Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death 3031495489, 9783031495489

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Contributions to Phenomenology 128

Gustav Strandberg Hugo Strandberg   Editors

Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death

Contributions to Phenomenology In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology

Volume 128 Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, Department of Philosophy Pennsylvania State University State College, PA, USA Ted Toadvine, Department of Philosophy Pennsylvania State University State College, PA, USA Editorial Board Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive KU Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University Atlanta, GA, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University of Hong KongSha Tin, Hong Kong James Dodd, New School University New York, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, University of Lille Lille, France José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong Sha Tin, Hong Kong Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University Seoul, Korea (Republic of) Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne Cologne, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University Ohio, USA Algis Mickunas, Ohio University Ohio, USA J. N. Mohanty, Temple University Philadelphia, USA Dermot Moran, University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis Memphis, USA Gail Soffer, Roma Tre University Rome, Italy

Anthony Steinbock, Department of Philosophy Stony Brook University Stony Brook New York, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University Sapporo, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University Nashville, USA Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than 100 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship,the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology.

Gustav Strandberg  •  Hugo Strandberg Editors

Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death

Editors Gustav Strandberg Department of Culture and Education Södertörn University Huddinge, Sweden

Hugo Strandberg Department of Philosophy Åbo Akademi University Turku, Finland

ISSN 0923-9545     ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions to Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-031-49547-2    ISBN 978-3-031-49548-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

 1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Gustav Strandberg and Hugo Strandberg  2 The Phenomenology of Afterlife ������������������������������������������������������������   13 Jan Patočka  3 T  o Live After Death: Where? Patočka’s “Phenomenology of Afterlife” and Its Contexts������������������   25 Jan Frei  4 Dying  With the Other: Death as the Manifestation of Community����   37 Gustav Strandberg  5 The  Intimacy of Disappearance��������������������������������������������������������������   53 Nicolas de Warren  6 Forgiveness  and the Dead������������������������������������������������������������������������   69 Hugo Strandberg  7 Postmortal  Openness to Meaning����������������������������������������������������������   83 Tomáš Hejduk  8 The  Other Modern Séances��������������������������������������������������������������������   99 Ondřej Beran  9 What  Does It Mean to Love the Dead?��������������������������������������������������  121 Erin Plunkett 10 Between  Memory and History: Retracing Historical Knowledge Through a Phenomenology of Afterlife������������������������������  139 Lovisa Andén

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11 Drawing  a Line or Blurring the Contour Between Animate and Inanimate with Clarice Lispector and Jan Patočka����������������������  153 Antony Fredriksson 12 “Unresting  Death, a Whole Day Nearer Now”: Parfit and Patočka on Death and False Consolations��������������������������  167 Niklas Forsberg

Contributors

Lovisa  Andén is associate professor of philosophy at the Arctic University of Norway. She is the co-editor of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Le problème de la parole: Cours au Collège de France, Notes, 1953–1954 (MetisPresses, 2020), and her research examines questions of representation, truth and experience in witness literature. Ondřej Beran is associate professor of philosophy, based at the Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. His recent publications include the monograph Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking (Routledge, 2021). Niklas Forsberg is head of research at the Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. He is the author of Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary: Language and Morality in J. L. Austin’s Philosophy (Routledge, 2022) and Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2013). Antony Fredriksson is researcher at the Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. His latest monograph is A Phenomenology of Attention and the Unfamiliar (Palgrave, 2022). Jan  Frei is research fellow at the Czech Academy of Sciences (Institute for Philosophy), translator, and current head of the Jan Patočka Archive. His research interest is the existential stratum in Patočka’s philosophy. Tomáš Hejduk is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. His latest monograph is Nepolitická politika v díle Ladislava Hejdánka (Filosofia, 2021), and the latest paper is “What Form of Existentialism is there in Havel’s Concept of Dissent?” (Filosofický časopis, 2022). Erin Plunkett is senior lecturer of philosophy and religious studies at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She is the co-editor of The Selected Works of Jan Patocka (Bloomsbury, 2022) and the editor of Kierkegaard and Possibility (Bloomsbury, 2023). vii

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Gustav  Strandberg is senior lecturer of philosophy at Södertörn University, Sweden. He specializes in phenomenology, political philosophy, and aesthetics, and recent publications include the edited volume Populism and the People in Contemporary Critical Thought (Bloomsbury, 2023). Hugo Strandberg is associate professor of philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. His latest monographs are Forgiveness and Moral Understanding (Palgrave, 2021) and Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception (Palgrave, 2015). Nicolas de Warren is professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA.  He is the author of Husserl and the Promise of Time (Cambridge University Press, 2010), A Momentary Breathlessness in the Sadness of Time (Jonas ir Jokūbas, 2018), Original Forgiveness (Northwestern University Press, 2020), and German Philosophy and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Chapter 1

Introduction Gustav Strandberg and Hugo Strandberg

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. This is, at least, what Plato could be said to claim in the suite of dialogues that revolve around the trial and death of Socrates. To begin with, we have no reason to fear death, since death is, as Socrates expresses it in the Apology, something of which we cannot have any knowledge. Hence, to fear death is “nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not; for it is to think one knows what one does not know”. (2005, 107, 29a)1 But Plato does not only admonish us to discard all of our irrational and hubristic fears of the unknown. He also holds that death is intimately tied to the ethos, the way of life, of the philosopher. This is spelled out most clearly  At the end of the Apology, however, Socrates makes some claims about life after death (40c–41c).

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G. Strandberg Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] H. Strandberg (*) Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_1

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in the Phaedo, in which Socrates introduces the notion that death is the separation of the soul from the body, something which in turn implies that the state of being dead is a state in which the soul has been liberated from the body and exists by itself.2 By and through the dialectic of the dialogue, Socrates uses this notion in order to show that throughout his life the true philosopher attempts to avoid all that is associated with the contingency of the body. The philosopher is temperate and keeps away from bodily pleasures in the form of food and drink, he despises superficialities such as fine clothes and other bodily ornaments, and he considers the bodily senses as hindrances “in his attempt to search out the pure, absolute essence of things”. (2005, 229, 66a) As Socrates puts it, those who practice philosophy in the true sense of the word therefore “study nothing but dying and being dead”. (2005, 223, 64a) In fact, philosophy, as a specific way of life, can be understood as a continuous practice in dying, a continuous attempt to live life as if it was already over and as if the soul had already been liberated from the shackles of the body. Thus, it would, as Socrates remarks, be absurd if someone “who had been all his life fitting himself to live as nearly in a state of death as he could, should then be disturbed when death came to him”. (2005, 235, 67e) In other words, for Plato, death is not only something we should not fear, it is something we as philosophers should embrace and welcome. These reflections on death, and on the relationship between philosophy and death, that we find in Plato’s work, have reverberated through the history of philosophy. A century or so after Plato’s own death, Epicurus would, for example, write in his famous “Letter to Menoeceus” that “death, the most frightening thing, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist”. (1994, 29) While Epicurus’ attitude is reminiscent of Socrates’ injunction that we should not fear what we do not know, other thinkers would build upon Plato’s understanding of the necessary relation between death and a philosophical way of life. It was, for instance, echoed in Seneca’s thought when he wrote “he will live badly who does not know how to die well.” (1997, 92) This sentiment lived on in Cicero’s work who approvingly quoted Socrates’ sayings from the Phaedo, and would later find its way into the work of later thinkers such as Montaigne, whose essay “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die”, noted that “premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave”. (1966, 60) To be sure, this Platonic way of addressing our own mortality gradually disappeared with the onset of modernity. The focus of most modern philosophers was no longer the purported immortality of the soul and our possible survival after death. This notwithstanding, death has remained an important and recurring theme in modern thought as well. And even though we would be well advised not to exaggerate the importance of the Platonic position for modern philosophy, there are still lingering traces of it. While it has taken different forms, the recognition of the

 For a discussion about the various senses of the terms “soul” and “body” in Plato’s texts, and hence the various ways the distinction is employed, see Strandberg 2015, 10–12. 2

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importance of death in and for life is still present in modern philosophy. To see this, we only need to remind ourselves of Hegel’s analyses of the master-slave-dialectic. In the fight for life and death, it is ultimately the master’s willingness to risk his own life that sets him apart from the slave: “it is solely by staking one’s life that freedom is proven to be the essence, namely, that as a result the essence for self-­consciousness is proven to be not being […] but rather […] that self-consciousness is only pure being-for-itself.” (2018, 111) At the same time, also the slave, the one who lets himself be enslaved rather than killed, thereby goes through an important transformation, for the slave felt the fear of death, the absolute master. In that feeling, it had inwardly fallen into dissolution, trembled in its depths, and all that was fixed within it had been shaken loose. However, this pure universal movement, this way in which all stable existence becomes absolutely fluid, is the simple essence of self-consciousness; it is absolute negativity, pure being-for-­ itself” (115).

In the post-Hegelian tradition, the ability to face up to our own finitude has been interpreted not only as what separates the master from the slave, but also as what separates man from other animals: all animals die, but man is the only animal who may consciously choose his own demise. While it is possible to live without engaging with our own death, such a life is ultimately deemed to be unfree, just as Montaigne once noted. A similar, albeit differently formulated, understanding of death can be found in Heidegger’s seminal analysis of being-towards-death in Being and Time. When Dasein confronts its own finitude, it stands, as Heidegger formulates it, “before itself in its ownmost potentiality of being” in such a way that its own authentic existence is disclosed. (2010, 241) By explicitly relating to our own finitude, we are thrown back upon ourselves and torn away from the inauthentic way of being, in which we ordinarily live our lives. That is, we are torn away from “the they,” and the way in which it covers over our death by turning it into an impersonal form of “dying” that we can purportedly control. In order to truly exist, in order to exist authentically and to live our life – and not merely repeat the life of others – we need to live it such that we are open to the fact that our own death is a necessary part of our lived existence. Even though he radically transformed our understanding of death by analyzing it in strictly atheist terms, Heidegger’s thought is clearly in keeping with the valuation of death that we find from Plato and onward in Western philosophy. However, regardless whether we are speaking of the intimate connection between philosophical thought and death, the relation between our mortality and freedom, or of how our own finitude forces us to take responsibility for our own life, it is clear that philosophers throughout history have almost always focused on how we relate to our own death. Instead of attempting to come to terms with the many deaths that we do experience in our lives, philosophy has privileged the only death that withdraws from our experience, or that we can only experience momentarily at the cost of never experiencing anything else. In and of itself, this is not that surprising, for due to the opacity, anxiety, and sense of wonder that our own death gives rise to

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death is one of the perennial questions of philosophy. Still, this has led to a situation in which the death of others has received surprisingly little philosophical attention. One notable exception to this, however, is Jan Patočka’s (1907–1977) essay “The Phenomenology of Afterlife”, to which this volume is dedicated. In this essay, Patočka reflects on our relation to the dead and on how the departure of a loved one affects our existence. The premise of his investigation is that our existence always takes place by and through an originary and reciprocal “being for others”. Even our own relation to ourselves is predicated on this reciprocity: we relate to ourselves in ways that are mediated by the reactions and responses of others. However, this constitutive reciprocity disappears as soon as the other dies. Thus, the death of the other gives rise to a set of themes that concern not only our relation to the dead, but which at the same time calls human existence as such into question. Taking Patočka’s essay as its starting point – the first English translation of which is included in the volume – the contributions in this anthology seek to respond to the questions that Patočka once raised by continuing the reflection that he initiated. Before presenting the individual contributions in greater detail, it is, however, necessary to provide a more detailed account of what Patočka actually puts forward in his relatively short, but philosophically rich essay.

The Phenomenology of Afterlife During large parts of his life, Jan Patočka was banned from publishing. The censorship and oppression of the communist regime of Czechoslovakia meant that he could never truly pursue an academic career. As a result, many of Patočka’s most important texts were only disseminated in a clandestine way during his lifetime and were only published posthumously. This is also the case when it comes to the essay “The Phenomenology of Afterlife”. Unfortunately, this essay was left unfinished by Patočka and was, as far as we know, never disseminated during his lifetime. In fact, we do not have much information about the essay at all, and we still do not know exactly when it was written, though it was clearly written sometime during the latter part of his life. The essay was found together with a number of other manuscripts that date from the 1960s, which seems to suggest that the essay was written during the same period. Some have argued, with some plausibility, that it was written after Patočka’s wife Helena had passed away in the autumn of 1966. Yet, in a letter to Walter Biemel written in 1976, Patočka notes that he is working on “a study on ‘life after death and immortality’”.3 Ultimately, we still do not know whether or not he had already began working on it in the 1960s and merely sought to finish it in 1976, or if the manuscript as a whole was written at a later date. But regardless of when it was actually written, and regardless if it was written in a state of mourning, Patočka’s  For more bibliographical information about Patočka’s essay, see Erika Abrams’ comments in relation to the French translation of the text (Patočka 1995, 296–297). See also Jan Frei’s contribution in this volume. 3

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attempt at coming to terms with the afterlife of a loved one remains a fascinating essay about something that all of us someday will face. In what follows, we will provide a summary of the main arguments in Patočka’s text. Needless to say, this summary will not delve into all of the aspects of the essay, but our hope is that it can provide the reader with some important signposts about Patočka’s way of thinking. In the beginning of the essay Patočka notes that the question of afterlife usually has been reduced to a question concerning the mortality or immortality of the soul. From Plato onward, the immortal soul has served as the substantial guarantor for our posterity. The question we need to ask ourselves, however, is how we are to conceive of the afterlife if we reject that conception: “how would afterlife be possible without its own substantial bearer?” (this volume, /130/)4 The immediate answer to this would be what Patočka calls a kind of “positivist consolation”: the diseased other has disappeared but lives on in us; in our recollections, memories, and the stories that we tell. To be sure, this is not immortality, but a precarious afterlife that is dependent on us, even if it arguably is the only thing that we can hope for. Still, this form of afterlife gives rise to a number of interrelated questions. It is remarkable, Patočka notes, “that nobody has asked with philosophical thoroughness: how does the other live in us? Who is this surviving other? What is his mode of being? To what extent is he identical to the one who lived, and how is this identity modified?” (/130/) These are the questions that Patočka sets out to analyze phenomenologically in his essay. When addressing these questions, Patočka starts out by noting that our existence is always already “an intersubjective formation”. In order to analyze this “formation”, we need to break it down analytically into its constituent parts. We are, first of all, beings in ourselves, and as such, “we live in our own, original, live presence in ourselves”. (/130/) This is a form of presence that only I have access to, and one that other people cannot participate in. Even though Patočka does not refer to Husserl in this context, his understanding of this form of presence is clearly indebted to Husserl’s analyses in the Cartesian Meditations. This original presence is admittedly quite opaque: in it, all our experiences arise in their actuality, but in a way that makes them inseparable from who we are. Because of this inseparability, our experiences can only appear in an unreflected form, which as Patočka writes, “prevents the capturing of the how” of experience. (/131/) In order to understand our experience, we need to objectify it and ourselves and change perspective so that we are no longer only an experiencing agent, but also the experience that is being analyzed. In turn, this requires that we, at least to some degree, make ourselves public, that we turn our original and unshareable presence into something public or visible that can be shared by others, something which is primarily done by and through language. Our being in ourselves would thus be transformed into a being for ourselves. But if we truly want to understand the imbricated nature of our existence, these two forms

 The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the below English translation. 4

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(being in oneself and being for oneself) need to be understood in relation to our being for others. My being for others has its specific originarity as well, but one that I cannot fully comprehend. I know that I appear for others, just as others appear for me, but I can never perceive myself as a whole in the way other people can. Instead, my being for others is, Patočka writes, “the object of fantasy, imagination, meaning, considerations concerning me as an object of various purposeful actions of others”. (/133/) We do, however, have a basis for these more or less imaginary constructions. I am a being for others, but others are beings for me as well, and hence I know what it means to appear for others. Furthermore, our appearance in relation to others can be understood in both synchronic and diachronic terms: the other appears to me in the originarity of sensory givenness, but the other is also present to me in his physical absence. Of course, this also holds true for my being for others, which, as Patočka puts it, means that I can “live my own afterlife, my quasi-life in others”. (/133/) Our existence is thus an “intersubjective formation” that is constituted by the imbricated interplay between being in oneself, being for oneself, being for others, and another’s being for me. As long as we are alive all of these aspects of our existence are synchronized with each other and constitute an integral whole. The question that Patočka now raises is how this synchronic unity is affected when someone close to us dies, or, as he himself puts it: “to what mode of being does the deceased pass?” (/133/). To begin with, it is important to recognize that all forms of being for others that is not a mere figment of our imagination (such as a character in fiction) once had its own originality for itself. Even when someone dies, it thus still has its own inner originality. However, it is a being that is no longer synchronous with us any longer. What has disappeared is, to phrase it differently, the possibility of a reciprocal exchange with the other. Patočka writes: The dead person does not co-perceive, does not execute anything, but he withdraws from all this completely and becomes a mere object, which does not have the sense of “together” anymore, does not have the sense of participation in human enterprises, actions and interests. This participation is something that essentially takes place in reciprocity – life is life in reciprocity, and thus in the duality of being in itself and being for itself. (/134/)

Even after death, the deceased other is a being for us: he continues to be a part of our lives and we continue to relate to him, but there is no possibility for any synchronous exchange any longer. The other lives on, but at the mercy of our recollections, which also places a responsibility on our shoulders insofar as the deceased other can no longer affect how we actually perceive him. The dead person does not, Patočka writes, “have this possibility to make himself anymore; the dead person is a closed history, and even his possibilities are dead”. (/134/) This, then, presents us with an obvious problem, since the closed history of the other could mean that his identity is now predicated on our highly subjective memories of him. Patočka’s example here is of his dead father. For him, he is “my father”, whereas others might remember him as “Headmaster P.”, which could give the impression that the afterlife of the deceased is based on the respective roles and titles they once had when they were alive. (/134/) We might instinctively think that this is problematic, but if

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other people do not only live on as particular roles, who or what is actually preserved in their afterlife? When attempting to answer this question, Patočka makes reference to Roman Ingarden’s analysis of the metaphysical quality of a work of art, a quality that, according to Ingarden, presents itself as the unifying element of the artwork through which the artwork affects us, but which also has the capacity of unifying all of its multiple traits (form, content, color, style, etc.). (see Ingarden 1973) While Patočka does engage with Ingarden’s aesthetic theory in other texts (see Patočka 1990, 354f.), in this context he draws attention to the fact that something akin to this metaphysical quality seems to be present in our relation to the departed. Even when there is no longer any possibility of a synchronous exchange with the other, according to Patočka, we still perceive this metaphysical quality: it is present in photographs, portraits, literary remains, as well as in the words and deeds that we remember from the other. The metaphysical quality is, as he puts it, “something global, and therefore it has an affective character, the character of explicable implicatedness, which does not coincide with any detailed explicatum”. (/135/) It is, we might say, the unmistakable sense that is present in the other’s being for another; an affective sense of unity that encompasses all of the different traits that we associate with the person in question. Even though this quality does not arise from the originary relation that the other once had to himself – it is after all present even when this originary relation has disappeared – it is still related to something living according to Patočka, to something that is more living than the specific features and individual qualities of the departed. We can understand this to be analogous to Ingarden’s notion of the metaphysical quality of the work of art, but it is also related to Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of our perceptual experience, to which Patočka also refers in his essay. Following Merleau-Ponty, we could then speak of this quality as that which makes it possible for us to recognize who someone is before we can actually see them properly (by recognizing their specific gait and “style” of comportment) (see Merleau-Ponty 1967, 166f.). To be clear, we can only grasp this quality if the deceased other was someone close to us; but if the other was close to us, this quality lives on as an essential aspect of the other’s afterlife. The other thus lives on in us, and while this form of afterlife might give us some consolation, it will of course not alleviate the sorrow and sense of loss that the death of a loved one entails. As we have already seen, “life is life in reciprocity”, according to Patočka, and it is precisely this reciprocity that disappears when a loved one dies. There is, he writes, “a vacuum left after this reciprocity, there is suddenly a wall against which our habitus of reciprocity is crashing”. (/137/) If we look closer at this form of reciprocity, it becomes clear that it takes the form of a need for the other in our life. But we do not merely need the other as a mere existence, we need the other to need us, just as he reciprocally needs our need for him. By drawing on Alexandre Kojève’s famous interpretation of the master-slave-dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Patočka notes that there is a complicated structure in play here, since this reciprocal need for the need of the other will never reach any point of saturation, but is continuously intensified. Patočka also makes clear that this need should not be understood as a form of objectivation of the other or as an attempt to control the other’s freedom (a position Patočka identifies with Sartre’s

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understanding of intersubjectivity, but which can also be found in the Hegelian conception, upon which Patočka, at least in part, bases his analysis): We do not make ourselves into an object in order to take possession of another’s freedom, it is on the contrary fulfilment by emptiness: the need is not to be quenched, but should on the contrary be rekindled constantly, it should be renewed all the time: which is also the reason why the need for the other has the character of incessant actualization. This is why when real “saturation” occurs, when the need disappears, the result is a disappointment. (/137–138/)

As Patočka here makes clear, our need for the other’s need is rooted in a sense of emptiness or lack, but in an emptiness that is complicated by the fact that the other’s need for us will never fulfil it, but will rather act as a catalyst that continues to intensify our need. As such, our need for the other’s need is, Patočka notes, distinct from how our material needs, such as our need for food, sex, shelter, etc., are structured. If we want to understand the peculiar structure of our need for the other, we have to remind ourselves of Patočka’s initial claim that our existence is an “intersubjective formation”. Since our existence is always already an existence that is imbricated with others, we simply need others in our lives. I am never only a being in and/ or for myself and as such I am never self-enclosed, but always already “the experienced identity of this outer and inner just as the other himself is”. (/140/) Were it not for the presence of other people, my being-outside-my-self, just as the outside-­ himself of the other, would never lead anywhere. On the contrary, it is only in relation to another person that my being for another becomes explicit and actualized. Since my being for another is an essential part of who I am – an essential aspect of the integrity of my existence – it is only by relating to others that I become who I am, and that I can become someone different than I was before. This is precisely why I need the other’s need: I need to be a being for another, and this can only take place in a true sense if the other reciprocally needs me in his life so that he is a being for another as well. Even though Patočka never uses the concept himself, we can also speak of this in terms of identity. Without the reciprocal engagement with others there is no being for another, and hence an important aspect of my identity will never be actualized. From this, we can also understand why this continuous process of need will never come to a halt. I live my life in and with others, and this can never result in any sense of saturation or fullness since this would imply that my identity could be closed or completed, which it never is, not even when I am dead. This is also why my being for another cannot be understood as a form of alienation. It is not, Patočka writes, “something essentially inauthentic, but it belongs to the full content of one’s own being, to what this being essentially is, but what it can become internally, recuperatively only through another”. (/140/). As soon as we recognize how essential the other is for our own being, we can also start to understand in greater detail the sense of loss we experience when a loved one dies. The loss that we experience in such situations is not only the loss of a loved one, and the loss of the reciprocal engagement that we used to have, it is also a loss of the possibility of relating to ourselves that the other enabled for us. Hence, we also experience this loss as “the annulment of our own existence” and as a “living death”. (/141/) We go on living, but what was once an essential part of us has

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died. It is a living death, in which we have lost “the possibility to feel ourselves, the possibility that the other used to give us, the possibility that we were for ourselves on the basis of the other”. (/141/) As will become clear from the other contributions in this volume, Patočka’s understanding of the afterlife, together with his analysis of how the death of the other manifests itself as a living death for the survivors who are left behind, elicits a wide variety of questions. For instance, in what way can Patočka’s reflections help us to understand grief and mourning; how is our relation to the dead affected when our life together was marked by conflict or by non-reciprocal love? Likewise, how are we to understand our existence to begin with, when the “intersubjective formation” that we are is no longer limited to our co-existence with the living, but is permeated, perhaps even haunted, by our relations to the dead? The contributors in this volume seek to respond to these, and to similar, issues, and they do so by extending the field of inquiry into the wider phenomenological and post-phenomenological discussion of death; by taking cognisance of how works of literature can broaden our understanding of death, grief, and forgiveness; and lastly by reflecting on issues of philosophical anthropology, community, collective memory, and the ecstatic nature of life – issues that can all be related back to Patočka’s initial reflections, but which nonetheless radiate in other directions.

The Essays in this Volume The volume begins with Patočka’s essay “The Phenomenology of Afterlife”, here translated into English for the first time. The rest of the volume consists of papers discussing Patočka’s essay. The first three papers contextualize Patočka’s essay in various ways. Jan Frei identifies seven thought complexes in Patočka’s essay, the contexts of which he then locates in Patočka’s oeuvre as a whole. This makes it possible for Frei to explain why Patočka sets up his essay in the way he does, that is, why he decides to observe the afterlife only in the consciousness and actions of others. Gustav Strandberg relates the analysis in “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” to Patočka’s reflections on death in his philosophy of history and political thought. By way of such an interpretation, Strandberg shows how Patočka’s phenomenological analysis of the afterlife can help to shed new light on his understanding of human co-existence and solidarity. Nicolas de Warren discusses Patočka’s essay in its wider phenomenological context, especially with reference to Husserl, Ingarden and Scheler. The main theme of his essay is the interplay of disappearance and participation, the ways in which the dead person continues to mean for me while the details of our life together fade from memory. One central point in Patočka’s essay is that my relation to the dead lacks reciprocity. The next three papers discuss this claim. Hugo Strandberg focuses on forgiveness in relation to the dead: is forgiving someone possible if reciprocity is

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lacking, and what would it mean to see oneself as forgiven by someone dead? These questions raise methodological issues about the very possibility of describing such experiences philosophically. Tomáš Hejduk gives one example of post mortem reciprocity: the ways in which someone dead lives on in his projects, projects that can still surprise and challenge us. For Hejduk, this calls for a rethinking not only of death but also of life. Ondřej Beran confronts Patočka head-on, by discussing precisely one of the things Patočka’s denial of reciprocity rejects: encounters and communication with the dead or with spirits. How should reports of such encounters be understood? One of Beran’s points is that people claiming to have had such experiences do not have to be understood as affirming some ontological or metaphysical thesis, such as the one denied by Patočka. The four last papers relate Patočka’s essay to other philosophers and writers. Erin Plunkett starts out from Søren Kierkegaard’s account of loving the dead and highlights problems in it. She then turns to Patočka’s essay, showing that Patočka’s insistence on authentic being for others allows for a more hopeful and intersubjective relationship to the dead than the Kierkegaardian one. In her paper, Lovisa Andén relates Patočka’s essay to historiographical discussions about the relation between memory and historical knowledge, discussions undertaken by thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Nora. Andén argues that we can understand testimonies and archives as different modes of being with the dead, modes that continue to constitute both our individual field of experience and our collective historical situation. The theme of Antony Fredriksson’s paper is Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G. H. In the light of Patočka’s essays, Fredriksson discusses one theme he identifies in the novel, that life is constituted by material processes beyond that which we conceive as living. Lastly, Niklas Forsberg discusses Derek Parfit’s attempt at alleviating fear of death through philosophical redescription. One point in Forsberg’s paper is that Parfit’s focus on his own death, the death of the “I”, gives rise to a one-sided discussion and that Patočka’s reflections on the death of the other therefore shed important light on Parfit’s theory.

References Epicurus. 1994. The Epicurus reader: Selected writings and testimonia. Trans. Brad Inwood and D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2018. The phenomenology of spirit. Trans. Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY Press. Ingarden, Roman. 1973. The literary work of art: An investigation on the borderlines of ontology, logic, and theory of literature. Trans. George G.  Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1967. The structure of behaviour. Trans. Alden L.  Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press. Montaigne, Michel de. 1966. The complete essays. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Patočka, Jan. 1990. L’art et le temps. Trans. Erika Abrams. Paris: P.O.L. ———. 1995. Papiers phénoménologique. Trans. Erika Abrams. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. Plato. 2005. Euthyphro, apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Trans. Harold North Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Seneca. 1997. On the shortness of life. Trans. C. D. N. Costa. London: Penguin Books. Strandberg, Hugo. 2015. Self-knowledge and self-deception. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 2

The Phenomenology of Afterlife Jan Patočka

/130/ [1] Afterlife is usually reduced to the issue of the mortality or immortality of the soul. However, the soul is here a dualistic philosophical, metaphysical figment: a duplication of our concrete existence, conceived as a body without the body, as a separated “driver”, as a directing substantial core, the initiator of that which the body executes. Since the very existence or non-existence of this duplication connects to survival, the practical interest in the matters of life after death has been focusing chiefly on this condition, considered as a sine qua non. How would afterlife be possible without its own substantial bearer? On the other hand – a kind of positivist consolation: we do not leave wholly, the other lives in us. However, it is a precarious life, dependent on us, not immortality, only survival, and only so long as we ourselves live. A trivial, self-evident idea. How remarkable, though, that nobody has asked with philosophical thoroughness: how does the other live in us? Who is this surviving other? What is his mode of being? To what extent is he identical to the one who lived, and how is this identity modified?  – No doubt, there exists this empirically discoverable and analysable phenomenon of afterlife that ought to be systematically investigated – it is remarkable that this has not happened yet; why? Probably for reasons of practicality, too: the consolation involved in these thoughts is too weak, the more we analyse the matter and inquire into it, the more it falls apart.

J. Patočka died before publication of this work was completed. Translated by Ondřej Beran (email: [email protected]) J. Patočka (*) Prague, Czechoslovakia

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_2

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J. Patočka We would like to ask this question here in a purely philosophical form, independently of these practical-metaphysical considerations. Phenomenology seems to offer the apparatus of a method, which will enable us to ask these questions and treat them somewhat more closely.×

[2] I. Afterlife as a modification of being for others. – In our concrete lives, we are an intersubjective formation ourselves. We live in our own, original, live presence in ourselves, a presence unparticipable by anyone else; here all experiences arise in their actuality, here they are in the originality that makes it possible, in the fullest sense, to say that they are – in the entire certainty of their that, as soon as they occur – not as something we look at, /131/ but something that we are and that along with this being is also for itself (in an unreflected form, which prevents the capturing of the how, but is an essential privilege of its kind of entity, which does not live in a distance from itself, and yet has itself).  – However, besides this absolutely unparticipable, original entity that is and sticks only in itself, we are, at the same time and inseparably from this, being for others or as for others. Being for another and as for another is being essentially in a distance from oneself. Being as for others is a modification of being in oneself; being for others can never be in itself, just as being in itself can never be for others; however, since others are for us and we are for others, the fact of our being for others produces one of the most important objects and components of our own being in oneself. While we are not for others in the originality of our inner time, but as an object, i.e. not as a stream in which we can live, but as something that can only be re-presented (před-stavovat si), and not in the originality of perception, but always only in a somehow derived form, the originality of our being for others is primordially outside ourselves, and only its reflection is in us mostly just an abstract awareness and meaning thereof; nevertheless this abstract meaning, essentially incapable of fulfilment (not even in a mirror do we see ourselves as “objectively” as another sees us, we hear our own voice differently from how others hear it, in fact, we see ourselves constantly “in the mirror” of others, i.e. in a way mediated by [3] their reacting to our being for them). (It is even absolutely abnormal to imagine oneself as another and to see oneself as another – a Doppelgänger. This is on the whole possible only when we do not react to ourselves through others, when we do not live our image in others, but when we split ourselves internally and instead of reacting to ourselves in others we imagine, in ourselves, ourselves for others, which is an altogether different kind of behaviour, incompatible with reacting to oneself in another. Unless I formulated the appropriate identity of another with myself only ex-post, as a hypothesis; however, in such a case imagining would have already had to cross into hallucinating.)1

 In the MS there is a crossed paragraph: »As long as we live, there is synchrony of our being in oneself and being for others, being in its own originality of stream and being in a distance and an image. It is to be remarked that being for others has its own originality. We are not in the original only in ourselves, but also outside ourselves. The original being of self for another is only in the other’s perception, in the actual contact, otherwise we are for him only in meaning and allusions, primarily in words. The non-original being of another for us is not necessarily the being of reality, as the original being. The original /132/ being of another is real perception, the perception of the 1

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/132/ [3ar] As long as we live, our being in oneself, for oneself and for others is synchronised. Being in oneself has its own unsubstitutable originarity in the stream of inner time that nobody else can penetrate, because this streaming of inner time is a completely private act, constituting our very being; if its boundary fell, the difference between I and you would fall, too. Being for oneself is already an alienating oneself from this originality and an objectivising, in being for myself I am already at a certain distance from myself; here I am no longer the experiencing, but the experienced, and as such I am, at the same time, made public, if in various degrees. My being for others is something that has its own originarity, which I, again, cannot reach myself in this form. For myself, I experience non-thematically this being for others in a general form, I know that I am for others just as others are for me, but I do not have the original sensory presence of my appearance in a whole in the way in which another has it. Another’s being for me has its originarity, too, one which does not overlap with his being in himself, but is only synchronic with it. The core of another’s originarity for me is the possibility of perceiving the other as such. However, the other’s originarity can manifest itself also as his acting in my world in absence, i.e. outside the originarity of the sensory givenness of his physical appearance; the other expresses himself for instance by an action, or by a letter, and only in it do I come to recognise him as cruel, ruthless, caring, careful… The other’s originarity can be conceived also in such a broad manner: the other’s inner horizon can be explicated only in his deeds, the results of which I have before myself in actuality and perceive with my senses. My being in itself (bytí o sobě), my personal individual situated freedom-project, is something around which my being in myself, for myself, for others, as well as others’ being for me revolve, insofar as it is being-together, a reflection of my deeds, /133/ a reciprocity of contact with me. This ‘being in itself’ naturally does not overlap with any thing, any “en soi” in Sartre’s sense2; if we call it [3av] being in itself, it does not at all mean that it is an inert entity in various perspectives, given in their intersection; it is not an entity given (apart from the situational component), but freely created, and this is exactly why it does not overlap with any self-experience (being for oneself) or others’ experiences (being for others); it is a free entity, yet it is living in the world, contained in the world, encountered in the world. It is not independent of being for oneself and being for others, but it does not fully overlap

real, it is tied to the real and along with the presence of another’s bodily appearance it is the awareness of his inner, primordial originality in himself. If we have another as such before us, what we have is never only his bodily aspect, in the sense of a physical thing, as in a table, a plate, a cup, but we always also know that he has in himself his intransitive originality, his different way of perceiving his being. In the non-original being for another, one’s own inner reality may but also may not become a mere quasi-reality.« (eds.) 2  See J.-P. Sartre, L’Être et le Néant, Paris 1943, pp. 30–34. (eds.)

