcomes the nature-spirit separation, but provides again the first primordial institution of negativity, which allows meaning to emerge, reestablishing the cleavage. However, in order to arrive at this point where the body can come to be understood in this way, a sort of involuntary reduction must be carried out, not a reduction to a transcendental absolute subjectivity, but rather the sort of reduction that Merleau-Ponty calls for in The Philosopher and His Shadow and which one might read the Phenomenology of Perception as an expounding of, a reduction to nature, to our primordial empathic relation with the world, rather than a reduction from nature.58
54 [] the transformation of the meaning of life which here [at the front] trips on nothingness, on a boundary over which it cannot step, HE, p. 131. 55 I. CHVATK, op. cit., p. 62. 56 In a deeper sense, however, he [man] is never a thing, as already the primacy of sinking roots into others testifies, NWP, p. 262. 57 Patoka quoting Teilhard de Chardin, HE 125, from Pierre TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, La nostalgie du front, in Ecrits du temps de la guerre, Grasset, Paris, 1965. p. 210. 58 M. MERLEAU-PONTY, Signs, English translation by Richard C. McCleary, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1964, p. 178; Cf. also R. BERNET, op. cit., p. 57; H.-R. Sepp also notes that Patokas break from meaning makes use of the radicality of the Husserlian notion of epoch, though in a much different sense than Husserl uses the concept of epoch, cf. H.-R. SEPP, op. cit., p. 170.

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Nature as understood here is not an in-itself, but rather as Rudolf Bernet writes in his essay on Merleau-Ponty The Subject in Nature, nature is something at the heart of human existence that does not properly belong to the human subject: a ground (Grund) of its constituting capacities, that is at the same time a non-ground or abyss (Abgrund), a capacity that evades constituting reason and hence as Patoka writes, it appears as non-existence from the point of view of the day.59 If we are to speak of the front as an involuntary reduction to nature, then we must understand that implicated in this is a shift from an active self, or active body, to a habitual or passive self, and hence despite the annihilation at the front of history as a cultural horizon, we are left still with what can be called a proto-memory, or proto-history, this temporal depth that results precisely from the bodily rooting in the all embracing context of landscape.60 The experience of the front restores to the body its natal past, which is first of all an intersubjectivity intercorporeity and becomes culture, traditionality only by way of this sensible and corporeal communication.61 It is intersubjectivity which is here again fundamental in the formation of the solidarity of the shaken. In one sense the reduction to the natural world as a world wherein I am primordially, through the fact of corporeity, rooted in the other, already accomplishes a certain solidarity in that it is the negation of the (necessary) movement which in Patokas words perverts the natural world into its opposite, i.e., the movement of work and self-prolongation, and objectification.62 However, this primordial level of solidarity is not enough; for one thing, humans cannot live without this second objectifying movement, but the literal return to the natural world at the front is a necessary step to establishing the solidarity of the shaken as initially a corporeal solidarity. Patoka also argues that this return to the natural world by way of our corporeity, though necessary, is limited. The front as a sort of reduction to the natural world, as a return to our primordial relation to the world, results in a negative self awareness I am not a thing, the world
R. BERNET, op. cit., p. 57. BCLW, p. 149. 61 We find this expression, natal past, in Merleau-Pontys discussion of Teilhard de Chardin in the Nature lectures. N, p. 273, I am essentially paraphrasing MerleauPonty here. 62 For we can see that in the movement of worldly being there is inevitably a phase or a mode whose very nature lies in the orientation of the world against itself in the self-prolongation through self-abandonment, it the orientation to objects, and in the self-loss, through distraction amid objectivities, NWP, p. 269.
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is not a thing but rather a pre-given whole but the encounter with this whole as an encounter with a radical loss of meaning, the border of meaning itself, prepares us for the solidarity of the shaken, which Patoka tells us is a solidarity of spirit and understanding. What is important is that the experience of the front has collapsed the distinction between nature and spirit, and thus opened us to the establishing of this new community through our primordial intercorporeity, even if it transcends it, i.e., preserves yet surpasses it. All three of Patokas movements are ways in which we encounter the other our neighbour as well as modes of temporality in which the encounter takes place; as such the solidarity of the shaken must be first a return to the primordial movement of rooting in the other and a proto-history in which the other and the self are completely intertwined in an all encompassing empathic relation with the world. This movement however cannot be self-sufficient as human life always encompasses all three movements self anchoring, selfloss in self-sustenance and self finding in self surrender63 which are in fact parts of the overall movement of human life. The possibility of the third movement nonetheless rests first on a return to the fundamental corporeity of our existence. Patoka, referring to this whole of movement, reminds us that:
This movement is a movement in the most primordial, strongest sense of the word; each of our physical movements is in reality a part of this all-embracing overall movement that we are our movements are after all, essentially the movements of a subject-body or are inseperably marked by this body in their meaning and likewise all givenness is a component of what is essentially a corporeal orienting which we can therefore only designate as a movement.64

