”Fenomenologin får inte vara en metafysik, utan en kritik av all metafysik, av alla stelnade system.”
”Om vi vill nå fram till sanningen kan vi inte bara söka efter den i lågländerna och vi får inte låta oss fascineras av den ytliga harmonins stillhet; vi måste låta det oroande, det oförsonliga och det gåtfulla växa i oss, det som det vanliga livet blundar för, det som det förbigår till förmån for dagens ordning.”
Inledning till fenomenologisk filosofi samlar de föreläsningar som den tjeckiske filosofen Jan Patočka höll vid Karlsuniversitet i Prag mellan 1969 och 1970.
Det som står i fokus är fenomenologin och dess utveckling från Edmund Husserls första arbeten fram till och med Martin Heideggers analyser i Vara och tid. I dessa föreläsningar introducerar Patočka fenomenologin genom att framhålla både fenomenologins aktualitet och dess många kontaktytor med filosofihistorien.
Dessa föreläsningar kan betraktas som en inledning till fenomenologins grundbegrepp, likaväl som ett utmärkt sätt att bekanta sig med viktiga dimensioner i Patočkas egen filosofi.
In Patočka’s later thought, death is a recurring theme. It is something that he analyzes phenomenologically and existentially, but also a theme that is related to his critique of modernity and to his philosophy of history. In this article, I analyze the question of death more broadly in Patočka’s later philosophy in order to show how his reflections in “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” can shed new light on his understanding of our co-existence with others and provide us with a phenomenological concretion that is lacking in his more speculative philosophy of history. By relating “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” to Patočka’s more famous analyses in the Heretical Essays, we can also understand the interconnection between his political thought and his so called “a-subjective phenomenology” in greater detail.
This article discusses the relationship between Jan Patocka's and Vaclav Havel's political writings. By specifically focusing on Patocka's concepts a "life in the idea" and a " life in problematicity" and Havel's notion of a "life in truth", it seeks to draw out the differences and similarities between their respective understandings of the relationship between truth and politics. The paper argues that Havel reinterpreted Patocka's ideas in a way, which in the final analysis diverged from Patocka's original intentions. Finally, the article argues that Havel's, in many ways productive, reinterpretation gives rise to a highly problematic conception of ideology and politics since the "pre-political" form of politics that Havel envisions ultimately tends to naturalize both truth and politics.
The present investigation analyses the political thought of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. It focuses on the question of how we are to understand political life: what are its distinguishing features and how we are to circumscribe it conceptually. According to Patočka the experience of politics is one characterized by a loss of meaning, a loss of a foundation or principle that could lend stability to our lives. It is an experience of a tremor by and through which the foundations of our experience are shaken.
Philosophy’s political task is, however, not to provide any foundation for political life, but rather to address the question of why man is inclined to posit metaphysical foundations and why refuge in ideological principles is sought. Philosophy must instead engage with the groundlessness and negativity permeating human existence as such. In order to provide an analysis of human existence, and how this very groundlessness of existence is exposed in politics, Patočka calls for an “a-subjective phenomenology” that abandons the traditional notion of the subject and of subjectivity. An “a-subjective” phenomenological analysis is central for the present investigation. The author shows that it is only by and through Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology that his political thought can be understood; out of his distinctive phenomenological analyses, the negativity, instability and groundlessness of human existence is brought to the fore. Politically, this negativity manifests itself in two phenomena, which, when taken together, constitute the very bedrock for politics: freedom and human coexistence. Human existence is neither stable nor self-sufficient. On the contrary, it is always already exposed to others, always already engaged in the self-transcending movement of its freedom. Freedom and coexistence are in this respect two interrelated expressions of the inherent negativity of human existence and two phenomena that, accordingly, occupy a privileged position in this study. The author seeks to show that it is by way of an in-depth analysis of freedom and coexistence that the question of politics can be addressed in the work of Patočka since they give testament to the trembling, unnerving, and disorienting nature of politics.
In this article, Strandberg analyses the development of Swedish cultural policy during the last decades. In contradistinction to the first policy proposition from 1974, which emphasised the importance of counteracting the negative impact of the market, the cultural policies that have been in place for the last twenty to thirty years consider the forces of the market to be conducive to the freedom of culture and the arts. This has entailed a paradigm shift in Swedish culture that has opened up the field of cultural policy for the so-called creative industries, equated culture with creativity, and collapsed the distinction between culture and creative forms of entrepreneurship. When analysing this, Strandberg relates the modern history of Swedish cultural policy to the wider international development that has given rise to the paradigm of the creative industries and discusses how the equation of culture with creativity has made the autonomy of culture and the arts more and more difficult to uphold.
In this article, I examine Reiner Schürmann's interpretation of Nietzsche's critique of subjectivity. By focusing on Nietzsche's reflections on the difference between weight and lightness, I analyze Nietzsche's critique of the appropriative nature of man and relate it to his understanding of the expropriative tendency in human existence. In the second part of the article, this Nietzschean understanding of subjectivity is developed through Schürmann's interpretation of Nietzsche. Here, the onus is placed on Schürmann's understanding of "the will to power." For Schürmann, the will to power is the completion of man's appropriative nature at the same time as it is points beyond subjectivity and towards an understanding of man as an expropriative being. The aim of the article is to show up Nietzsche's importance for Schürmann's thought and to investigate how his interpretation can shed light on what existence would become if it transcended the limits of the appropriating subject.
From its very inception philosophy has been preoccupied with death, so much so that many philosophers have received the reputation of being somber, melancholic, and morbid in nature. By continuously reflecting on the meaning and nature of death, philosophers have seemingly been shrouded in darkness to such an extent that their contemporaries considered them to be dead long before they met their own demise. While this image of the moribund philosopher can certainly be questioned, the fact remains that many philosophers, and then especially the ancient ones, have insisted that there is an essential relation between philosophical thought and death. A life dedicated to philosophy would, it seems, at the same time imply a life lived in the shadow of death.
Den här boken tar sin utgångspunkt i Myndigheten för kultur- analys rapport Så fri är konsten, som publicerades i juni 2021. Boken är utformad som en motrapport och ställer ett antal speci- fika frågor: hur bör vi förstå begreppet ”konstens frihet” under samtida förutsättningar? Vilka är relationerna mellan det be- greppet och de ”kreativa näringarnas” fält och principen om ”armlängds avstånd”? Och vilka skulle de politiska implikatio- nerna vara av en sträng förståelse av ”konstens frihet”? Men bok- en vill samtidigt, på en mer generell nivå, bidra till att öppna en principiell diskussion om vad en långsiktig, progressiv och anti- rasistisk kulturpolitik skulle kunna vara i Sverige idag, mot bak- grund av ett politiskt läge som kännetecknas av konservativa, xenofobiska och antiintellektuella krafters allt starkare inflytande. Författarna är forskare i Estetik och Filosofi vid Södertörns Högskola, där de driver forskningsprojektet Autonomi, kultur, handling: om kulturens politiska handlingssfärer i den nyliberala väl- färdsstaten, finansierat av Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2021–24.