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with these. What comprises its essence can be hidden from oneself just as much as from others, and may yet have to be interpretively deciphered. ( for me) is the object of fantasy, imagination, meaning, considerations concerning me as an object of various purposeful actions of others, both in synchrony and in diachrony; in diachrony, I can thus in this represented manner live my own afterlife, my quasi-life in others. My being for myself in the form of pure non-actuality, being of protention  – there is no being for oneself without protention, the awareness of being without protention is always either knowledge that transcends its own consciousness as an object, or the inner awareness of a project that is running out, but not even this “running out” is ever without protention. It cannot be such by the very essence of its own being – herein the problem of the difference between one’s own being and one’s own project, Dasein in mir and my being in the fundamental sense. [3] The mere absence is the non-originality of the awareness of the other, along with the awareness of his own original being for himself. I know about him that he is, that he lives in himself, without having a sensation of this being, without its being present to me in its how. – In death, when I see the dead person, the originality of his being for me is here, along with the awareness of the non-existence of his being for himself; if he is buried, transformed, removed from any possibility of sight – his ashes are no longer his image – then the non-originality of his being for himself connects, for me, to the (original?) awareness of his non-existence for himself. [4] To what mode of being does the deceased pass? Any being for others, which is not merely quasi-being, had its originality for itself and nothing, no ceasing of this originality, can take it away from the being; every being for others is still being with its own inner originality, /134/ which has, however, stopped and is not synchronic with us anymore. Therefore, it is not a transition into pure being for others in the sense of quasi-being (a character in fiction or imagination), but a core remains here: a being which used to have its own originality and which is now only an object, the identical object of our relationships to it without reciprocity. Reciprocity is the basic factor of the synchrony of both originalities: the originality of the other’s being for me (with the awareness of his originality for himself) and my originality for the other (with his awareness that I am original in myself). However, the originality of his being for himself has now turned into the originality of his not-being for himself, it has turned into this by its lack of reciprocity. The dead person does not reply, does not cooperate, does not co-­ perceive, does not execute anything, but he withdraws from all of this completely and becomes a mere object, which does not have the sense of “together” anymore, does not have the sense of participation in human enterprises, actions and interests. This participation is something that essentially takes place in reciprocity – life is life in reciprocity, and thus in the duality of being in itself and being for itself. Now, how is the passed other meant? Of course, he is meant as the one who no longer has his originality, who has spent it. In this sense, he is no longer with us. His own originality for himself has reached its end and in no way will re-awaken or make itself synchronic with our originality for ourselves. A problem is arising now: who is this passed other? Does he coincide with any phase of his elapsed stream or

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with the totality of these phases, or is he something still different from these? Whom do we in fact mean when we think of the passed one? Surely, he is still identical to the one who used to live, and yet is meant in an altogether different manner. A living person is indeed identical within change, but this identity is alive, it is the identity of what can be made of situated freedom, [5] which is constantly inheriting itself. By contrast, the not-living person does not have this possibility to make himself anymore; the dead person is a closed history, and even his possibilities are dead. Does this mean that he has become only a series of elapsed experiences, that we see him as a kind of record on a tape and that his identity is the identity of this elapsed stream? The horizon of possible empathising into (vžívání do) his elapsed possibilities is indeed essentially here. However, the deceased is for us, in the first place, what he was for us. His past originality is meant along, but is not realised in the order of his experiences. The dead father is my father and he remains as such for me. For others, he remains as “Headmaster P.”, in the position in which they used to know him, with the characteristic trait with which they identify him. Does this mean that what the deceased is for us is in the first place his role? That he is an arrested being for us, with the mere empty horizon of the past originality for himself? /135/ Ingarden speaks of the “metaphysical quality” or “idea” of an artwork; after analysing all of its particular “layers” there is still a unifying element through which the work is affecting us and from which its multiplicity springs.3 It is remarkable that there is something similar in the experience of the other and that this similar thing does not depend on whether the other exists in actuality, whether he is in synchronic reciprocity with us. We intuit the “metaphysical quality” of the other even afterwards, from those things through which he is still present to us: from memories, photographs, portraits, his words, deeds. For example, a portrait is not a snapshot of a particular moment or phase in life, though it is also this, or, to put it better, it is a portrait through a phase. It is remarkable: everybody knows about this “quality” of Beethoven, once they have heard Beethoven’s music, even if not necessarily the most essential and peak Beethoven; simply once they are capable of distinguishing Beethoven from Haydn, both qualities become sharply distinct for them. This “metaphysical quality” is something global, and therefore it has an affective character, the character of explicable implicatedness, which does not coincide with any detailed explicatum. This quality is not identical to the originality of the other’s life for himself. That follows from the very fact that it persists even where originality for oneself has already disappeared and that it is not [6] experiencing as such, life, but rather something lived, content. Despite that, it is more closely connected to this something lived than for example features, shapes or colours are, though not even these, qua the appearance, are unrelated to this quality. [6a] Nevertheless, this “quality of the individual” is not unrelated to his own original experiencing. This quality sums up what the personality itself eventually

 R. Ingarden, Das literarische Kunstwerk, Tübingen 1965, §§ 49–50. (eds.)

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constitutes by its original life, its unmistakeable sense, that which was in the end at stake in any moment of its ‘inner’ experiencing and self-constitution. That ‘which was at stake’ is nothing private in the way in which constituting is, it’s nothing inaccessible in the sense in which the personality cannot be substituted for by, or confused with, anybody else; it is already for the personality itself something ‘objective’. The personality separates and distinguishes itself from this shape that it has, though it has been otherwise working on it throughout its whole life; with respect to this sense the personality is, in its experiencing, in a similar relation as understanding, as others, and since the distance to this sense is smaller in the case of understanding, /136/ understanding is in a sense made more difficult here and burdened by complicated and contradictory relations to oneself.4 [6] Such an intuited characteristic trait of individuality is connected to our image of the one who has left us. Merleau-Ponty once said that the spectator can recognise the particular football player who has the ball by the characteristic way in which he is kicking, even though his face and hair cannot be seen5; something similar remains in our minds of those who are gone. Those gone are most likely to leave behind, for the longest time, such a characteristic trait in which their whole individual substance is implied: their look, their voice and accent, their gait, the inclination of their head. Such a “metaphysical quality” represents the deceased when we have been quite close to him, but also when we were merely acquainted or even got acquainted with him only posthumously, through descriptions, portraits, qualities, and messages intimated by his works. In the case of people with whom we were not in everyday close contact, we have neither the possibility, nor reason and incentive to further develop and explicate this representative feature. Even when we know the biography of a famous person, we are not imagining him in the situations that we know him to have undergone. On the whole, the identity of the dead person is an identity through such representants, actual and actualised in the mode “I can” in those who are close to the dead, and in the mode “I could” in all others. All those who are not close to the dead person have an implicit awareness of how we live with the dead in the case of closeness, in the form of an indeterminate horizon. Those who have an original awareness of life with the dead are those close to him; they undertake the task to master this absence, to incorporate it somehow into /137/ their own lives

 In the manuscript, p. [6a], there are also some preparatory notes: »The other in the world – his “surviving” in things, in works, in the consequences of his actions, in the meaning he has created. Coming to terms with the other in the world. History as coming to terms with the dead.  Partial self-surviving – anosognosia and phantom limbs – analogy with suppression. –  The survival of the close associations of existences (love, marriage, parenthood, sonhood, brotherhood, friendship).  The dead as a part of different worlds – death as biological exhaustion and slumping down from the human world to the objective world. The dead as the matter of a different world, a different sense than our, human sense.« (eds.) 5  Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement, Paris 1942, p. 228. (eds.) 4

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which have been rather profoundly modified by the ceasing of the dead person’s available towardness (vstřícnost). Coming to terms with the absence of the dead will, naturally, vary depending on what his function was in our life, what basic life relationship there was, what aspect of life is affected by this absence. Life is essentially life with others, and another who has been removed from it has, indeed, stopped being there in the mode of presence, yet has not, just because of that, stopped being there. His being is in the mode of definitive absence, which is substantially different from non-being, and this στέρησις6 has an essentially positive life content. [7] Afterlife is therefore a primordially privative mode of life with another in all its basic forms. Of course, where life with another has the utmost importance and intensity, afterlife has it, too; and, again, afterlife has much greater importance and intensity where life with the other had the utmost positive character, where it brought fulfilment; on the other hand, where it took a negative shape and obstructed our fulfilment, where it was a life of hardship and hatred, coming to terms with the dead is easy and it does not have the character of retaining, but rather leaving easily and fading away – unless we are enjoying the feeling of revenge etc. The other’s reciprocity is the way in which we live with him and in him. We do not “need” the other as mere existence, a being that was not lost, but we rather need him in his function, in his affecting us, in the reciprocity in which we are for him just as much as he is for us. There is a vacuum left after this reciprocity, there is suddenly a wall against which our habitus of reciprocity is crashing. In various ways and to various extents, we got used to the other, we “became one in our lives” (sžili jsme se), whereby the other has become a kind of external organ of our own life. There is a complicated structure here, one which Kojève characterised well in his exposition of Hegel: we need the other’s need, that is, the most positive mode of life in reciprocity; we need the other to need us, and thereby we ourselves rely on him in our neediness. Only thereby do we give our need for the other (the most essential need we have) its fulfilment: we are for him what he is for us.7 The need for the other’s need is itself a basic fact of reciprocity. We need to be the fulfilment of another’s emptiness, and if this happens, our own emptiness – need – is fulfilled. This fulfilment has a peculiar character, it is not  – as Sartre incorrectly claims  – /138/ a transition into mere being, into objecthood (předmětnost).8 We do not make ourselves into an object in order to take possession of another’s freedom, it is on the contrary fulfilment by emptiness: the need is not to be quenched, but should on the contrary be rekindled constantly, it should be renewed all the time: which is also the reason why the need for another has the character of incessant actualisation. This is why when real “saturation” in this respect occurs, when the need disappears, the result is a disappointment.

 privation / absence / deprival (eds.)  A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. R. Queneau, Paris 1947, pp. 11–16. (eds.) 8  J.-P. Sartre, L’Être et le Néant, op. cit., pp. 431–446. (eds.) 6 7

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This is why the need for another is (1) essentially the need for the actual entity of the other in reciprocity, (2) and the more powerful the need (i.e. the non-­fulfilledness of the other, and therefore [8] – as a consequence of reciprocity – one’s own need as well), the more this need is fulfilled. Through another’s need, we need our own need and non-fulfilledness as well. This is why desire escalates, rather than gets numb, in a relationship that corresponds to this structure and does not decline into a mere fulfilment of a material need, a need for a particular thing, such as hunger, sexual agitation, the need for warmth and a shelter from foul weather. (Sartre’s phenomenology of relationship to another and an attempt at criticism. – According to Sartre, I am primordially an attempt to escape from my factual existence as being in itself, the cause of which we are not, towards an impossible future in which we would be in oneself – for oneself, i.e. the cause of oneself.9 Pure being for itself is a mere nothing, it is what is not, i.e. the facticity of one’s bodily being, which is in itself purely objective; if it is nothing, it is because it “escapes from” this being, or “néantisates” it; however, it is escaping somewhere-nowhere, that is towards the imaginary goal of reaching oneself in being in oneself, without ceasing to be for oneself. In accord with this, the fundamental human need is the need to get rid of the contingency, the accidental character of one’s purely objective being, one’s facticity, which arises for us by the fact of another’s looking at us, of our being a mere object in his eyes. We achieve this either by appropriating another’s freedom, i.e. another’s being for oneself, in the manner of turning ourselves from a mere object for another into a value for him, something towards which he is escaping from himself. Without ceasing to be objective for him, we thereby incorporate his freedom; instead of him “transcending” us, being a freedom superior to us, he becomes a freedom in our service, a freedom which justifies us, because /139/ it gives us the reason. Or by trying to act towards him as a freedom turning him into a mere thing, which is nothing but an object for freedom, which in the domination of this objectivity finds again the reason of its being. In neither case does the primary impulse go from one freedom to another, from one need to another, but from freedom to the objective [9] side and form of a free being and attaches to it; only indirectly and insincerely does it become the need for another’s freedom, and thereby his own interiority. In Sartre’s interpretation, Husserl’s idea that in our subjectivity, principally if it is conceived transcendentally (i.e. in an extraworldly manner), each of us is an original that another cannot capture, takes the existential shape of the escape from the world of pure being in oneself and the imprisonment of being for oneself in itself. In reality, the case is that a subjectivity that is, in itself, pure being for itself, does not exist (for various reasons). It is indeed true that I have my own private inner time, which nobody else can share with me. But in this time I am constantly dealing with my organic foundation,

 Ibid., pp. 428–484. (eds.)

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my private activity is constantly making this foundation meaningful, and this making-­meaningful (osmyslování) has an objective character not only for another, but also for myself; in it, I am for myself constantly also an “object”, since I / although only in part/ see and touch myself, use my body in various ways, train it, work with its help etc. All these acts take place within a horizon, which provides me with a substitute for my objective seeing of myself, just as the horizon of things provides a substitute for seeing things from different sides. I am constantly given to myself in non-givenness. Thus I am constantly being made public, by my own activity, not only to others, but also to myself, and I am never a flight from mere objectivity, but, on the contrary, mere objectivity – in the sense of pure being in itself – is in fact only a limit concept, which does not essentially occur in our primordial experience of things and of ourselves. For Sartre, the need for another’s need has no meaning, because it can never be reached. That would mean to get through to the primordial ‘for-oneself’ of the other, to blend with it – for Sartre does not acknowledge a middle term between en soi and pour soi; by which he encloses himself into a “practical solipsism” – Schutz.10). /140/ In reality, though, the other in his otherness is always made public just as we are. That is why I am not, through his appearance and behaviour, with a mere objectivation of the other, and neither am I turning myself (if insincerely) into a mere objectivation of myself, but, on the contrary, I am the experienced [10] identity of this outer and inner just as the other himself is. And what I need is not only one side of the other, in order to incorporate and gain control of it, but if I am acting in this way – which of course is possible – then I am generalising a secondary attitude, the attitude of consciously egoistic objectivation. There are two possibilities inherent to the primarily-naïve relation to another: to not let him be what he is – i.e. to relate him to oneself, to drag him into the range of one’s existence, one’s own needs (disregarding the need for another as another); and the possibility of letting him be, which is, in the first place, built by suppressing the first possibility and fighting it constantly. However, what do I need the other for at all, why do I have the need for the other as other? One of the motives here is reciprocity again. As I am outside myself just as in myself, so is the other outside himself, but both lead nowhere – it is only in relation to another that this being for another becomes explicit, that we become what we are, and yet other and otherwise than we were before. Not only do I receive back my being for another from this other, I also give him back his being for others. I am intentionally making myself the outside of the other’s being, that which the other is outside himself, in order to give it back to him and for the other to be this other not only in the form of an unrealised horizon, but of an actual realisation. The positive meaning of being for another, of the being of self outside oneself becomes clear through the fact that this being outside oneself is not alienated (zcizené) being, it is not something essentially non-authentic, but it belongs to the full

 A. Schuetz, Sartre’s Theory of the Alter Ego, in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (1948), No. 2, pp. 181–199; book edition in: A. Schutz, Collected Papers I. The Problem of Social Reality, ed. M. Natanson, Den Haag 1962, p. 203. (eds.) 10

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content of one’s own being, to what this being essentially is, but what it can become internally, recuperatively only through another. I have my physicality and my transcendence in the automatic, unconscious functioning, without being able to encounter them as such thematically; they become a theme to me as soon as the other returns them to me, through my experiencing of myself in his eyes, in his [11] wishes and desires. Only through and in the other do lovers discover themselves as bodies, in and through the other do friends discover each their own virtues and imperfections, their own will and individuality. It is only in the other’s eyes that I can discover also my personal quality, originally of course in a subjective colouring, but in such a way that it is capable of correction. In short, it is only through another that I can live myself as well. But if there was only this relationship here, we would not overcome through being for another the “practical /141/ solipsism” that Schutz is criticising in Sartre. A more profound significance of being for another consists in that we are, simultaneously and in reciprocity with this awakening to the explicitness of our own non-thematic entity, waking the other to himself, or at least can be waking the other to himself, helping him live, suffer and be happy, that is waking him up to existing genuinely rather than somnolently– by kindling life in the other we are kindling it in ourselves as well. This way, by being for others, by being outside ourselves, we live in others, and not only metaphorically, but authentically. A problem: what can the other signify for us once he has left the actual reciprocity? In the first place, the loss of actual reciprocity obviously means also the loss of this possibility of awakening to oneself. We feel this loss, it is not a mere decrease, but a decrease felt and experienced as the loss of one’s most primordial possibility, as the annulment of our own existence, it is living death, the other’s non-existence becomes living as if we didn’t live. Not only are we lacking the fulfilment that we used to depend on, and thus our intention is directed into a void, but we are also losing the possibility to feel ourselves, the possibility that the other used to give us, the possibility that we were for ourselves on the basis of the other. Actual reciprocity means that the other lives in possibilities that are still open, and our own life is stretched towards these possibilities and depends in its awakedness [12] on them. Together with others, we live a shared mutual drama, and what we “need”, what we demand, what fascinates and satisfies us is exactly this dramatic process, even when it means the most common stereotype in everyday encounters, conversations, acts of kindness, vexations. For example, love wants a straightforward bodily presence in its strongest form and the whole tension of the renewal of bodily life which is connected to love, and this presence needs to be lived out presently. Other life relationships depend, again, on the realisation of certain intentions towards us and our intentions towards others – parents want to raise their children to independence, to guide them towards their selves, and where this is interrupted, the impulse ends in a void. This impulse directed into a void can now create false, illusory reciprocity, just as an unappeased bodily impulse creates a false, illusory limb. To create pseudo-­ presence, in which we live in the state of as-if… To prevent the present from becoming the past, to understand non-actuality as a mere departure, a distance in which the other’s presence is still living. As an impulse, this is present within us all the time, but it is held down in normal cases by the awareness of reality, of reciprocity which

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is definitively lost and will never return, and this conflict is what the pain of loss means. /142/ On the other hand, however, there is the experience that the other has not spent the energy of his reciprocity simply because he is not there anymore and does not actively create our future together with us, because he is not actualising his and my possibilities anymore. For it may be that I am actualising only ex-post a lot of what the past person was, that his being becomes an impulse encouraging me to still new things by realising more profoundly what his existence meant and means, that I keep exposing myself to the problematisation which this being is for me. [Addendum] Being accepted – being sheltered (krytost) – monadic self-relation – the centre of the world The parallel with others – seeing oneself in equality – the objective world – one’s own centrality a mere phenomenon. This breaking through the eccentricity is harmless, innocuous – becomes dramatic once we learn about its consequence – in fact, its foundation: the phenomenon of another’s death. Another’s death is in this perspective one’s own, though: I am the same as the other, the dead – I, too, am lost. The understanding of oneself as the lost other is the foundation of the second attitude – exposedness, relativity, work, fight always from the viewpoint that this world of phenomenon, of individuation, as Fink puts it,11 is the only valid one, and in this world, we as individuals are lost, only the time-limit varies, and this is what we compete for, work for, fight for – for a delay, a superstructure and sediment, for what goes through our short-term realities as relatively permanent – identification. Fink: individuation as such problematised in the phenomenon of death; thus not only my individual case, but the world of individuation in its entirety, the fact that individuated entity is the totality of beings – the night side of the universe comes to the fore. But what if it is not only the night side, but an entity as such in a massive sense that emerges here in its dependence on that which makes it phenomenal? Not only an entity, but primarily that which makes entities manifest, and is not manifest itself – things, material processes, structures, laws –. but that which itself is nothing, and yet there is nothing without it –. Note on the translation. This translation is based on the text as it appeared in Volume 8/2 of the Collected Writings of Jan Patočka (Fenomenologické spisy III/2, Praha: OIKOYMENH, 2016, pp. 130–142). The page numbers in slashes / / correspond to the pagination of this book edition. The page numbers in square brackets [ ] correspond to the page numbers of the original manuscript as displayed in the Collected Writings edition. The title “Addendum” in square brackets is an editorial addition; all the contents in angle brackets < > are supplemented by the editors of the Collected Writings as well. The 11

 Cf. E. Fink Metaphysik und Tod, Stuttgart 1969. (eds.)

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text also includes a few original Czech terms in parentheses () and italicised; these are added by the translator. We thank the representatives of the Jan Patočka Archives for permission to translate and publish the essay here. Jozef Majerník and Erin Plunkett have made several helpful suggestions that enabled a significant improvement of the translation. O. B.

Chapter 3

To Live After Death: Where? Patočka’s “Phenomenology of Afterlife” and Its Contexts Jan Frei

The main aim of this chapter is to show what place Patočka’s study of the afterlife occupies in the totality of his work. I can limit myself here to a few basic facts, for Patočka’s study is published in English translation in this volume, and the following chapters offer a number of interpretations of it.1 The external form of the manuscript indicates that it probably originated in the 1960s, while a more precise dating can only be guessed at; similarities in wording might perhaps suggest a temporal proximity to Patočka’s 1967 article The Natural World and Phenomenology (Patočka 1989a).2 The surviving text is clearly only part of an intended longer study, which was to have contained at least one more section (after the three introductory paragraphs comes a section marked with a Roman I, which should have been followed by other sections, but these were not written or at least have not been found), but the extant part itself is practically complete: apart from the continuous text, it contains only two passages consisting of entries referring to later elaboration. So much for the formal character and possible dating of the text. The text itself, i.e., its content, will now be dealt with under three points: first, I will present the essential features of Patočka’s study, before moving on to show from Patočka’s  For existing interpretations, see Karfík 2008, Merlier 2010, de Warren 2017, and Sternad 2017.  The article will be discussed below. The year 1967 as a possible date for the study on the afterlife is considered (on the basis of dated manuscripts preserved in the same file) by Erika Abrams; at the same time, however, she points out that Patočka wrote to Walter Biemel about a work in progress on the afterlife in the summer of 1976. The text is sometimes dated to 1967 because in the autumn of 1966, Patočka’s wife Helena died, which may have prompted him to undertake this study; see Abrams 1995, 295. 1 2

J. Frei (*) Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_3

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other works the various themes or groups of texts that provide the context into which this study can be placed, and finally, I will indicate what kind of image of the human being can be glimpsed through this study and other related texts.

I There is no space here for a recapitulation of the entire content of the text; moreover, a large number of individual details (however significant) might obscure Patočka’s fundamental decisions, which I consider to be essential, and which I therefore want to emphasise. There are two such decisions. Firstly, Patočka decided to describe only the phenomenon of the life after death, i.e. only the afterlife as experienced by others: the title of the first part of the text (which in its surviving form represents practically the entire study) is “Afterlife as a Modification of Being for Others” (Patočka this volume, /130/).3 This afterlife in the experience of others cannot, of course, be examined except as the afterlife of another in my experience. Patočka starts from the fact that after the death of another there is “a kind of positivist consolation” that “the other lives in us”. He states immediately that this consolation is “too weak” and that “the more we analyse the matter and inquire into it, the more it falls apart”; he nevertheless wants to do what he believes no one has done before, namely to ask “with philosophical thoroughness” this very question: “how does the other live in us? Who is this surviving other? What is his mode of being? To what extent is he identical to the one who lived, and how is this identity modified?” (Patočka this volume, /130/). The second decision is to keep “within the boundaries” of this experience, to keep with its description and not to infer from it – or from other experiences – any possible way of being of the other beyond his being in my consciousness or in the consciousness of others. Patočka, it is true, clearly says that the being of the other for me includes, among other things, my awareness that the other has his sphere of “originality of his being for himself” which is not directly accessible to me and is independent of me; but the deceased other, according to Patočka’s analysis, has already “spent” his originality, his originality “has reached its end and in no way will re-awaken” (Patočka this volume, /134/). It is certainly true that Patočka does not limit himself to the presence of the deceased in our consciousness, that he also speaks of his after-“life” in our actions: there is “the experience that the other has not spent the energy of his reciprocity [while alive]”, and that I can actualize this unexhausted energy by realizing some of the unrealized possibilities of the other and by allowing his being in my memory to continue to problematize me, i.e. to question my opinions, attitudes, beliefs, plans etc. (Patočka this volume, /142/).

 The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation. 3

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Even then, however, the deceased is dependent on me and my actions: questions, hopes, or fears directed outside the realm of my consciousness and action do not arise. Thus, Patočka (unlike Scheler, Landsberg or others) does not reflect the fact that death – our own or others’, especially those we love – appears or at least can appear to us not as an immanent possibility of personal existence, but as something coming from outside, as something that is alien to our personal being and that opposes a certain unignorable tendency of our being (so that we must laboriously appropriate the necessity of dying, we must overcome its very strangeness). He does not reflect on the fact that the fundamental structure of our existence is itself oriented towards survival (and only for this reason can we feel anxiety about death), that the need to survive and develop or fulfil ourselves belongs not only to our vitality but also to the ontological constitution of the person; he does not ask whether or not this need corresponds to a real possibility. He does not ask whether the special temporality of the person, different from the temporality of inner-worldly beings, suggests a hope (or threat) of the fulfilment of a personal future independently of the future of the world.4 To put it as succinctly as possible: Patočka does not thematise the experiences that led and lead to creating and maintaining the immensely various symbols associated with the idea of the afterlife – and indeed to the creation of the word “afterlife” itself (see e.g. Pieper 1999; Voegelin 1967). In their place he sees only “metaphysical conceptions” (Patočka 1993, 135)5 that have arisen from the reification of their symbols; we can observe this in how he deals with the concept of the soul. At the very beginning of his study, he defines the soul as just “a dualistic philosophical, metaphysical figment: [the soul is] a duplication of our concrete existence, conceived as a body without the body, as a separated ‘driver’, as a directing substantive core, the initiator of that which the body executes” (Patočka this volume, /130/). Patočka, then, does not reflect on the experiences that engender this symbol; from the beginning, he presents the soul as an objectified idea. Such metaphysical objectifications are then naturally rejected by him, precisely because – as he says – they make us “forget the analysis of the original experience” (Patočka 1993, 135) – but he limits this original experience to the experience of the afterlife of the other in our consciousness. Both decisions are easily explained by the fact that Patočka, as he explicitly states at the beginning of the study, decided to follow the phenomenological method, which at that same time he also employed to carry out extensive analyses of subjectivity, corporeality, temporality, space, movement or appearance (Patočka 1995a, 2000, 2016). This specifically means that he chose here to deal with the deceased  With this paragraph, I am trying to indicate the main points of Landsberg’s exposition of death (Landsberg 1966); for a comparison of Patočka with Scheler, see Sternad 2017; for the broader context, see Scherer 1979. The term “person” does not appear in Patočka’s study (unlike, for example, in his early lecture Der Geist und die zwei Grundschichten der Intentionalität (Patočka 1936), where it is the most common name for a human being). 5  I quote this passage here and below because it is part of one of Patočka’s most detailed interpretations of (Heidegger’s conception of) death. 4

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other only insofar as it can be shown to be a specific object of our consciousness. The object of Patočka’s interest is my consciousness of the deceased other, and what can be apodictically reported in it; perhaps this may be why he leaves aside not only questions of the afterlife of others independent of my consciousness, but also images of the other, memories, traces or shared stories that exist in the external world. Actually, Patočka confines himself, in the surviving part of the study, to what Jannicaud would later call “minimalist phenomenology”. The phenomenology of the afterlife becomes, in effect, an investigation of our awareness of someone who is permanently and irrevocably absent from us; it contains no reflection on the nature of death, and thus no reflection on the specific nature of the absence of the deceased, as distinct from the absence of the living who for some reason we will never again encounter directly or indirectly. Nor does it pose the question of the afterlife of those who for whom no one is left to remember them and who therefore cannot have an afterlife in another’s consciousness in the sense analyzed by Patočka. Nor does it finally open up the question after our future death and the vast issues that go with it. Despite these limitations, at least seven thematic contexts can be found in Patočka’s oeuvre which can be used to interpret the study of the afterlife. These will be shown in section II; in section III I suggest a deeper reason that may lie behind Patočka’s methodological decision.

II The first context into which Patočka’s text can be included comprises the phenomenological analyses of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, corporeality and other problems just mentioned. During his lifetime, Patočka published several such analyses,6 but most remained in manuscripts that were only published posthumously (Patočka 1995a, 2000, 2016). As Filip Karfík has shown in detail, within the framework of these phenomenological analyses, the investigation of the afterlife represents one piece of a mosaic in which nothing more is at stake than the uncovering of the structures of life here and now: intersubjective, corporeal, temporal life. The second thread leads to Patočka’s interpretations of the Greek, especially Plato’s, conception of the soul, from the beginning of the 1970s (see e.g. Patočka 1972). This connection too is mentioned by Karfík, whose interpretation can be summarised thus: when Patočka, in his study of the afterlife, observes this life only as a phenomenon, and when he refuses to connect it to the idea of the soul, when he thus (as seen from the other side) refuses to link the idea of the soul with the idea of survival after physical death, he paves the way for an interpretation of the soul which is immortal in a sense other than that of continued existence – that is, of the

 Particularly Patočka 1996b (first published as a series of articles in 1965–66), and Patočka 1988a (first published in 1968 as an afterword to the Czech edition of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations). 6

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soul which is not wholly immersed in the mutable, imprecise and unformed world of the doxa, but which belongs by its essence, by its being, to that which is ontós on, to the region of purity which gives the world of the doxa its scale; of the soul which belongs to the agathon and constantly relates itself and things to the agathon (and which only as a consequence thereof cannot be mortal). It is as if an idea previously banished through the phenomenological door returns here through a Platonic window: the idea of something that has no being of inner-worldly entities recognizable as objects of consciousness, and yet is not just a thought construct. The third thematic context consists of reflections on the reciprocity of our relationship to the other, as developed by Patočka in the late 1960s. Particularly in his aforementioned study The Natural World and Phenomenology (Patočka 1989a, originally published in 1967) and in the concept for his lectures on corporeality held in 1968–69 (Patočka 1995b),7 we can find formulations similar to those we read in the study of the afterlife: “we need the other’s need … we need the other to need us, and thereby we ourselves rely on him in our neediness. … We need to be the fulfilment of another’s emptiness, and if this happens, our own emptiness – need – is fulfilled. … It is only in the other’s eyes that I can discover also my personal quality … In short, it is only through another that I can live myself as well. … A more profound significance of being for another consists in that we are, simultaneously and in reciprocity with this awakening to the explicitness of our own non-thematic entity, waking the other to himself, or at least can be waking the other to himself, helping him live, suffer and be happy … by kindling life in the other we are kindling it in ourselves as well” (Patočka this volume, /137, 140–141/; cf. Patočka 1989a, 262–263; 1995b, 110–114). This complex structure of mutuality is shattered by the death of the other; our pain at their death is the pain of the definitive loss of this reciprocity. If this third line of thought is related to Hegel’s early work,8 then the fourth is a critical reflection on Sartre’s thought. Patočka dealt with this at the end of the 1940s9; Sartre’s visit to Prague in 1963 brought him back to it; in 1966 he touches on it in a shorter text about Simone de Beauvoir (Patočka 1966), in 1967 in an extensive review of Foucault’s The Order of Things, where he emphasizes Sartre’s role in the “anthropologist” philosophy criticized by Foucault (Patočka 1987) and he treats it more thoroughly in his paper for the XIV International Philosophical Congress in Vienna in 1968 (Patočka 1968). In working on the study of the afterlife, he comes to terms with Sartre’s philosophy in the context of his own analyses of my being and the being of the other – in full enumeration: being in oneself, being for oneself, my  In the lecture cycle itself (Patočka 1998), the formulations on reciprocity are not contained: the academic year ended before Patočka could come to them. 8  Specifically one of his theological texts from the Frankfurt period, Fragments on Religion and Love (1797/8). It was only in the second half of the 1960s that Patočka referred to this text; in his (still unpublished) two-semester lecture on the Phenomenology of Spirit from 1950, he only briefly touched on this early Hegelian interpretation of reciprocity. 9  In particular in Chap. 12 of Patočka 2011a (written in 1947) and in several places in his philosophical diaries from 1946–1950 (Patočka 2021). 7

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being in itself, my being for others, another’s being for me, and “(my being for others) for me” (Patočka this volume, /133/). The fifth contextual framework comprises analyses of our relation to our own finitude – analyses Patočka makes within the framework of (some of) his accounts of the three movements of life: if in the movement of truth we accept ourselves in our finitude – that is, also in our mortality – which we have obscured in the movements of sinking roots and self-prolongation (e. g. Patočka 1988b, 2011a; explicitly for the obfuscation of death, see Patočka 1993, 135–136), then the impulse to this recognition and acceptance could be the confrontation with the death of the other, who then has an afterlife in our consciousness. The sixth relevant context is represented by condolences and memorial texts. These, too, are statements about the life of the other for us, about what the deceased was and how his past existence binds us. We see this clearly in the speech in memory of Edmund Husserl and in some private condolences.10 Particularly close to the study under review is a condolence letter to the art historian Václav Richter, written by Patočka on September 4, 1951, after the death of Richter’s father (and shortly after the death of his own father). For it contains general formulations almost identical to those in the study on the afterlife11: the departure of the other “is not a real farewell, because the one who has gone is inseparably here, after all, … in having formed [us], and in how he has formed” (Patočka 2001, p. 39). However, in contrast to the sober analysis Patočka gives in his study, he understandably gives more space in the condolences to the emotions associated with the death of another12 (only briefly mentioned in the study, see Patočka this volume, /141/) and the claims or obligations upon us that stem from their death: departure means “that from that moment on we must always be together with [the other] … We must read here the life’s reminder that we are, among other things, a permanent departure … We are here to spend ourselves and to be spent by others and in others. And the greater and stronger the part of ourselves that we lose, the more we must be grateful; that gratitude is the last gift of the departing, and it abides.”13

 For Husserl, see Patočka 1938. From the condolences see e.g. the letter to Otilia Utitz of February 14, 1956: Emil Utitz “war für uns alle ein Wahrzeichen und die Bürgschaft dessen, daß unser Lebenssystem und Lebensstil eine Kontinuität wahrt mit den höchsten Menschenidealen und Menschheitswerten, die je durch geistig Hochstehende erarbeitet und errungen wurden. Er war … einer der letzten Zeugen …, in deren Fußstapfen wir heutige zu gerne weitergehen möchten, es aber nicht mehr vermögen.” (Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences, thus far without signature). 11  The similarity of the two texts has already been pointed out by the editors of Patočka’s correspondence with Václav Richter (see Patočka 2001, 39, n. 2). 12  “We are sorry that he himself can no longer enjoy a mutual relationship …” (Patočka 2001, 39, n. 2). 13  Patočka 2001, 39. In the study of the afterlife, demands appear only in the form of the phenomenon of demands, i.e. as part of an indicative description of actual or possible agency: even after the death of the other, I can allow him to problematise me; I can develop his unfulfilled possibilities, etc. (see Patočka this volume, /142/) 10

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Finally, the seventh thread, again shown by Karfík, adds to the question directed “after” life a symmetrical question directed “before” it; the problem of intersubjectivity after the end of life raises the question of intersubjectivity at the beginning of life and before it. In the first Heretical Essay, afterlife in the consciousness of others – that is, the specific subject of the study of the life after death – is shown to be something belonging to archaic societies (including those of Greece and Rome). Until the idea of personal survival, which according to Patočka is linked to Plato’s idea of the care for the soul, crystallized, a person was dependent in their afterlife on their progeny, in whose memory, rituals or dreams they survived precisely in the form of being for others, as an “image” appearing to living descendants. This intersubjectivity after the end of life, however, presupposes intersubjectivity at its beginning; for in order to survive in the consciousness of descendants, one must first accept and take care of those descendants. “In that all individuals prove themselves links in a sequence of ‘acceptations’: they come into life not only conceived by and born of those who live, but also accepted by them and dependent on their care, and they leave life equally dependent on those whom they had themselves accepted.” Those being born, the living, and the dead are thus, through this series of acceptances, members of one productive substrate of the genus, which is itself “somewhat as a middle term between the undifferentiated great Night and the autonomy of the individual”. The movement of acceptance thus ultimately refers, through the substrate of the genus, “to a still more basic movement from which all that is in our day arises out of the nonindividuated night” (Patočka 1996a, p. 22–23).

III Each of these contexts sheds a different light on Patočka’s study of the afterlife, each allowing us to understand some aspect of it. Above all, however, each of his themes develops and shows in a fuller light those aspects of Patočka’s image of the human being that could only be hinted at in the study. Thus, the being present after death in the consciousness of others (as described in the study) appears now also as a subjective, corporeal, spatial and temporal being; as a being that can transcend a changeable and imprecise world and relate to the Good; as a being that can come to itself only through its relation to the other; as a being that accepts its finitude; and as a being concerned with the “two chasms” that circumscribe its life (cf. Patočka 2007a, 38). In the last part of my chapter, I would like to focus on the latter problem – our relation to the reality for which we create or adopt images of the events that take place after and before life  – which, I believe, can illuminate Patočka’s study of the afterlife. For this purpose, however, it is necessary to transfer Patočka’s reflections from archaic society to (Patočka’s) present. Here, the shared tool for understanding what precedes and what follows life is no longer the idea that we emerge from and reintegrate into the substrate of the genus, and thus participate in the emergence of being from the undifferentiated great Night and return to it. Nor is it adequate to

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speak of the idea of creation by God of the living and of a future communion with Him and with others in Him: from the sixteenth century onwards, the “Christian man” started to become “the post-Christian man”, as Patočka himself says (Patočka 2006, 77); and for the twentieth century it is certainly true that there is no universally shared picture of the totality of reality and of the place of human life therein (cf. already Scheler 1958). It is the case that “for various historical reasons, the axes of the image of the world and of Man, based on shared beliefs, have collapsed, and that therefore an enormous burden rests on everyone who philosophizes in our time: they must build such a system of axes, more or less successful, by their own solitary work,” preferably with support in those thinkers who have felt themselves in a similar situation at various times of upheaval and watershed moments (Schütz and Voegelin 2004, 209). What system of axes, then, did Patočka build through his solitary work? More specifically: what is the form of the symbols situated before the beginning of life and after its end? All that can be said in the space available here is: this issue comes up quite rarely in Patočka’s work. In none of his essays or lectures does Patočka devote himself to it as the main topic, and even his rare statements sometimes give the impression that Patočka was forced to them almost against his will by the logic of his interpretation, as if he were trying to leave them unexpressed for as long as possible.14 Yet even so, we find in his work a variety of symbolism for what gives rise to life (symbolisms of God, Life, Origin, an “Animator”), as well as of symbolism for the emergence of life from this founding (Life gives rise to men; the Origin sends us; the Animator sets our freedom into motion; God lets us show how we can help ourselves)15 – but

 See e.g. the tentative, almost hesitant, statement about divinity in the second half of the last paragraph of Patočka 2007b, or the explanation of the Idea, the key concept of Patočka’s Negative Platonism, given only in the last chapter of the main text (Patočka 1989b). 15  Life “gives rise to men who live and die in order to show their greatness and their might to themselves and to others” (Patočka 2007c, 24, italics added). “… man … lives turned away from his origin (which is normal: the origin sends us into the universe, among things...” (Patočka 1990, 171–172, italics added). “isn’t there something that … sets [our freedom] into motion? … [Our] capacity, the possibility of dis-objectification, … must lie in a potency other than our private subjectivity or also than subjectivity in general. This disembodying animator however, this factor that makes possible the act of … philosophical freedom, can never be an object in the universe. … It is therefore never possible to think of it as something being, much less as something real. … In philosophy, nevertheless, we are forced … to attempt … to think what is (directly) unthinkable, to objectify the non-objective and non-objectifiable” (Patočka 2000, 45–46). “… I understand what today’s theologians are saying, that God … [sees] us as mature beings, and for that reason He lets everything be as if He were not there at all, letting us show how we can or cannot help ourselves, i.e. how far we have matured for this, His, i.e. serious world of responsibility and tests” (letter to Milada Blekastad, December 18, 1974, Patočka 2011b, 110). In fact, Patočka uses these symbols to evocate what underlies and enables our freedom, our free acts that are always “new”, not explainable by inner-worldly circumstances. Trying to reconstruct how Patočka sees the position of man within the whole of the world, however, we can read these symbolism as expressing what underlies (and precedes) our existence as such. 14

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we do not find a comparably developed symbolism for what life flows into.16 Patočka’s God (under various names) sends us out into the world to act freely, but never promises any form of salvation or its opposite. From this, we can also understand his treatment of the concept of immortal soul. Wherever he encounters it  – be it in the analysis of Plato’s Apology, Republic, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Gorgias and Timaeus, or of the Faustian legend  – he rightly emphasizes its function in understanding our being “not just mortal”, in understanding that our actions need not and should not be determined only by the desire to postpone death; but everywhere he also more or less explicitly rejects the related question of the possible existence beyond temporal life. In the fragment on the afterlife, the absence of these symbols of “life” beyond death was motivated by a conscious self-limitation to a “minimalist” phenomenology. However, the basic methodological decision concerning the afterlife – the decision to focus attention on our consciousness of the others and on our actions inspired by them and to seek the afterlife there and only there – is also observed in Patočka’s memoirs and condolences; and we see the absence of symbols of the afterlife even where symbols for the emergence of life are present. Is it not possible, then, that Patočka’s field of vision, however extraordinarily wide, does not include experiences leading to the creation of symbols of the afterlife? That this field doesn’t include the human person questioning the possibility of its fulfilment independent of the future of the world? Could it be that when Patočka refuses to use symbols of immortality, it is due to the absence of the issues underlying them, of their engendering experiences? If this were the case, it would mean that when Patočka decided to seek the afterlife only in our relation to the other, it wasn’t a matter of choice for him: our relation to the other was for him the only “place” where he could find the afterlife.17

References Abrams, Erika. 1995. Notice bibliographique. In Jan Patočka, Papiers phénoménologiques, ed. Erika Abrams, 291–296. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. de Warren, Nicolas. 2017. Souls of the departed. Metodo 5: 205–237.

 One of the few places where this theme appears at all is in the already quoted reference to life being framed by “two chasms”. Another lone discussion is the wartime manuscript of the Studies on the Concept of the World: man is “a wave carried by the currents of life”; looking death in the face should be connected “with this nourishing idea of a lasting life on this earth, in this world” – but even here Patočka immediately adds: this life “cannot be participated in personally forever” (Patočka 2021, 101). And in The Spiritual Foundations of Life in Our Time he devotes several paragraphs to the problem of death and afterlife, saying e.g.: “phenomenologically speaking, neither reincarnation nor coming back to life in a purely internal personal world can be ruled out.” (Patočka 2022, 274). 17  This article was supported by the Czech Funding Agency (GACR)—project No. 20-26526S, “Czech Philosophical Humanism: An Open Question. Patočka, Masaryk, their Critics and Successors”. 16

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Karfík, Filip. 2008. Das Leben nach dem Tode und die Unsterblichkeit. In Unendlichwerden durch die Endlichkeit, ed. Filip Karfík, 82–100. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Landsberg, Paul Louis. 1966. The experience of death. In Essays in phenomenology, ed. Maurice Natanson, 193–231. Dordrecht: Springer. Merlier, Philippe. 2010. Patočka et le phénomène de la vie post mortem. Philosophies 104: 63–73. Patočka, Jan. 1936. Der Geist und die zwei Grundschichten der Intentionalität. Philosophia 1: 67–76. ———. 1938. Edmund Husserl zum Gedächtnis. In Edmund Husserl zum Gedächtnis: Zwei Reden gehalten von L. Landgrebe und J. Patočka, 20–30. Praha: Academia. ———. 1966. Francouzský existencialismus a Simone Beauvoirová [French existentialism and Simone Beauvoir]. In Druhé pohlaví [the second sex], ed. Simone Beauvoir, 389–403. Praha: Orbis. ———. 1968. Die Kritik des psychologischen Objektivismus und das Problem der phänomenologischen Psychologie bei Sartre und Merleau-Ponty. In Akten des XIV.  Internationalen Kongresses für Philosophie, Wien 2. – 9. September 1968, vol. II, 175–184. Wien: Herder. ———. 1972. Zur ältesten Systematik der Seelenlehre. In Phänomenologie heute: Festschrift für L. Landgrebe, ed. Walter Biemel, 122–137. Den Haag: Marius Nijhoff. ———. 1987. “Die Wörter und die Dinge”. Eine Analyse der anthropologischen Epoche des europäischen Denkens in Michel Foucaults “Archäologie”. Trans. E.  H. Plattner. In Jan Patočka, Kunst und Zeit, 542–555. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ———. 1988a. La phénoménologie, la philosophie phénoménologique et les Méditations cartésiennes de Husserl. Trans. Erika Abrams. In Jan Patočka, Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie? ed. Erika Abrams, 149–188. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. ———. 1988b. Qu’est-ce que l’existence? Trans. Erika Abrams. In Jan Patočka, Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine, ed. Erika Abrams, 243–264. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1989a. The “natural” world and phenomenology. Trans. Erazim Kohák. In Jan Patočka, Philosophy and selected writings, ed. Erazim Kohák, 239–272. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1989b. Negative platonism. Trans. Erazim Kohák. In Jan Patočka, Philosophy and selected writings, ed. Erazim Kohák, 175–206. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1990. La surcivilisation et son conflit interne. Trans. Erika Abrams. In Jan Patočka, Liberté et sacrifice, ed. Erika Abrams, 99–177. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. ———. 1993. In Úvod do fenomenologické filosofie [Introduction to phenomenological philosophy], ed. Jiří Polívka and Ivan Chvatík. Praha: OIKOYMENH. ———. 1995a. In Papiers phénoménologiques, ed. Erika Abrams. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. ———. 1995b. Leçons sur la corporéité. Trans. Erika Abrams. In Jan Patočka, Papiers phénoménologiques, ed. Erika Abrams, 53–116. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. ———. 1996a. Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Chicago-­ LaSalle: Open Court. ———. 1996b. An introduction to Husserl’s phenomenology. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Ed. James Dodd. Chicago-La Salle: Open Court. ———. 1998. Body, community, language, world. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2000. Vom Erscheinen als Solchen. Trans. and ed. Helga Blaschek-Hahn and Karel Novotný. Karl Alber: Freiburg-München. ———. 2001. In Dopisy Václavu Richterovi [Letters to Václav Richter], ed. Ivan Chvatík and Jiří Michálek. Praha: OIKOYMENH. ———. 2006. Einleitung: Geschichte als geistige Lebensform. Trans. L. Hagedorn. In Jan Patočka, Andere Wege in die Moderne, ed. L. Hagedorn, 65–79. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ———. 2007a. Life in balance, life in amplitude. Trans. Eric Manton. In Jan Patočka, Living in problematicity, ed. Eric Manton, 32–42. Praha: OIKOYMENH. ———. 2007b. Des deux manières de concevoir le sens de la philosophie. Trans. Erika Abrams. Studia Phaenomenologica – Romanian Journal for Phenomenology VII: 71–88.