Where does the body take us then? The return to the natural world through our primordial rooting in others, is as much a return to our finitude. In this return, wherein I realize my dependence on and intertwining with the other, there is also the possibility for Patoka of transcending this finitude and moving with the other towards the infinite. This possibility emerges in the abysmal depth of the front, in the realization that the enemy, who has already with me undergone this involuntary reduction, has become fused with me, as a fellow participant and discoverer of this primordial situation. The foundation of the solidarity of the shaken is what Patoka calls in the Heretical Essays the abys63 64

Ibid. Ibid.

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mal realm of the prayer for the enemy, the phenomenon of loving those who hate us.65 What is this abysmal realm? It is the placing of my life into the other, without carrying out the return movement back to myself, rather Patoka says, it is to give myself to the other.66 This giving of myself over to the other, or in a sense sacrificing my very being to the other, is a truly authentic sacrifice in which an awareness is gained of myself as essentially infinite, reproducing the whole in each part.67 Yet this awareness can only come about by acclaiming our finitude. This is achieved first in a negative movement of shaking that is accomplished at the front, the negation of our objectified rootedness in a role. Here we have the answer to a question that was posed in the beginning of this essay: how is it that we are both rooted creatures and uprooted at the same time? What we are uprooted from at the front, as the paradigm of the political, is any role a profession, a career, a nationality that we had taken in life, and with which we have merged, to the extent of a complete alienation from our natural being. These roles, which allow us to preserve and continue our lives, also constitute what Patoka calls our enslavement to life in the biological sense. This enslavement to life is what allows humans to be manipulated in the drive towards war and so Patoka tells us, it is life which gives birth to war, and that the history of war is the history of mere life, barren and chained by fear,68, or as Patoka says elsewhere, deadness is death that seized our life from behind our backs, draining it under the pretext of preserving it, of repeating its moments.69 The front line, as a release from all roles, is likewise a release from our enslavement to this mere life, an absolute freedom, but it is a freedom that we share with the other to whom we surrender and sacrifice ourselves. The solidarity of the shaken is a community of an absolutely necessary and primordial vulnerability to the other, only as such can it be a free and historical community. Though he does not use the same terminology in Wars of the Twentieth Century, in Natural World and Phenomenology Patoka describes the relation to the whole that comes about through the shaking of all objective roles as a question. A question is posed by the whole, and so the experience of the front is likewise a question, a question which is not answered by any appeal to social forces. Thus the question itself is a call to what Patoka describes as the side of the front. This does
HE, p. 131. NWP, p. 262. 67 Ibid., p. 263. 68 HE, p. 134. 69 NWP, p. 267.
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not mean it is a call to war. Quite the opposite, the question posed by the front, which is the question of history, itself is a call to resist war and resist all those answers to this question, those pleasing slogans of the day which are in fact the real call to war. To pose a question to the earth and the sky in other words to our horizons means, Patoka argues, to sacrifice oneself so that something other could be.70 This other brings us to a problem: our natural being, our corporeal being is, as we have seen, fundamentally horizontal and finite, but there is no question that the experience of the front is also, in addition to a reduction to our primordial or natural being, an encounter with an infinite or absolute meaning. We may only be brought into contact with this meaning through the body, through our vulnerability and dependence on the other, and through the horizontal experience of the natural world, but this absolute is there: in acclaiming finitude, finitude is overcome in the sense of overcoming and preserving.71 Even the passage from Wars of the Twentieth Century which first alerted us to the centrality of corporeity in the experience of the front, ends with a reference to what is without doubt an appeal to a sense of a-horizontality: so the landscape of lifes fundamental meanings has been transformed, it has acquired an end beyond which there can be nothing further, higher, more desirable.72 This is a problem in Patokas work that has been pointed out by some of the most astute readers of the Heretical Essays.73 In the radical encounter with the negativity of the world, a negativity which contains some sense of overwhelming meaning, Patoka establishes the possibility of an absolute meaning, one that betrays the horizontality of the natural world. In conclusion, I would like to try to offer a partial solution to this problem by suggesting that this absolute in the Heretical Essays is life itself, life freed from its enslavement to the mere biological sense. Simply giving a name to this absolute meaning does not excuse it from being absolute, from being a metaphysical turn. If we wish to argue that this
Ibid. Ibid. 72 HE, p. 131. 73 It seems therefore, that despite all Patokas efforts to liberate himself from metaphysics, his attempt to meet Weisschedels demand and maintain at least a hypothetical hope for absolute meaning is, in its own way, nihilistic and still belongs to the history of onto-theological metaphysics. I. CHVATK, op. cit., p. 72; Patoka clearly did not establish an explicit link between his interpretation of the unparalleled possibility of breaking off of meaning in the radical experience of the border and his analysis of the natural world-relationship nor did he consider the consequences that the paradox in the idea of an innerworldly escape from the world entailed for his conception of the world. H.-R. SEPP, op. cit., p. 170.
70 71