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———. 2007c. Some comments concerning the extramundane and mundane position of philosophy. Trans. Eric Manton and Erazim Kohák. In Jan Patočka, Living in problematicity, ed. Eric Manton, 18–28. Praha: OIKOYMENH. ———. 2011a. Éternité et historicité. Trans. Erika Abrams. Lagrasse: Verdier. ———. 2011b. In Korespondence s komeniology [correspondence with xomeniologists] I, ed. Věra Schifferová, Ivan Chvatík, and Tomáš Havelka. Praha: OIKOYMENH. ———. 2016. In Fenomenologické spisy [phenomenological writings] III/2: O zjevování [on appearing], ed. Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba. Praha: OIKOYMENH. ———. 2021. Carnets philosophiques. Trans. Erika Abrams. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2022. The spiritual foundations of life in our time. Trans. Alex Zucker. In The selected writings of Jan Patočka: Care for the soul, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Erin Plunkett, 263–280. London: Bloomsbury. Pieper, Josef. 1999. Death and immortality. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press. Scheler, Max. 1958. Man and history. In Max Scheler, Philosophical perspectives. Trans. O. Haac, 65–93. Boston: Beacon Press. Scherer, Georg. 1979. Das Problem des Todes in der Philosophie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Schütz, Alfred, and Eric Voegelin. 2004. In Eine Freundschaft, die ein Leben ausgehalten hat: Briefwechsel 1938–1959, ed. Gerhard Wagner and Gilbert Weiss. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag. Sternad, Christian. 2017. The holding back of decline: Scheler, Patočka, and Ricoeur on death and afterlife. Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 9: 536–559. Voegelin, Eric. 1967. Immortality: Experience and symbol. Harvard Theological Review 40: 235–279.

Chapter 4

Dying With the Other: Death as the Manifestation of Community Gustav Strandberg

Death is a phenomenon, which more than any other merits the designation “limit-­ experience”. It is a limit in the strongest sense of the word, the most originary limit we ever encounter in our lives and that we can reasonably conceive of, and this in a twofold sense: it is a limit for our life and existence, that which demarcates life as we know it, but also a limit for thought, that which simply cannot be encompassed by our faculties. However, it is also a distinct limit for phenomenology in the sense that the lived experience of our own death by necessity eludes us. What we do experience is the phenomenon of dying, but even this phenomenon is difficult to grasp, at least for those of us who are blessed to die of natural causes, since dying is then congenial to life itself. As soon as we are born, we are, as Heidegger was wont to point out, old enough to die. Death simply cannot be lived, and dying is always already an indelible part of life itself. To engage with the phenomenon of death is therefore to engage with the limits of phenomenology. If looked at from this perspective, it is perhaps no wonder that death became such an important question for Jan Patočka. From the beginning of the 1960s and up until his own death in 1977, Patočka was engaged in a project that sought to expand the limits of phenomenology beyond the strict confines of the modern conception of subjectivity and thereby beyond the limits of phenomenology in its traditional and Husserlian guise – a project that is known to us under the name of “a-subjective phenomenology”. In Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology, and in

G. Strandberg (*) Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_4

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his later thought as a whole, the limit-experience of death is a recurring theme.1 When confronted with our own death, the limits of subjectivity manifest themselves and the confines of individuality break asunder. In this sense, death is not only one of many phenomena under study in Patočka’s philosophy, but something with which it is intimately tied. Death is that which speaks of the limits of the subject, but also that which shows up the limits of the philosophical and phenomenological account of subjectivity. Patočka’s most sustained attempt at analysing the phenomenon of death takes place in the essay “The Phenomenology of Afterlife”, but it is far from the only place in his work where he discusses the phenomenon. In fact, his later work as a whole could be read as an ongoing meditation on death, and on how our constitutive co-existence, or solidarity, with others could manifest itself by and through the de-­ subjectivating and self-sacrificing experience of death. However, in Patočka’s thought death is not only an important thematic on a purely phenomenological or existential level, it is also a central part of his critique of modernity and of his understanding of how the logic of modernity can be overcome. The twentieth century was, so Patočka famously holds, a century marked by war, a century shrouded in darkness and death. Paradoxically, it is also by way of a renewed understanding of death that the darkness of the twentieth century can be overturned. Thus, death is, for want of a better word, a politico-existential category in Patočka’s work, and as such it is both a crucial part of his understanding of the movements of human existence, of human existence as movement, and an important critical and political category in his philosophy of history and political thought. In what follows, I will seek to analyse what role the experience of death plays in Patočka’s later thought in an attempt to elucidate how the experience of death can manifest a form of solidarity that challenges the homogenizing logic of modernity, what Patočka famously calls a “solidarity of the shaken”. After having outlined Patočka’s understanding of death, I will seek to connect Patočka’s later reflections on death with the essay “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” in order to show how his earlier reflections in this essay can provide a much needed phenomenological concretion to his later, more speculative, philosophy of history.

Death and the Three Movements of Human Existence In order to fully understand what role death plays in Patočka’s analyses in the Heretical Essays and in his later thought as a whole, it is important to begin by delineating the place that death, and being-towards-death, has in Patočka’s understanding of the three movements of human existence. As is well known, Patočka  Patočka borrows the concept “limit-experience”, or limit-situation (Grenzsituation), from Karl Jaspers. In the article “Co je existence?” (“What is existence?”) (Patočka 2009), which Patočka dedicated to Jaspers after his death in 1969, Patočka states that Jaspers’ analyses of the limit situations of human existence constitute his most important contribution to modern philosophy. 1

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understands human existence in Aristotelian terms as a dynamic movement from potentiality to actuality (from dynamis to energeia), and as a form of movement that is constituted by three interrelated, but distinct, inflections: the movement of acceptance and rooting, which on a temporal level is related to the past; the movement of self-prolongation and work, which is related to the present; and the movement of freedom, which takes place in relation to the future.2 Even though Patočka is not completely consistent on this point (in part because he returns to the thematic of the three movements of human existence in a number of different texts and from out of slightly different questions), he nonetheless considers the first two movements to be constitutive of man’s inauthentic existence.3 These movements are inauthentic, since they do not include any explicit relation to our own finitude.4 In these movements we are instead overburdened by the impact of the past, be it in the form of customs, traditions, myths or habitual modes of existence, or submerged in work, which encloses us within the pressing demands of the present. In both cases, albeit for slightly different reasons, we are existing in an inauthentic way, since we fail to see that the meaning of human existence is something that we have to take responsibility for ourselves, a burden which we ourselves have to bear. Instead of owning up to our finitude, we take refuge in the past and the meaning contained therein or we immerse ourselves in our career and the self-realization that it holds out for us in the form of an empty, but alluring, promise. However, when we are explicitly confronted with our own finitude, in affective attunements such as anxiety, boredom and hopefulness, we are, Patočka writes, confronted with “the ultimate possibility, the possibility of a radical impossibility of being” – a possibility that is impossible since it cannot be actualized without ending our life and with it every imaginable possibility. The impossibility of death, Patočka continues, “casts a shadow over our whole life yet at the same time makes it possible, enables it to be whole” (1996, 153). Death enables our life, it is the condition of possibility for meaning, since it is  Patočka’s theory of movement is an attempt to combine Aristotle’s understanding of movement, as it is presented in the Physics, with an existential and phenomenological analysis. This is something that Patočka returns to in a number of his texts, but the most important and sustained analysis of this is to be found in his large study on Aristotle from 1964 (Patočka 2011). Patočka’s reflections on the movements of human existence have been covered extensively in the secondary literature. In fact, this part of Patočka’s philosophy is the one that has received most attention in the existent literature, to such an extent that almost all studies on Patočka’s thought address it in one way or form. That being said, the most important secondary texts are Barbaras 2007, Duicu 2014, and Novotný 2012. 3  The most important texts that address the three movement of human existence are: “K prehistorii vědy o pohybu: svět, země, nebe a pohyb lidského života”, a short essay from 1965  in which Patočka for the first time speaks of three fundamental movements of human existence; the article “Přirozený svět a fenomenologie” (“The Natural World and Phenomenology”), from 1967; the lecture series Tělo, společnosti, jazyk, svět (Body, Community, Language, World) from 1968–69; and the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, Patočka’s magnum opus from 1975. 4  Patočka’s analyses of the distinction authentic/inauthentic has given rise to an ongoing debate as to how Patočka’s use of the distinction differs from that of Heidegger. However, this is neither the time nor the place to enter into that discussion. For a text that analyses the parameters of the debates, see Kouba 2007. 2

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only by responsibly and actively engaging with our own finitude that our life is given a direction and a proper orientation – proper since it is no longer directed by the past or administered by the present, but open for the possibilities of the future. Thus, it becomes clear to us that our existence takes place in relation to possibilities, and ultimately to the impossible possibility of our own death. We can relate to these possibilities in two distinct ways: either we shy away from them and once again seek refuge in the past or the present, or we relate explicitly to our own end and to the whole of existence. If and when we manage to relate to our own possibilities and our own finitude, a transformation of existence is made possible, a transformation that Patočka describes in different ways, but which is presented as a metanoia, as a transformative conversion, in the Heretical Essays, and as a shaking of existence that uproots it from its dependency on the past and its alienation in the present. In the Heretical Essays, Patočka writes (1996, 40) that by and through the experience of finitude humans cease to identify with [pre-given meaning], myth ceases to be the word of their lips. In the moment when life renews itself everything is cast in a new light. Scales fall from the eyes of those set free, not that they might see something new but that they might see in a new way. It is like a landscape illuminated by lightning, amid which humans stand alone, with no support, relying solely on that which presents itself – and that which presents itself is everything without exception.

Nothing of that which we relied upon in the first two movements is meaningful for us any longer: our cherished traditions and customs no longer appear as solid foundations upon which we can base our lives, but are manifested in all their arbitrary fragility, and the promised self-realization by and through work all of a sudden strike us as meaningless. However, this sense of meaninglessness is something that gives rise to meaning, something that forces us to search for meaning anew. When confronted with death, we are, in short, confronted with the responsibility for meaning as such, i.e. with a form of meaning that necessitates our responsibility and which can no longer be passively received. For anyone familiar with Heidegger’s analyses in Being and Time, none of this comes as a surprise. Even though Patočka makes use of different formulations, especially so in the Heretical Essays where his tone and style become more dramatic in nature, partly as a response to the dire political situation in Czechoslovakia, his existential analysis of our relation to death and finitude is consistent with Heidegger’s famous reflections on being-towards-death in Being and Time. However, there are two important differences. First of all, Patočka transposes the analysis of being-towards-death to a historico-political plane in the Heretical Essays. Admittedly, Heidegger alludes to a similar problematic in the notorious discussion in § 74 of Being and Time, but without entering into the concrete historical and political dimensions to which Patočka turns. For Patočka, the question of being-­ towards-­death becomes, one might even say, the axes around which modernity turns, and from which it turns away. Since man has been reduced to work and production during modernity, he has reverted to a pre-historical and inauthentic mode of existence. Thus, modern man is alienated from that which is most proper to him; he is alienated from his own death and thereby from his finite existence as such.

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However, this does not mean that death is absent during modernity. On the contrary, we encounter death wherever we turn. Death is omnipresent. According to Patočka the twentieth century was characterized by its wars to such an extent that war became not only one of its defining hallmarks, but identical to it. During modernity people are dying on an almost industrial scale, but this is, paradoxically, only registered on the level of impersonal statistics. A form of deadness (umrtvenost) is here at play, according to Patočka, by which he means precisely an inauthentic relation to death. This relation, this deadness, Patočka writes, “has seized our life behind our backs” and emptied it of its meaning and we can, he continues, paradoxically only vanquish this deadness “by acclaiming mortality, by acclaiming that from which deadness seeks to escape and what it confirms in its escaping” (Patočka 1989a, 267). In this sense, modernity is a struggle for and against death, an ongoing struggle against deadness that takes place by and through a renewed relation to death. Second of all, Patočka’s reflections on death differ from those of Heidegger since he considers the experience of death to be intimately related to the question of community. Whereas Heidegger famously writes that being-towards-death “individualizes Da-sein down to itself”, since our anxiety in front of death throws us back onto our proper existence (Heidegger 1996, 243), Patočka, on the other hand, insists that the experience of death implies a form of “self-surrender or self-dedication” that implies a differentiation and sharing, rather than a singularisation of existence, and a sharing that, in turn, can manifest our belonging and community with others (Patočka 1989a, 267).

Death and the Front-Line Experience It is against this background that Patočka calls for a renewed understanding of death, but this renewal cannot take the form of a transhistorical reflection on the nature of human existence. Instead, the possibility of a renewed understanding of death, and a renewed experience of it, has to be found within the very logic of modernity, which has given rise to the obfuscation of our relation to death. However, the logic of modernity has to reach its own completion for a rupture to manifest itself. Only when “the powers of the day”, i.e. the technological and political development that characterises modernity, and the wars to which they have given rise, reach their nadir, can we, according to Patočka, catch sight of the fleeting possibility of another relation to death, and concomitantly, the contours of another form of co-existence. This is the context in which Patočka introduces the front-line experience of the First World War. The experience of the front harbours the possibility of breaking with war and death by and through a proper experience of death itself – proper since it no longer relies on statistics, but implies a face to face encounter with death. During modernity the front line has, in other words, become the concrete instantiation of a limit-experience where the limits of human existence have been inscribed on the sundered landscape of Europe. The front line experience is first of all an

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experience of meaninglessness: it is the culmination of the homogenizing development of modernity, which has made everyone and everything completely interchangeable, and therefore meaningless in and of themselves. In this respect, the experience of the front entails a confrontation with modernity as such, an epoch which has been condensed into the front-line, into the absurdity of fighting a war that purportedly aims to end all war, but which in reality is only the transformation of peace into war and the transformation of life into the omnipresence of death.5 Yet, the absurdity of the front-line also harbours the promise of a metanoia, of a profound transformation of human existence, precisely because it entails a confrontation with death and not with yet another form of deadness. In the Heretical Essays, Patočka writes (1996, 131): 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 a mere nonexistence; the transformation of the meaning of life which here trips on nothingness, on a boundary over which it cannot step, along which everything is transformed.

From out of the meaninglessness of the front, a new form of meaning can arise. Meaning is discovered, Patočka writes, “in the seeking which flows from its absence” and the shaking of meaning and existence can give rise to a new form of meaningfulness (1996, 61). However, the experience of the front line does not only imply a new, and radically different, relation to meaning, it also heralds a new and coming community, which Patočka famously calls “the solidarity of the shaken”. In this solidarity, the enemy is no longer an absolute adversary, but, Patočka writes, a “fellow discoverer of absolute freedom with whom agreement is possible in difference, a fellow participant in the upheaval of the day, of peace, and of life lacking all peaks” (1996, 131). This form of solidarity is made possible by the fact that the experience of the front line is also an experience of sacrifice. It is, Patočka writes, a sacrifice of the self, which presents itself “as the authentic transindividuality” of man (1996, 131). Here we encounter the “self-surrender” and “self-dedication”, which I mentioned previously. By and through the limit-experience of death, we not only confront the absolute limit of life, we also transgress and transcend the enclosing limits of our own individuality: we give ourselves away, we abandon and dedicate ourselves to something that lies beyond our self, that is to a form of transindividuality, community and solidarity that ultimately rests on nothing but a shared exposure to that which makes the confines of our subjectivity and individuality tremble. We encounter the thematic of sacrifice throughout the Heretical Essays, in which Patočka not only understands the experience of death as a potential self-sacrifice, but in which he also plays on the polyvalence of the Czech word for sacrifice, oběť, which, just as its German equivalent, Opfer, has both a passive and active sense: to be the victim of something, and to sacrifice oneself for something. Accordingly,

 The idea that the First World War would be “a war that ends all war” was expressed by H. G. Wells in his book The War that Will End War, first published in 1914 (Wells 1914). 5

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man has during modernity become a victim of its techno-scientific development – a mere cog in the techno-capitalist machine – at the same time as a true sacrifice is the only possible salvation from this very logic. What is at stake is, in other words, an attempt to turn sacrifice against sacrifice itself, to turn sacrifice against victimhood. But even though the question of sacrifice therefore is present, albeit implicitly, in all of the six Heretical Essays, it is nonetheless a question that is left relatively unexplored in the text. However, in the recorded notes from private seminars from 1973 on the “technological era”, which Patočka conducted with five of his students, he presents his understanding of sacrifice in more detail.6 Even though these seminars took place before the publication of the Heretical Essays, it is clear that the discussions address the same constellation of problems that Patočka will turn to later on.7 In the seminars, Patočka starts out from a reflection on a sentence by Hölderlin – which was made famous by Heidegger’s interpretation – namely: “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch” (“Wherever there is danger, the saving power grows as well”) (Patočka 2002, 389). Patočka’s reflections therefore start out from the idea that there has to be something within the very development of our techno-capitalist modernity that contains its own negation. According to Heidegger, the salvation in question can be found within art (Patočka 2002, 391). Because of its uselessness, art contains an implicit negation of technological framing: art is, in short, by its very nature a form of resistance. Patočka takes issue with Heidegger on this point, not because he disagrees with Heidegger’s understanding of art, but because he deems the field of aesthetics to be insufficient for the problem at hand. Instead, what is searched for in the discussions is an ethical and religious form of resistance (2002, 393). It is in this context that the theme of sacrifice is introduced. By and through a sacrifice of ourselves, we can push the alienation of modernity to its extreme, to the point at which alienation as such breaks apart. Life can be controlled, ordered and framed, but death simply cannot. The negativity of death is uselessness par excellence and as such it withdraws from the calculative logic at play in modernity. Therefore, we have to “go to the very end of the narcissistic desires and representations of man in order to, through this, manifest that, that which does not exist, reigns over all that which is” (Patočka 2002, 403). By and through the act of sacrifice, a useless and sovereign form of negativity breaks through, precisely that negativity or darkness, which the forces of the day have perverted and attempted to sequester and appropriate. In this ultimate sacrifice of the self, existence, Patočka writes, “manifests the sovereignty and supremacy of non-existence” (2002, 403). In order for this to be possible, in order for the sovereignty of negativity to manifest itself, the sacrifice must be authentic in nature. An inauthentic sacrifice is, Patočka notes, a form of  The seminars have been translated into French (Patočka 1990), but not into English as of yet. In what follows, all the references are to the Czech original. 7  With one important caveat: in these discussions, Patočka defines the political and metaphysical problems of modernity in a way that is closer to Heidegger’s understanding of technology as a form of “framing” (Gestell) of our relation to being, whereas in the Heretical Essays Heidegger is barely mentioned, even though his presence is implicit throughout the book.

6

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transaction: we sacrifice ourselves, or something we hold dear, in order to gain something else. This form of sacrifice is therefore still part of the homogenizing logic, with which it seeks to break – it is still riveted, we might say, to the law of general equivalence. A true or authentic sacrifice is instead a sacrifice for nothing, in which there is no profit to be made. The true form of sacrifice is, Patočka notes, a “non-achievement”. Such a negative sacrifice implies an implicit refusal of the forces of the day, for which everything has to be ordered, calculable, and profitable. It introduces a radical negativity that cannot be appropriated and which shows us that there exists aspects of the human condition that cannot be controlled by the instrumentalized rationality of modernity. But this form of sacrifice also implies a shaking of human existence, which, Patočka writes, “effaces the boundary between our own existence and that of the other” (2002, 422). However, despite the fact that Patočka alludes to this effacement of boundaries during the seminars it is not something that is explicated in any detail. In passing, he mentions the possibility of a sacrificial community in the discussion with his students, but this is something neither he, nor any of his students, focus on. Instead, the remainder of the seminar is centred on other issues. First and foremost on specific examples of authentic forms of sacrifice. Here Patočka speaks about Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, but that which is most noteworthy about the discussion is the names that are not mentioned, i.e. the students Jan Palach, Jan Zajíc, Evžen Plocek and Michal Leučík who all sacrificed themselves by committing suicide as a direct response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague spring.8

Self-Sacrifice and Self-Surrender In these seminars on the technological era, as well as in the Heretical Essays, Patočka tries to come to terms with the politico-existential meaning of death and sacrifice by drawing attention to the transindividual and de-subjectivating negativity that the experience of death brings with it. The experience of death, Patočka suggests in these texts, implies a form of sharing of existence that harbours the possibility of a new form of community. On this point, and before proceeding with the analysis, it is helpful to contrast this reading of Patočka with the one Jacques Derrida presents in The Gift of Death. Here, Derrida focuses on what the gift of death means in Patočka’s work, and then more specifically in the Heretical Essays, which is the only text by Patočka that Derrida refers to in his analysis. Who or what, Derrida asks, “gives itself death or takes it upon him-, her-, or itself” (1995, 45)? When analyzing this question, Derrida turns his attention to the care of death, melete thanatou, which according to Patočka was a central part of the Platonic idea of a care of the soul (epimeleia tes psyches). To care for one’s soul, was, Patočka holds, also a

 For an account of these tragic events, see Bolton 2012, 54ff.

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care for one’s death, an attempt to take cognizance of and explicitly relate to one’s own finitude. For Plato, the “care for death” thus became, he writes, “the true care for life; life (eternal) is born of this direct look at death, of an overcoming of death (perhaps it is nothing but this ‘overcoming’)” (1996, 105). In Plato’s work, this is most clearly expressed in the famous passages of the Phaedo, where Socrates claims that philosophy is nothing but a preparation for death since, by and through the dialectics of philosophical thought, man gradually liberates himself from his finite bodily existence. “Those who study philosophy aright”, Plato writes, “study nothing but dying and being dead” – a statement that Socrates later expounds on in the remainder of the dialogue (2005, 64a). When commenting upon this, Derrida writes (1995, 13): The famous passage of the Phaedo (80c) that Patočka obliquely refers to but neither analyzes nor even cites, describes a sort of subjectivizing interiorization, the movement of the soul’s gathering of itself, a fleeing of the body towards its interior where it withdraws into itself in order to recall itself to itself, in order to be next to itself, in order to keep itself in this gesture of remembering. This conversion turns the soul around and amasses it upon itself.

After having presented this interpretation of Plato, Derrida then ascribes this Platonic understanding of death to Patočka and to his conception of the care of the soul. Even though Derrida’s reading captures Plato’s understanding of death, he is, nonetheless, fundamentally mistaken when he identifies Plato’s conception with that of Patočka. As I have tried to show earlier, Patočka does not understand the experience of death as an experience that interiorizes and subjectivizes man, that founds his or her subjectivity, but on the contrary as an exteriorizing and de-­ subjectivizing experience (we might even call it an experience of destitution). To be fair to Derrida, this is not that clearly pronounced in the Heretical Essays, but it is clearly manifested in some of Patočka’s other texts from the same period where he emphasises that the negativity inherent in death exceeds the limits of subjectivity. This is brought out most clearly in Patočka’s analyses of the third movement of human existence, and the form of self-sacrifice, or self-surrender (sebevzdaní) that it implies. The confrontation with death, which is central to the third movement of existence, consists of a process of self-abandonment and self-surrender that transcends the limits of the self and which thereby enables a sense of continuity with others – a continuity that Patočka, at times, identifies with a sense of unconditional love. The following passage deserves to be quoted in full, since it succinctly expresses what is at stake in the experience of death for Patočka. It stems from the essay “The ‘Natural’ World and Phenomenology” from 1967, in which Patočka writes (1989a, 267f): In acclaiming finitude something else takes place than in proclaiming nothingness and nihilism. What is taking place is the overcoming of finitude, which is an authentic overcoming in the sense of overcoming and preserving. Life is not capable 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, self-dedication. However, an existing being can only surrender itself, dedicate

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G. Strandberg itself, to an other. The strength of the transubstantiation of life is the strength of a new love, a love yielding itself unconditionally to others. Only in this love does individuality become itself without maintaining the other in a self-alienation. Only here is the distraction of atomized life replaced by an inner continuity for which the other is not alien but a living I, not only abstractly but in the power of self-surrender – much as in biological love, though now freely, openly, universally. That is not love as sympathy, as fellow feeling for a destiny of the same suffering but of the same glory, the same victory  – the victory over the self-­ destructive self-centredness.

By and through the experience of death, our atomized individual existence is put into question and a new sense of meaning manifests itself as a shared sense of continuity, a form of continuity which transcends and transgresses the limits of our ordinary and discontinuous separation. It is an experience by and through which we are confronted with the fact that our subjectivity is never self-enclosed, but always already in relation with others. Contrary to what Derrida claims, this is not a centripetal experience by which we are thrown back upon ourselves, but a centrifugal experience that manifests our primordial dissipation. In his earlier essay “Negative Platonism” from 1955, Patočka alludes to something similar. However, in this text it is not the negativity of death which is being discussed, but the negativity inherent in human freedom. Here Patočka states that this experience takes place in man, but that man is insufficient for this experience and that the experience of negativity thereby shatters the stability of the subject. It is, he writes, an experience that “stands above both objective and subjective existents” in such a way that it “avoids all subjectivism” (1989b, 200). Whether he is talking about the negativity of death or the negativity of freedom, Patočka insists on the fact that these forms of negativity supersede the limits of subjectivity.9

Death as the Manifestation of Community Before moving on, it is important to note the discrepancy between the passage quoted above and the more bellicose passages of the Heretical Essays. In both his descriptions of the front experiences of the first world war, and in his discussions concerning authentic forms of sacrifice, there is an unmistakable, and highly problematic, heroism at play in Patočka’s reflections. Whether he is talking about the front-line soldier or the Soviet dissident, it is the lonely and heroic individual that defies death, which is his privileged example and model. This also has consequences for our understanding of the solidarity of the shaken. If we focus on Patočka’s analyses in the Heretical Essays and on the tone with which this solidarity is addressed, it seems to be a form of solidarity that is reserved for heroic men who face death undaunted and who share this experience with an equally undaunted enemy. Moreover, and this is perhaps even more problematic, Patočka fails to recognize that

 For an in-depth analysis of Patočka’s understanding of negativity in “Negative Platonism”, as well as in his later work, see Hejdánek 1992. 9

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many of the so-called front soldiers of the first world war would side with fascism after the war, something which further accentuates how problematic this form of solidarity can be.10 For this reason, it is important to remember Patočka’s more existential and phenomenological discussions of death since they provide us with a radically different picture and one in which the individualistic heroism gives way to a more nuanced phenomenological account of the specific form of co-existence that manifests itself in less exceptional experiences of death. The passage that I quoted earlier is one example of this, but so is Patočka’s reflections in the essay “The Phenomenology of Afterlife”, which constitutes his most sustained and detailed phenomenological analysis of death. Even if it is difficult to date, this essay was in all probability written during the latter half of the 1960s, that is, before Patočka’s later reflections on death in the Heretical Essays.11 But this notwithstanding, I believe it can help us to shed light on Patočka’s understanding of what role the experience of death has for our community with others. In the essay, Patočka addresses the fact that subjectivity, as it has been conceived within the tradition of transcendental philosophy from Kant up until Husserl, never exists as an unmediated self-presence, as a “pure being for itself” – a statement, we might add, that is in keeping with Patočka’s critique of Husserl in his a-subjective writings.12 If anything this “pure being for itself” is, he writes, “only a limit concept, which does not essentially occur in our primordial experience of things and of ourselves” (Patočka this volume, /139/).13 The pure interiority and self-presence of the subject is a limit concept since it is not something that actually appears in our lived experience, where our relation to ourselves is always already mediated by our relations to others. We can only relate to ourselves, as Patočka formulates it, “by relating to the other, to more and more things and ultimately to the universe as such, so locating ourselves in the world”. In order to actualize our relation to ourselves, our self-relation, we simply “must go round about another being” (1998, 31). This is the only possibility of catching sight of ourselves, but it is also a necessary condition for meaning as such, since it is only by externalizing ourselves in relation to others that meaning can arise. Thus, all meaning requires a form of objectification or, as Patočka puts it in “The Phenomenology of Afterlife”, it requires a sense of publicity and sharing. And this also holds true for our so called inner experience, for our  After the war, many of the front line soldiers sided with fascism and played an important role in the battles fought during the Second World War, first and foremost in Germany, but also in other European countries. For an historical account of this, see Hobsbawm 1994, 125. 11  For an analysis of the text that circumscribes its position within Patočka’s œuvres as a whole, see the paper by Jan Frei in this volume. 12  In his critique of Husserl, Patočka often returns to the idea that the purported self-presence of the subject to itself is false, which concomitantly implies that Husserl’s notion of a phenomenological reduction must be abandoned as well. Patočka will, for example, write that “perceiving the cogitationes with the help of an ‘inner gaze’ [Blick], parallel to an external gaze as its inverted counterpart, is a myth” and that the only way of catching sight of the ego is by and through man’s relations to the world and to others (Patočka 2015, 49). 13  The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation. 10

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experience of ourselves. To be sure, I have “my own private time”, as Patočka puts it, and there is a part of my subjectivity that only I have access to and that can only be adumbrated for others, but when I try to make this inner experience meaningful for myself, I need to objectify it: I need to turn it into something public, into words and actions in order to be able to make sense of it and in order to share it in a meaningful way with others. Thus, I am “constantly being made public, by my own activity, not only to others, but also to myself” (this volume, /139/). This is a precondition for any form of communication, but it is also a precondition for my own self-­ relation: “it is only through another that I can live myself as well” (this volume, /140/).14 We thereby require the reciprocity of others in order for our existence to be meaningful and for our own self to have any semblance of identity. When Patočka discusses this issue in the “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” he does so by stating that this reciprocity is based on need, and by briefly alluding to Kojève’s famous interpretation of Hegel and the master-slave-dialectic. However, here it is important to note that whereas Hegel, as well as Kojève, start out from the category of need or desire, their respective analysis revolves around the question of how our desire can be recognized by the other. Patočka, although he refers to these discussions, takes a different approach. Instead of focusing on our need for recognition, Patočka understands our relation to the Other as being centred on our “need for the other’s need” (this volume, /137/). This need is reciprocal in nature: we need the Other’s need of us in his or her life in order for our self to be constituted (indeed, our self would not even exist were it not for the ways in which it is mediated by the Other), at the same time as the Other needs my need in order to accomplish his or her being. Thus, the telos of need is not recognition, but participation: we need to participate in the life of the other and we need the other to participate in ours since this is the only way for us to relate to ourselves (de Warren 2017). Since my need of the Other’s need to participate in my life is equiprimordial with the Other’s need of my need to participate in his or her life, our inter-subjective relations do not revolve around the hierarchical differences, which are at play in the Hegelian theory of recognition, and which Sartre would later develop in his theory of inter-subjectivity. Instead, we can, as Filip Karfík has pointed out, speak of a “circular character”, perhaps even of a hermeneutic circularity, at play here since our need is in need of the Other’s need and vice versa (Karfík 2008, 85). Patočka himself will speak of this in terms of a fulfilment of our inherent emptiness or negativity. We need, he writes, “to be the fulfilment of another’s emptiness, and if this happens, our own emptiness – need – is fulfilled” (this volume, /137/). However, the fulfilment of our own emptiness does not lead to any form of saturation, since it concomitantly implies a new spark of need for the Other. When we  In this respect, there are some striking similarities between Patočka’s analyses and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the “tacit cogito” in the Phenomenology of Perception. Similarly to Patočka, Merleau-Ponty highlights the constitutive relationality of the cogito. See MerleauPonty 2012, 422ff. For an excellent comparative study that seeks to trace the similarities and differences between Patočka and Merleau-Ponty, see Šan 2012. 14

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experience that the Other needs us, our inherent emptiness is fulfilled, but in such a way that our need for the Other increases. It is, Patočka continues, a form of need that is “not to be quenched, but should on the contrary be rekindled constantly, it should be renewed all the time” (this volume, /138/). The more the Other needs me and wants me to participate in his or her life, the more I need him or her to participate in mine. In the Other’s need of me, I recognize my need of the Other in such a way that our desire for each other escalates rather than reaches any form of saturation. This structure thus offsets the traditional understanding of the negativity of need or desire, since our need is constantly augmented by and through the need of the other. It is, to quote Maurice Blanchot, a form of need that “is not looking for what may put an end to it, but for the excess of a lack that grows ever deeper even as it fills itself up” (Blanchot 1988, 8). The reciprocity of needs that characterizes our co-existence with others, thus implies that we live our lives in each other and that our existence involves a constitutive form of ecstasy, of being and living outside of our selves, outside of the purported interiority of subjectivity and in and with the Other. However, this does not imply, and this is something that Patočka stresses in the text, a form of alienation. It is not, he writes, “something essentially non-authentic, but it belongs to the full content of one’s own being” (this volume, /140/).15 But this also implies that the death of someone near to us, the death of someone with whom we reciprocally engage, implies a death of something essential to our own being: the loss of the Other is a loss of our own Self. What we lose, when the Other dies, is namely, as Patočka writes, “the possibility that the other used to give us, the possibility that we were for ourselves on the basis of the other”, that is the possibility of relating to ourselves through the need of the lost Other (this volume, /141/). Thus, the death of a loved one manifests how interwoven our life and existence is with that of others: the Other passes away and with him or her a part of me disappears as well, that part of my identity or being that could only be accomplished through my reciprocal relationship with the deceased. In order to account for this, Patočka speaks of the other as “a kind of external organ of our own life” – an organ that lingers on after the Other’s death and haunts me as a form of phantom limb or “living death” that constantly reminds me of my loss (this volume, /137, 141/). Thus, the death of someone close to us manifests that our existence is never self-enclosed and that our purported interiority is always already populated with others. Even though the question at play in “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” is how we are affected by the death of others and not how we relate to our own death, I believe  Here we are once again reminded of the difference between Patočka and Heidegger when it comes to the question of being-with or co-existence. Patočka’s critique of Heidegger’s understanding of inautenticity and the “They” (das Man) is most explicitly formulated in the lecture series Body, Community, Language, World, in which Patočka writes: “Herein our conception is fundamentally different [to that of Heidegger]. The relation of humans to the world is not negative in that way but rather positive, it is not a self-loss but the condition of the possibility of self-discovery” (1998, 49). Even though Patočka uses other concepts in “The Phenomenology of Afterlife”, his claim that our being-outside-of-ourselves does not imply a form of alienation, but is a constitutive part of who we are, is in keeping with his critique of Heidegger’s understanding of being-with. 15

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these analyses can help us shed some light on Patočka’s later reflections on death as well. For what is at stake in Patočka’s attempt to come to grips with a community of death is not a form of community that arises from out of the experience of death or that is constituted around it (in the form of a sacrificial community or a death cult). What he is trying to analyse is the form of community or co-existence, which is always already a part of our very existence, but that is made manifest in the limit-­ experience of death. What the experience of death does, if we return to a quote by Patočka that I brought attention to earlier, is that it “effaces the boundary between our own existence and that of the other”. I are, to paraphrase Rimbaud, others and I have never been anything else than others. Behind the illusory boundaries that separate me from other people, I am only an interwoven mesh of needs, identities, relationships and shared memories. In this respect, the experience of death is an experience of our a-subjectivity, of the fact that our subjectivity is only an illusion and that we can never relate to ourselves without others, that the introspection, cherished by transcendental philosophy, has in fact never been anything else but an extrospection. However, this is not an experience of something new, of a new form of community. Rather the experience of death is an experience in which, to quote Patočka, “scales fall from the eyes of those set free, not that they might see something new but that they might see in a new way” (1996, 40). In light of this, we can also return to Patočka’s idea that the experience of death implies a form of self-sacrifice and self-dedication. This form of sacrifice does not have to mean an actual sacrifice of our lives. Instead, and by shifting the emphasis of Patočka’s expression, we can speak of a sacrifice or abandonment of the self instead of a self-sacrifice, that is a sacrifice of the illusory self, behind which we, all too often, seek refuge. However, this experience is something which modernity has tended to obfuscate. It is an experience that is covered over by sediments of narcissism, individualism, and careerism to such an extent that man tends to forget all of the people who make him or her into what (s)he is, something which led Patočka, in despair and desperation, to look for the semblances of this experience in the trenches of the First World War. That being said, if we read Patočka in the way that I have proposed here, the solidarity of the shaken is neither restricted to the heroic experiences at the front, nor to the courageous protests of dissidents, but is instead a solidarity between those of us, all of us, whose existence is being shaken by the incessant, and at times painful, sharing of our a-subjective existence. Patočka’s ongoing meditation on death is thus a crucial part of his a-subjective phenomenology. The limit-experiences that he tirelessly sought out and described in his later thought are precisely the experiences by and through which the a-­subjective dimension of our existence is made manifest. These experiences are painful since they destitute our subjectivity and question our identity; they are upsetting, shocking and disorienting since they confront us with our constitutive exposure to others. But even though these experiences can be painful and unnerving at times, they are a testament to our undetermined, and perhaps undeterminable, solidarity and co-­ existence with others. In this respect, Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology is not only a-subjective since it refutes Husserl’s transcendental idealism, but because it

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decentres and destitutes the position of the subject in favour of a relational understanding of human (co)existence, in which the “co”, the “with”, is always prior to and more originary than any form of individuality or self-enclosed subjectivity (cf. Strandberg 2017).

References Barbaras, Renaud. 2007. Le movement de l’existence: Études sur la phénoménologie de Jan Patočka. Vol. 52, 483. Chatou: Les Éditions de La Transparence. Blanchot, Maurice. 1988. The unavowable community. Trans. Pierre Joris. New  York: Station Hill Press. Bolton, Jonathan. 2012. Worlds of dissent. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. de Warren, Nicolas. 2017. Souls of the departed: Towards a phenomenology of the after-life. Metodo 5 (1): 205–237. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. The gift of death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duicu, Dragoš. 2014. Phénoménologie du mouvement: Patočka et l’héritage de la physique aristotélicienne. Paris: Hermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: State University of New York Press. Hejdánek, Ladislav. 1992. Nothingness and responsibility: The problem of ‘negative platonism’ in Patočka’s philosophy. In La responsibilité / Responsibility, ed. Pavel Horák and Josef Zumr. Prague: Institut de philosophie de l’Academie tchécoslovaque des Sciences. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. The age of extremes: The short twentieth century 1914–1991. London: Abacus. Karfík, Filip. 2008. Unendlichwerden durch die Endlichkeit: Eine Lektüre der Philosophie Jan Patočkas. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Kouba, Pavel. 2007. Le problème du troisième mouvement. In Jan Patočka: Phénoménologie asubjective et existence. Milano: Mimesis. Novotný, Karel. 2012. La genèse d’une hérésie: Monde, corps et histoire dans la pensée de Jan Patočka. Paris: Vrin. Patočka, Jan. 1989a. The ‘natural’ world and phenomenology. Trans. Erazim Kohák. In Philosophy and selected writings, ed. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1989b. Negative platonism. . Trans. Erazim Kohák. In Philosophy and selected Writings, ed. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1990. Séminaire sur l’ère technique. . Trans. Erika Abrams. In Liberté et sacrifice: Écrits politiques, ed. Erika Abrams. Paris: Jérôme Millon. ———. 1996. Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1998. Body, community, language, world. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2002. Čtyři semináře k problému Evropy. In Sebrané spisy III – Péče o duši III. Prague: Oikoymenh. ———. 2009. Co je existence? In Sebrané spisy VII  – Fenomenologické spisy II. Prague: Oikoymenh. ———. 2011. Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2015. Epochē and reduction: Some observations. Trans. Matt Bower, Ivan Chvatík and Kenneth Maly. In Asubjective phenomenology: Jan Patočka’s project in the broader context of his work, ed. Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams. Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz.

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Plato. 2005. Phaedo. Trans. Harold North Fowler. In Eutyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library. Šan, Emre. 2012. La transcendance comme problème phénoménologique. Paris: Mimesis. Strandberg, Gustav. 2017. An a-subjective coexistence. Acta Universitatis Carolinae Interpretationes: Studia Philosophica Europeanea 7 (1): 86–101. Wells, H.G. 1914. The war that will end war. London: F. & C. Palmer.

Chapter 5

The Intimacy of Disappearance Nicolas de Warren

Is she more apparent because she is not anymore forever? –Jack Gilbert

In a poem of exceptional insight, Jack Gilbert evokes a grieving for the death of a beloved one – his wife – that does not exclusively possess the character of distinct memories and ample recollections, and hence, which cannot be solely understood as an interiorized image, representation, or object, to which, belatedly, one remains attached in lieu of the beloved, whose presence is no more. Although the beloved is no longer present, their presence nonetheless abides with a spectral insistence that does not let us go. As suggested by the title of Gilbert’s exquisite poetical thought, such mourning attests to an intimacy of disappearance within the interstices of memory, thus highlighting the brightness and colorations of what that person continues to mean for us beyond the sharp resolution or dim fading of remembrance. Who is this beloved, who stills in me, after their departure from the world, once words are no longer whispered between us, once silence no longer hushes among us?

HIGHLIGHTS AND INTERSTICES We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children, vacation, and emergencies. The uncommon parts. But the best is often when nothing is happening. The way a mother picks up the child almost without noticing and carries her across Waller Street while talking with the other woman. What if she

N. de Warren (*) Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_5

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N. de Warren could keep all of that? Our lives happen between the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss about her is that commonplace I can no longer remember. (Gilbert 2012, 176)

To involve oneself in the lives of others, as opposed to merely living along with others, is to partake in the events and experiences that shape who we are, for ourselves as well as for each other. When recalling our lives together, experiences from the past commonly return as memories. Such memorable events (dining at a restaurant, away on holiday, lazy afternoons, etc.) possess a certain definitiveness. Even if our memories are vague and imprecise, we remember something of the past because something once happened thus and so. We remember what we did with another person, what was said in a conversation, what we failed to do together, etc. On Gilbert’s telling, although “marriage we remember as the children, vacation, and emergencies,” these past happenings, as objects of remembrance, reflect the “uncommon parts” of lives shared together. What is “common” in the sense of taken for granted is what matters most about the other, namely, what their lives means for us, as acutely felt once they have departed from the world. It is the unremarkable, indeed barely noticed habits of living with the beloved, those daily routines transpiring without fanfare or fabulation, that spins between us the fabric holding us together into the tapestry of our lives. If relationships with others are inexorably bound-up with memorable events once experienced, there is a more poignant sense in which the lives of others mean something for us that is less definite and recognizable than those events through which our lives unfolded; the banality of living with another is imbued with a quality, and hence, a value that does not emanate from any particular attribute of who they are, but from that they are. Gilbert’s poem bespeaks a grief holding onto the incandescent quality of another’s singular presence, one not identifiable with (merely) an amalgamation of recollections or the sedimentation of memories. What we miss about the other is “that commonplace” between us in multiple senses: as a space of communion and time of consort in which our lives unfold; as what is taken for granted of the other’s meaning for me; as the unspoken quality of their being, that translucent medium of co-being within which our relationship thrives, and through which we come to see ourselves in light of each other’s precious presence. In Gilbert’s poem, the atmospheric meaning of who a person is for me does not squarely reside within our memories and yet cannot be recalled without remembrance. This meaning that the beloved embodies for me transcends the memorable happenings of our lives together and yet does not stand beyond the scope of recollection. What is immemorial of the other’s meaning for me lodges within the interstices of memory itself. And yet, what is memorable of the other in turn abides within this immemorial quality of their life for me. Who the other is for me cannot, strictly speaking, be an object of remembrance nor forgotten in the sense of a lost or misplaced memory. This commonplace between us that cannot be remembered is likewise the commonplace that cannot be forgotten. It is in this sense, drawing from Gilbert’s poem, that I shall speak of the intimacy of disappearance: who is touched in us with the death of the other is how the other touched, and continues to touch, me. This intimacy of disappearance could also be expressed

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thus: although the person was, the meaning of their lives for me still is. If the intimacy of our lives together happens between the memorable, it is because my life (much as yours) quietly happens between me and you. The intimacy of disappearance does not only pertain, however, to the death of others. There is a kindred manifestation when others become lost to time – a friend we have not seen for ages, a lover exited from our lives, a sibling long departed from the ambit of our days. Whether the circumstances of such distancing were amicable or conflictual, or due to lassitude and neglect, the disappearance of the other from our lives to time (as opposed to the departure of the deceased from time) possesses a spectral presence of its own. Often, it is not a recollection initiated or searched-out by me; on the contrary, it is the other, long disappeared other from the scene of my life who recalls me, as it were, when revisiting me unannounced in the flash-pan of an ignited memory, even of the most insignificant moments or episodes from our past, in making an unbidden claim on me. With such involuntary reminiscences, I cannot escape inhabiting their disappearance. Loss, in its manifold waywardness, grieves in the hollow of spectrality, of how the other does not “survive” in me nor beyond me, but insistently partakes of me, or rather, that I continue to partake in them, in the intimacy of their disappearance. * In an unfinished text “The Phenomenology of Afterlife,” drafted after the death of his wife,1 Patočka addresses the question “whom do we in fact mean [as an intentional object] when we think of the passed one?” (this volume, /134/).2 Although I have previously reflected upon Patočka’s text in its French translation (see de Warren 2017; see also de Warren 2016), the appearance of its English translation has prompted me to revisit this suggestive effort at a phenomenology of the afterlife with an eye towards exploring the intimacy of disappearance. In motivating a phenomenology of life after death, Patočka is quick to distance his approach from any affiliation or implication with the traditional metaphysical and/or religious concern with the immortality of the soul, or afterlife in the sense of a continued existence of the soul after (bodily) death. Patočka critically refers to Plato’s “fantastical” arguments for the immortality of the soul; the distinction between the soul and the body is a “metaphysical fiction.” If the question of the soul’s immortality is framed as the continued existence of the soul after death, this appeals to an incorruptible substance, which, however, Kant decisively dismantled (tacitly endorsed by Patočka) with his critique of Mendelssohn’s Phaedon. Along with this metaphysical framing of the soul’s immortality, Patočka acknowledges that the question of the soul’s immortality traditionally represented a concern with the question of redemption and hope, or, in other words, with the meaningfulness of existence. It is this aspect of the  Erika Abrams, the French translator of Patočka’s text, speaks of a “rumor” that Patočka drafted these reflections around 1967 after the death of his wife. In a letter to Walter Biemel in 1976, Patočka continues to ruminate on this topic and states his intention to explore his thinking on life after death further. 2  The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation. 1

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theme of immortality that Patočka arguably transposes into his own reflections on life after death, albeit no longer freighted with the religious significance of redemption, but shaped instead around how the other continues to mean something for me in the wake of their death. In adopting this reframing of “life after death,” Patočka effectively suspends the traditional question of “what” or “who” ontologically survives beyond death. The focus of Patočka’s reflection is rather on “how the other lives in us” after their disappearance from the world. It is in view of advancing this phenomenological topic of seldom inquiry that his fragmentary reflections can be understood as making a decisive step. That the presence of others, after their death, continues to resonate within our own lives, that, in other words, death does not rob the other of their meaning for us, as if the meaning of their lives for us would suddenly become extinguished upon their death, is revealing of who we are, of how I am constituted in relation to others. The question of life after death is thus inseparable from the question of life before death, of what it is to have a life in concert, communication, and consort with others. Patočka in this respect understands a phenomenology of life after death as offering an unique perspective on the constitution of inter-subjectivity as such. How does the other, whose actual presence in the world is no longer, remain present to those who continue to exist in the world? Who is this other that still resonates for those left behind when there no longer stands any “who” before us? As Patočka thus wonders: “whom do we in fact mean [as an intentional object] when we think of the passed one?” Patočka’s insertion of the question of life after death into the framework of intentionality might at first glance seem strained. In what sense can we speak of the other, whether dead or alive, as an “intentional object”? According to Husserl’s conception of intentionality, the other (as an “alter-ego”) is both a “noematic object” for me, as the manifold ways in which I relate to, that is, experience, the other as “transcendent” (as not-me), and a “noetic subject” for themselves, as the manifold ways in which the other immanently experiences themselves, that is, lives consciously in relation to the world (and myself). The other’s stream of inner time-consciousness cannot in principle be experienced, nor, indeed, constituted by me. What I experience of the other is not just the irreducibility of their own consciousness as a transcendental subject endowed with their own capacity of constitution, and, most significantly, self-constitution; inextricably, I also experience the other as a noematic object: I can shake their hand, recognize their face, and, most significantly, speak with them. The other is an object for me, yet an object that I understand to be a subject imbued with their own consciousness and agency, all the while that the sense in which the other is a subject for themselves, as an ego other than my own, remains given to me as what, or who, cannot be constituted by me. When characterized as a noematic object, the other is a unity of sense with manifold ways of appearing (or not-appearing) to me, inscribed within a nexus of external and internal horizons, not only in terms of their bodily incarnation but as a person in the world with whom I (and others) can interact. Setting aside any further consideration of details and complexities, Husserl’s ingenious argument in the Fifth Cartesian Meditations hinges on the thought that the alterity of the other  – the other as an

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alter-ego  – must be constituted in its “non-constitutability,” as it were, by me in order to meaningfully speak of my experience of the other as other. This argument does not concern itself with the traditional problem of solipsism in the sense of the empirical consciousness of the other. More trenchantly, Husserl’s aim is to avoid transcendental solipsism, thus requiring an account of how the other is constituted as another transcendental subject – paradoxically: how is the other constituted by me as another source of world and self-constitution other than my own? With the death of the other, both dimensions of their existence – as a noematic object for me and as inner time-consciousness for them, that is, as object for me, as subject for them – no longer obtain. There is no longer an animate noematic object for me to intend, that is, constitute; what I have before me is not a lived body, but a corpse: a defunct body not merely reverted to an inert material thing, or Körper, nor retaining itself as self-animating Leib-Körper. Indeed, in terms of mortuary practices, rituals of burial, and living in relation to ancestors, the dead are never entirely dead for those left behind. Caring for the dead are constitutive features of human societies and historical consciousness (see Ruin 2018). In this sense, one could arguably speak of a deceased qua noematic object, for as Levinas observes: “the act of burial is a relationship with the deceased, and not with the cadaver,” in terms of which the dead becomes retained and incorporated, as a member, into the living memory of a community (Levinas 2000, 86). We might thus speak of “the dead” as a social-noematic object in contrast (but not necessarily separable from) a noematic object for individual consciousness. Along with the defunct noematic object for me (when the death of another is seen in terms of a concrete, that is, individualized relation to me), there is likewise no longer a stream of inner time-consciousness for them; the adventure of self-constitution which once animated their life of consciousness is no more. From the standpoint of my own consciousness, my intentional directedness remains perpetually empty. In calling out their name without any possibility of response, and hence, intuitive presentation of the other and fulfillment (whether in word or in the flesh) of my signitive intention, what I nonetheless still have of the other’s presence, as an “object,” are memories and imagination. In the form of remembrance as a reproductive consciousness, an experience from the past with the other can be fulfilled as a recollection of the past (i.e., I can see in remembrance once again their smiling face, I recall what we had for drinks, etc.), but never as an experience in the present. There is no possible intuitive self-giveness of the other, but only my reactivations of givenness (from the past) within remembrance. In the form of the imagination, I can conjure the quasi-presence of my friend, imagining what we might be doing together, although she is no more. In both cases, the fulfillment of the “object” (the remembrance of my friend’s face, my imagining her dressed a certain way) only occurs in the form of Vergegenwärtigung, that is, “presentification,” (albeit an intuitive experience), yet never in a full-bodied intuitive and hence originally fulfilling form of Gegenwärtigung, that is, “being present in flesh and blood.” Even if Husserl decisively departs from an image or representation conception of remembrance and the imagination (Phantasie), how the other is given to me remains tethered to a re-activation of consciousness from sedimentations of retained and hence past experiences. Strictly speaking, then, of the other, once

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disappeared from the world, the only way we still have them is as memories or imagining from memories. Yet, what about that other form of Vergegenwärtigung, sitting in-between imagination (Phantasie) and perception, as well as straddling perception and remembrance, which Husserl identifies as “image-consciousness” (Bildbewußtein), as, for example, with a photograph? In Camera Lucida, Barthes argues that what he terms the noema of the photograph consists in the “that-has-once-been.” Unlike other types of images (paintings, moving pictures, drawings), as Barthes writes, “photography’s inimitable feature (its noema) is that someone has seen the referent (even if it is a matter of objects) in flesh and blood, or again in person” (Barthes 1980, 79). In beholding a photo from the past, there is an “awakening of inaccessible reality” of “this-has-once-been,” as concentrated in a detail of the face into whose deceased presence we look, or of a specific (and perhaps itself unremarkable) feature of a world, or scene, that is no longer. It is in this sense that, “the photo is like a primitive theater, like a living painting, the figuration of the still and painted face under which we see the dead.” In a photograph, we see the departed with an evidence that affects us, as what Barthes calls the punctum, namely, in the poignancy that “this (person) once was.” As Barthes writes: “Before the photo of my mother, child, I say to myself: she is going to die.” There is a distinctive kind of photographic evidence which transforms the instant of the past into an object that is not merely an object of semantic inscription (the studium), that is, in terms of the recorded attributes of an object (or person); the instant of the past touches us in the present, with the intimacy of disappearance, as the spectral presence of the person who once was. There is thus uniquely a truth of photography; “not… a ‘copy’ of reality but […] an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art” (Barthes 1980, 88). This spectrality of the person in the photographic noema makes of its mode of presentation neither an “image” (whether in Husserl’s terms as “seeing-in”) nor an actual perceptual object of experience. The noema of the photograph is “neither image nor reality, [but] a new being, really: a reality one can no longer touch,” and yet, one might add, which nonetheless touches us, as the punctum (Barthes 1980, 87). This ghostly apparition of the deceased in photographic evidence leverages a “power of authentication [that] exceeds the power of representation.” Photography gives witness to the singularity of “this-person-has-once-been” that punctures accrued semiotic layers of meaning, and therefore all the more poignantly means, as with the photograph of a deceased beloved that does not let us go. In response to Patočka’s guiding question, then, “whom do we in fact mean when we think of the passed one?”, a preliminary answer from a phenomenological perspective would seem to confirm as well as clarify an entrenched view that the only way in which we are conscious of the deceased other is either through remembrance stamped with a consciousness of the past, or an imagining stamped with the consciousness of “as if,” or a photograph stamped with the pointed affect that this person once was, but is no more. For how else could the beloved be given to me, whose presence in the world and to themselves is no longer, other than in the form of remembrance, imagination, or photography? *

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While still holding onto the lead question “whom do we in fact mean when we think of the passed one?” Patočka nonetheless shifts the frame of analysis from the intentionality of consciousness to the afterlife as a modification of being for others, thus placing his reflections under the wider horizon of the constitution of intersubjectivity. Patočka thereby implicitly suggests that one cannot understand what it means to be with the living without an accompanying understanding of being with the dead. For Patočka, what it is to have a life is to be for-myself as well as for-­others. A person, as an individual life unfolding in the world (as a who, not a what), is at once self-constituting, other-constituted, and other-constituting. “In our concrete lives,” Patočka writes, “we are an intersubjective formation ourselves” (this volume, /130/). Sketched in broad strokes, Patočka delineates the contours of interrelated dimensions within the intersubjective constitution of the person, that is, individual subjectivity. These different dimensions are anchored in “being in oneself,” as an original living of one’s own self-presence, which another person, by definition, can neither substitute for nor participate in. Being in oneself is a mode of being in which there is no distance from oneself; one does not relate to oneself as an object. Within the pre-reflexive stream of inner time-consciousness, I do yet have myself, but am oneself. Being in oneself possesses the essential form of inner time-­consciousness through which one singularly experiences or “lives” oneself immanently. This primordial sphere of temporal self-givenness does not have the presumptive certainty of the Cartesian ego cogito. Being in oneself is, in other words, not defined in epistemic terms, but rather as a pre-reflexive self-awareness of oneself as temporal through and through. There is thus, strictly speaking, no self-­identification, or taking myself as thus and so, within the streaming of pre-reflective life. This mode of being in oneself is self-originating, yet who I am does not thereby exclude an original mode of being for others, which Patočka characterizes as a modification of being in oneself. In being for others, who I am becomes objectified into an ego. The ego, as the mode of being for others as well as for myself, is not at home in consciousness, but exists, as it were, outside consciousness; it is an “outside” from myself that nonetheless is myself, insofar as I am for myself in terms of how I am for others. Because I am for the other, as the object of another’s consciousness, much as the other is an object of my consciousness, how I am for the other, as Patočka remarks, “produces one of the most important objects and components of our own being in oneself” (this volume, /131/). The ego, as the objectification of being-oneself for another (as well as for myself) is thus in-between myself and the other. In this regard, being for others is “already an alienating of oneself” from the originating stream of inner time-consciousness; in this self-objectification, I am “experienced,” either for myself and for another, and hence experienced at a distance from my own experiencing. The drama of our inter-subjective existence turns on the constant negotiation and navigation of my life within this inter-subjected conjunction. The self-objectification of one’s consciousness as an ego (how I am for myself) is not identical with my objectification for others. Unlike being for oneself, I cannot fulfill or reach my being for others (as the object of their constituting consciousness). I experience myself as experienced by others without any direct experience of how others experience me. As Patočka writes (this volume, /131/):

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Much as there is a constitutive gap between being for myself and being for others, there is likewise a gap between how I imagine my being for others, namely, how I imagine myself as seen by others, and how I am in fact seen, and hence objectified, by others. In addition to how I am for myself as well as for others, another’s being for me is for Patočka an original (“originarity”) mode of being. How I experience others cannot itself be experienced, and hence constituted, by them, much as how I am experienced by them cannot be experienced, and hence, constituted, by me. From these manifold distinctions (being in oneself, being for oneself, being for others, others being for me), Patočka arrives at “being-in-itself,” here characterized as “my personal individual situated freedom-project.” Being-in-itself is the gravitational center “around which my being in myself, for myself, for others, as well as others’ being for me revolve” (this volume, /132/). Freedom names the ontological dimension of my being, its openness to the world, as well as an intrinsic self-­ responsibility for who I am. I am free, yet in a manner which, as the center around which my being for myself and being for others gravitates, exceeds (complete) identification with any determinate sense given to my life, be it by others or myself. As Patočka writes in Heretical Essays: “The responsible human as such is I. It is an individual that is not identical with any role it could possibly assume” (Patočka 1999, 107). As echoed his reflections on life after death: my being in itself “is not independent of being for oneself and being for others, but it does not fully overlap with these. What comprises its essence can be hidden from oneself just as much as from others, and may yet have to be interpretively deciphered.” (this volume, /133/) From this account, one can formulate a three-fold distinction between the non-­ participable uniqueness, or “mineness,” of being in oneself, the identity of oneself as an ego for others as well as for myself, and the unity of one’s life as inextricably involving participation in and of the lives of others. What holds together these different dimensions of subjectivity, as intersubjectively constituted and constituting, is the synchronized temporality of reciprocity between myself and others. As Patočka writes, “as long as we live, our being in oneself, for oneself and for others is synchronised” (this volume, /132/). These dimensions can be understood as developing through intersecting lines of self-constituting and (being)-other-­ constituted, along different, yet enmeshed vectors of temporalization in sync with each other in the one and the same time of actual existence, ultimately, then, of the world. When thought in these terms, the death of the other represents not a cessation of other’s temporality per se, but rather the permanent interruption of synchronization between us. The interwoven temporality of both our lives becomes disjointed. As Patočka remarks (this volume, /133/): In death, when I see the dead person, the originality of his being for me is here, along with the awareness of the non-existence of his being for himself; if he is buried, transformed, removed from any possibility of sight – his ashes are no longer his image – then the non-­ originality of his being for himself connects, for me, to the (original?) awareness of his non-existence for himself.

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Death does not mark the end of time, but the transformation of the temporal relation between myself and the (defunct) other, for rather than living in the life of another, I now find myself living with the dead, along with the dead living-on through me. * Through-out this admittedly cursory account of subjectivity in its concrete relation with others, Patočka’s guiding insight is that an individual life entails different modes of being in relation to oneself as well as to others. This conception of subjectivity accentuates irreducible senses of “originarity,” thus allowing Patočka to meaningfully claim that the cessation of the other’s originality for themselves does not (necessarily) entail the ceasing of their being for others with its own mode of “originarity,” and, hence, evidence. Death instigates a permanent rupture in the synchronization of different modes of being, not the termination of all modes of being, and, most significantly, being for others. On this view, death does not represent a passage in toto from “being” to “non-being” or “quasi-being” (for example, in the form of imagination or remembrance). As Patočka writes, “a core remains here: a being which used to have its own originality and which is now only an object, the identical object of our relationships to it without reciprocity” (this volume, /134/). And yet, as Patočka still wonders: “To what mode of being does the deceased pass?” (this volume, /133/) Or, in other words: “Does he coincide with any phase of his elapsed stream or with the totality of these phases, or is he something still different from these? Whom do we in fact mean when we think of the passed one?” (this volume, /134/) The deceased other is no longer a situated freedom (“being in itself”) who inherits herself within an open trajectory of protentional possibility of self-­ constitution. Death is not only the extinguishing of the actuality of the subject but just as much its projection of possibilities “to be.” But does this suggest that we can only “see him [the deceased other] as a kind of record on a tape and that his identity is the identity of this elapsed stream,” in other words, that we can only remember his life, and in this manner, intend him? (this volume, /134/). The disjunction between being in and for itself of the other and the other as being for me is not to be understood in metaphysical terms as a separation between “substances” or the continued existence, in ethereal form, of the “soul.” This de-­ synchronization, as the consequence of the death of the other, is to be understood phenomenologically as a modification of how the other appears for me. I remain affected by the other after their death in terms of what the other meant, and continues to mean, for me. In a revealing statement, Patočka remarks that “the dead father is my father and he remains as such for me.” (this volume, /134/) While for others, Patočka’s father may be remembered as “headmaster,” or neighbor, colleague, etc., the poignancy of loss affecting Patočka with the disappearance from the world of “my father” attests to a modification of what the other – “my father” – continues to mean for him. By evoking how “my father” still remains, Patočka hints at a more intimate sense of disappearance than attested to with representations secured through memory and remembrance. Whereas for others who knew his father, he is remembered in absentia as a “teacher,” as “Mr. Patočka,” or as “the next door neighbor,” Patočka’s evocation of “my father” suggests a different sense of “with me” than the interiority of memory and remembrance. This intimate abiding of

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spectrality is no longer simply “in” me, held before me as an internal album of memories without any outward traces in the world. The spectrality of the deceased other is just as much “in” me as it is “in” the world: the world as such, in its form of appearance for me, has changed in an intimate manner, only felt by me, for I can no longer look onto the world without seeing traces of the other’s departure out there. The intimacy of disappearance is thus not to be associated with an interiority that would not in the same abated breath hollow out the world in which the beloved is no more. This world affecting poignancy of loss  – that the deceased remains “my beloved” for me, despite, and, indeed, more so, given their death – means that the affectivity of another’s death is not necessarily identifiable with any particular attribute, or “noematic predicate” (the color of their eyes, their skin color, etc.), nor any given memorable event (having dinner in Paris, traveling together, etc.). The poignant quality of grief for the death of another does not depend – and cannot depend – on the actual existence of the other: we cannot grieve for a person who is still alive, though we can wonder whether there exists a kindred form of grieving for a person who, although not deceased, has disappeared from our lives (a long-lost childhood friend, a one-­time lover, etc.). Moreover, this poignant quality of who the other not just was for me but continues to be for me (“my father remains my father”) is neither an empty intentionality nor a quasi-object (imagined): it is not that I imagine the beloved as still dear to me nor that the cherishing of my deceased beloved is “empty,” that is, without intuitive fulfillment. And yet, what kind of evidence, and hence, originating intuitive fulfillment “gives” me the dead, when the dead can no longer give themselves (i.e., when there is no possible Selbstgebung of the other)? This abiding quality of the other’s spectral presence is, as Patočka proposes,“something analogous” to what Ingarden understood as the “metaphysical quality” of an artwork: “it is remarkable that there is something similar in the experience of the other and that this similar thing does not depend on whether the other exists in actuality, whether he is in synchronic reciprocity with us.” (this volume, /135/) In The Literary Work of Art, Ingarden attributed to works of art a “metaphysical quality” along with aesthetics qualities such as color, line, and shape (i.e., sensible qualities of perception). These aspects of an artwork are organized around the function of exhibiting or depicting something (a person, landscape, etc.). Given its exhibiting function, an artwork could be understood as either expressing an artists’ view, as provoking an emotional response from a viewer, or as representing some feature of the world. These various ways of apprehending what an artwork “means” or “manifests” do not exhaust, however, the scope and significance of what an artwork reveals to us. All the while rejecting the notion that an artwork expresses an Idea, Ingarden argues that artworks manifest a metaphysical quality in the same manner as aesthetic qualities, i.e., as an experienced manifestation in the work of art. Both qualities structure the form of an art-work. But, unlike the aesthetic qualities of the objective features of an art-work or the psychological qualities of subjective reactions to an artwork, the metaphysical quality of an artwork represents what Ingarden terms the “aesthetically most active or salient dimension” of an artwork. This qualitative dimension is neither an objective feature of the artwork nor a merely subjective response or emotional reception. It is, in this regard, “invisible” in terms

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of what one might call the semantic (thinking back to Barthes, “the studium”) and visible attributes, although, in equal measure, not divorceable from such manifest qualities. Metaphysical qualities, as manifest in artworks, are identified by Ingarden with “the tragic, the dreadful, the demonic,” and other kindred Stimmungen, which, as he specifies (1973, 291), are not properties of objects in the usual sense of the term, nor are they, in general, ‘features’ of some psychic state, but instead they are usually revealed, in complex and often very disparate situations or events, as an atmosphere which, hovering over the men and things contained in these situations, penetrates and illuminates everything with its light

Neither an objective predicate of the noematic object nor a noetic way of apprehension (“experiencing”), an artwork’s metaphysical quality can be characterized as a noematic modification, the distinctiveness of which lies in its atmospheric hue, as “hovering over the men and things contained in the situations” exhibited in an artwork (Ingarden 1973, 291). It is this metaphysical quality of aesthetic experience that imbues an artwork with a self-disclosing transcendent, or “superlative,” value for life. As Ingarden writes: “Life flows by – if one may say so – senselessly, gray and meaningless […] And then comes a day – like grace – when perhaps for reasons that are unremarkable and unnoticed, and usually also concealed, an ‘event’ occurs which envelops us and our surroundings in just such an indescribable atmosphere.” This conception of an artwork’s metaphysical quality motivates Ingarden’s rejection of the idea that artworks are bearers of truth, where truth is understood in terms of predicative structure of judgment. As Ingarden argues: “no sentence in a literary work of art is a ‘judgment’ in the true sense of the word” (Ingarden 1973, 300). Artworks, therefore, cannot be considered as “true to reality,” since artworks do not stand in a relationship of correspondence in the manner of “a true judicative proposition and an objectively existing state of affairs.” In this regard, artworks are thus neither faithful reproductions of reality nor distorting illusions of reality. And yet, even as an artwork is, strictly speaking, neither “true” nor “false” with respect to its exhibited or depicted subject, an artwork can nonetheless be truthful, for example, as with the truthfulness of a portrait that captures and expresses the quality of the depicted person. Since metaphysical qualities are not aesthetic qualities (although they cannot be separated from these), the truthfulness of an artwork remains irreducible to an artwork’s objective properties as well as our merely subjective responses.3 Ingarden’s conception of “metaphysical quality” bears the imprint of various influences from the vibrant phenomenological circle in Göttingen to which he belonged and contributed. A central theme of debate among these gifted early phenomenologists was the phenomenology of value, in both its ethical and aesthetic forms, which, on various accounts, was recognized as posing a challenge to conventional distinction between realism and idealism, subjective and objective. Among the influences on Ingarden’s thinking from this milieu, Scheler’s “On the  Such metaphysical qualities reveal what Ingarden also calls “essentialities” (Wesen-heiten). See Ingarden 1925. 3

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Tragic” must surely have contributed significantly. (In fact, Scheler’s essay was translated by Ingarden into Polish.) In this essay, Scheler argues (1954, 178) that “the tragic” is above all a property (ein Merkmal) which we observe in events, fortunes, characters, and the like, and which actually exists in them. We might say that it is given off by them like a heavy, cool breath (ein schwerer, kuehler Hauch, der von diesen Dingen selbst ausgeht) or seems like an obscure glimmering that surrounds them. In it a specific feature of the world’s makeup appears before us, and not a condition of our own ego, nor its emotions, nor its experience of compassion

It is this atmospheric quality in its value-disclosing expressiveness, neither “objective” nor “subjective,” which re-surfaces (nearly verbatim) in Ingarden’s own phenomenological characterization of metaphysical qualities as the evocative atmospheric presence of an artwork. In Scheler’s essay, the tragic is a form of world-disclosure; it is a situation or event that is “tragic” where things of the world emanate a “heavy, cool breath.” Composed during the First World War, it is not all together surprising that Scheler addresses in his essay the relation between the tragic, death, and grief. On this account, the tragic involves a situation or event in which there exists a conflict between higher and lower values, with the latter prevailing over the former. As Scheler writes, “all that can be called tragic is contained within the realm of values and their relationships” (Scheler 1954, 180). Inscribed within Scheler’s conception of ordo amoris, the tragic can only occur within a world structured by a hierarchy of values, whereby a (higher) value becomes destroyed. And yet, it is not the destruction of a value that is per se tragic, but rather, “the course that an object of lower or equal positive values, never of higher values, is able to force upon it.” The tragic occurs when a lower value eclipses or suppresses a higher value. With death, however, although, as Scheler remarks, every death is sad, not every death is therefore tragic. Tragic grief possesses a two-fold character: it is free from anger and reproach “as if it had only been otherwise,” and is thus imbued with equanimity and composure, “a special kind of peace” (Scheler 1954, 181). There is an acceptance of death in grief that colors how the world is manifested for us in the absence of the other. Grief, as with the tragic, comes from “something outside ourselves” – the loss of the other – for which there is nothing in our power to mitigate or undo. As Scheler writes: “We see over and above it [the tragic event] the permanent factors, associations, and powers which are in the very makeup of the world,” and this revelation of the world “as tragic” occurs directly, that is, intuitively, without interpretation. Grief registers the singularity of another’s death, not only, however, in terms of the passing away of their existence from our lives, but, within the same heavy breath of loss, an individuated valuation of the world; hence, the englobing, atmospheric night of grief upon the world that occurs with the death of another. The world appears to us to have become impoverished, less value-laden, on account of the other’s death, whose life meant something to us, indeed, upheld and exhibited a value for us. As Scheler writes (1954, 182): Grief seems to pour out from the event into unlimited space (beyond the horizon of the world). It is not a universal, abstract world-constitution that would be the same in all tragic events. It is rather a definite, individual element of the world’s construction. The remote

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subject of the tragic is always the world itself, the world taken as a whole which makes such a thing possible. This “world” itself seems to be the object immersed in sorrow

As Derrida eloquently states this insight within his own reflections on mourning (though Scheler’s essay does not appear to have been known or a reference point for Derrida’s work on mourning), “each time, and each time singularly, each time irreplaceably, each time infinitely, death is nothing less than the end of the world” (Derrida 2005, 140). In speaking of the “tragic knot” in Scheler’s description of the “inner entanglement between the creation of a value and the destruction of a value,” it follows that if “the specific sadness of the tragic is really an objective character of the event itself,” then, with reference to the death of another, the sadness of grief belongs to the event itself, namely, the disappearance of the other from the world and our lives (Scheler 1954, 182). Returning back to Patočka’s own ruminations, the tragic quality of another’s death for me attests to the value of the beloved for my existence as well as a valuation of the world, of how, in other words, the other constituted for me the world in which we both partook. We sense this loss of a world together with the residual echoes of interrupted habits and commonplace routines that no longer texture the days of our life, now that the other has departed from the adventure of our reciprocal intersubjective co-constitution. The value, or meaning, that the other has for me does not, however, become “destroyed,” but, on the contrary, becomes, when thought along the lines of a “metaphysical quality,” co-­ memorated as the intimate significance of the other’s disappearance for me. * Even after the death of the other, their “metaphysical quality” can remain intuited through an affectivity which cannot be reduced to any aspect of the person, who once was, nor identical “with the originality of the other’s life for himself,” for it abides in me, even though the other is neither “originally” self-given to themselves or given to me “in flesh and blood.” Much as, for Ingarden, metaphysical qualities adhere to aesthetic qualities without being reducible to such manifest modes of sensible appearance, by the same token, the metaphysical quality of the other, as encapsulating the singular meaningfulness of her existence for me, inheres in our remembrance. But whereas memories, strictly speaking, mark the absence of the Other and the irretrievable distance between the now of remembrance and the remembered past, with the manifestation of the Other’s metaphysical quality, something essential of her presence abides in me as present. And whereas memories may or may not be “true,” the manifestation of the Other’s metaphysical quality bespeaks a truthfulness of what her life meant for me. This metaphysical quality does not, therefore, contain and reflect the identity of the departed nor reveal the person as whole. It is rather “a characteristic trait in which their whole individual substance is implied: their look, their voice and accent, their gait, the inclination of their head” (this volume, /136/) Such singular traits might have passed us by or gone unnoticed in our daily interactions with the Other during our shared life together. Such traits might have never been genuinely perceived or appreciated while the Other was alive, but only come into their essential meaningfulness, as truthful expressions of who the Other was,

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and thus still is, for me. What we take for granted of the Other – the meaningfulness of her life for me – we now recognize as their eidolon, or metaphysical singularity, in the acute lucidity of their departure. Such a metaphysical quality stands in a metonymic relationship with the Other’s life as a whole. It is not a particular trait that encompasses her life as whole (its meaningfulness for me), but rather a trait that expresses something singular about the Other’s essentiality as more than the whole, such that no summation or summoning of her life in its entirety could do justice, or speak the truth, of what, truthfully, her life still means for me. This “metaphysical quality,” that is, intimacy – what the other means for me, that is, concretely and specifically, and not “as such” – is, as Patočka writes, “something global, and therefore it has an affective character, the character of explicable implicatedness, which does not coincide with any detailed explicatum” (this volume, /135/). The intimacy of another’s death for me is not attributable to any detail or trait of the other which I miss. Looking back to Gilbert’s poem, it is not the memorable (a particular event or experience, i.e., an object of remembrance), but, on the contrary, the non-memorable, yet immemorial habits, for example, of breakfasts, that commonplace that one never remembers as such (one morning in particular, a specific breakfast dish, the weather of any given day, etc.) and yet which one never forgets. Habits shared with others inscribe our mutual lives within the world, and with the loss of the other, this tethering of being in the world together, becomes arrested, torn. It is here, in this common place, in this shared time, that intimacy between oneself and another is both nurtured and nourished. As Gilbert writes (2012, 176): Our lives happen between the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss about her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

As Patočka notes, however, this quality of the individual – their singular and irreplaceable meaning for me – is, on the one hand, not dependent on the actuality of the other and yet, on the other hand, is not unrelated to the other’s own, and now defunct, original experiencing of themselves. This affective quality discloses the “unmistakeable sense,” that is, meaning of the other’s life for me, “that which was […] at stake in any moment” the “‘inner’ experiencing and self-constitution” of the other (Patočka this volume, /135/). This intimacy of meaning is, moreover, not identical or subsumable either to how the other was for others, other than myself, nor with socially coded attributes (as teacher, neighbor, etc.). This quality is thus akin to the punctum of which Barthes speaks, and yet is not lodged within the medium of the photograph and its noema “this-has-been,” for what distinguishes the poignant quality of another’s meaning for me, of their life after death through me, is not that it “was” or “has been,” but that it “is,” or better: that she is, as with the atmospheric presence of Gilbert’s deceased Michiko, highlighted in the interstices of the poem itself, its revealing silences. This meaning of the other for me, their “personality,” or personal quality, is distinguishable from the objectivity of their personality (for others) as well as the subjectivity of their personality (for themselves). This quality

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does not encompass the person as such, nor the unity of their personhood. It is, instead, expressed, or manifest, in a characteristic trait – the smile of their face, the gait of their walk – that bespeaks the valuation of their individuality. It is in this regard that Patočka states that “afterlife is therefore a primordially privative mode of life with another in all its basic forms.” (this volume, /137/) The loss of the other is a privation of their existence that nonetheless leaves behind, abiding in us, “an essentially positive life content” insofar as we remain touched by the other, and hence, intimately affected by their disappearance. Although Patočka does not spell it out in the following way, we can say that this quality embodies the value that the other had for my life, and this would be a function of care. The value of the other for me – their meaning for my life – does not end with their end. And in this sense, the other continues to mean something, and hence, “live” after death, albeit only to the extent that I remain affected and hence continue to value the other’s meaning for me. In this sense, then, although reciprocity and hence mutual participation between us is no longer possible, there continues, as it were, a one-­ sided participation: I can no longer participate in the deceased’s (actual) existence, for it is no more; and yet, the other continues to participate spectrally in mine. I can no longer awaken the other to themselves as when we once existed together, and yet, the deceased can still awaken me to myself. And thus, while alive, by being for others, in being outside myself, we live for others, and, as Patočka points out (this volume, /141/), “not only metaphorically, but authentically,” with the death of the other, the other can continue to kindle my life to itself, not just metaphorically, but authentically. But this also means that “another’s death is in this perspective one’s own […]: I am the same as the other, the dead – I, too, am lost” (this volume, /142/). The intimacy of another’s disappearance for us is inseparable from an intimacy of our own disappearance from ourselves. We are touched, perhaps as never before, besides ourselves in grief for a disappearance from our lives that never lets us go, until that day, when we ourselves step into our own unavoidable self-oblivion, at which point we are both divested from life after death.

References Barthes, Roland. 1980. Camera lucida: Reflections on photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. de Warren, Nicolas. 2016. Le anime dei defunti. La società degli individui 57: 36–43. ———. 2017. Souls of the departed: Towards a phenomenology of the after-life. Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 5 (1): 205–237. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. In Sovereignties in question: The poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press. Gilbert, Jack. 2012. Collected poems. New York: Knopf. Ingarden, Roman. 1925. Essentiale Fragen: Ein Beitrag zu dem Wesensproblem. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 7: 125–304. ———. 1973. The literary work of art: An investigation on the borderlines of ontology, logic, and theory of literature. Trans. George G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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Levinas, Emmanuel. 2000. God, death, and time. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Patočka, Jan. 1999. Heretical essays. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court. Ruin, Hans. 2018. Being with the dead: Burial, ancestral politics, and the roots of historical consciousness. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Scheler, Max. 1954. On the tragic. Trans. Bernard Stambler. CrossCurrents 4 (2): 178–191.

Chapter 6

Forgiveness and the Dead Hugo Strandberg

In “The phenomenology of afterlife”, Jan Patočka writes (this volume, /137/)1: afterlife has much greater importance and intensity where life with the other had the utmost positive character, where it brought fulfilment; on the other hand, where it took a negative shape and obstructed our fulfilment, where it was a life of hardship and hatred, coming to terms with the dead is easy and it does not have the character of retaining, but rather leaving easily and fading away – unless we are enjoying the feeling of revenge etc.