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meaning which fills the void of the front is life itself, then this must be life as a full phenomenological concept, a phenomenology of life. Certainly in Wars of the Twentieth Century Patoka makes many references to life as this meaning which defies all meaning, this otherof-meaning. In the passage we referred to earlier it was precisely life that Patoka says is the most profound discovery of the front. In this same passage he refers to life as a mere non-existence from the point of view of the day, and also as nothingness.74 Paradoxically, nor is this move towards the infinite without its temporality: the relation in which I acclaim my finitude by giving myself over to the other and hence gaining the awareness of myself as essentially infinite is future oriented; the movement at the front is an opening to the other that is not determinate.75 If this experience is determined by an absolute, then we must say that it is an absolute from below. This view, despite the fact that Patoka seemingly refers to this absolute meaning as life several times in Wars of the Twentieth Century, is not without its problems. It is after all not the core of essential warmth that is the feel of life which we find at the front; the experience of the front transports us to the freezing cold of non-being.76 Patoka also speaks of life in relation to a more primordial meaning in the giving over of oneself to the other:
Life is not capable only of preserving itself by giving up on itself, but of transforming itself in self-surrender. It succeeds in proclaiming itself not as the highest power but as a powerlessness which yields itself to the power of the higher primordial meaning. Only here does life gain the negative power/strength of self surrender, of self-dedication [] the strength of the transubstantiation of life is the strength of a new love.77

But what is spoken of here is not a power over life but a transubstantiation of life, a life transformed at the front. When describing the return to the natural world Patoka claims that in being shaken:
I begin to live life anew, feeling my life, and that in all that up to then had escaped me and been present only in concealment without that life becoming an object [] it only acquires an unexpected attractiveness and intensity without losing any of its impenetrability, its virgin depth and unreachable mystery, any of that distance that indicated we are dealing with the past.78
HE, p. 131. NWP, p. 266. 76 Ibid., p. 265. 77 NWP, pp. 267-268. 78 NWP, p. 264.
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This passage refers to the first movement, the experience of the natural world, and likewise to the sense of the natal past rather than an open future. However it seems to complement perfectly the description of the indescribable meaningfulness of the front. If this experience of the natural world is so important to the experience of the front, then it seems fully plausible that the immense meaningfulness of the front is in fact the experience of life transformed. In a sense we may speak here of a transcendence of life, in that it moves beyond the relation to a natal past, opening itself up to the future. If this is lifes transcendence of itself, we may then say that the absolute meaning that we are exposed to at the front, the experience beyond which there is nothing further, nothing higher, is lifes own movement and surpassing of itself. As such it is the inner-worldly transcendence of the world. If we are to demand a name for this movement, this silent lgoj of the world, Patoka has given us one. It is love.79

79

Ibid.