Although I believe I understand what Patočka is referring to here, there are also experiences very different from these. For example, and staying with one of Patočka’s central examples, relationships between fathers and sons are not seldom difficult, also after the death of the father. These difficulties need not involve hatred specifically; the son might even understand that the difficulties were not (only) his father’s fault. But precisely because of the strained nature of the relationship, coming to terms with the dead will not be easy and it will have the character of retaining; the son’s grief over the death of his father might be more intense, precisely because the grief is also for a hope that now seems definitely extinguished, the hope of their coming together in, say, a father/son friendship. Thus far, I have set up the theme of this essay in contrast to Patočka. However, thinking in greater depth about the case I have sketched above will, I believe, make it possible for us to work out some of the suggestions in his text in more detail. Specifically, reflecting on the need for forgiveness that might arise here, the need for the son to forgive and be forgiven by his father, is one way of showing why Patočka  The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation. 1

H. Strandberg (*) Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_6

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is right when he writes (this volume, /140/): “[I]t is only in relation to another […] that we become what we are, and yet other and otherwise than we were before.” The need to forgive and be forgiven would also be an interesting instance of the problems brought about by the loss of reciprocity that is a central theme of Patočka’s text. The question that arises here is thus whether the son’s relationship to his dead father will remain forever as difficult as it was at the time of the father’s death, whether its possible transformation is the result of a move on the son’s side only, or whether some (though obviously not any) form of reciprocity would still be possible. As Kierkegaard puts it (1963, 341 (SKS 9:351)): “If […] a change sets in in the relation of one living and one dead, it is however clear, isn’t it, that it must be the one living who has changed.” Kierkegaard’s “isn’t it” is rhetorical, but in the context of this essay I take it as a genuine question.

The Relationality of Forgiveness Problems brought about by death are seldom discussed by philosophers who write on forgiveness. This might be surprising, but it is a result of their largely psychological conception of forgiveness.2 If forgiveness is about the waning of certain feelings, feelings of resentment say, death does not make much of a difference. Such feelings of resentment might wane no matter whether the one they are directed to is alive or dead. Likewise, a dead person does not have such feelings anyway, so the issue of forgiveness would disappear with her death; one might even say that with such a psychological conception of forgiveness, one would automatically forgive all survivors at the point of one’s death. This take on forgiveness thus disregards its relationality, the fact that I turn to the one I have hurt and ask her forgiveness, hoping for a positive answer, and that I tell, and long to tell, the one I have forgiven that I have done so. Conversely, the difficulties of forgiveness, if I, say, find certain topics very hard to approach when talking with the person I have hurt, are obviously difficulties our relation will then by marred by. However, “asking”, “answer” and “tell” should here be understood in a wide sense, for words need not be involved (and are in most cases not involved, in my experience).3 For example, forgiveness often takes place in the meeting of eyes and in friendly smiles. The relationality of  To this can be added that philosophers writing on forgiveness most often picture themselves as victims, not as perpetrators. As a result of this, the difficulty of asking one’s dead father’s forgiveness will not be taken up for discussion, at most only the difficulty of forgiving him. For this and the above description of contemporary philosophy of forgiveness, see Strandberg 2021, esp. ch. 1 and 7. (In order not to repeat myself, in this essay I approach the issue of forgiveness in a different, but hopefully not incompatible, way than I do in Strandberg 2021. Still, the discussions in that book are helpful to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the questions I explore in this essay and who wants a critical discussion of the contemporary philosophy of forgiveness; references to Strandberg 2021 could have been added frequently here, and I have therefore abstained from doing so.) 3  Cf. Kierkegaard 1963, 328 (SKS 9:338). 2

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forgiveness thus means that forgiveness does not only involve me but just as much the one whom my difficulties concern. It is precisely for this reason that death is a problem: I need to address and be addressed by someone who is not there. Why is there such a need? In his text, Patočka writes (this volume, /140/): “[I]t is only in relation to another […] that we become what we are, and yet other and otherwise than we were before.” For my purposes, the general bearing of this claim is not important. Instead, I will discuss it in relation to forgiveness specifically. I will do so by discussing an imagined case, the complicated relationship between a son and his father. It is the relationship that is complicated, which means that each one is responsible for the problems, at the same time as the problems would not exist were it not for the other one. The need to forgive and the need to be forgiven are therefore not to be sharply distinguished here, but nonetheless I will mostly focus on one of these, the need to be forgiven, because in this way the questions I want to ask are easier to bring into view but also more difficult to answer. So, being the son who mourns my dead father, with whom I had a complicated relationship,4 the forgiveness that I now feel I need can be understood in correlation to my bad conscience. If this bad conscience is understood solely psychologically, no relationality is involved (at least not on the face of it).5 According to such a psychological interpretation, what I need would thus be, say, to be cheered up, and my father is not needed for that; I could just as well meet some friends or watch a feel-­ good film. What is disregarded here is the way in which my bad conscience involves my father, that he is its intentional object, as it were: I have a bad conscience for what I have done to him. The forgiveness I need corresponds to the bad conscience: I need to be forgiven for what I have done, I need to be forgiven by him. Conscience can be understood as a matter of vision or attention,6 as seeing the one I have wronged, in his absence seeing him in front of me; correspondingly, forgiveness can be understood as really coming together with him. The content of the need to be forgiven is thus of a moral nature, and the same consequently also goes for myself, for it is I who suffer privation until I have been given what I need. Or, as Patočka puts it (this volume, /140/): “[I]t is only in relation to another […] that we become what we are, and yet other and otherwise than we were before.” Forgiveness can be understood fruitfully in Patočka’s terms: in the relation to the one who forgives me, I am brought back to myself, but, on the other hand, this relationship, as a living relationship, is never a mere recuperation.7 If we leave it at that, the full relationality of forgiveness would be overlooked, however. Above, I have only mentioned that I cannot create what I need on my own  In order to bring the real import of the experiences I am discussing into view, it is necessary to write and think in first-person terms. However, in case someone worries: my father is alive and my relation to him far from a bad one. In other words, my discussion is not autobiographical. 5  Cf. Buber 1958, 8–10, 31. As Buber points out, a proper understanding of human psychology is not to be had by abstracting from moral relationality. A “solely psychological” account is hence only on the face of it solely psychological. 6  Cf. Weil 2008, 154; Weil 1997, 426; Nykänen 2002, 224ff. 7  Cf. Levinas 2004, 160–161. 4

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and that my father is the one, the only one, who is able to give me what I need; this is the relationality of forgiveness as described so far. If this were all there was to it, asking his forgiveness would be something I did for my own sake, and the need itself would thus still be understood in individual terms. However, in order to understand the need to be forgiven in all its dimensions, we have to pay attention to the fact that asking his forgiveness is also a way of telling him something that I would like him to hear, such as that I am sorry, in this way showing him, among other things, that my previous hostile attitude towards him is one that I have turned my back on. What I need is to give him something, one could say. It is consequently misleading to understand the need to be forgiven in individual terms, for I want to ask his forgiveness as much for his sake as for mine, or, rather, there are not two sakes here but one. Or, perhaps better expressed, forgiveness is not the means to an external end but is as such its end, two people coming together, ultimately wholeheartedly. This coming together is not something either of us could have accomplished on his own; our being together is not the coincidence of two individual states or processes but is, in this sense, sui generis. An objection to this analysis could be to claim that the question is one thing, its answer another: if I tell him something by asking his forgiveness, I do so regardless of whether he actually forgives me or not. In other words, the question only conveys something to him the first time it is asked; thereafter, asking his forgiveness is something I do for my sake only. This objection conceives of my desire to tell my father that I am sorry, say, as a desire to utter certain words in his presence. But “tell” is ambiguous, and the sense that is intended here is not this one; what I need is not to utter the words “I am sorry” in his presence but for him to understand that I am sorry. When would I have taken him to understand this? There are certainly several possibilities here. It is significant, however, that one possibility is seeing his understanding that I am sorry as identical to his forgiving me; understanding can only in special cases be exhausted in cognitive terms but is instead often about, say, taking something to heart. Saying “I understand that you are sorry, but I cannot forgive you nonetheless” is indeed possible, but I, hearing him say this, might take what he says to mean that he does not trust me. In trust, understanding and forgiveness thus come together. The above objection hence overlooks the possibility that as long as he has not forgiven me, there is still something I would like to convey to him. Correspondingly, the same problem of trust might surface when he says that he has forgiven me, for I might take this as just an outward show, believing that deep down he still bears me a grudge. Through the course of our interaction, my understanding hence changes too, for good or for bad, in this respect of trust, but also in other ways: my understanding of what I am asking him, of what I have done, of his situation. The process of forgiveness could therefore be conceived of as a process towards an understanding in togetherness, which does not mean, however, that we ultimately have to describe things in the same way or that we have to work on such descriptions, only that in the end we are no longer divided by such differences, that we come together in trust. Consequently, the question of whether I want this understanding for my sake or for his does not make much sense, for it introduces a distinction that is alien to what the issue concerns. For instance, if my sake were

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distinct from his, I could try to force a change on his part, but success in this regard would not mean that he has forgiven me. On the contrary, using (physical or psychological) force here would make our relation even more damaged. Thus, there is a sense in which the question and its answer are not two different things but two sides of the same process of understanding. What I want to give my father and what I want from him are at bottom the same thing. What annihilates my bad conscience is his joy at our getting together.

My Father and Me The death of my father thus means that I cannot be given what I need, his forgiveness, for no coming together is possible. The need will then always be there, unfulfilled. (Or is this so? The loss acknowledged in mourning would only be undone if it turns out that he is not dead, but whether this means that no form of forgiveness and coming together is possible is the question we will come to.) Of course, I might take the psychological route, as mentioned above, which is not only a theoretical option but just as much a live one, but the need would then still be unfulfilled, for I would only obtain psychological alleviation. In its most radical form, this problem is the problem of the murderer, and thus one dimension of the horrible nature of murder. In other cases, the death of the one whose forgiveness I need is only externally related to what I have done to him, and in this respect a coincidence, but in the case of murder, this is not so. Furthermore, the murder victim will be defined by what has been done to him in a way that is not otherwise the case: the one I have murdered is always dead, but the one I have, say, let down is not marked by this on all occasions. For instance, I might see from a distance the one I have let down, now happy in the company of others. This is not identical to forgiveness, but the alleviation I feel is still not merely an inner, mental state or anything like it, for the meaning of what I have done to her is often, in various, intricate ways, shaped by the consequences of what I have done to her. What we are discussing here is not murder, however, but the much more indefinite problems that often exist in the relations between fathers and sons. Particular incidents might sometimes stand out, but even they cannot properly be understood without taking into account the background of the innumerable, indistinct events that make up our life. From my father’s perspective I might be ungrateful, rude, arrogant, and distant, though not in ways that would clearly show on particular occasions or be apparent to anyone else but him. Furthermore, he might also say that although these terms fit me, they do not capture the full extent of my badness as a son but that he does not know what to add. From my perspective, I could say the same thing of him, except that the terms I would use would be domineering, full of himself, boastful, and patronising. However, there are two different ways in which such a background will shape the understanding of someone’s death. If I once had a troubled relationship with someone but have not seen him for many years – it might be a former colleague or a

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friend the relation to whom gradually degenerated – his death puts an end to the possibility of our getting together again. Still, it would be false to say that our falling-­out colours his death. He might not have thought of me for a very long time, nor I of him until I heard of his death. The difficulties between us might still have effects, but nonetheless he is not in them as the focus of my attention; even if an encounter would have been painful for both of us, the fact that we did no longer actively avoid one another is not insignificant. In the case of my father, however, one could very well imagine that our troubled relationship would colour his death, by my presence, or by my striking absence, at his deathbed. For example, he might die in bitterness, and the dying itself thus raises questions of forgiveness: on my part, because I know, say, that I am the cause of his bitterness; on his part, because he knows, say, that his bitterness towards me is unfair. The distinction I made in the previous paragraph, between an external and an internal way in which the death of the one whose forgiveness I need is related to what I have done to him, is therefore not really applicable here: his dying is not the result of our troubled relationship, but they are still not two distinct things.8 These difficulties, however, have different forms for my father, on the one hand, and for me, on the other hand. On his deathbed, he might reflect on his life, and this life, and thus his reflections, include the people who have been important for him – for good and for bad. Our troubled relation will therefore be a significant part of the closure of his life. For me, however, the present situation is different: in surviving him, I will have him as part of my life also after his death. But what does “he” mean here? As long as he was alive, he was part of my life not as a memory but as a living being, someone I could address and be addressed by, someone I could get in touch with and someone who could get in touch with me, against my will or just as I wanted, someone I could challenge and be challenged by, someone who could surprise me, disappoint me, or exceed my most sanguine expectations. After his death, all these possibilities shape my memories of him, by their absence. Even so, it is to him that I direct myself in my memories.9 “Memories” are in rare cases the object of my attention; in most cases, he is the object of my attention and memory its form. “He” still means my father and he is still part of my life, with all that this involves, though no longer as a living being. In other words, this is one example of what “afterlife” means, as Patočka uses the word. After his death, all these possibilities shape my memories of him  – by their absence, as I said. However, not all possibilities of interaction are lacking. For there is a kind of challenge still possible after his death. If I, upon reflection, come to realise that I have been, say, unfair to him, and that this realisation must have consequences for my thoughts, words, and actions, the one whom I see in my bad conscience, the one I feel responsible to, the one I feel that I wronged when I was unfair and that I will wrong if I now fail to live up to my realisation, is him. There are certainly cases where this is not so, cases where I feel responsible to, say, his friends

 For many interesting examples of this, see O’Connor 1961.  Cf. Winch 1989, 150.

8

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or myself, but this does not change the fact that the possibility I just pointed to exists. In other words, there is a way in which he, though dead, still exists for me and challenges me.10 This challenge and this form of existence are not reducible to memory. For I miss him, not only the time when he was alive. Furthermore, I may feel that I have wronged my father because my memories of him fade. This realisation will therefore not be the result of an act of remembering; to the contrary, it is the result of failing to carry out such an act. In addition, the case in which the memory of him is that towards which I am responsible is a special one, a case of honouring or desecrating his memory, not the general one. To understand the horrible nature of desecrating the memory of someone, we must also in such a case pay attention to the fact that the act concerns someone, the one of whom the memory is; I feel responsible to her, to her remains because they are remains of her, and to her family and friends because they stand in a relation of responsibility and love to her. “But in order for you to be able to realise that you have wronged your father, you must obviously remember him!” Such an objection takes for granted that there is no other way in which my dead father can be present to me than in memory, and thus begs the question (or flattens the concept of memory). Furthermore, it might be the realisation that I have wronged him that triggers memories of him rather than the other way around. Above all, memory as a condition is one thing, memory as the category to which it belongs is another: in the case of living people, the senses of sight, hearing, and so on could be said to be conditions for the possibility of getting to know them, but this does not mean that sense impressions are that towards which I am responsible. In short, in bad conscience I am challenged by him, because it is him that I have wronged.11 In order to clarify this, it should be pointed out that having wronged someone is not the same as going against what she says or (says that she) wants. She might say that she deserves to be treated in the way I treat her, but this does not preclude my seeing her in my conscience and thus that I am wronging her. Also when dead, I might certainly hear my father speak to me; my bad conscience might have the form of a question to me: “Why are you doing this to me? Why am I being hurt?”12 (Being heard does not mean being possible to record, of course.) However, hearing, in whatever sense, is not essential to conscience. In my conscience, it might be her pleading eyes that I see, or her unconscious body after I have beaten her up. At the end of his text, Patočka warns of “false, illusory reciprocity” and “pseudo-­ presence” (this volume, /141/). Is what I have been discussing here a possible instance of such a fault? What we are trying to understand is the experience I might have of my father, though dead, as still existing for me and challenging me. The possibility that people who do not have such an experience, perhaps because they  In a sense, Aristotle points this out, when he claims that the fortunes of their descendants will affect the happiness of the dead; see EN 1101a22–1101b9. A similar idea is to be found in Hebrew wisdom literature; see Sir 11.28 (LXX). 11  Cf. Gaita 2000, 32. 12  Cf. Weil 2019, 214. 10

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are not related to my father in any way, think that it is false and illusory is therefore only of interest if that makes me understand that it is false. A change in my relation to the experience can of course come about through some kind of external pressure: they tell me that I am being silly, and because I do not want to appear silly in their eyes, I try to stop thinking about my father. But such a change is not a deepened form of understanding, and is thus of no interest to us. In a more subtle manner, the same goes for rejecting the experience as false and illusory because of the challenge inherent to it, a challenge not easy to take on board. If this is the reason for my rejection, then it is the rejection that is false and illusory, not what is rejected. In order for the rejection to be of interest to us, it must provide a better (and negative, of course) understanding of the experience than the experience itself provides. In specific cases, this will be possible (when someone forms her self-deception after the model of such an interaction), but I have a hard time seeing what the basis would be for claiming that this will always be possible. Unless, of course, one begs the question by already having decided that everything that appears to one as, say, odd and strange should be discarded.

Being Forgiven by the Dead But what does all this mean with respect to forgiveness? In the case of forgiving my dead father, the relevance of the above discussion is obvious: it is him I forgive, not his memory; my forgiving him is a response to him, to the reality of him; he is the one I feel that I have deserted by failing to stay true to my forgiving of him. In other words, there is a way in which he, though dead, still exists for me. This is indeed a form of interaction, for the way in which he exists for me is not to be identified with my will. For my will is here potentially questioned and should furthermore be understood in relation to the reality it is a response to, as we have just seen. In the case of asking his forgiveness, however, a real form of interaction seems not to be possible, or, at most, possible in the experience of not being forgiven, for in the experience of being forgiven, by contrast, there seems to be no reality independent of my will. If so, no possible distinction to forms of imaginary, self-induced, cheap forgiveness would be possible to make, and Patočka’s warning against “false, illusory reciprocity” and “pseudo-presence” would consequently be apt here. Or is this really so? In order to come to a better understanding of this, let us for a moment leave the main example of my father and me and instead discuss one I touched upon only briefly, the example of the murderer. Stories about murderers who in prison find God and God’s forgiveness are stereotypical, but this does not make it less important to try to come to a philosophical understanding of them. That the risk of self-­ deception is immense here is obvious. Pointing that out does not require much thought, however; the more thought-provoking and difficult question, by contrast, is whether such forgiveness is necessarily self-deceptive, and, more fundamentally, how to understand what we are talking about here at all.

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If the murderer claims that all problems are solved because God has forgiven him, I would not take this seriously.13 Or rather, since “would” is too weak and does not capture the moral stakes involved: I could not take this seriously. The relations between the murderer and other people, say the relatives of the victim, might change if they hear him speak about his religious experience, but in what way is indeterminate. All problems are not solved, consequently, but still I think that it would be a mistake to insist that the experience of being forgiven by God must leave everything else as it is, as if God’s forgiveness were on a par with the forgiveness of any bystander. God’s forgiveness is indeed understood to address the problem of murder, which would mean that to be forgiven by God is to be forgiven by the victim as well, and the victim would hence in some way be included in God. If we understand this experience on its own terms, we thus have an example in which the transformation of the surviving perpetrator’s relationship to the dead victim is not brought about by the perpetrator himself. This, then, would be an example of being forgiven, somehow, by the dead. However, what kind of conclusion is this? Can the above experience ever be an object of theoretical description? Clearly, someone who questions its possibility would answer the latter question in the negative; of more interest is that taking the experience seriously will also lead to a negative answer. For one of the characteristics of such an experience is its miraculousness, that it is something the possibility and nature of which is not comprehended in advance. Or not even after the fact: this is not the experience of having made a mistake, as if what has happened to me showed that it is indeed possible, but its impossibility is part of its nature.14 Anyhow, only from the standpoint of someone actually sharing the experience of the miraculous forgiving – not a mere bystander but someone who from the inside sees what the murderer sees – is it real. From the external (including the theoretical) standpoint it will be seen as if not illusory then at any rate not existent. A theological account would not solve this conundrum: if the theological account does not amount to a denial of the miraculousness of being forgiven by God, it can merely indicate something the nature of which will remain at most indistinct until it is experienced as actual. One reason this is so is because being forgiven is also an inner transformation. Hearing someone say to me that she has forgiven me does not mean that I trust her not to bear me a grudge, as I pointed out earlier. This lack of trust may very well be unwanted: I am not able to trust her, however much I would want to. Likewise, believing that she is sincere does not mean that I am able to overcome the reserve her presence causes. The miraculousness of being forgiven consists in, among other things, a liberation from distrust and inhibition, the force and intensity of which exceed my expectations. (In the religious context, this would be the point of speaking of grace.) This means, furthermore, that the difficulty of forgiveness is not only  Cf. Jaspers 1962, 366.  Cf. Holland 1980, 183–184. As Holland points out, this amounts to a rejection of the principle ab esse ad posse valet consequentia. Cf. also Marcel 1958, 54; Winch 1972, 185–186; Winch 1989, 155. 13 14

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the difficulty of forgiving or of asking someone’s forgiveness; living the life of one truly forgiven is indeed difficult, not a matter of course. Some might say that forgiveness is rewarded to the one who is able to change his ways, but without the experience of being forgiven, without really understanding oneself as truly forgiven, a new life will not be possible. The question of whether the understanding of oneself as forgiven by God is necessarily self-deceptive is therefore a complex one. On the one hand, one could point to the above issues concerning its miraculousness, and say that there is no independent position from which this question can be answered. On the other hand, one could bypass this question and say that the only thing that matters, as far as self-­ deception goes, is what happens afterwards, how the alleged forgiveness manifests itself in the life of the one forgiven, specifically the inner transformation I referred to above.15 In the religious context particularly, these two approaches are not to be sharply distinguished. For the believer may say that God’s forgiving is not a quality distinct from all other qualities of God. Instead, God’s forgiving is an aspect of the same goodness that manifests itself in the call to change one’s life, most evident in the “go, and do thou likewise” inherent also in the experience of being forgiven. To see oneself as forgiven is to have the possibility of forgiveness, and the possibility of the love that forgiveness is an aspect of, always before one’s eyes; as long as I live my life in the light of this forgiveness, I live my life in the presence of God. Consequently, the believer may say that sin, turning away from God, is therefore just as much turning away from God’s forgiveness. In the particular situation of sin, I hence no longer see myself as forgiven for what I have done it the past, but rather turn my back on the forgiveness shown me. That being forgiven by God does not solve all problems is consequently not a fact that reduces its significance but is precisely what its significance consists in. To this discussion of being forgiven by God could be added that other people can sometimes be of a similar, though less radical, importance. Thus far, I have rarely mentioned anyone other than me and the one whom I want to forgive or be forgiven by. But what other people do and say to me, and what we do and say together, will, in various ways, change my relationship to the one, say, whose forgiveness I need. Obviously, it might change how I think about her, but of more interest for my discussion is that I may hear her in what other people say, and so she may speak to me through them. Their forgiveness might consequently be her forgiveness, but I might also hear her forgiveness through the seemingly unrelated words of others. Let us now return to my father and me. Previously, I said that not all possibilities of interaction are lacking, because there is a kind of challenge still possible after my father’s death. But I then asked the question of whether this is relevant when it comes to being forgiven, because here no challenge is involved. If this is so, there is no possible distinction to forms of imaginary, self-induced, cheap forgiveness here, and Patočka’s warning against “false, illusory reciprocity” and “pseudo-presence” is therefore apt. What we now have come to see is that there are reasons for  Jaspers himself seems to suggest something like this, although in a very different context. See Jaspers 2012, 92–93. 15

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questioning this objection. The experience of being forgiven is the experience of an address. Referring to “false, illusory reciprocity” and “pseudo-presence” would therefore be to reject the experience as an experience of being forgiven. But, as I tried to show, referring to the miraculousness of being forgiven, there is no independent position from which the question of its reality can be answered. In other words, if sense sometimes is the result of experience and does not precede it, questions of possibility cannot always be asked and answered in advance. Which does not mean that such questions have clear answers even after the fact; that what has happened to me is impossible and does not make sense is not necessarily a defective description of it. Another way of approaching the question of the possible illusoriness of the experience of being forgiven by my dead father is to ask what the criteria for what should be counted as false and illusory are here. If one’s criteria are of a moral kind, there is no general reason for discarding the experience, as the meaning of being forgiven cannot be captured by referring to a specific moment of time but shows itself in the life of the one allegedly forgiven. The experience of being forgiven is indeed an experience of liberation, but not for someone who wishes to free himself from all moral relations to other people, as the life in which the meaning of forgiveness shows itself is a life of such relations. Being forgiven by my dead father is certainly in many respects different from being forgiven by God, but it would be a mistake not to see my dead father’s forgiveness as being a light in which the rest of my life could be seen. Furthermore, the problem with claiming that the possibility of being forgiven by my dead father would reduce its urgency, because I could then postpone it indefinitely, is not only that this objection makes use of the concept of possibility, the applicability of which I have questioned, but most of all that postponement would always run counter to the fundamental need of being forgiven, which is as such urgent, on account of what would get lost right now.16 At the beginning of this essay, I quoted Kierkegaard (1963, 341 (SKS 9:351)): “If […] a change sets in in the relation of one living and one dead, it is however clear, isn’t it, that it must be the one living who has changed.” What is to be said in response to his “isn’t it”, in the light of my discussion of the possibility of being forgiven by my dead father? Is it my father who has changed? One might be inclined to answer this question in the negative: it is above all I who have changed, I have gone through the transformation of being forgiven. This transformation, however, is just the other side of the transformation of the way in which my father appears to me. In other words, my father might have died in bitterness, as I discussed earlier, but to me he is not bitter any longer. Still, of course, my father is dead, so there are many forms of forgiveness and coming together that will not be there. The question I have discussed is whether no form of forgiveness and coming together is possible, that is, whether a possible transformation of my relationship to him is the result of a move on my side only or whether some (though obviously not any) form of reciprocity would still be possible.

16

 Pace Hägglund 2019, e.g. 12–13, 191–192.

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Conclusion In “The phenomenology of afterlife”, Jan Patočka writes (this volume, /137/): afterlife has much greater importance and intensity where life with the other had the utmost positive character, where it brought fulfilment; on the other hand, where it took a negative shape and obstructed our fulfilment, where it was a life of hardship and hatred, coming to terms with the dead is easy and it does not have the character of retaining, but rather leaving easily and fading away – unless we are enjoying the feeling of revenge etc.

I set up the theme of this essay in contrast to Patočka, and throughout the discussion I have pointed to experiences different from those he refers to. Even so, they are not unrelated. For the experiences I have discussed, although they have a negative character and involve if not hardship and hatred then bitterness, are still not without a positive character. The need to forgive and be forgiven could be said to point to this positive character, and not as a mere possibility, as if what I hope and long for has no real point of contact with my father at all. One way of concluding this essay is therefore to agree with Patočka: the importance and intensity of afterlife has to do with something positive. In fact, this is why some form of reciprocity is still possible.17

References Buber, Martin. 1958. Schuld und Schuldgefühle. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider. Gaita, Raimond. 2000. A common humanity: Thinking about love and truth and justice. London: Routledge. Hägglund, Martin. 2019. This life: Why mortality makes us free. London: Profile Books. Holland, R.F. 1980. Against empiricism: On education, epistemology and value. Oxford: Blackwell. Jaspers, Karl. 1962. Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung. Munich: Piper. ———. 2012. Die Schuldfrage: Von der politischen Haftung Deutschlands. Munich: Piper. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1963. Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, Samlede Værker 12. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2004. De l’existence à l’existant. Paris: J. Vrin. Marcel, Gabriel. 1958. Journal métaphysique. Paris: Gallimard. Nykänen, Hannes. 2002. The “I”, the “you” and the soul: An ethics of conscience. Turku: Åbo Akademi University Press. O’Connor, Edwin. 1961. The edge of sadness. Boston: Little, Brown. Strandberg, Hugo. 2021. Forgiveness and moral understanding. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Weil, Simone. 1997. Cahiers 2: Septembre 1941–février 1942, Œuvres complètes 6. Paris: Gallimard.

 An earlier version of this essay was presented at the research seminar in philosophy, Åbo Akademi University, Finland; thanks to those who participated in the discussion, especially to Lars Hertzberg and Olli Lagerspetz. This publication was supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value”, registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic. 17

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———. 2008. Écrits de Marseille 1: Philosophie, science, religion, questions politiques et sociales, Œuvres complètes 4. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2019. Écrits de New York et de Londres 1: Questions politiques et religieuses, Œuvres complètes 5. Paris: Gallimard. Winch, Peter. 1972. Ethics and action. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1989. Simone Weil: “The just balance”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 7

Postmortal Openness to Meaning Tomáš Hejduk

 he Personal Project and Its Setting in the World (in T the Middle of Things) When we read Patočka’s paper “The phenomenology of afterlife”, we encounter something striking. Patočka distinguishes between various forms of being (human existence) and crucially stresses “being-in-itself”. This “being-in-itself” is a personal project, and such a project is not given: it is an individual act, having a situational status, that is, occurring in the world here and now. This is why Patočka calls it the “freedom-project” (Patočka this volume, /132–3/1): the identity of the individual is what he makes of the situated freedom in which he finds himself, where he is (that is, how he deals with the situation in which he finds himself). What strikes me is this: what sort of project is it, if – as Patočka writes in the following – it “does not overlap with any thing” (this volume, /133/)? The question is what Patočka means by this “thing”. If he is referring to an entity, his point would simply be that the project is an activity as opposed to an unchanging, given substance. That would be unproblematic. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. A more appropriate explanation is that this “thing” is not something given but is rather created by human activity (as is the case with most or even all things in the world). Such an explanation of “the thing” would mean, since the personal project “does not overlap with any

 The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation. 1

T. Hejduk (*) University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_7

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thing”, that the personal project is happening outside this world, that it does not belong to the here and now. Patočka explicitly claims that a personal project does not coincide with “any self-­ experience (being-for-oneself) or others’ experiences (being-for-others)” (/133/). He then implicitly, apparently, adds that it is also not meant to be a being-for-theworld, since it does not coincide with any thing.2 This is puzzling, because it is clear that any project worthy of the name is, after all, a plan for the world, for situations, events, people and things here and now, and a responsible person knows that whatever he does will have an impact on the world around him. It seems, then, that what we have here is a distinction – not explicitly formulated by Patočka, but implicitly at work in his text – between situation and things, between acknowledged situatedness (which Patočka limits the freedom to) and “factuality” (which Patočka excludes without further explanation). This distinction seems incidental, but in my judgement has, or can have, an important role in tracing the afterlife (of people).3 In the following section, I will describe a specific form of afterlife that allows or at least strongly supports the recognition that one not only has a situational status, but also always “overlaps with some things”.

Different Forms of Postmortal Life I will now elaborate on this doubt of mine. First, I will clarify what Patočka says. According to him, “the deceased is for us, in the first place, what he was for us” (this volume, /134/). In the face of the absence of his action and response to us, we henceforth regard him as someone who is no longer evolving, whose life has closed (Karfík 2007, 25–6). The deceased “is still identical to the one who used to live”, but his identity itself is no longer living; it is no longer “the identity of what can be made of situated freedom” (Patočka this volume, /134/): “the not-living person does not have this possibility to make himself anymore”. His identity takes on the character of a fixed, arrested (ustrnulé) being, the character of “the identical object of our relationships to it without reciprocity” (/134/). If we show in more detail what that identity actually is, I believe it will become apparent that the life of the one who has died has ended only in a certain form. In other forms, he can live on. Against the quoted claim, I would say that, thanks to the

 The gap that I point to in Patočka’s text is diminished by the fact that even if Patočka writes that this project does not coincide with any experience and with being-for-the-world, he at the same time does not doubt the connection of this project with these experiences and beings: “It is not independent of being for oneself and being for others, but it does not fully overlap with these.” (/133/) 3  I am aware that in his text Patočka programmatically deals with the deceased other primarily as an “object” of the consciousness of living people. Yet I think that the context of his interpretation discussed here is also crucial. 2

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continuity of these forms, his identity or part of it is or can still be alive: to some extent not even the deceased need be deprived of all life. So, what forms of life are the dead capable of? Certainly, the form of spatio-­ temporal, palpable reciprocity is gone. But a similar kind of reciprocity is still possible: after all, even the deceased can still surprise us, challenge us, discuss and cooperate with us. This interaction and challenge can be seen as a cultivated form of ancient peoples’ fear of the dead and the effects of the afterlife on them. Moreover, even today there are advanced nations where people “feel and experience the afterlife and the actions of those whose life continues after death. […] The Japanese consult their ancestors at the home altar before an important meeting to learn what they think of the matter” (Scheler, 13–14) At the same time, Max Scheler (13–14) convincingly shows that this is a perfectly legitimate understanding of the afterlife, and is quite widespread: It is not a ‘belief’ in something, a trusting admission of something that ‘we do not see,’ but a supposed seeing, feeling, and perceiving of the existence and action of the dead, a sort of automatically-given illustrative presence and effect of the dead in the midst of the completion of real tasks which the day and its problems bring, a presence which is independent of all special acts of pious reflection. It is not a commemorative return to them back or upward in remembrance, … but it is always an actual surrounding by people who live after their death, a perception of their actions and their intervention in the affairs of the day and in history.

Many similar instances can be found in European culture too, for example in acclaimed novels: “And it was very strange for me to feel this again, this companionship with one now dead but still more intelligent, for all my extra decades of life” (Barnes 2012, 81). The depicted form of the life of the dead thus consists in interfering in the course of the world and the life of people. Another, perhaps one might say less direct, interference in the course of the world represents a second form of afterlife. It is the participation, already indicated, in events, projects and ideas that transcend the dead, but with which the dead was identified, to which he devoted his life, in which he saw the meaning of his life and so at least a part of his identity. This form of postmortal life I will discuss further, because it is the one which has some support, albeit ambivalent, in Patočka. Moreover, it is less debatable: while a Japanese person’s consultation with his ancestors cannot be verified, the unfolding of events, ideas and projects initiated or created by a now-dead person can be. In other words, this unfolding is not to be understood as a matter of any personal involvement of the dead here and now. It seems to me that it is precisely the recognition of the “factuality” of the personal project (being-in-itself) that leads to the possibility of this form of life for the one who has gone. This form of existence might (together with other forms) lead to the completion of his meaning, to which this action on others, on their thinking, on society and on everything around him, has always inherently belonged, and there is no reason why it should not suddenly be reckoned with. How much does the recognition of the “factuality” of personal projects and meaning involved in a person’s identity allow for the continuation not only of a “material” (tangible) existence (for

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example, in the works – books, sculptures, etc. – that the individual has created) but also of the individual’s identity? This is a complex question. An affirmative answer is to some extent admitted by Patočka’s thesis that the identity or essence of the individual must in any case be “interpretively deciphered” (this volume, /133/). What else could this mean but to figure out the identity and complete it, think of it, anticipate it, and thus further promote and develop it in new situations and in the middle of things and ideas? For example, until now – until death itself – the identity and meaning of the deceased may not have been (fully, or even at all) intelligible to its bearer, or to anyone else, and so its potential in life here and now could not be seen and used: this “project”, this “personal affair”, in its essence “can be hidden from oneself just as much as from others, and may yet have to be interpretively deciphered” (/133/). The identity and meaning of each of us is – to some extent – formed by our projects, ideas and thoughts, but we typically don’t know exactly what their consequences and future are. Other people help us to develop our personal projects during our lifetime, and there is no reason why they should not continue to do so after our death. This can happen “without us”, or somehow in the form of the dead interfering in the here and now as depicted above using Japanese culture as an example. But the key point is this: If one continues to develop the projects and ideas that filled the life of the deceased (indeed, were the most important things in his life), then one is developing the meaning of his life too. Simply put, if what a long-dead statesman began to promote in world history becomes established, then, in the light of the historical progress of what he once did, his once perhaps unappreciated activity becomes meaningful. Of course, the sense of the dead person’s life can only be revived in this way to the extent that he identified with those projects and ideas. In this sense – in this form of postmortal life – the deceased is not a “closed history” or event, and the deceased’s life possibilities (opportunities) are not gone (pace Patočka this volume, /134/). When Patočka says that the deceased will no longer “make himself”, as this possibility has indeed expired (/134/), he is right. But other people can further make his self to the extent that they develop his activities and ideas, and so develop and reveal further meaning to what he was doing and planning to do, a meaning that he himself may or may not have suspected in its most developed forms. Thus, in both forms of the afterlife of the deceased, the individual person of the dead does not survive. In the first case, it is the afterlife of ancestors, not of the person: “it is a man as an ancestor …, it is the vital continuity of an unfinished line of ancestors” (Scheler, 61–2). In the second case, it is a more “personal” matter – specific ideas, projects and events and the meaning associated with them. But again, these do not belong exclusively to the person, but to the spiritual continuity of values and ideas. However, this continuity of values would not have been established here in the world without people like the deceased individual, and everyone who participates in this continuity transforms it in a distinctive way. In the development of this distinctive way one can see the afterlife of at least some part of the meaning or identity of the dead.

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The Self as a Project and an Event that Transcends all Selves Having introduced two forms of afterlife, I will now develop one of these forms, namely the one based on the concept of man, according to which man’s identity lies at least partly in the projects he co-creates and the ideas he embodies through his activities. Living people can assume and imagine the thoughts of the deceased and follow up on his actions, continue his projects, further develop the ideas put into motion by him. At the same time, the actions, ideas or projects of the dead take on – and he with them to the extent that he identified with them – a new form. In new situations, he not only shows himself in a new light but both his works and his meaning directly take on new forms. Only he himself can no longer do anything about it; here, he has to rely on others to carry on his projects, actions and ideas. But, thanks to them, his meaning (again, only to the extent that he identified himself with them) can continue to develop, and the idea, action or event that he has (co-) constituted can grow. It is therefore not true that death means the end of the transformation of the meaning of one’s life, or that the closer one gets to death, the less one is able to transform that meaning. This may be true in many cases, and can be inferred from the phenomenon of ageing, as examined by Max Scheler (1957), but it does not say everything, or even what is essential, about death and our experience of it. It is rather the other way around: only the end of the transformation of meaning marks the death of the person in question. This can be seen most trivially, for example, in the changing interpretation of various great figures in our history. During the communist era, many church reformers were interpreted as fighters against class inequality; today we see them more as fighters for human rights. In any case, the meaning of their struggles is not closed, insofar as they have something to say about our present situation and help us solve it. In Patočka’s text I find a passage that is close to my interpretation (even if it cannot be identified with it): it may be that I am actualising only ex-post a lot of what the past person was, that his being becomes an impulse encouraging me to still new things by realising more profoundly what his existence meant and means, that I keep exposing myself to the problematisation which this being is for me. (Patočka this volume, /142/)

The difference is obvious, however. Here, Patočka is working exclusively with the past, the past other, whereas I propose to continue to speak of the evolving other – evolving, of course, only in his meaning and events (works, projects and ideas) as discussed above. However, even Patočka says that the existence of the past other meant something and means something even now, even though the person himself is dead. And this new, different meaning is what can be a significant form of the afterlife. Karfík’s interpretation of Patočka also comes close to what I have in mind (Karfík 2007, 29–30, my translation): The realization of the possibility of letting myself be determined in my own possibilities by what the deceased other was for me, may very well go hand in hand with my actual awareness of his non-being for himself, his past mode of being. However, even though the actualization of this possibility is, so to speak, one-sided, it still draws on the source of what the

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Well, Karfík ascribes to “the being of the other […] an energy of reciprocity even after his death”, and to the living the possibility of actualising this energy of reciprocity here and now. In this sense, it corresponds to my account of the possible further unfolding (evolving) of the meaning and events of the other even after death. In the end, however, Karfík, like Patočka, emphasises only the development of the self, not the meaning of the other, the dead. It should be evident that I am working with a thesis that assumes that the meaning of a person’s life is co-created by the realities that transcend that person: transcendent ideas, values or other people. The fundamental conditioning of the individual, and the co-creation of his or her meaning by these realities, i.e. the refusal to atomise the individual and encourage an understanding of him as part of a greater context, also leads to a different account of his afterlife. To the extent that we are co-created by others (in Patočka’s case, for example, by the deciphering interpretation he mentions), the meaning of our lives can change and develop even after we die – in others and in the whole eventful happening here and now in the world, of which we are otherwise no longer a part (compare Whitehead 1948). The definitive closure of identity would only occur at the moment when humanity as a whole goes extinct.4 For this open conception of the meaning of life, then, it is true that the meaning of life is not living itself, and therefore death as the termination of the course of life is not and cannot be able to deprive […] the particular life of the individual (etc.) of its meaning. Not only that; life takes risks precisely because it is concerned with something other than itself and its continuation. Hence it may sometimes […] happen that not the preservation of life but, on the contrary, its commitment and sacrifice, that is, death, may be the salvation of life’s meaning (Hejdánek 2002, 38).

Here, death saves life, and even one’s own specifically personal life, if we identify this life with its meaning. These theses of Hejdánek’s are based on the anthropological concept that “an individual’s particular life is more than its own course, limited by birth and then death”. Man, by his life and death, contributes to “that aspiration of life in general, of life in its entirety, which transcends each individual life”, to his direction beyond himself and “before himself”, further and higher, that is, into the future (which comes to him, addresses him in something and calls him to action).

 See Gilles Deleuze’s exploration of such a condition in the character of Robinson in Michel Tournier’s novel. Robinson, who has lost touch with any human being (even in thought), lacks figures providing “a scale … and possible points of view that attach the necessary virtual possibilities to the real point of view of the observer.” His vision of the world around him “is reduced to himself. Everything he does not see is absolutely unknown. Wherever he is not, a bottomless night reigns.” (Tournier, 43). 4

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The person in question participates – and in this one can see her meaning – in a “life that lasts for ages”, and even here she can have an “individual” meaning even after her biological death (Hejdánek 2002, 38). However, it is still true that personal meaning may not be sufficiently determined by this attachment to transcending ideas, events and projects. It is determined by them only to the extent to which she has identified with them, or to the extent to which she has understood her own meaning in the realization of these ideas and projects.

Unchanging Essence Versus Conversation with the Deceased Let us now compare these theses about man with Patočka’s other statements. Thus, we shall determine their mutual compatibility, as well as their persuasiveness. Although Patočka speaks of a metaphysical quality that we continue to hold as lived content after the death of another, it is its “metaphysicality”, consisting in its permanence and unchangeability, that is the problem. Why couldn’t the personal project or meaning continue to transform and evolve after death, as I show above? According to Patočka, the metaphysical quality “sums up what the personality itself eventually constitutes by its original life, its unmistakeable sense, that which was in the end at stake in any moment of its ‘inner’ experiencing and self-constitution” (Patočka this volume, /135/). Patočka comes close to my interpretation when he acknowledges that that “which was at stake” is not private property, inaccessible to anyone else (and I would add that it is sometimes invisible also to the possessor himself, or, more precisely, always partly invisible to him). This sense can be – or has to be – sought and created by anyone who is sufficiently interested in it, who cares about it. At the same time, however, Patočka talks about the “unmistakeable character” of the sense of personality and distinguishes this sense from its very constitution, which falls into the private sphere, inaccessible to those around it: “That ‘which was at stake’ is nothing private in the way in which constituting is, it’s nothing inaccessible in the sense in which the personality cannot be substituted for by, or confused with, anybody else” (this volume, /135/). This distinction is not justified in any way, and the purely private self-constitution is striking: after all, the interventions of others (parents, to begin with), as well as the challenges presented by situations, all contribute to the constitution of a given individual, though in the end it is up to him how he turns out, how he uses the help of others. It is as if Patočka is making the traditional mistake of working with “independent existence” (on the criticism of independent existence, see Whitehead 1948). What his exact position is is however not that clear, especially because Patočka later speaks of the essential participation of the other in the constitution of the self, in the discovery of one’s individuality and qualities; in short, he speaks of the fact that “only in relation to another […] we become what we are” (Patočka this volume, /140/), and it is this claim that corresponds to his other texts.

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Patočka then likens the metaphysical quality to a characteristic feature that is supposed to be the core of the legacy of the deceased, what we remember of him: “Those gone are most likely to leave behind, for the longest time, such a characteristic trait in which their whole individual substance is implied: their look, their voice and accent, their gait, the inclination of their head” (/136/). Certainly, we all have experience of such character traits, but however strongly they may suggest the person, the idea that they are capable of revealing “the whole individual essence” is exaggerated. They can certainly refer to it, but the gait or the tilt of the head may just as well be misleading with regard to the individual’s heritage or legacy (although Patočka partially rules this out by narrowing it down to a close circle of people). Rather, I would look for the implication of the whole individual essence in what the voice of the deceased communicates to us even after death, when we recall him, when we consult him in our minds and “really” hear him in our minds, when he suggests, reflects back to us, argues with us, persuades us as if he was here with us. In fact, even after the death of one of the partners, some such interpersonal relational essence5 is still evoked by Patočka himself (in his interpretation of the specifics of ancient humanity): There are relationships elevated above all contingency, relationships to others that seem to constitute or co-create our deepest essence; […] such is the relationship of a child to its parents, […] the relationship of friendship, the relationship of love; relationships quite independent of our emotional, pathological state, relationships that determine us before our every action, from which there is no escape, to which one can only maintain loyalty or betray it. They do not cease with death: on the contrary, they become clearer in it, they only take on their full meaning. Who knows the conversations that a mother has with her dead child! (Patočka 2004, 20)

The difference between the accent of the voice or the inclination of the head and what the deceased is telling us is also the difference between, on the one hand, returning to the same feature over and over again, and, on the other hand, continuing to fulfil the need to interact with the other. Of course, the content of what is said varies according to the situation; we never know exactly what the voice will say, even if it no longer belongs to a tangibly present person; that is why we consult it, why we call it up in our minds again and again, especially in moments of decision-­ making in precarious situations. The deceased one’s speaking in this way still represents a certain effect on us, and an effect that is incalculable, because it is not just a matter of remembering the principles that the person in question held but of letting him continue to speak. Here it is shown that something else is needed besides memory in order to have a responsible attitude towards the past. And this is revealed in letting the past speak, in opening a space for it to be updated. When Patočka speaks of the “primarily-naïve […] letting him [the other] be”, that is, of not annihilating him by assimilating him to “one’s existence, one’s own needs” (Patočka this volume, /140/), this “letting be” in my interpretation not only means letting the other speak in his otherness to our lives, actions and works, but it  On the preservation of interpersonal, reciprocal relationships even after the death of one of the partners, see Ondřej Beran’s text in this book. 5

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also means developing his ideas, continuing the events that at least partly constituted the meaning of his existence. To let him be is to let him act on us, and through us on others and the world around us. Of course, it is possible that the continuation of the projects and ideas that give meaning to the life of the deceased is false, that it is a falsification of the projects and ideas of the other, even a violation of them. However, just because there are people who violate them, this does not mean that the continuity is necessarily illusory: continuity is possible, not certain. But I do not want to deal with that issue in detail here. Similarly, I will not here address the interesting and important question of who is able to follow the deceased. Even at the most basic level of discovering oneself through the eyes of the other (Patočka this volume, /140/), it is, of course, an open question whether this role can be played by any other person, or rather by a unique other to whom there is a special connection. Patočka’s examples from eroticism or friendship imply this unique other, and not a common or ordinary person. This would be similar to the case of whomever properly follows the deceased, that they themselves possess this unique quality (in their relationship with the deceased). However, let me return to my interpretation, which, as we have seen, Patočka’s thinking certainly inclines to, even though it is also in tension with it in certain respects (for example, with respect to the metaphysical quality). In the next part of this paper, I will support my interpretation through a sketch of the concept of man in process philosophy and in ancient Greek thought. In referring to ancient Greece, I rely exclusively on Patočka’s interpretations of it, in which he presents Greek thought, including his sympathy for and understanding of it. Therefore, Patočka’s remarks on mortality in this context should be taken as his considered opinion, which we have to take seriously.

Process Philosophy and Ancient Greek Culture My way of describing the relation of us to the deceased finds support in the axioms of process philosophy. Essentially, this philosophy claims that “no historical event can be reduced to a factum at the moment it occurs, but happens for a rather long time afterwards”, and therefore “every historical fact is such as people continue to react to it” (Hejdánek 1978, letter no. 12). And, according to this conception, the same is true of man: every deceased person and his meaning is and will be such as people continue to react and respond to him. Such human reactions, however, have a strong “non-given dimension”: As long as […] a past event has actual meaning, as long as it somehow intervenes in the present, it retains a kind of hidden ambiguity, indeterminacy, and so far, it is not finished, done, dead. On the contrary, as a living thing, it continues on its journey towards greater certainty, […] it grows something new, which is by no means alien, external to it, but which is its own […] But this actuality, this “aliveness” […] is not given in an objective way, […]

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And that which is not here are challenges (in the Platonic tradition, ideas) coming from the future: the challenges heard by people, and concretely developed and applied in their lives and work, challenges that, as measures, call us to action here and now, or prevent us from acting in a merely inert way, without invention. The deceased, while he was still alive, implemented some of these challenges, and so they co-created his identity and meaning. At the same time, these ideas can still appeal to people today, and thanks to this, the meaning of the dead who once developed these ideas and the people of today who continue to develop them can be connected: “What brings us together is not anything that is part of them and us, but what is valid (co platí) for them and us, or what is the basis of what is valid (true)” (Hejdánek 1988, 88.261). This understanding of the deceased other is made possible not only by the axioms of process philosophy but also by ancient Greek thought as it was received by Patočka, who saw in it the source of future European thought and life. According to Patočka, the experience of death in the ancient Greek world is expressed by people who understood, “[b]y the wisdom of a dangerous life that deals with death” and by their whole existence, action and thinking, that the more they assert themselves, the more they give (Patočka 2004, 14). They give themselves not only to the communities and people around them but above all to the forces and events that transcend them. To know this, which does not necessarily mean to fully understand the transcendent events, is to find the way to reconciliation: that is why, in that time and culture, unlike in our own, reconciliation is not sought in some subsequent experience of pity or compassion but in the experience of “the other side of the matter”, in “the knowledge that human life stands under the law of duality, that will, life, freedom are not pure wine but always a blend, that glory is always misery, that fulfilment always conceals disappointment, that it is only possible to want when one accepts something, when one gives up something and when one commits to something” (Patočka 2004, 14–15). This does not mean that the ancient Greek identifies himself with the cosmos, that he merges with the cosmos, but only that he “experiences himself and non-self”, he participates in himself, in the human but also in the non-human, and in this sense anti-human; he experiences “against man just as with man”, and in this sense he experiences the whole, the cosmos (Patočka 2004, 12). And it is in this less self-centred or “personal” understanding of self and man that Patočka interprets the ancient Greek notion of immortality and the “real understanding of the other side of being, on which we are not” (2004, 13). This applies to  Hejdánek (1997, 28–29) continues: “In the present conception, the past is meaningful (and real) because it is finished and definite; and the present achieves meaning and reality […] if it can imitate the past […] if it can change nothing about it and add nothing to it. In the new conception, on the other hand, the past is meaningful – and real, i. e., operative – only insofar as it is unfinished […]; the present, then, achieves meaning and reality […] insofar as it is able to reify it as an actual openness, and insofar as it is able to take a decisive step forward from it and away from it, a step into the future, i.e., insofar as it is able to add something new to it and thereby change it.” 6

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everyone to some extent, and we know the extreme form from tragedies in which, in death, man becomes both free and committed to a higher agency (Patočka 2004, 22). The Greek man is able to pass from this life peacefully (see reconciliation above) precisely because he is fully aware that he is “not absolute, that the universe does not end with him”. This is not a devastating message; on the contrary, it allows him to see himself as a kind of sharer, even after “his” departure, in what “he himself is not” and in what lives on after his death. According to Patočka, we are less capable of this today in that we have “lost the ability to live with the universe” (2004, 13).

Derrida’s Patočka When dealing with the afterlife in the context of Patočka’s work, we should not neglect Patočka’s Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History. In this section, I will revisit some death-related motifs from this book. I will stick exclusively to Derrida’s interpretation, which I consider to be the most interesting as regards our topic (leaving aside the possible differences between Derrida and Patočka). The interpretively deciphered life and work of the dead can be explained – using terms from Heretical Essays – as an acceptance7 of the orgiastic, demonic mystery of death. This interpretive decipherment as a continuation of the events, projects and ideas in which the dead individual was participating during his lifetime, it seems to me, is one possible way of bringing the demonic (death) to life, namely, by integrating the already dead into the actual life, by “suppressing” the death of the one who has gone by developing him in the present life. This interpretive decipherment is, in my view, also a transition to responsibility, because it essentially answers the question of what the deceased lived for, and who he was, is and may be in the future (compare Derrida 2008, 4–5). Instead of us being “haunted” from beyond the grave, the deceased in this way assists life here and now; instead of in the mysteriously vague form of a spirit, the dead person takes a form that is visible, accessible to the aforementioned actual life course. This continuation of what the person lived for is

 Patočka and Derrida sometimes argue that the orgiastic (whether in the form of death or love, to be specific) must be subjugated by overcoming it (“the orgiastic is not removed but is disciplined and made subservient”, Patočka 1996, 106; Derrida 2008, 21). My interpretation is directed, on the contrary  – and it should be added that in both Patočka’s and Derrida’s interpretations, such an interpretation is also developed and no explicit decision is made as to which one they are more inclined – towards the fact that the orgiastic is to be accepted in its mysterious but nevertheless meaningful sense (in contrast to e.g. Derrida 2008, 8: “the secret of orgiastic mystery that the history of responsibility has to break with”). As such, I believe it can be a solid part of lives and thought that are both rational and reflective. I see no reason why rational life cannot retain a space for mystery, pathos and non-rational (not necessarily anti-rational) action and thought, or why reason and the orgiastic cannot be part of a person’s or community’s identity, albeit a tension-filled one. I interpret both Derrida and Patočka in such a way that they ultimately express – in different words – the combination of these opposing forces. 7

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at the same time a relationship to him. The finality that has tangibly entered into life here is always already present and impressive. And it manifests itself everywhere. Psychologically speaking, for example, we experience that we treat those who have died more respectfully as their heirs. In the field of philosophy, finitude is even one of the central concepts: it comes, for example, as the experience of another kind of being and co-being, with content that goes beyond ordinary thought and expression, in Heretical Essays content expressed by terms of orgiastic or demonic mystery. Derrida tries to express what is at stake in relation to the dead. Patočka’s interpretive decipherment would, in Derrida’s words, be an alterity that “regards without being seen”. While it lacks the reciprocity to which we are otherwise accustomed in our relations with living others, it still consists of a certain relation, namely, a goodness that “gives in an experience that amounts to a gift of death” (Derrida 2008, 5). This alterity and goodness is represented by the one who deciphers the deceased and so develops his legacy – that is why the interpreter is associated with goodness. At the same time, he is still someone else: a) is alive, as opposed to dead, b) however faithful he is to the deceased, he develops him in a new situation and in his own way, thus transforming those events and projects with which the deceased identified himself (and let us remember that deciphering and unfolding can also mean the recognition that the dead has nothing more to say to present and future events, that his legacy is exhausted). Thus, the only acceptable imperative in the case of genocide, “not to let others die a second time”, is in accord with the above interpretation, supplemented by the reminder that in the case of any death, it is necessary to let others die, that is, to help them die properly in the sense of not letting the potentialities of their life (ideas, projects, etc.) dissipate once they are gone. To know the other or others (in their responsibility, i.e. in their existence as answering the question of the meaning and fulfilment of life, and not in some detail or totality of their lives (Derrida 2008, 6)) is to take up their inheritance and, in this way, to give them fidelity in their death. However, death here is a continuation of life: death is given by the dead person’s life being developed further; in this way, previous developments are “buried” in the sense of being overcome, i.e. fully developed and completed. Death is in this sense the fulfilment of life, consisting in the finalisation of unfolding events, identities and projects. The dead cannot be properly buried without being realized. By this, I do not mean, however, that we should try to finish what each and every deceased person had started. Simply put, for those whose activities have proved to be unworkable or even criminal, completion is instead the uncompromising refutation or elimination of what they did. In this way, Derrida’s “gift of death” can be interpreted as an acceptance of the death of others in the way that those who are still alive - and thus able to add to the meaning the deceased himself created during his life - are addressed by his death. To accept death means to accept the finality of life, and the responsible one is the one who in this situation does not give up, but continues to act with the knowledge of the imperfection and incompleteness of all possible actions, and with the knowledge that they can only be (imperfectly) completed by being passed on to successors. And regarding these successors, we neither know who they are, nor what they will do.

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Derrida’s text, it seems to me, makes it possible to express this whole interpretation also from the opposite side – to be fully understood, it even requires this opposite view – that is, by looking not only at what life is after death but also by looking at what death is when present in life. From this point of view, then, it is true, and experience confirms it, that man does not only care for, pay attention to and experience (his) death near the end of life, but also much earlier. One does not first live and then die (as for example the famous Epicurean trick claims: as long as one exists there is no death, and once death comes, one no longer exists). On the contrary, existence proceeds simultaneously with death, so that life always already carries death with it. Simply put, human life is and means dying. Derrida does not say this directly, but, rather, implicitly: “It is nothing other than this care about dying as a relation to self and an assembling of self. It only returns to itself, in both senses of assembling itself and awakening itself, becoming conscious, in the sense of consciousness of self in general, through this care for death” (Derrida 2008, 16). Derrida, like Patočka, thematises death as the final, instantaneous end of life, but at the same time Derrida and Patočka are inclined to acknowledge that it does makes sense to say, and it is important to stress, that we die every day. This, by the way, is an idea held by some old philosophies or wisdom schools: one of them (the hedonistic) is associated with the imperative to seize the day (carpe diem); another one (though similarly attached to the reality of the daily beginning and end of the day), to which both Patočka and Derrida belong, can be associated with Socrates’ imperative of the “practice of death”, or meleté thanatou.8 Meleté means a practice that consists in repetition: we experience death repeatedly, we become accustomed to a life that is finite, we live life at its ultimate horizon, which is its death (for Socrates, the leaving of the body of the soul).9 In this way we do not diminish death, we only understand it more comprehensively and therefore potentially experience it correctly. The soul or person does not gather itself in preparation for death (Derrida 2008, 41) but gathers itself in meleté thanatou, literally in practising and thus realising death, and thus in beginning the next day by the full experience – realisation – of the previous one. At the same time, this conception is inherent in Patočka’s lifelong programme of care for the soul, and just as he says of the soul that it can only be understood and seen when we exercise care for it (epimeleia tés psychés), so, by analogy, death cannot be rehearsed and understood until we exercise it (Patočka 1999, 229).

 Plato (2009), Phaedo 67de, 80e–81a. Proper philosophers pursue nothing else than dying and being dead (64a). 9  I disagree, in the case of the practice of death, with a one-sided interpretation that “practice is a continuous preparation for a certain state” – in our case, death – that lies ahead of the one who practices (Notomi 2013, 59–60). I do believe that we might practise for the sake of practice itself, which makes a lot of sense in Socrates’ case. Such an interpretation, in which philosophy becomes the lived experience of a presence, is given by Pierre Hadot (for example 2004, 70). And this interpretation is also supported by the meaning of the verb meletan, which means “careful attention to something he loves, when he tends it as if it were a garden, when he lovingly weeds, waters and prunes. Melete is a passion at work.” See Kalkavage 2022. 8

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If we, in this strong sense, die every minute, hour, and day, it is not generally the case what is true of Platonic philosophers according to Derrida: “[T]he Platonic philosopher is in no better a position than the animal when it comes to ‘looking’ death in the face and, as a result, to having access to that authenticity of existence linked to the epimeleia tés psychés as meleté thanatou, the caring concern for the soul that cares by watching for/over death” (Derrida 2008, 21). Philosophers such as Socrates, on the other hand, look into the face of death permanently – for example, at the end of each day in reflection on and evaluation of it: “Nor suffer sleep to close thine eyes / Till thrice thy acts that day thou hast run o’er; / How slip? What deeds? What duty left undone?” (Porphyry, Vita Pyth. 40; Guthrie 1987, 131). According to this interpretation, to care about death is to care about the unity, interconnectedness and inseparability of day (life) and night (death), for each day passes into night, by night it ends, and we are a composite of these finite day/night units, which are the beginning and the end of each other. It is necessary to know that death happens daily and not only at the end of life – see Derrida’s appeal to accept the given death (2008, 12), with respect to which the acceptance gains importance at the moment when the individual who has died lives on and can therefore realise the acceptance. To place death only at the end of life, “after life”, would be the same as not admitting the mystery in our lives and in the events here in the world. The impossibility of someone dying instead of me, in my place (Derrida 2008, 42), applies to this daily death as well. It is impossible to end (reflect on) the day for someone else. However, this is only partially true if we accept the possibility described above of continuing and finishing the projects, events and meaning of those who have died. We can reconcile the two theses by explaining the posthumous continuation of what the deceased developed and identified with as the creation of a space by others for the development of what the deceased saw meaning in. The others finish what the deceased started, the others develop his projects and continue the events that were meaningful in his situation, and thereby find meaning in their own situation as well. And here it is true that because the dead person can no longer reciprocate with us, we are responsible for their afterlife – “dead” both in the literal sense and in a figurative one, that is, at the end of each day.

Conclusion If we accept the fact that we die every day, it could be said that some of us are more dead than alive (a man of sixty is more dead than alive; 60 years of his life are gone, dead). We are much more what is not present than what is. Most of our existence, our life, consists of what has already happened and what is yet to come. If we would reduce our life to the here and now, life would lose all perspective; it would make no sense to ask for the identity, direction and ideas of life. If, then, we accept the fact that for the most part we are not alive (namely, we are primarily what has already been and what has not yet been), it is not so difficult to include in our life what

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happens after the end of the bodily presence here and now, though not after the disappearance of the events, meanings and ideas of which we have been a part. This inclusion, as we can see, is not based on emphasising the soul as an entity distinct from the body but rather on emphasising the location of personal meaning in the world, in the middle of things, that is, how this personal meaning is lived by people here and now. In Patočka, and similarly in the other thinkers I have discussed, I find a tendency towards such a conception, though there are also contradictory tendencies in all of them. Furthermore, the second condition of my interpretation, that is, the specific conception of man mentioned above, both in the context of process philosophy and in the context of ancient Greek tradition, is present in Patočka, although it is not particularly developed in “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” itself. It seems to me, however, that such a development would be a possible continuation of his text, which would then have to be properly modified and elaborated in some of its parts (one of them is the part that acknowledges the situational but neglects the factual). In summary, after introducing one element of Patočka’s basic sketch of human life, I pointed out a contradiction hidden in this element and therefore in the overall sketch as well: according to Patočka, the meaning of an individual’s life and his identity is in the middle of a situation but not in the middle of things. The omission of one side of this contradiction leads to a conception of life (and thus of life after death) as a closed history, one that is opposed to a more reasonable conception of life (and life after death) as an open project. Next, I introduced a sort of general anthropology, which establishes human existence as an open project. Comparing this anthropology with Patočka’s other claims, these again turn out to be, on the one hand, close to my interpretation, on the other hand, still marred by the idea of “man as a closed history”. Finally, I supported my interpretation with an outline of the understanding of man in process philosophy and in ancient Greece thought (in Patočka’s interpretation of it). At the very end, I supplemented the study with a reminder of Derrida’s interpretation of Patočka’s Heretical Essays. This interpretation, I believe, can also support my proposed conception of one particular form of postmortal life.

References Barnes, Julian. 2012. The sense of an ending. London: Vintage. Derrida, Jacques. 2008 [1995]. The gift of death and literature in secret. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Guthrie, Kenneth Sylvan. 1987. The Pythagorean sourcebook and library: An anthology of ancient writings which relate to Pythagoras and Pythagorean philosophy. Grand Rapids: Phanes Press. Hadot, Pierre. 2004. What is ancient philosophy? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hejdánek, Ladislav. 1978. Dopisy příteli II (Letters to a friend II). Ladislav Hejdánek Archives. https://www.hejdanek.eu/. ———. 1988. Myšlenkový deník 88.261, 20. února 1988 (Thought Diary). Ladislav Hejdánek Archives. https://www.hejdanek.eu/.

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———. 1997. Nepředmětnost v myšlení a ve skutečnosti (Non-objectivity in thinking and in reality). Praha: Oikoymenh. ———. 2002 [1991]. Kapitoly z filosofické antropologie (Chapters from philosophical anthropology). Ladislav Hejdánek Archives. https://www.hejdanek.eu/. Kalkavage, Peter. 2022. Plato’s Phaedo and the care of death. http://seaver-­faculty.pepperdine. edu/mgose/GBQuarterly/winter00/careofdeath.html. Accessed 27 Feb 2022. Karfík, Filip. 2007. Posmrtný život a nesmrtelnost podle Jana Patočky (Life after Death and Immortality in Jan Patočka). Reflexe 32: 21–41. Notomi, Noburu. 2013. Socrates in the Phaedo. In The platonic art of philosophy, ed. George Boys-­ Stones, Dimitri El Murr, and Christopher Gill, 51–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patočka, Jan. 1996. Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Ed. James Dodd. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1999 [1973]. Platón a Evropa (Plato and Europe). In Péče o duši II (Sebrané spisy, vol. 2), 149–355. Praha: Oikoymenh. ———. 2004 [1945]. Poznámky o antické humanitě (Notes on ancient humanity). In Umění a čas II (Sebrané spisy, vol. 5), 11–29. Praha: Oikoymenh. Plato. 2009. Phaedo. Trans. D. Gallop. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scheler, Max. 1957. Tod und Fortleben. In Gesammelte Werke 10: Schriften aus dem Nachlass 1: Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre, 9–64. Bern: Francke. Tournier, Michele. 2006 [1967]. Pátek aneb lůno Pacifiku (Friday, or, The Other Island). Trans. M. Pacvoň. Červený Kostelec: Nakl. Pavel Mervart. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1948. Immortality. In Essays in science and philosophy, 60–74. New York: Philosophical Library.

Chapter 8

The Other Modern Séances Ondřej Beran

Ale já jsem zemřel a nezanechal žádných potomků ani majetku Budu však žít navěky A nikdo mi v tom nezabrání Oldřich Wenzl, “Po veselé noci” (“But I have died and left no offspring or possessions/Yet I will be living forever/And nobody will stop me”. From the Czech poet Oldřich Wenzl’s poem “After the merry night”.)

Introduction: The Phenomenology of Afterlife The surge of online meetings during the Covid-19 pandemic gave rise to many meme jokes, often absurd or bleakly humorous. My favourite (in picture versions accompanied by a black-and-white photo of a spiritualist séance from the late nineteenth century) is the following: Virtual meetings are basically modern seances: “Elizabeth are you here?” “Make a sound if you can hear us.” “Is anyone else with you?” “We can’t see you. Can you hear us?”

Spiritualism is often considered a dated curiosity, featuring mostly in vintage mystery novels. What makes the joke appealing is the highlighted similarity between the absurd and the everyday. For in online meetings, we are interacting with living people (hopefully), and living people differ sharply from the deceased. One key aspect of this implicitly assumed structural difference concerns the possibility of

O. Beran (*) University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_8

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genuine interaction. Spiritualism is considered funny because it appears self-contradicting. Much of Jan Patočka’s “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” is devoted to the exploration of the difference that death makes to the “reciprocity” between the living person and the dead other. Patočka mentions the traditional ideas of the survival of the soul, yet leaves them aside; for him, they are of no concern for how we live with the deceased, and how they live in or through us. The presence of the dead in our lives seems not sustained by a literal presence of souls or spirits. Due to this lack of support, the idea of afterlife offers only a weak consolation, and its analysis eventually makes that consolation “fall apart” (Patočka this volume, /130/).1 The reason is that the dead do not reciprocate. A dead person “withdraws […] completely” from synchronic relational being with and for others and “becomes a mere object, which does not have the sense of ‘together’ anymore, does not have the sense of participation in human enterprises”. Not only is he2 “no longer with us” but this is the way in which he is understood, “meant” by us. This lack of reciprocity, this “no longer being there”, this complete withdrawal – that is what “being dead” means. The dead person has ceased to be; we still relate to him but only through a complicated cluster of attitudes, relying on our memory or idea of the dead person (see Patočka this volume, /133–134/). The meaning of whom I thereby relate to is not “my idea of my father” but “my father”, but my father is no longer alive and has no say in my shaping “my father”. That unfolds from what was left behind by my father, and from the shape in which I am able to pick it up. This is why Patočka calls afterlife a “primordially privative mode of life with another” (/137/). It is a certain absence, though sometimes an absence very important to the survivors. This absence, and the correlated futility of pondering otherwise, is embedded in the notion of “the dead”. Patočka’s arguments parallel discussions in the philosophy of religion regarding the question of the survival of death. Geach (1969) argues that a person can be thought of as persisting after her death only in terms of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The gist of Geach’s argument is simple: the identity of a person (personality) rests upon the continuity of its being the centre of embodied sense experiences: feeling something, having pain. We would not know what applying these concepts to an immaterial spirit should mean. Geach does not reject the possibility of the survival of a disembodied spirit or soul, but he argues that identity cannot be thereby preserved. Here, the survival would not be the survival of the person. Analogously, Flew (1963) suggests that words such as “person”, “somebody”, “Antony Flew” refer in some way to material objects located in space and time. The continuity of the significance of such words after the physical dissolution of the object is difficult to think. Even if some sense can be attached to talk of survival, it

 The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation. 2  I stick with generic “he” where the wording of the works I quote has it, too. 1

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is of little interest unless it substantiates the continuity of the experience of the person and the continuity of holding the “person” responsible. Flew does not think that the way we talk about identity, experience, and accountability can apply to the dead conceived of as continuous with the living. Phillips (1970) agrees with much of Flew’s and Geach’s arguments. He, too, argues that talking about the survival of the soul rests upon conceptual confusion. However, he adds a more positive spin to the notion of the immortality of the soul. Immortality need not presuppose any metaphysics of survival; rather, it represents a dimension of our moral language. The observation of a man selling or losing his soul is not a matter of the absence or disappearing of an object, but of “the kind of life he is living” (p. 43f). Why “immortality”, then? Phillips argues that the immortality of the soul is a matter of our living “in the light of eternity”, that is, of living a “life seen under certain moral and religious modes of thought” (p.  49). Those modes are otherworldly and impose absolute demands of goodness on our lives. Geach was a conservative Christian, Flew an atheist, Phillips a Christian of a particular kind – one who kept his distance from debates in philosophical theology but actively embraced Christian spirituality, with its notions of sin or atonement. Patočka’s own stance towards Christianity is a secularised analogy of Phillips’s position; his notion of “care for the soul” draws upon the moral outlook of Platonism and Christianity but does not presuppose any metaphysics of the object “soul” (cf. Kočí 2020). All these thinkers share the mistrust of educated people towards the “naive” metaphysics of the soul literally surviving physical death. Their attitude towards popular religious narratives of their time is that of a distinctly modernist, or secular observer. When they discuss the idea of survival, they resemble social scientists who relate the beliefs of the “objects” of their research with understanding, even sympathy, but not more. In the orthodox Catholic case, though, this approach is in line with the official doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In the rest of this chapter, I will mostly diverge from the background set by Patočka’s discussion of the phenomenology of our relating to the dead. Instead, I will focus on the aspect towards which he shows remarkable restraint: afterlife in the sense of the survival of the soul. In the following three sections, I will discuss various examples that, as experiences, seem at odds with the presumption of the impossibility of afterlife survival (or the self-contradictory character of the notion). First, examples reflecting the background of distinctive cultures that involve the survival hypothesis: coming from the viewpoints of spiritualism (and philosophies taking it at face value), of religions incorporating reincarnation, and of bereaved parents experiencing “continuous bonds” (typically backed by a religious standpoint). Then, I discuss more “mundane” and individual cases of “bereavement visits” in widowed people. After that, I offer more general observations about the consequences that such an approach may have for social sciences. Some are explored by the “ontological turn”. Most of my comments reflect the idea that doing justice to all these various phenomena, rooted in different cultures, requires the mildly paradoxical combination of (i) taking them as practices grappling with certain realities (i.e., avoiding the “hermeneutical” move of true-for-them), but (ii), as they are practices in the first place, not ascribing underlying theoretically coherent beliefs of

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an ontological nature to them. From this point of view, I am then revisiting my reading of Patočka’s discussion of afterlife.

Some (Perhaps Unusual) Cases of the Dead in Our Lives We may start by simply asking: If the talk of survival is confused nonsense, why the common temptation to relate to the dead as if they could reciprocate? Consider familiar examples. We talk to the picture of the deceased person, saying, “If only you were here … I don’t know what to do. What would you do?” The person is not here and cannot reply, but it makes sense to address them thus. (The “you” is the person, not the picture.) Yet, we would be surprised if “you” appeared and replied. However, whether this surprise would differ in quality from a case in which one addresses in this way a picture of somebody who is in the forests of Amazonia, beyond cell phone signal, that depends on whether you simply cannot talk with a dead person at all, or whether particular (ritual?) conditions would have to be met first (here, much is determined by what culture “you” inhabit). But we do not talk in such a way to the picture – in either case – out of habit; there was no such habit before we lost contact. Neither do we simply talk to an “object of our psychological need”. It is understandable to be angry with the absent person because she died and left us here, just as it is because she left us for a six-months adventure trip to Darkest Peru. We do not get angry with what/who we know to be an object of our imagination. We also have dreams about our dead. Certainly, we have dreams about all sorts of things. Many of them do not exist. Yet whether or not dreams about the dead are a widespread phenomenon (probably not), and whether or not it is usual to attribute a special significance to these dreams, people sometimes have them, and they are intelligible. People say, on account of such dreams, things like “My dead mother is watching over me.” To be sure, not all dreams featuring our dead ones strike us as sustaining such an interpretation. For instance, while it seems easy to understand some dreams as “My mother is watching over me” rather than as a psychological compensating mechanism, other dreams that suggest that the dead person is not interested in watching over us but rather in annoying us maliciously (much like living people) seem much easier to explain away as a psychological mechanism. Acting in a way that reflects that the dead are there, or in contact with us, albeit in contact of a special kind, differs significantly from acting in a similar way while being aware of the status of one’s own behaviour as a psychological compensating mechanism. To be convinced that it is (logically) impossible that “talking to the dead” could be anything but a psychological compensation mechanism means to draw one more firm distinction between our relationship with the dead and our relationship with the living. That is, between “normal” relationships to the dead and those that are not normal, because in the latter people tend to reject the firm distinction. Spiritualism is a prime example of such rejection, taken thus by most “reasonable” philosophers as a confused curiosity. But is it necessarily a confused curiosity,

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considering the other cases of refusing the distinction, indicated in the above paragraphs? Some respectable philosophers have been seriously engaging with spiritualism and its related survival hypotheses. Price (1995, 201ff) suggests that much that one can witness in spiritualist séances can be explained without postulating any contact between the medium and the spirit of the deceased. However, such alternative explanations can be equally eccentric and demanding. For instance, they suggest that the medium is capable of very extensive and far-reaching finely-sorted extra-­ sensory perception. Price remarks that there is probably no way of getting proof of survival, but he suggests there is evidence that at least justifies taking the survival hypothesis seriously and not simply dismissing it out of hand. To say the least, medium séances are far from straightforwardly gratifying the paying audience.3 Similarly, Broad (1962, 385ff) argues that while much mediumistic communication can be explained by the medium’s telepathic gathering of information from living sources (and many communications are pseudo-communications), it seems implausible that all cases could have this explanation only. However, a full continuity of the person is unlikely to take place. The surviving entity would be a cluster of some memories, dispositions, and personality features. Broad also considers the importance of the fact that many dispositions displayed in legitimate cases of mediumistic communication concern body-related behaviour, such as speaking in a particular voice or tone of voice. For him, this suggests that if we consider the survival hypothesis as relevant, it should posit a kind of continuous bodily, if “discarnate”, identity. It is worth noting that cases such as apparitions or bereavement visits – if we can take them seriously – involve witnessing what behaves, in many respects, like a body. Ghosts are often reported to walk, on the floor, or to go through doors rather than always pass through walls, though there is no good reason why, being immaterial, they should not appear quite as often as partly immersed in the ground, or moving while positioned horizontally rather than vertically, and so forth.4

 Price (1995, 206) notes that communications through a medium “are sometimes excessively boring to hear or to read. It would seem that the art of saying very little in a very large number of words is as well understood ‘on the other side’ as it is here.” 4  Among thinkers favourably inclined towards spiritualism, Broad and Price are probably the most rigorous philosophically. Their cautiousness is notable; nowhere does either of them claim that the survival hypothesis is the most probable, or the only possible, explanation of mediumistic communications. They mainly state that it is a possible explanation that seems to fit some cases better than other explanations do but that does not fit most other cases. They stress the need to keep the possibility open. In his robust discussion of the possibility of survival, Sudduth (2016) – while being respectful towards the rigour, clarity, and humility of Broad’s and Price’s arguments – argues that exactly in this important aspect, the survival hypothesis fails: it is neither statistically more probable than its opposite, nor can it be tested for likelihood against its rival hypotheses, and thus it cannot be considered the best explanation of the total evidence. Yet he observes that while the hypothesis proves “inferentially unjustified” (cannot be proven), his critical arguments do not show that one cannot be “epistemically justified” in one’s belief in survival based on one’s own experiences. As Sudduth notes, belief in afterlife/survival has, in this respect, a nature similar to belief in God (see Chap. 11). 3

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I feel incapable of evaluating the soundness of Broad’s or Price’s arguments in favour of the possibility of survival. But their overall attitude shows a conviction of the significance of talking about souls (and spirits) in a sense other than just as a shorthand for a certain (neurotic) dimension of our lives. Consider another example, which I use with some hesitation: if having a soul is indeed a matter of what kind of life one leads (pace Phillips above), then a new-born baby seems to have not much of a soul. “Soul” would be something into which one “grows”, with time, as one gradually learns the ways in which we live with one another. What happens, then, when a child dies shortly after birth? Is a soul lost here? Probably not in the sense of the (fully developed) moral dimension of the person’s life. There are of course other kinds of talk about the soul (“beautiful soul”, “innocent soul”), often present in the way in which grieving parents would mourn for their deceased child. The terms of the “moral” notion of the immortal soul do not apply quite neatly here, though; for the parents, it is not as if less than an actual person was lost. If their attitude is one of grieving we cannot suppose that, for them, what was lost was, in a profound sense, only a potential of something. The parents lost their child, not the potential of having a child (as “fully” as other, more fortunate parents have children). To the extent that these parents are convinced that people have souls, they face the loss of a soul. For them, the life of a new-born child has significance related to the child’s having, or being, a soul in more than just the shorthand “moral” sense. Studies of bereaved parents (e.g. Klass 1993a, b) discuss the various senses in which the child is still present to the parents. The presence is neither merely psychological (most parents argue against the reduction of the sense of the presence to a “psychic reality”) nor straightforwardly objective. Its meaning is usually very personal and grants no implications for the lives of other people, such as predicting whether, in what form, or with what kind of a “message” they might experience the presence of their dead children (Klass 1993a, 346). While Klass’s studies mostly explore the “continuing bond” as relying on the sense of the transcendent, and while the dead are not present in the same sense as the living, they are still “present in the same world in which the parent lives, not in another world” (p. 362). Some relational facts about the parents and the children – as real, particular persons – remain unchanged. One of Klass’s respondents, a mother haunted by her feeling of being a “failure”, wonders whether her child “would want her to be her mother again”. Then she corrects herself: “I think I’m not saying, ‘Would you want.’ I’m saying, ‘Well, regardless, I am. I was and I am’” (Klass 1993b, 268f). How does the child stay with the parents after his or her death? I have no good answer. A ready answer would be, again, to interpret the parents’ sense of the presence as wishful thinking, or a psychological coping mechanism. A ready answer need not be a good one. For one thing, most bereaved parents who have this kind of experience (many don’t, notably) reject such a suggestion. They perceive their child’s “staying” with them – sometimes just for a while, to help them through the stage – as an expression of his or her love of them and a response to their love (Klass 1999, chapter 4). To understand it otherwise than as a work of mutual love would distort the significance of the event. However, if the bereaved parents understand the child’s presence only as a figment of their psyche or imagination, feeling love both

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towards and coming from such a thing would be (i) deeply disturbing for them and (ii) pathological. Who would want to love, or to be loved by a product of their subconscious? But, feeling such love, could they understand their experience in these terms? Borrowing a remark by Phillips from an analogous context, we might say that the language of the sense of presence “is not contingently related to the believer’s conduct as a psychological aid to it. On the contrary, it is internally related to it in that it is in terms of this language that the believer’s conduct is to be understood” (quoted in Burley 2015, 57). I have mentioned the importance of the terms in which the bereaved understand the encounter. This is also to avoid unnecessary dabbling in ontology; for we may not best approach our connection with the dead through asking ontological questions and giving ontological answers. The bereaved parents reject the framing of their situation in terms of one particular answer to the ontological question, that is, that the encountered child is, in reality, a projection of their psyche. But they need not thereby commit to an alternative ontological standpoint, for instance, that the encountered child is a discarnate spirit with an astral body. No particular ontological framing of the encounter may strike them as interesting. In his discussion of reincarnation, Burley (2015) employs a similar reading of the belief of the Betsileo people (from Madagascar) that one can meet one’s reincarnated ancestor in a crocodile. While most philosophical advocates (informed by the Western tradition) of the survival hypothesis frame it as a metaphysical mind-body dualism, the Betsileo do not commit themselves to any such metaphysics – even when they claim that the encountered crocodile really is one’s reincarnated grandmother. The thesis that they assume a kind of dualistic anthropology in their reincarnation beliefs would have to be first substantiated (and its meaning clarified) by the investigation of their lives and practices. A metaphysical framing cannot be divorced from the ultimately moral framework of a particular practice, and neither needs to be the primary explanation. As Burley (p. 57) notes, “rather, the moral attitude is articulated through the vocabulary of reincarnation, and hence we see what it means to hold this particular conception of reincarnation in the forms of moral activity in which the (…) people engage”. A bereaved person’s encounter with a dead person commits to exactly the degree of metaphysics that is inherently and irreducibly involved in the terms in which she understands the experience. Any metaphysics here is inherent to the constituted sense, but this, in many cases, simply begins and ends with the bereaved person’s certainty that it is the dead person that she encounters. To any more specific follow­up questions, they may reply, “I don’t know”, “Who cares?” or “I don’t understand what you mean”. The diverse examples in this section were designed to show that there is no reason to presuppose that all cases of relating to a dead person as a genuine interaction partner must be neurotic or deluded. For the people experiencing such encounters, these reductionist accounts would strike them as simply inaccurate, i.e. such that would render the experience incomprehensible, which is in no way desirable. However, the suggestion to respect the terms in which they experience these encounters does not mean moving towards a particular (extravagant) ontological

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commitment; very little specific ontology is needed for the person to experience the encounter with the dead as such.

The Dead in Our Lives: Grief, Simply To the examples discussed in the previous section, one can object that it is rather problematic to contradict phenomenological insights into the regular structure of our experience by referring to unusual and extreme life situations. (Leaving aside now the Madagascar case, perfectly normal there.) Not many people suffer the tragedy of losing their child, and few experience the kind of continuing contact I describe above.5 The relatively low frequency of a phenomenon does not reduce its intelligibility, or the importance of its role in the way we understand our lives, though. Nevertheless, there appear to be analogous phenomena that occur much more commonly. Consider the similar context of widowing, or outliving one’s life partner. While genuinely disrupting for the life of the bereaved, too, it is, for obvious reasons, much more common than losing one’s child. The pioneering study by Dewi Rees (1971), by his main profession a GP in rural Wales, showed an unusually high percentage of reported encounters with the dead. The researchers approached 94.2% of widowed people living in the area of the medical practice who could (not being seriously ill themselves) participate in the research. Of the 295 widowed people approached, 293 consented to participate, and of these almost half (46.7%) reported “post-bereavement hallucinations”. A sense of presence, difficult to specify further, was the most common form, followed by cases of seeing and hearing (talking to) the dead person. Perceived tactile contact was the rarest form (reported by 2.7% of respondents); it was also most typically a feature of those cases in which the encounter was perceived negatively; which was, however, overall very rare (about 6% of all the reported cases of bereavement visits; cf. Rees 2001, 270). These encounters were generally perceived as uplifting by the respondents, and in the long run proved to be helpful. Much later, in a reflection on the study, Rees (2010, 187) avoided – following the consensus of the psychiatric community – the term “hallucination”, given its judgemental and unsuitable connotations. Instead, he simply spoke about “report[ing]… some perception of, or contact with, their dead spouse”, every time “in clear

5  The sense of presence of dead children also varies strikingly. Klass (1999, chapter 4) suggests four main expressions of the continuous bond: attachment to “linking objects” (a toy, a piece of clothes); embracing religious ideas and devotion; relying on memories; and identifying the presence in an aspect of the bereaved parents’ life (“Our children live on in the love that we share”). It is in the connection to religious ideas that the sense of presence comes closest to what the survival hypothesis talks about: uncanny or awe-inspiring events (such as inexplicable-looking movements of significant inanimate objects) are understood in the light of the perceived wish of the deceased child to reach out to the parents.

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consciousness… and never sought”: notably, none of the interviewees have “tried to contact the dead; all their experiences had occurred spontaneously” (p. 170). Rees’s original findings, unprecedented and surprising, attracted interest. However, studies seeking to check the phenomenon more thoroughly often ended up replicating his findings, thus showing that this is not an isolated phenomenon specific to rural Wales (cf. Bennett and Bennett 2000; or Barbato et al. 1999 – this research also presents analytical reasons for dropping the term “hallucination”). Bereavement encounters are now considered normal and natural, rather than a pathological phenomenon marking a particular stage of grieving and supposed to be processed in order to inevitably “move on” in a “healthy” manner (cf. Simonds and Rothman 1992, 161ff). Nor do they necessarily wane with time (Rees 2001, 275), as one might expect of a temporary psychological mechanism. This change of perspective has been opened by listening more carefully and in a less prejudiced manner to the bereaved people’s stories. A few accounts: Example 1 (reported by Hufford 2014, 149) One morning in 1995, one of our hospital chaplains called my office at Pennsylvania State University’s medical center, asking me to speak with a man who had just been visited by his deceased wife. In a few minutes, the three of us sat in my department’s conference room, and the man, in his 70s, told us the following story. His wife had recently died in our hospital. On the previous day, shortly after his wife’s funeral, he was in his living room, when his wife walked in. He was stunned. He told me, “I was amazed. I didn’t know such things could happen. I never heard about it in church!” As for most modern people, this experience came out of a cultural void. She told him that she was all right and that he should not be so upset. They chatted briefly, and then she said good-bye, telling him that she had to go. He was distressed. He recalled asking, “Who says you have to go?” “Where will you spend the night?” But she was gone. He said that he was shocked, though he was glad to see her. He had questions. Why couldn’t she stay? Who makes these rules? Why hadn’t it occurred to him to reach out and touch her? Where would she spend the night? He tried to speak about the experience with his daughter, a very religious woman, but it upset her. She said, “Never speak to me about that again!” But he couldn’t let go of it. (…). I told him that I have spoken with many other people who have had such experiences, that they are well known in the grief literature, and that they are normal. I said that those who have told me about their visits have considered them a beautiful and consoling gift, a sign of love. He was pleased and relieved, comforted by this common human experience.

Example 2 (narrative recorded by Bennett and Bennett 2000, 143f) I really saw my husband now, about six or seven weeks after. I’d gone to sleep. I’d had a sleeping tablet. I couldn’t sleep, and I woke up to hear somebody say, “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy”, and I woke up, and it was like I am now, and just inside the bedroom door was John, HONESTLY! and he gave me the loveliest smile, and he’d got his lovely silver-grey suit on, and that was it. Never dreamt about him since or anything. But it was real. It was really real.

Example 3 (from a letter to Dr. Rees, quoted in Rees 2001, 308) Shortly before Christmas, I lost my beloved wife. I had known her for some 56 years and we were very close. Some little while ago, I had gone up to our bedroom, preparing to lie down when she was there, so real I could reach out to her. She said, “I love you dear.” In a few moments she was gone but I felt wonderful. It happened just as you said, spontaneously and unexpectedly.

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Example 4 (from a letter to Dr. Rees, quoted in Rees 2001, 312f) [T]he experience I encountered about 3  weeks ago. It happened during the night. I had retired to bed at approximately 10 pm. I had not taken any stimulants whatsoever, unable to sleep I lay in bed thinking of what I would do the following day. I heard the Grandmother clock in the hall strike 11 pm and shortly afterwards I sensed someone in bed besides me. I knew immediately it was my wife. She put her arm about me as she did in life, I sensed a tender warm feeling that was so natural. I then turned to face her but her face was just a blur. I then spoke to her and said, “You shouldn’t be here,” and she replied, “I know,” and then she left me with a feeling of intense pleasure and comfort.

These reports describe the encounters as something that happened, a matter of fact. Perhaps, as in Example 1, a fact difficult for the person to make sense of, but a fact nevertheless. When these reports thematise the genuineness of the experience, they typically suggest that the person expects a reaction of incredulity from their audience, rather than struggling with the suspicion of delusion or hallucination in themselves. The role of the expected audience should not be underestimated. Part of the reason why the results of the first studies of bereavement visits were so unexpected is that many people kept such experiences to themselves, or confided only in those closest to them. Rees recorded various reasons for keeping the experiences secret: “People only make fun of you; the less you tell people the better” “They would think it most queer”, or “Perhaps they would laugh at me, saying I’m dreaming, but I don’t think I am.” Rees (2010, 178f)

The reassurance, offered by researchers, that such experiences are normal and healthy comes as a relief to the bereaved person, who has remained silent out of fear of being “considered insane” (Grimby 1993, 76). Of course, one may have such experiences during a difficult time of one’s life, and then it is tempting to comply with the perceived need to frame them in a “safe”, rational way: as temporarily induced hallucinations. One problem with this framing is obvious: it “brackets” the meaning of these experiences. They are helpful and healthy exactly when not bracketed in this way, when the bereaved person feels free to take them bona fide. As Hufford (2014, 150) notes, the information that comes from such experiences must be perceived as valid; after-death communications, for example, would not assuage grief if they were taken to be symbolic expressions of the bereaved person’s deepest wishes, as Freud suggested.

What counts as normal and rational, and consequently what one can safely claim as real without compromising oneself, is not cultural invariant. In a unique study of bereavement in Japan, the authors observe that. [the local] religions permit the mourner to maintain contact with the deceased, who become ancestors,

admonishing that

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[i]f you would for a moment give up your Judeo-Christian beliefs and attitudes about one’s destiny after death and pretend to be a Japanese, you might be able to feel how you are in direct daily communication with your ancestors. (Yamamoto et al. 1969, 1660, 1663)

The repeated and mildly ironic-sounding emphasis of the Japanese researchers on permission is not accidental. The hegemonic kinds of Western discourse about death, informed by modern science but also by mainstream, institutionalised forms of Christianity, are hostile to the idea of encountering and talking to dead persons (cf. Hufford 2008, 283ff). It thus seems that encountering dead people and taking this in good faith is a phenomenon far more common than it seems and especially when it can be experienced freely on its own terms, instead of forcing the person to accept the “hallucination” account, it is natural and helpful. This thus perhaps creates a problem not for those who experience these encounters (the question of how they should conceptualise these experiences can perhaps be qualified as “just” a therapeutical one), but for those who would like to provide an account doing justice to these experiences from a third-person’s perspective.

A Problem for/Within the Philosophy of Social Science? The core ideas of the hegemonic Western discourse presuppose that a belief in spirits, or in the soul, as real and existing independently of the body, has been proven untenable by science and that any religious talk about this must not contradict the confines set by science. This means eschewing any talk about souls or spirits as real “somethings”. It is clear that this poses a challenge to social scientists, especially to anthropologists and scholars of religion who conduct their research in communities (typically non-Western and/or non-metropolitan; though not only) where belief in spirits is alive and common. Where earlier researchers reported events that they witnessed and that looked like supernatural encounters and merely stated their momentary incapacity to discover the “real” cause of what they saw  – implicitly assuming the falsity of the explanation accepted by their informants (Evans-Pritchard, quoted in Hufford 2008, 281) –, a younger generation of researchers takes a “hermeneutical” standpoint, admitting that the belief is “real for” the researched people and exhibits an internal consistency. The immersed researcher may share the experiences for a while, yet eventually has to retract back to the ground of “our shared understanding”. As Hufford (2008, 278) observes, these reluctant attempts both to talk of the experiences in the experiencers’ terms and yet not to “accede” to the game amount to practically denying the belief any validity. The reason is that spirit experiences and beliefs are considered to be caused by the particular culture that supports them. Hufford frames his criticisms by referring to his own and others’ ethnographic research into Western cultural contexts and cases (folk, rural, oral) deemed peripheral by mainstream research and argues that belief in spirits, etc. is just as alive in

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Western societies as elsewhere. Unfortunately, the standard academic language has not been well-suited to talking about unfitting experiences. In what is probably the most famous – in its time somewhat infamous – case of an anthropologist “going native”, Edith Turner (1992, chap. 6) records her own participation in the healing ritual (taking the ihamba – the “dead hunter’s tooth” – out of a sick woman’s body) of the Ndembu people in Zambia in the form of a narrative. At its peak (p. 149), she recounts her own witnessing of the bad spirit: Clap, clap, clap – Mulandu was leaning forward on their feet – this was it. Quite an interval of struggle elapsed while I clapped like one possessed, crouching beside Bill amid a lot of urgent talk, while Singleton pressed Meru’s back, guiding and leading out the tooth  – Meru’s face in a grin of tranced passion, her back quivering rapidly. Suddenly Meru raised her arm, stretched it in liberation, and I saw with my own eyes a giant thing emerging out of the flesh of her back. This thing was a large gray blob about six inches across, a deep gray opaque thing emerging as a sphere. I was amazed – delighted. I still laugh with glee at the realization of having seen it, the ihamba, and so big! We were all just one in triumph. The gray thing was actually out there, visible, and you could see Singleton’s hands working and scrabbling on the back – and then the thing was there no more. Singleton had it in his pouch, pressing it in with his other hand as well.

Later on, she reflects on the experience: Then I knew the Africans were right, there is spirit stuff, there is spirit affliction, it isn’t a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology,

diagnosing the dominant approach of anthropologists as. an endless series of put-downs as regards the many spirit events in which they participated – “participated” in a kindly pretense. (Turner 1993, 9)

One who studies events featuring spirits thus faces a choice. One can either draw a neat distinction between how the participants themselves understand the experience and its “real” explanation. This suggests that what is “real for them” is in fact only, say, a projection of subconscious psychological forces or cultural drives appearing to “have materialised”, even when one doesn’t know how exactly this mechanism operates.6 Alternatively, she can take the experience at face value. While for some this means leaving behind the presumed methodological resistance against spirits as possibly “ontologically real”, no particular positive ontological commitments are a necessary part of such a changed attitude. It means treating the spirits with fear and respect of a different kind than one would pay to hidden strata of one’s own psyche. That something is not just a matter of oneself (one’s psyche) is, certainly, a notion that has the capacity for an “ontological” interpretation. However, what might be, with good reasons, characterised as a “belief in spirits” needn’t consist in  Hufford (2020, 94) stresses the need to retain the distinction between religion (there being a particular “spiritual institution” to which people can commit themselves) and spirituality (taking into account spiritual realities as independent). He notes that even the religion-friendly secularist position “defin[ing] spirituality as that which provides ultimate meaning to the believer incorporates a theory about the origins of religion and simultaneously excludes some of the most common spirit experiences”. Encounters with spirits may equally well not provide any – ultimate or not – meaning to the lives of those who experience them. Which is part of what “independently real” means.

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consistently proclaiming a “belief” that “spirits exist”. It may not involve engaging in, interest in, or even understanding any discussion about the ontological question of whether spirits exist. An experience of being confronted with a spirit or visited by one’s dead spouse may require one to stop participating in the hermeneutical suspension of judgement, for it would not do justice to the meaning of the experience. It may equally well accommodate a strong reluctance to engage in a discussion of the “ontology” of the experience. This has some very “extrinsic” reasons, as suggested above (the fear of the audience), but also some “intrinsic” reasons (about these below). There have been developments in anthropology towards a clearer awareness of the difficulty of maintaining the hermeneutic suspension of judgement. Some take the shape of versions of what is sometimes called the “ontological turn” in anthropology, bypassing the far-too-cautious distanced “it-is-true-for-them” stance, which amounts to claiming for oneself the authority of standing above cultures. Some forms of the ontological turn posit a multiplicity of ontologies (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2004), which, however, then need to deal with obvious relativistic problems, such as how to think of multiple, irreconcilable ontologies qua ontologies. My concern is with more modest, perhaps marginal versions of the ontological turn. As Bowie (2020) points out, the turn can simply involve a change of attitude – admitting the possibility that what “they” say “may in fact be true”. This, too, would stress a parting of the ways with phenomenological (“bracketing”) accounts of religion, which, as Bowie points out, still remain within the confines of the “true for them”. The methodology proposed by Bowie recommends instead. a close engagement with the people and events being studied; willingness to accommodate a worldview that incorporates witches, psychic attack, and communication between seen and unseen worlds, and the ability to use this perspective as part of the ethnographer’s interpretive apparatus (Bowie 2013, 717).

This approach integrates elements of cognition (considering all the experienced data without bracketing anything, based on an external criterion), empathy (“putting oneself aside” and intuiting what the world feels and looks like to the other person), and engagement. Engagement involves commitment and taking seriously – like in friendship –, rather than necessarily “full participation”. Bowie’s comparison to friendship allows us to understand better the nature of the modesty of her notion of ontologism, compared to Viveiros de Casto’s multiplicity of ontologies. No commitment to proposing an ontology is needed. Just as someone from/in Niger can be convinced about the reality of local sorcery, without knowing, or even caring about, what to reply to questions about the compatibility of this view with common Western worldviews (cf. Paul Stoller’s research, reported by Bowie 2013, 715f). An anthropologist taking this seriously, analogous to a friend’s taking it seriously, might not care strongly about these questions either.7

 In his detailed criticism of ontologism in anthropology, Paleček (2022, 167) points out that a lot of the ontologists’ troubles stem from their tendency to “ascrib[e] to [the locals] intentions, desires and reasons, where actually there are none”. This, I suspect, applies also to “beliefs” in the sense

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How should we understand this “friendly” approach? Sensitive understanding may require taking what the other says with the same kind of richness and flexibility with which a friend might take it. Sure, a friend can question what the other says and sometimes draw her attention to the problems in the statement. But it matters very much in what way one questions what the other says and how she draws her attention to the problem. And, in general, a lot enters into recognising when this is the right thing for one to do, as a friend. This decision does not follow a simply empirical criterion, such as whether what is in question is “normal”, or “paranormal” vocal communications. Much rather, it follows judgement, in a Wittgensteinian sense (2009: II, § 355). Judgement tells me when, speaking to a friend, it is the right time to rely on the empirical criteria of “normal”, and how. In some cases, there is no right time; other times it is of utmost importance immediately. I would like to stress, again, that my aim is not to argue that spirits are “ontologically real”. I only want to advocate for being more careful in providing an account for aspects in which cases (narratives) of encountering spirits may appear (ontologically) less-than-coherent. For one thing, proceeding as a “friend” presupposed the awareness (if implicit) that one treads a fragile ground here – there are reasons why people often keep reticence about their encounters with the dead. I have mentioned some of them earlier, quoting from reports by Rees’ respondents. Thus, coming forward and talking about “it”, if to a close friend, is already a gesture of trust (incomparable to telling a friend that one has met a particular living person downtown yesterday, even if a mere mention of that person makes the friend feel uncomfortable); as such it deserves to be reacted with consideration. More importantly, people encountering “spiritual realities” as real often feel no urge to talk to others for a more foundational reason than the fear of being considered “insane”. The encounter simply may not be for the others. Thus, consider the following reasons cited by Rees’s respondents (Rees 2001, 271; 2010, 178): “It is a thing between you and her, nothing to do with outsiders.” “I don’t think anyone has any business with my feelings, that’s my business.” “It’s not to be mentioned.”

or even the borderline hostile “I have always heard that it is very unlucky to repeat what was said on those occasions. And I have never told anyone and I am not going to tell you.”

The encounter is not for other people, being importantly related to the bereaved person’s “feelings”. This does not detract in any way from her understanding of the encounter as real. The reason for excluding other people is not that feelings are required for having the experience, but that “my feelings” are required. Other people may have much the same feelings as I have, but they cannot have my feelings. (Though we can, of course, have shared feelings – as parents for a child, for example; but then these are our feelings, rather than a case of one person’s having

in which a Western intellectual helps himself to this term when trying to talk about some “other” people’s relationship to the world (cf. Risjord 2020).

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another’s feelings.) Turner (2008, 80) compares this to the exclusion of male perceivers from the possibility of feeling what a woman feels during childbirth. This exclusion does not justify denying the reality of these feelings or construing them as imagined by their perceivers. Nor does it, on the other hand, require worrying about the multiplicity of possibly incompatible feelings about the same situation. This point differs from, for instance, Viveiros de Castro’s (2004, 11) “perspectivism”, according to which different real words are constituted through the situated practice of the observers who perceive them from their points of view. Claims about the intersubjectively robust cultural constitution of realities make it difficult to understand individual encounters that may make little “cultural”, or any other, sense to the individual. Note that in the case of the ihamba, reported by Turner, the ritual rooted in a rich cultural network comes as a corrective measure, after the attack of the “dead hunter”, which is an unexpected event afflicting an individual. In how the community understands what has happened, communal practice plays the role of processing the problem with spirits, not of summoning them or generating their presence. Certainly, there are rituals for summoning the spirits, but not all spirit experiences rely on rituals. This, on the one hand, leaves open a potentially stronger sense of the basis on which some spiritual realities pass for “real” (stronger than relying on well-mapped, or mappable pathways of cultural construction). On the other hand, it offers, in fact, little more than shrugging one’s shoulders in reply to questions about in what sense or on the basis of which what one experiences as real is real. (Agnosticism of sorts.) As indicated earlier, I don’t have a good answer to these ontological conundrums. By the very terms of understanding the experience, the experiencer undertakes a certain “ontological commitment” – simply by accepting that this is really happening, this is really the person. That much seems involved in speaking – or, as an anthropologist, taking over from one’s respondents – the ontologically suggestive language. I am less sure if further steps in the territory of systematic ontology are needed. Some people encounter their dead, some do not and find it unthinkable. I do not see this as calling either for a unified ontological picture of the world (that would accommodate these differences), or for separate ontologies specific to each of them. Neither those who encounter their dead, nor those whom this strikes as unthinkable may feel a need for either unified, or diversified ontologies. In order that people can conceive of their experiences, they don’t need to have the question of compatibility thematised in any way. And the friendly researcher may find herself challenged to proceed with the same kind of restraint; relying, of course, also on judgment to tell her when to raise objections.8

8  Burley (2020a, 55f, 68) observes that for a philosopher of religion working in a “radical pluralist” way, the important task is to highlight the diversity of religious perspectives – by staging them and giving them voices in a manner similar to a dramatist –, without downplaying their differences or assuming the need to strive to resolve them. Elsewhere, when he is making this point, he even argues that “coming to see the diversity more clearly may (…) just as readily reveal that the disputes are liable to be irresolvable” (Burley 2020b, 314).

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The expectation of compatibility of one’s beliefs (about this world) with other people’s beliefs (also about this world), or rather the imposition of the task of settling this matter, may rest upon a misunderstanding. Winch (1964, 314f) points out that the mere fact that someone holds a belief that may be elaborated to have contradictory implications does not mean that such implications should be made by the person or that, if she does not make them, it testifies to her inferior rationality. That one’s implicit relationship to the spirits of the dead as real stands in a possible contradiction to another belief she holds may not disturb the person at all, if imposing such a presumed logical “grid” on the whole of her life is of no “theoretical interest” for her (in Evans-Pritchard’s words). Forcing the person to see her thought as incoherent in a manner calling for a “solution” is neither something the person needs, nor something the “scientific” approach of the researcher should require. Moreover, as Winch argues, relying on Wittgenstein, if the person comes to see some incoherence in her taking the spirits as real and starts seeing it as a problem that needs to be addressed, this only means making the reality of the spirits impossible for the person from now on, rather than proving that she believed in falsehoods before. To make a bereaved person worry about her encounters with a dead person simply on account of the fact (previously not troubling to her in any way, though she was not unaware of it) that other bereaved people do not encounter their dead – that their respective ways of relating to their dead might appear incompatible in one person – means not even trying to do justice to what she experiences. If this endeavour to do justice is something to expect from a friend (and the blatant absence thereof might cast doubts about the friendship), shouldn’t as much be expected from a researcher? And isn’t a researcher interested in whether she disrupts, in the name of scientific objectivity, the life of her respondent, acting as a poor friend? Approaching what adherents of a religious or spirits-involving way of life say and do as a system of beliefs (which should be, as such, capable of withholding a certain load, a certain requirement of consistency) thus differs from approaching it as a practice, albeit one which features what quite clearly looks like beliefs. How we approach a practice – even when “we” are anthropologists and our “approach” involves description – is accommodated within this practice as relating, acting and interacting (with it, towards it). We place a different kind of expectations on our relational personas than on our theoretical and intellectual performances. In some respects, more demanding (the requirement of applying a friendly judgment), in others, less demanding (taking some ontological statements at face value, without caring about their corollaries). I am not sure how viable this approach is for social scientists. To conclude this section, though, I would like to mention the shape that the practice-oriented approach takes – to return to the beginning – in the research of spiritualism; a topic which is now looked at with different eyes. Modern-day spiritualism also takes place in secularised Western societies and includes educated participants. Many methodological difficulties relating to “going native” are thus significantly diminished. Also, spiritualism can be, and is, approached along the lines of the method suggested by Bowie. Some have studied the practice of mediumship by way of training themselves in mediumship (cf. Yerby 2017). Yerby’s study of mediumship indicates that participant practice involves

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serious compromising of central tenets of the observer attitude, such as giving up the expectation of recording, remembering, and understanding everything that has happened, and focusing instead on exploring the way in which one’s located body is affected (p. 5ff). While the practice of distinguishing between one’s own imagination and the language in which the spirits speak to the medium is an important part of mediumship training, in reality this discerning is precarious. For in order to bring out the message of the spirits, the medium may have to exercise her own imagination and make extensive use of “fabulation”. The medium-in-training is in fact exhorted by her teachers to “mak[e] it up until it becomes real”, that is, “suspending one’s anxiety over the source of these images” is needed (Yerby 2020, 461). These practices aim at fleshing out the understanding of mediumship practice as not being centrally about faith and establishing its truth (if by “leaps of faith”), but about the focus on the “experience of the spirits, communicated through the body of the medium”. Mediumship, Yerby argues, concerns “the fact [that] one way or another, the spirits show up, and keep showing up”, and responds to the perceived “imperative to make spirits evidential to others”. An honest researcher into mediumship, instead of presupposing the fraudulence of the whole practice,9 realises the heavy demand placed by this imperative on the medium and the continuous self-doubt and self-scrutiny it brings (p. 463f).

The Phenomenology of Afterlife Revisited To the extent that the encounters reported and reflected on by the above authors are of interest to us, they indicate that things may not be as straightforward as Patočka pictures them. People who believe in spirits, and/or have experienced encounters with the dead, do not understand the dead as those who do not and cannot reciprocate. Certainly, there are differences. Patočka rightly stresses that reciprocity means that “[w]e do not ‘need’ the other as mere existence, a being that was not lost, but we rather need him in his function, in his affecting us” (this volume, /137/). For many Christian bereaved people, the encounter with the dead comes as a shock. While they may have been convinced that the person is not lost altogether – they assume some kind of existence, until bodily resurrection comes – they might not have expected the dead’s “functioning” or “affecting” them. In reciprocity we would be “for him just as much as he is for us”; but the relationship between the dead and the living, while not one-sided, does not seem symmetric.

 Researchers into spiritualism have exhibited, from the very beginning, a strong, almost paranoid anxiety about being “duped” by fraudulent mediums or misinterpreting the cases, rather than an eager willingness to believe anything. The history of the Society of Psychic Research is one of constant trials and scrutiny; the scrutiny is more intense in present-day research into mediumship, with the consent of the mediums themselves, regardless of the additional stress this brings to them. See Bowie (2014, 25ff). 9

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Bereavement encounters often mark the importance of the change that happened with death. The “sense of a presence” is reassuring in a way different from that during life, because among the many ways in which our life partners are present to us, when alive, “reassurance” may not be prominent. Or, if we take the dead person to be “watching over us”, this, again, may not mirror the way in which she used to do that during her life. Talking to the dead person seems typically to centre round the fact that she is dead – but that we do not have to worry about her (for instance). Patočka twice raises the parallel with phantom limbs (this volume, /136, 141/), but this doesn’t seem right. Phantom limbs are pathological phenomena, and their disturbing impact stems from the conflicting co-occurrence of the factual loss of the limb with its feeling present. The distinction between life and death is put under extreme strain in attempts to make sense of encounters with the dead, which makes them confusing, but not necessarily self-conflicting or hurtful. (We do not say things like “I know she is dead, and yet she was so alive when she appeared to me” about limbs, also because when we say this about meeting a dead significant person, then not as a complaint, analogous to the way in which people complain about their aching phantom limbs.) Also when Patočka speaks about an “impulse directed into a void” that creates a “false, illusory reciprocity”, he presupposes automatically that the experience of an encounter with a dead person has the kind of structure that, logically, can only originate in the experiencing subject. For him, it’s the structure of one-sided role-playing (“living in the state of as-if”).10 His derogatory stance is unnecessary. A lot of bereaved people, including those who do not have “after-death-communication” (ADC) experiences, dwell in their thoughts on the lost person, typically in their memories. Some address the other in speech even when she is gone, because this is the way they get through the day. Is lovingly remembering the lost person “creating a pseudo-presence”? It seems not, but then I am not sure of the object of Patočka’s critical point. Either he wants to criticise the occasional indulgence in sentimental memories, though that means to criticise something quite normal and natural and hardly harmful. (I am not sure what should be the philosophical point of criticising, phenomenologically, something like that.) Or, his criticisms aim specifically at those who actively fantasise about encounters or interactions with dead people even when they do not experience them and the encounters are thereby “pseudo” for them. But how many people really do this? Among the people who experience what they understand as interaction with the dead, few would intentionally create these interactions as fantasies, which they would then strive to perceive as real. Why (and, frankly, how) would they do that? Much rather, they have peculiar unsolicited and unexpected experiences, as researched and reported by Rees and others. Patočka’s criticisms would seem to apply better to seeking mediumistic communications and to mediumship in general. But even here it presupposes that these settings are by definition suspicious.

 Cf. the differences between cases of ADC (after-death-communication) and phantom limbs or “yearning search”, briefly discussed by Rees (2001, 276ff). 10

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However, if unsolicited ADCs are not necessarily suspicious (in a way substantiating Patočka’s criticisms), why should mediumistic communications necessarily be so? In their case, the suspicion rests merely upon the purported communication with the dead, and that is not enough. What can be criticised are doubtful motivations, or indulging in delusions, but neither is this necessarily the case with ADCs, or with seeking out mediums. That one seeks out the medium does not make one’s motivation questionable. Even when we leave the judgemental language aside, for Patočka, purported cases of ADC mean constructing “another’s being for me” without its proper “originarity” that would normally “manifest itself […] as his acting in my world in absence” (this volume, /132/). That is, he argues that I cannot intelligibly think of the dead as independent, as being there even behind my back, as it were. It is true that this concern is probably largely absent from the terms in which the bereaved approach and understand their encounters with the dead. Yet, there is a lot that is surprising and difficult to come to terms with it about these experiences; in this aspect, they differ strikingly from leisurely entertaining fantasies designed centrally to be pleasant and unchallenging. ADCs are challenging. Then, the mere fact that we may be prone to make sense of ADCs in a way that would otherwise suggest self-consolatory fantasising (such as “talking to my dead wife”) does not mean that the conceptualisation must be profoundly flawed or deluded. Patočka’s language suggests that religious and spiritual realities engaged with (mostly) in “folksy” settings (realities and reactions to them that provoke “ontologising” readings in observers prone to systemising what they observe) are beliefs at best, and, judging by their contents, most likely erroneous beliefs. In this double preoccupation with (i) taking the phenomena as beliefs about the existence of things, and (ii) their implicitly assumed falsity (qua beliefs about the existence of, by definition, fishy kinds of things), Patočka is a child of his era. This is not intended as a philosophical criticism. On the contrary, his analysis provides a thorough phenomenological self-diagnose of the modern, secular, educated, urban relation to the dead. The limits of his approach have to do with not taking into account (quite understandably, in the confines of the short text) the heterogeneity of human cultures and lifestyles and ways of life; and, secondly, with the fact that his more critical comments seem to rely on his presumption that in the (alleged) experiences of encountering the dead, beliefs (of an erroneous, or self-deceived nature) feature centrally. I have argued in this text that it may be more fruitful to approach to describe these encounters as practices, which, however, have the confusing character of working with (what looks like) statements (carrying possible ontological implications) quite liberally and, at the same time, in a non-committal way. Coda  A personal recollection: when my father was terminally ill, my mother had a strange dream. She woke up in the middle of the night because she had a disconcertingly vivid impression that my father was calling her. Just the day before, when she had been with my dad in the hospital, he was unusually active, focused, and talkative; the following morning, he woke up only for a short time, was very disoriented, and then lost consciousness again, never to regain it. He died the following

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night. My mother was convinced that something serious and worrying was happening even before she got to know about Dad’s final deterioration, that he was calling her for some reason of utmost importance. Afterwards, Mum got to understand the event as the moment of Dad’s saying goodbye, as he was crossing a kind of threshold. I don’t know what to think of this story. I have no reason to question the truth of the report itself. Did my father (his soul? his spirit?) really do, in the last moments of being fully alive to this world, something that people usually do not or cannot do? I am painfully aware of my limited capacity to positively embrace the “ontological” implications the story seems to suggest. But how to avoid this positive embracing in a way other than that of mere dismissive scientism or non-committal hermeneutics? This is more than an issue of etiquette: of what I actually told – or would have or should have told – my mother in reply to this report. Rather: what to make of it, aloud or to myself. Thinking, “Okay, I am sure Mum had this dream; her mind was playing tricks on her, she was under great stress” resembles the above-quoted implicit assumption by Evans-Pritchard (i.e., the assumption of just a momentary incapacity to discover the “real” cause of what one experienced). Sure, our minds play tricks on us, which makes this suggestion a handy explanation. Replying, to someone who just shared a very personal and somewhat difficult experience, “Feel free to think so; I don’t question your sincerity,” if only in one’s own mind, is not necessarily the voice of reason, though. In a family member, this is the voice of low social intelligence. Dropping comments, if tacit, about the other’s sincerity, granting it condescending acceptance, when the person reports something shaking but lucidly remembered, is not a part of what being the other’s “family” means. In a social scientist, this is the voice of “playing it safe”, not of striving to understand; instead of trying to approach the report in the manner of a “friend” (pace Bowie’s suggestion). When I talked to my mother, I could not really relate to what she told me with a shade of the “hermeneutic” “feel-free-to-think-so” reaction, much less by appealing to “real causes”. That I still don’t quite know what to think of it does not change much about the fact that neither the “scientism” response nor the “hermeneutic” response was open for me at that moment, and still is not. But what kind of response does it leave me with? Speaking of “utmost respect” or the like here doesn’t feel right; why should I characterise my attitude in these high-minded terms? “Acceptance” sounds more precise, but – as far I can judge from my own example – a kind of acceptance that does not really commit itself to any “ontology”, whether one that accepts spirits, or a reductionist one. The most honest thing to say seems, to me, this: it is difficult to make sense of these experiences philosophically. But, after all, perhaps they are not here, in the first place, to be made sense of philosophically.11

 I thank Mik Burley for insightful comments on the manuscript and the participants of the workshop Death and Afterlife for a helpful discussion. The editors of this book, Gustav Strandberg and Hugo Strandberg, read through the manuscript thoroughly and offered me several very valuable suggestions, which I haven’t accommodated quite as they deserved, I am afraid.

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References Barbato, Michael, Cathy Blunden, Kerry Reid, Harvey Irwin, and Paul Rodriguez. 1999. Parapsychological phenomena near the time of death. Journal of Palliative Care 15 (2): 30–37. Bennett, Gillian, and Kate Mary Bennett. 2000. The presence of the dead: An empirical study. Mortality 5: 139–157. Bowie, Fiona. 2013. Building bridges, dissolving boundaries: Toward a methodology for the ethnographic study of the afterlife, mediumship, and spiritual beings. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81: 698–733. ———. 2014. Believing impossible things: Scepticism and ethnographic inquiry. In Talking with the spirits: Ethnographies from between the worlds, ed. Jack Hunter and David Luke, 19–56. Brisbane: Daily Grail Publishing. ———. 2020. Experience and ontology in the study of religion. In Explaining, interpreting, and theorizing religion and myth, ed. Nickolas P.  Roubekas and Thomas Ryba, 196–216. Leiden: Brill. Broad, C.D. 1962. Lectures on psychic research. New York: Humanities Press. Burley, Mikel. 2015. Reincarnation and the lack of imagination in philosophy. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 4 (2): 39–64. ———. 2020a. A radical pluralist philosophy of religion: Cross-cultural, multireligious, interdisciplinary. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2020b. Religious pluralisms: From homogenization to radicality. Sophia 59: 311–331. Flew, Antony. 1963. Death. In New essays in philosophical theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, 267–272. London: SCM Press. Geach, Peter. 1969. Immortality. In God and the soul, 17–29. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Grimby, A. 1993. Bereavement among elderly people: Grief reactions, post-bereavement hallucinations and quality of life. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 87: 72–80. Hufford, David. 2008. The priority of local observation and local interpretation in evaluating the “spirit hypothesis”. In Ontology of consciousness. Percipient action, ed. Helmut Wautischer, 273–312. Cambridge: The MIT Press. ———. 2014. The healing power of extraordinary spiritual experiences. Journal of Near-Death Studies 32: 137–156. ———. 2020. Modernity’s defences. In Extraordinary experience in modern contexts, ed. Deirdre Meintel, Véronique Béguet, and Jean-Guy A.  Goulet, 55–103. Montréal: Université de Montréal. Klass, Dennis. 1993a. Solace and immortality: Bereaved parents’ continuing bond with their children. Death Studies 17: 343–368. ———. 1993b. The inner representation of the dead child and the worldviews of bereaved parents. OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying 26: 255–272. ———. 1999. The spiritual lives of bereaved parents. New York: Routledge. Kočí, Martin. 2020. Thinking faith after Christianity: A theological reading of Jan Patočka’s phenomenological philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press. Paleček, Martin. 2022. The ontological turn revisited: Theoretical decline. Why cannot ontologists fulfil their promise? Anthropological Theory 22 (2): 154–175. Phillips, D.Z. 1970. Death and immortality. London: Macmillan. Price, H.H. 1995. Philosophical interactions with parapsychology: The major writings of H. H. Price on parapsychology and survival, ed. Frank B. Dilley. New York: St Martin’s Press. Rees, W. Dewi. 1971. The Hallucinations of widowhood. British Medical Journal 4: 37–41. Rees, Dewi. 2001. Death and bereavement. 2nd ed. London: Whurr Publishers. This text was supported by the project “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value” (project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, Operational Programme Research, Development and Education).

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———. 2010. Pointers to eternity. Talybont: Y Lolfa. Risjord, Mark. 2020. Anthropology without belief: An anti-representationalist ontological turn. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 50: 586–609. Simonds, Wendy, and Barbara Katz Rothman. 1992. Centuries of solace: Expressions of maternal grief in popular literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sudduth, Michael. 2016. A philosophical critique of empirical arguments for postmortem survival. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, Edith. 1992. Experiencing ritual. A new interpretation of African healing. With William Blodgett, Singleton Kahona, and Fideli Benwa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1993. The reality of spirits: A tabooed or permitted field of study? Anthropology of Consciousness 4: 9–12. ———. 2008. The soul and communication between souls. In Ontology of consciousness. Percipient action, ed. Helmut Wautischer, 79–96. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation. Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2: 3–22. Winch, Peter. 1964. Understanding a primitive society. American Philosophical Quarterly 1: 307–324. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical investigations. 4th ed. Chichester: Wiley. Yamamoto, Joe, Okonogi, Keigo, Iwasaki, Tetsuya, and Saburo Yoshimoto. 1969. Mourning in Japan. American Journal of Psychiatry 125, 12: 1660–1665. Yerby, Erin. 2017. Spectral bodies of evidence: The body as medium in American spiritualism. PhD thesis, Columbia University. ———. 2020. Mediating spirits: Sensation, form and the body in American spiritualism. In Mediality on trial: Testing and contesting trance and other media techniques, ed. Ehler Voss, 432–474. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Chapter 9

What Does It Mean to Love the Dead? Erin Plunkett

Introduction The question in the title may strike one as odd. What does it mean to “love” the dead? And who are “the dead” in question? Jan Patočka’s short text on afterlife, recently translated into English by Ondřej Beran, is an attempt to answer the question of how the dead exist, if at all, and, more indirectly, whether a meaningful relationship to the dead is possible. Patočka’s text has a personal inflection, focusing primarily on those close to us who have died, but it is also a text about our relationship to others in general and, in the context of his other writings, about our relationship to history, specifically what it means to relate to the past. The question of loving the dead is thus equally about individuals and about our capacity for fidelity to the past.1 The final line of Patočka’s “Phenomenology of Afterlife” describes both an authentic relationship to the loved one who has died and the possibility of an authentic relationship to a historical event: “I keep exposing myself to the problematisation which this being is for me” (Patočka this volume, /142/).2 The phrase “loving the dead” that I employ here has its source in another text, by Søren Kierkegaard: a curious meditation from Works of Love entitled “The work of love in remembering one Dead”. While Patočka indeed read Kierkegaard, and while he may have been familiar with Theodor W. Adorno’s 1939 critique of Kierkegaard’s  See Ruin 2018 for a discussion of the meaning of death that likewise addresses the personal and the historical. See especially the Introduction and Chap. 1: Life, Historicity and Having-Been. 2  The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation. 1

E. Plunkett (*) University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_9

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Works of Love, I have no stake in what follows in the historical question of whether Patočka read Kierkegaard’s text. The aim of the dialogue between Kierkegaard and Patočka that I stage here is to better understand the structure of a loving relation to the dead. This involves both the nature of that relation for the lover, which is ultimately one of exposure and of care, and the question of the being of the dead themselves. This account relies on both authors’ explicit treatment of these themes, as well as other discussions in their works that bear on these questions. The most obvious feature of love for the dead is that the dead cannot return our love for them. I will open by discussing Kierkegaard’s framework of loving the dead as a non-reciprocal love, comparing it to other instances of non-reciprocal love in Kierkegaard’s texts. I will then complicate this understanding by opening it up to a phenomenological understanding of being for others, specifically showing how Patočka’s insistence on authentic being for others allows for a more hopeful and intersubjective relationship to the dead. Finally, I will use both Kierkegaard and Patočka’s reflections on relating to historical events and on the meaning of history for the present, drawing from Kierkegaard’s idea of “becoming contemporary with” the past and Patočka’s conception of the meaning of history.

Loving the Dead as Non-reciprocal Love Kierkegaard in Works of Love sets out to distinguish Christian love from our common ways of understanding love—preferential love, erotic love, transactional love, and so on. Most of the chapters in the book are based on the exposition of love in 1 Corinthians 13 describing the attributes of love, or what are referred to as love’s “works”: “Love is patient, love is kind”, “Love seeks not its own”, etc. In the second half of the Works of Love, Kierkegaard includes a meditation on what he calls ‘The work of love in remembering one dead’. Loving the dead is presented as an example of loving the unseen and not only those we see—a feature that he takes to be part of the Christian practice of neighbour love.3 In Kantian fashion, Kierkegaard seeks to root out all trace of inclination or potential compensation from the act of loving, with the understanding that a truly good act, in this case love as a supreme act of good, must be freely given.4 There can be no question, as he writes elsewhere in the book, of love as a “transaction” or economic exchange (Kierkegaard 1962, 223). As M.  Jamie Ferriera (1999, 2001) argues, this desire to eliminate any transactional element in loving motivates Kierkegaard’s at times extreme claims in the ninth  See Ferreira 1999 and 2001 for close readings of this chapter in the wider context of Works of Love. For a discussion of the critiques of preferential love in Kierkegaard, see the debate between Ferreira 2001 and Krishek 2009. For a good summary and interpretation of this debate, see Lippitt 2012. For a less sympathetic reading of Kierkegaard on these issues, see Adorno 1939. 4  As far as I know, Adorno is the first to compare Kierkegaard’s text to Kant’s project, though it is a comparison likely to occur to any reader familiar with both authors. “Any ‘preference’ [in loving] is excluded with a rigour comparable only to the Kantian Ethics of Duty” (Adorno 1939, 416). 3

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deliberation, a fact that must be borne in mind when seeking to apply these claims beyond the purpose for which they are specifically intended. Kierkegaard recommends that we test the freedom and steadfastness of our love by comparing our love for those living to our relationship to those who have died, who can neither compel our love, nor reward us for giving it, nor protest if we withhold it. In short, there is no reciprocity in our love for the dead; the work of love lies entirely with the living. Putting it in economic terms, as Kierkegaard frequently does in this chapter: “the dead make no repayment” (Kierkegaard 1962, 321). Our examination of love is therefore supposed to be simplified by considering love of the dead in comparison to the love of the living, where there are many factors to prevent us from seeing our own love clearly. In this sense, Kierkegaard uses the dead here much like Kant uses the categorical imperative—as a check against inclination and self-interest in our actions and thereby as a test of their moral worth. The chapter, on its face, does not contribute much to the question of how, if at all, the dead exist, a question that will concern us later in this study, yet the model of non-reciprocity in loving that Kierkegaard offers is an obvious starting point for what it means to love the dead, even if one rejects Kierkegaard’s aim of clarifying love in general by means of scrutinising love for the dead. Kierkegaard indeed has no interest in the dead as such in this chapter, that is, the dead in or for themselves. Though he has a Christian understanding of death and speaks of the eternal blessedness available to those who have been saved, Kierkegaard rarely mentions a personal afterlife in the Christian sense, and this chapter about the dead is likewise removed from any Christian framework of afterlife. Kierkegaard is concerned only with the being of the dead for us, and further, their being for us in the specific project of testing our capacity for love. He stresses this in the following remark: When one relates himself to one who is dead, in this relationship there is only one, for the one dead is nothing actual … he is only the occasion which continually reveals what resides in the one living who relates himself to him and which helps to make clear how it is with one living who does not relate himself to him. (Kierkegaard 1962, 319)

The dead, he says, do not change, do not compel. If they change for us, we are the ones who have changed. “In this relationship there is only one”. Kierkegaard makes this claim in the context of ceasing to love the one who has died, in forgetting one’s responsibility to the dead, but it is a point that we might carry further and ask whether in loving the dead there is still a relationship, even if it is a relationship without reciprocity. What sort of relationship is it that involves only one person? Kierkegaard writes that the one dead is “nothing actual”, that the dead are not “an actual object”. Combined with his remark that the dead one is “only the occasion” to reveal to me the true nature of my love, one might conclude that the being of the dead is a sort of fantasy existence, akin to a fiction or a thought experiment meant to deepen self-reflection. Kierkegaard is, after all, artificially isolating the lover from the beloved in order to test love and guard against the corrupting influence of compensation. But thinking about death beyond just the scope of Kierkegaard’s text, we might indeed worry that the dead, for us, become little more than an object

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of fantasy, a wilful projection or a figment of our imagination. This is a concern that appears in Patočka’s meditation on the being of the dead. In their absence, in their non-actuality, what is there to check and restrain our own understanding of the dead? Insofar as the dead cannot reciprocate, is an authentic relationship to them even possible, or is one in a sense bound to be unfaithful to them? Kierkegaard’s discussion in this chapter can give the impression that the dead as the objects of love need not have existed at all and could just as well have been imagined. On the other hand, he stresses the recalcitrance or obstinance of the dead, their abiding otherness, and this appears to restrain, at least in some measure, our response to the dead. The dead, writes Kierkegaard, are steadfast, are proud, are “canny”. They are simply there, forever unaltered in what they have been and forever other to us, however much we may continue to think about them and relate to them, in whatever ways we may construe them. Kierkegaard contrasts the steadfast dead with the living who may easily forget our promise to love them, or who may change so much themselves that our love is no longer something they value. The dead do not forget because they do not change. What they have been they have been, and what promises we have made to them while alive remain for them, even if we come to renounce them. It would be a mistake to read Kierkegaard as making an actual claim about the mental state of the dead when he attributes to them pride, everlasting memory, and steadfastness. These appear to be a manner of speaking about how they are for us, insofar as we relate to them. The dead are “proud” in the sense that they give no hint that they want to be remembered; like the proud person, they are “above” begging for our attention. They are “canny” in this regard because one cannot play the tricks on them as one might on the living, and if one deceives the dead, Kierkegaard says, one really only deceives oneself. If a daughter insists to herself that despite rarely thinking of her father who has died, she still loves him, the father, as it were, “sees through” such feints, functioning as a conscience that will not be deceived. In this way, the dead seem to judge us, and we feel disturbed by their memory. They “challenge” us, and we are the “object of prosecution” for them (Kierkegaard 1962, 322). Yet at the same time Kierkegaard stresses the utter vulnerability of the dead— they rely on us entirely and cannot “lift one finger” to make us to do anything. This combination of unsettling power and helplessness transforms the dead into the purest version of what Kierkegaard calls “the occasion” (Anledning). This is a notion that occurs in many places across Kierkegaard’s signed and pseudonymous writings and has different valences depending on the context. The key point about an occasion, as Kierkegaard understands it, is that it opens onto something, but is itself nothing. An occasion has a relational structure: it is not meant to be the object of attention in itself but is meant to send the attention elsewhere. The paradigmatic example is the teacher as the occasion for the learner, which is a key idea in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments and Postscript. In our usual understanding of these terms, the teacher cannot give the learner the truth, but can occasion the learner to seek the truth for herself. In Kierkegaard’s work, the occasion is most often a break, disturbance, or disorientation of some kind, opening the path to awakening. To revisit a passage I mentioned earlier: “When one relates himself to one

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who is dead, in this relationship there is only one, for the one dead is nothing actual … he is only the occasion which continually reveals what resides in the one living who relates himself to him” (Kierkegaard 1962, 319, my emphasis). The language of occasionality is inherently asymmetrical in that it looks only at one side of a relationship, that of the person being awakened. Asymmetrical relationships as a means of inward deepening play a much larger role than models of reciprocity in Kierkegaard’s work, and it is not surprising to find the former here in a chapter that focuses on the limit case of non-reciprocal relationships: our relationship to the dead. This figure of non-reciprocity is indeed championed in many of Kierkegaard’s texts, and looking at these other instances helps to expand our understanding of non-­ reciprocal or asymmetrical relationships, both their place in Kierkegaard’s thought and their viability as a model for loving the dead. I am thinking of in particular of the “Silhouettes” in Either/Or (Kierkegaard 1988), which include variations on the story of the young girl whose love has been betrayed and who is thereby awakened to anxiety and despair. In some versions, the girl is unable to decide if the lover truly loved her and so she exists in the ambiguity of “he loves me-he loves me not” or else maintains love but (infinitely) resigns the possibility of ever possessing the lover in actuality. Such stories occur in several of Kierkegaard’s writings. Not all of them involve someone who has actually died; in some versions, the beloved merely becomes inaccessible and reciprocity of relationship becomes impossible. Kierkegaard values in these instances both the steadfastness of the lover—who loves without the hope and comfort of reciprocity—and the deepening of consciousness or “inwardness” provided by the break in the lover’s understanding of themselves. In the case of the young girl in love, Kierkegaard often tells the story in such a way that the girl in love hopes to complete herself in the beloved, to happily abandon herself in loving. In being rejected, she is thrust back on herself. A young girl despairs of love, she despairs over losing the loved one, because he died or became unfaithful. This despair is not declared, No, she despairs over herself. This self of hers, which if it had become “his” beloved, she would have been rid of, or lost, in the most blissful manner—this self, since it is destined to be a self without “him”, is now an embarrassment; this self which should have been her richesse—though in another sense just as much in despair—has become, now that “he” is dead, a loathsome void, or a despicable reminder of her betrayal. Just try now, just try saying to such a girl, “You are eating yourself up”, and you will hear her replay, “Oh no, the pain is just that I can’t.” (Kierkegaard 1989a, 50)

The lover’s wound is kept open insofar as she is unable to come to a resolution but renews the difficulty—either by remaining in ambivalence or by actively renewing love5 in the face of utter hopelessness. Thus a kind of relationship remains, namely that of renewed exposure to the one who has died or left. For Kierkegaard, it is not simply that the young lovers idealise their dead or departed loved ones, translating them into the image they would wish them to be.  One of Kierkegaard’s examples in this chapter is Donna Elvira from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In Elvira’s case, a sort of demonic hatred accompanies her love after she is seduced and abandoned by Don Giovanni. 5

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Idealisation is common in actual instances of unrequited love and often provides the ground for the continued feelings of the lover who has been rejected or betrayed: It is because the loved one is so perfect that one continues to adore them, even when they cannot reciprocate. However, in Kierkegaard’s telling of these stories, the emphasis is on the ambivalence and despair of the lover, the disturbance in the lover’s sense of self (“she despairs over herself”) that the interruption of reciprocal love by death or betrayal has opened up. The poet Jack Gilbert, writing about the death of his wife, describes loving the dead as “The painful love of being permanently unhoused.” One is no longer on safe ground after such a profound loss has taken place because the loss is proof that any shelter can collapse. These lovers without hope enter what Patočka calls “the Night”—“the opening onto what disturbs” or the opening to a life in “problematicity” (Patočka 1983, 59), rather than a life structured by settled meanings and practices. Anne Dufourmantelle describes Patočka’s understanding of the night as kind of exposure to uncertainty and risk: “The night asks us to go through the experience of the loss of meaning, an experience from which flows the authenticity of philosophical thinking” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 46). The disappearance of a loved one can be a transformative experience of this kind, insofar as life and death are not phenomena that can be understood purely from the biological point of view. The lover whose love is not reciprocated finds herself exposed and unable to find rest in previously cherished structures of meaning. Thus there is a clear element of what Patočka calls “problematicity” in Kierkegaard’s model of unrequited love. Yet we might well protest that in the stories Kierkegaard favours, the awakening of the one left behind has more to do with the structure of loss as such than with the particularity of the one who has died. Part of the problem is that Kierkegaard in all these narratives focuses on the psychology of the one who remains, treating the beloved as an “occasion”. The entry of the lover into “the Night”, the possibility of permanent uprootededness, thus functions as a structural phenomenon that need not be tied to the dead or departed beloved’s particular being, to my encounter with their actual being; it takes instead the general structure of a psychological break or disorientation which might have been caused by any traumatic event. This much is clear from the fact that Kierkegaard treats the departed beloved in the same way as the beloved who has died (“he died or became unfaithful”) even when these cases have a different temporal and psychological structure. In the case of loving one dead, Kierkegaard is right that there can be no question of reciprocity and, we might therefore conclude, no hope or consolation. If the beloved has merely left the lover behind, then the lover could always harbour some hope of being reunited and might take consolation in seeing the beloved happy in some other situation, perhaps even with someone else. The lover’s feelings for the beloved could also shift in myriad other ways depending on the trajectory of both lives, even if there is never again an explicit relationship. Yet narrative arcs of this kind do not receive the same amount of attention or interest in Kierkegaard’s writings as extraordinary acts of devotion. The knight of infinite resignation in Fear and Trembling is the paradigm of selfless devotion: a lover who resigns himself to never seeing his beloved (princess) again yet continues to love with the utmost passion. He performs an internalisation

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or spiritualisation of the beloved so complete that her concrete life in a sense no longer matters: in a very real sense, she may as well be dead. The knight constantly renews his love, yet “He is no longer finitely concerned with what the princess does, and precisely this proves that he has made the movement [of love in resignation] infinitely” (Kierkegaard 1983, 44). Though here the object of love is unavailable rather than dead, Kierkegaard’s emphasis lies on the purity of the act of loving in the absence of reciprocity. “He has grasped the deep secret that even in loving another person, one ought to be sufficient to oneself” (Kierkegaard 1983, 44). The figure of infinite resignation thus functions in the same way as loving the dead—a limit case in which the need for reciprocity would spoil the “purity” of the act of loving, an act that must be freely given and in which one must be “sufficient unto oneself”. While these examples are extreme, the sheer proliferation of narratives with this structure in Kierkegaard’s work suggests that he understands love as an essentially psychological-­ existential phenomenon, rather than as a relationship between beings.6 Reciprocity, in Kierkegaard’s texts, is a morally complicating factor in a relationship, since one ultimately—or in an eternal sense—cannot rely on another. Silentio’s description of the knight is uncompromising in this regard: “What the princess does cannot disturb him; it is only the lower natures who have the law for their actions in someone else, the premises for their actions outside themselves” (Kierkegaard 1983, 44–45). In Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard, such an attitude approaches the demonic: “it is unnecessary to point out how close this love comes to callousness” (Adorno 1939, 416). There is then in Kierkegaard, after all, a danger of failing to engage with the beloved in their full problematicity as a particular other, even as the experience of unrequited love has a problematic character of “unhousing” or uprooting existing structures of meaning. The fact that loving the dead ends up following the structure of “the occasion” in general means that the beloved who has died risks becoming as abstract a figure as the “neighbour” in Christian theology—someone, anyone to whom duty is owed, the other rather than a proximate other.7 Further, the inaccessibility of the other—not just one who has died but the other as such—is valued as a means of “breaking down” one’s own consciousness or sense of self.8

 Many Kierkegaard scholars would vehemently disagree with me here and would point to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on love as “work” in Works of Love and the Upbuilding Discourses to counter the understanding of love I have presented. See the debate between Ferreira and Kriskek for examples of this alternative, more positive view of Kierkegaardian love. 7  See Adorno’s shrewd discussion of the neighbour in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Adorno 1939, 419ff). 8  Adorno rightly links this to Kierkegaard’s Lutheranism and its insistence on a “‘breaking down’ of nature” (Adorno 416). See also Hampson 2014. 6

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Being for Others and the Being of the Dead Like Kierkegaard, Patočka sees psychological and philosophical value in the break, in the failure of the world or others to conform to our expectations or to be managed by our reason—what he refers to in Heretical Essays as the “shaking of the naïve certainty of meaning” (Patočka 1996, 61). However, Patočka’s discussions of the dead and of afterlife take part in a very different philosophical context, namely a phenomenology of intersubjectivity. As a consequence, his account of authentic being for others offers a much more reciprocal and hopeful model of human relationships in general than what has been seen in Kierkegaard, and even love for the dead is not so one-sided as it initially appears. Patočka agrees with Kierkegaard that our relationship with the dead is one that lacks reciprocity in any strict sense because the dead no longer are for themselves, and therefore can no longer undertake the “shared mutual drama” of awakening together with us, as they were able to do when they were still alive (Patočka this volume, /141/). This, says Patočka, “is what the pain of loss means” (this volume, /141/). In a relationship between the living and the living, the self of each person is at stake, each entangled in the other and becoming who they are through engagement with the other. This strong notion of intersubjective awareness and development is central to Patočka’s phenomenology of human being. The fact that the dead lack a dimension of in and for themselves means that such a mutual entanglement is no longer a live possibility. This account of the being of the dead makes sense of many of Kierkegaard’s claims—that the dead do not change, can do nothing, etc. In this sense, then, the loss of the possibility of “shared mutual drama” is irrevocable and is indeed something to be mourned. In Patočka’s own words (this volume, /134/), which echo Kierkegaard’s: The dead person does not reply, does not cooperate, does not co-perceive, does not execute anything, but he withdraws from all of this completely and becomes a mere object, which does not have the sense of “together” anymore, does not have the sense of participation in human enterprises, actions and interests.

Without synchronicity of the various modes of being—being in and for oneself along with being for others—there can be no reciprocity, and thus in this sense the dead cannot be “together” with us. However, Patočka offers much more hopeful ground than Kierkegaard for thinking about our relationship with the dead as a relationship, one that still involves some dimension of intersubjectivity, even some dimension of possibility remaining in the one who has died. This is largely because Patočka has a much richer sense of intersubjectivity to begin with. The philosophical value of a relationship without reciprocity that one finds in so many places in Kierkegaard’s work is totally absent in Patočka, who stresses our openness to the other and their openness to us on multiple levels across many of his writings.9 In the “Phenomenology of Afterlife” text,  The only analogue in Patočka’s work is the “sacrifice for nothing” that he explores in his 1973 Varna Lecture “The dangers of technicization in science according to E. Husserl, and the essence 9

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much of this discussion falls under the phenomenological category of being for others. This is a category that Patočka looks to rescue from a purely Hegelian master-­slave dialectic or from Sartre’s conception of my being for others as a species of object being. These aspects of my being for others—struggle, violence, and objectification—are not absent from Patočka’s own writings on being for others,10 but the meaning of these movements is part of a wider phenomenology of transcendence and intersubjectivity. He recognises the potential for alienation in my being for others, but also stresses that being for others is an authentic mode of being, as much a part of me as my being for myself. It is worth lingering with the issues of intersubjectivity and being for others in Patočka’s work, as these form the context for his remarks about the being of the dead and my relationship to them. In “The natural world and phenomenology” (1967), Heretical Essays (1975), and elsewhere, Patočka describes our initial relationship to the dead as one of acceptance. When I am born, I am accepted into the world by the human “community of the living and the dead” (Patočka 1996, 22), who built up the structures, institutions, languages that I will take on as my own, as well as struggle against. Others open up for me a “potential fold of space” when I enter the world, a fold of space that is created even before my actual birth—as Patočka describes in his second Heretical Essay (Patočka 1996, 30). I “put down roots” in this ground of acceptation that precedes me, and from this I am able to develop. This is the first of Patočka’s three movements of life—(1) acceptance, (2) labour and maintenance of life into the future, (3) and life in truth—and he stresses the shifting nature of my relationship to others in each of these movements. Others are for me, accordingly, the ground of my being in which I root and anchor myself, those I struggle with and against as objectified being in various “roles”, and those whose essential freedom is intertwined with my own. In “The natural world”, Patočka stresses the extent to which our experience of a world is formed by intersubjectivity. our sensory contact, our perception, is fundamentally aimed at the sphere of people, not the sphere of things. The entire structure of our space is human, from the ground up, for though its entire central and centred structure comes from me, it ends in you, the other, who is closer to us than we are to ourselves, the true object of our fundamentally non-objective view, of our actions, our accommodating orientation, our conversation. (Patočka 2022d, 123–124)

The other, in being closer to me than I am to myself, gives me to myself in a fundamental way. It is noteworthy that in this passage and throughout the discussion of intersubjectivity in which it occurs, the other is you. Even though Patočka is describing a structural other here, the abstract other toward which my actions are oriented, with “you” he appears to mark a specific other, or at least the mode in which the specific other is met: as a “you” rather than a purely object being. “You” is the “near object”, the ‘one with whom we speak, never the one about whom we speak’

of technology as danger according to M. Heidegger” (Patočka 2022c, 289–292). 10  For an extended discussion of them, see e.g. Patočka 2022d, 130ff.

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(Patočka 2022d, 124). The importance of this point for our discussion is that even in the case of others as abstract, possible others, others that I do not “love” in any particular sense, I find an essential dimension of my being. In both “The natural world and phenomenology” and the “Afterlife” text, Patočka refers to the “mirror of the other” (Patočka 2022d, 124, and this volume, /131/) in which we “embryonically […] find ourselves, seeing and experiencing ourselves in the other’s reactions” (Patočka 2022d, 124). “I receive back my being for another from this other” (Patočka this volume, /140/). Here, my being for others, an essential dimension of my being, is given to me through the mirror of the other. My being for others is not an alienated being, not my self reduced to a role or to objecthood, but is something authentic. And the being of others for me is likewise authentic. Patočka thus counters Sartre’s account in which the other is reduced to pure in-itself or object being. This point gets developed in “The natural world” in relationship to the three movements of existence. In a deeper sense, however, we are never things, as already testified to by the priority of putting down roots in others, which is possible only by virtue of the fact that humans are by origin something beyond their own particular centre, something transcending their own self-contained person, their corporeality and needfulness. (Patočka 2022d, 127)

Relying on the human community to minister to my needs is the dimension of my relationship to others that seems the least capable of authenticity, since in this movement I do not even recognise the other as such, but experience only need and the fulfilment of need. Yet in Patočka this movement of life speaks to the openness of human being, our capacity to go outside of ourselves toward the world and others.11 One of the important claims in the “Afterlife” text is that being for others has its own “originarity” (Patočka this volume, /132/). We are not original only in ourselves, but also outside ourselves, and our being for others must be thought together with being in ourselves. Since others are for us and we are for others, “the fact of our being for others produces one of the most important objects and components of our own being in oneself” (Patočka this volume, /131/). […] being outside oneself is not alienated being, it is not something essentially non-­ authentic, but it belongs to the full content of one’s own being, to what this being essentially is, but what it can become internally, recuperatively only through another. (Patočka this volume, /140/)

The authenticity of being for others that Patočka describes in these passages pushes back against the idea that what I love in loving one dead is an imaginative projection of the person. When the loved other dies, it is not a transition into pure being for others in the sense of quasi-being (a character in fiction or imagination), but a core remains here: a being which used to have its own originality and which is now only an object, the identical object of our relationships to it without reciprocity. (Patočka this volume, /134/)

 For a similar emphasis on the authenticity of the first movement of existence in Patočka’s work, see Ritter 2017, 2019 (esp. 65–86). 11

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Patočka suggests that pure being for others, a being which never had the dimensions of in itself and for itself, would in fact be a work of the imagination: a fiction. Because the dead once had these modes of being, they maintain a “core” of originality in and for themselves, and so are not merely fictional beings or quasi-beings. In other words, the dead, in losing the modes of in and for itself, do not simply become identical to our imagination of them; if they did, that would of course raise anew the worries about idealisation and wish fulfilment mentioned in connection with Kierkegaard’s account of the dead, and it would mean that an authentic relationship to the dead is likely impossible. Patočka says instead that the dead become the identical object of our relationships to them, the relationships that they had in life. He offers the example of his own father, to whom he relates as my father but who for others is “Headmaster P” (Patočka this volume, /134/). But does this identification of the dead with our own relationship to them mean that the one who has died is merely “arrested being for us”, “the mere empty horizon of the past originality for himself”? (Patočka this volume, /134/). In other words, is the essential existence of the dead one of having-been, and do we thus, in loving the dead, only look backward to a being that once was? While Patočka is ambivalent in the “Afterlife” text, he ends up defending the position that the dead have an afterlife which does not merely consist in having been, that they live on through us in a way that is not trivial. This afterlife involves both the possibilities that the dead one represents for me and the possibility that I represent for the dead one. By insisting on the authenticity of being for others, the necessity of others in giving oneself to oneself, Patočka offers a strong version of intersubjectivity that, to an extent, outlasts the death of the other. Insofar as my being for others resided, as it were, in the one who is now dead, and was something that I responded to in relationship to that person, the “core” of the dead one still includes my being for her. This means that when I respond to the dead I am in part responding to what my being for them has been—or to what I have been through them. Writing about the loss of her father, the novelist Toni Morrison describes this relationship to oneself in the other. “He had a flattering view of me as someone interesting, capable, witty, smart, high-spirited. I did not share that view of myself, and wondered why he held it. But it was the death of that girl—the one who lived in his head—that I mourned when he died. […] I suffered the loss of the person he thought I was” (Morrison 2004, foreword). Another in this sense represents possibilities for my own being. One mourns the loss of these possibilities when the other dies, since they are no longer activated by the living presence of the person and, in a strict phenomenological sense, my possibilities no longer are for that person since the other who has died lacks any dimension of for themselves. However, Patočka ultimately suggests that my possibilities through the other need not have exhausted themselves during the life of the other person, and thus in a temporal sense these possibilities do not belong solely to the past, to what has been. Indeed, the sense of possibility that the other offers me continues long after death, even if the lost one is not actively called to mind, but all the more so if they are. This seems to me equally the work of memory and of imagination—though not

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imagination in the sense of the fantastic or of wish fulfilment. Imagination here is part of an ordinary ability to react to oneself in another when one is not faced with the actual other, but is imagining what the other would say, how they would see a situation or behave. Of course I can be wrong about this—and I am more likely to recognise when I am wrong if I am faced with the living other who challenges my imagined responses by actually speaking and acting in the world. I can be mistaken about the possibilities that the other represents for me in my being for myself and for the possibilities that I represent for the other in their being for me. Yet as we saw in Kierkegaard’s account of the “proud” and “canny” dead who judge us, the other maintains a resistance to us simply in having been, in Patočka’s language, in having been for themselves. So in this sense, my relation to the “arrested being for us”, the “has been” of the other remains paramount in my loving the dead. There is of course more scope to fall prey to false notions of the other, or of myself for the other, when the other is experienced in absence rather than in presence. This is surely part of “what the pain of loss means”. Patočka is clear eyed that the loss that occurs in death is irrevocable. “The not-­ living person does not have this possibility to make himself anymore” (Patočka this volume, /134/). If the other lives on, if the other can be said to have an afterlife, that afterlife is possible only through me, and through anyone else who holds the dead one in mind. The question is whether my relationship to the other, my love for them, must be oriented only toward the past or whether there is an authentic sense in which the other still is, still is there relating to me? One bad faith way in which the other can remain for me is through what Patočka calls pseudo-presence, when I fail to come to terms with the enormity of loss and instead “create false, illusory reciprocity”, behaving as if the other were still really present (Patočka this volume, /141/). “we live in the state of as-if… To prevent the present from becoming the past, to understand non-actuality as a mere departure, a distance in which the other’s presence is still living” (Patočka this volume, /141/). Patočka warns that while this possibility is a constant temptation, it is an ontological mistake and a form of psychological denial. Reciprocity is “definitively lost and will never return” (/141/). But he ends the text on a more hopeful note by opening up a different sense in which the possibilities of the other are not wholly exhausted by their death. On the other hand, however, there is the experience that the other has not spent the energy of his reciprocity simply because he is not there anymore and does not actively create our future together with us, because he is not actualising his and my possibilities anymore. For it may be that I am actualising only ex-post a lot of what the past person was, that his being becomes an impulse encouraging me to still new things by realising more profoundly what his existence meant and means, that I keep exposing myself to the problematisation which this being is for me. (Patočka this volume, /142/, my emphasis).

In this passage, it is clear that the other who has died can still be a source of possibility for me, and furthermore that I can be an “actualisation” of his possibilities— though not an actualisation that he experiences for himself, since he no longer is for himself. Thus a kind of intersubjective, reciprocal project remains, insofar as I can still realise myself through what the other was and I can continue to actualise “ex-­ post” the other’s being—“realising more profoundly what his existence meant and

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means”. The problematicity of the being of the other can remain, challenging me, orienting me toward future possibilities. I take it this is what Patočka means when he speaks of relating to the other in the mode of “I can” (Patočka this volume, /136/) and “undertak[ing] the task to master this absence” of the other, for the living “to incorporate it somehow into their own lives” (Patočka this volume, /136–137/). “On the whole, the identity of the dead person is … actual and actualised in the mode ‘I can’ in those who are close to the dead, and in the mode ‘I could’ in all others” (Patočka this volume, /136/). My continued openness or “exposure” to the other in the form of possibility is what it means for the other to “remain problematic”. It is not only, as mentioned earlier “the pain of being permanently unhoused” by the other, but also the reality of caring for the other’s particular identity by taking up their projects and making them my own.

Becoming Contemporary with the Dead I said at the outset that the notion of loving the dead was not only to be read at the level of the individual loved one but also to be understood as a possible attitude toward history and the past. To explore this, I would like to offer a final idea from Kierkegaard: his discussion in Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard 1986) and elsewhere about what it means to be “contemporary with” a historical event.12 In Fragments, Kierkegaard takes up Lessing’s question of whether a historical event— specifically the event of Christ’s death and resurrection—can be the basis for faith. This leads him to a reflection on what it means to be a contemporary of Christ. One might be tempted to say that those alive with Christ were his contemporaries, and that it was therefore much easier for them to believe in Christ than for someone living two thousand years later who faces an almost unimaginable gulf of history. But for Kierkegaard this is a mistake. People who were alive at the time of Christ were not contemporaries of Christ in the way that Kierkegaard understands the term. One is not de facto a contemporary; rather, contemporaneity is an achievement.13 To become contemporaneous with Christ means to have faith in him. In Kierkegaard’s language, I am a contemporary of Christ insofar as Christ’s actuality represents a live possibility for me. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus describes something similar in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, when he explains why he writes the way he

 For an account of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Lessing on this point and on the meaning of contemporaneity, see Benton 2006, Amengual i Coll 2008. For a reading of the significance of contemporaneity for hermeneutics, see Komel 2014. 13  In fact, in Kierkegaard’s telling, Christ’s contemporaries found it more difficult to ‘become contemporary’ with him because they were offended (scandalised) by him. On the other hand, those who, like Kierkegaard’s contemporaries, fail to understand Christ as the scandalon, are apt to misunderstand what it is to have faith and what Christ actually demands of them. 12

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does, in order to bring the reader “as close as possible” to the question of “how to live”. Instead of presenting the good in the form of actuality, as is ordinarily done, that this person and that person have actually lived and have actually done this, and thus transforming the reader into an observer, an admirer, an appraiser, it should be presented in the form of possibility. Then whether or not the reader wants to exist in it is placed as close as possible to him (Kierkegaard 1992, 358–359, my emphasis).

The basic movement that Climacus describes here is a switch from external observer or admirer to one who is personally implicated in the possibilities opened up by the text. The reader is put in a position to ask, “Is the good a possibility for me?” “Do I want to exist in it?” While the emphasis in this excerpt is on textual poetics, on how to communicate a possibility to a reader, the lesson is a wider one. In Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Frater Taciturnus takes up the question of possibility in relation to history. He distinguishes between history conceived as actuality—something that happened to others—and history conceived as possibility: something that is possible for me. On the one hand, “the historical is always raw material”, “a multiplicity of data”. (Kierkegaard 1989b, 439). But “the person who appropriates it knows how to resolve in a posse [possibility] and assimilate as an esse [actuality].” Appropriation here is Kierkegaard’s term for the existential movement corresponding to some external occasion. The real question, with regard to a historical event, especially one that is supposed to serve as a prototype for one’s own way of being in the world, is not “did it really happen this way?” But rather “Is what is being said possible?” (Kierkegaard 1989b, 439) and “Am I able to do it?” (Kierkegaard 1989b, 440). These questions, he concludes, cannot be “historically bottled” and offered to the audience to imbibe (Kierkegaard 1989b, 439).14 The proclaimed greatness of Caesar or of Christ does not help, nor do any scraps of verifiable historical evidence about their lives. Taciturnus claims that a meaningful relationship to history involves faith, which he does not define as a religious attitude but as a way of relating to actuality and possibility “that resolves an esse in its posse and then conversely draws the conclusion in passion” (Kierkegaard 1989b, 440). In short, through faith, I make the past into a living possibility for me, and then I bring it to actuality in my commitment (‘passion’) to it, in willing to live up to it.15 This is how I understand what it means to carry out the work of love in remembering the dead, to become a contemporary of the dead. This is not the pseudo-presence that Patočka describes, which is prone to wish fulfilment and other psychological mechanisms of illusion and delusion. Pseudo-presence, in relation to one who has died, means living “in the state of as-if… To prevent the present from becoming the past, to understand non-actuality as a mere departure” (Patočka this volume, /141/). Pseudo-presence, in relation to history, might mean an attitude that takes history to

 “Whether it actually happened this way, whether it is as ideal as it is represented, can be tested only by ideality, but one cannot have it historically bottled” (Kierkegaard 1989b, 439). 15  This bears similarities to what Alain Badiou (2013) calls ‘fidelity’ to the truth brought forth by an event. 14

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be part of the present in an unproblematic way, as part of an “interrelated causal series” perhaps, or as an actuality that is simply there, a settled matter that does not need to be resurrected, reinterpreted. Such a stance toward the past can form part of the psychological attitude of denial (i.e. toward the racist and colonialist legacy of Western nations), in the same way that the comfort provided by thinking the other who has died is still really “with me” denies the irrevocable loss of the possibility of a fully mutual relationship, as well as tending to eradicate the more difficult aspects of such a relationship. In contrast to the false comfort of pseudo presence or the twin attitude of denial, “becoming contemporary” is the active work of renewing the meaning of the dead one and of historical events of the past by making that meaning into possibility for me, by making it the future again. Patočka’s description of history as a field of human interest is similar to Kierkegaard’s own, though Kierkegaard’s discussions of history are motivated by the theological question of how to relate to the Christ event. In an early text “A Few Remarks on the Concept of ‘World History’” (1935), Patočka critiques a number of possible approaches to history (objective, positivistic, naturalistic, psychological) and offers a phenomenologically rooted one instead: The world of history is our practical world, the world of our (conscious) interests. To comprehend history historically, then, does not mean to interpret (e.g., psychologically, economically, etc.) these interests, but to conceive of them as supporting the typical forces governing humanity, human life and the world. If we ask why something happened in history, the question does not mean the same as it does in natural science […] rather we wish to understand them on the basis of those original forces that govern our existence and which we too may “experience”, “feel”, “consider”, “overcome”. (Patočka 2022a, 29)

In identifying the world of history with the practical world of our interests, Patočka points to a sense in which history represents certain possibilities for human being, including transformative moments where the truth of human being and of being as such come to the fore. While we may be separated from such events by an abyss of time, we can also approach them as responses to the same “forces that govern our existence”, which we can likewise, in the first person, “experience, feel, consider, overcome”. The events of “care for the soul” and the creation of the polis in ancient Greece are the founding moments of history in the sense that Patočka uses the term. They reveal human being as a being capable of living for something other than bare life or survival; this is variably described as life in truth, life in freedom, philosophical life, or political life: a life in which care for the soul at the same time means care for the polis. Part of Patočka’s project in developing a philosophy of history is to emphasise that these are gestures that must be continually renewed or else lapse into nothing. He is not naïve about the difficulty of renewal, which, as in Kierkegaard, is a creative rather than a backward-looking act. He is alive to the different “worlds” of historical epochs and does not imply that the possibilities open to, say, the ancient Greeks, are likewise open to the modern European. Part of what it means to occupy a world is to occupy a horizon of possibilities, and historical events foreclose on certain possibilities of being even as they open up others. So if one is to have faith in relation to an event of history, this requires Kierkegaardian ‘assimilation’, the processing of a possibility in specific relation to oneself, in one’s own situation. In

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his late text on the outline of history, Patočka places modern humanity within a framework of biologism, a world-picture that is in fact at odds with the notion of history (in the specialized sense), since it sees life as essentially biological, the object of scientific enquiry and statistical data. The insistence on seeing life only through the ‘forces of the Day’, life for the sake of bare survival of the species, is a formidable obstacle to becoming contemporary with the event of life lived for the sake of freedom—mine, others, and the freedom of being to be. Since Patoçka views the European project as dead, he asks the question whether it is still possible for us to be historical beings?16 (Patočka 2022b, 322). In other words, can we carry out the work of love to make the founding moment of history, the launch into a continual and communal ungroundedness, into our own future?

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1939. On Kierkegaard’s doctrine of love. Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 8 (3): 413–429. Amengual i Coll, Gabriel. 2008. Usefulness and uselessness of history: History, memory and the contemporaneity of faith according to S. Kierkegaard. Comprendre: Revista Catalana de Filosofia 10 (1–2): 103–122. Badiou, Alain. 2013. Being and event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Bloomsbury. Benton, M.A. 2006. The modal gap: The objective problem of Lessing’s Ditch(es) and Kierkegaard’s subjective reply. Religious Studies 42 (1): 27–44. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ferreira, M.  Jamie. 1999. Mutual responsiveness in relation: The challenge of the ninth deliberation. In International Kierkegaard commentary on works of love, ed. Robert L.  Perkins, 193–209. Macon: Mercer University Press. ———. 2001. Love’s grateful striving: A commentary on Kierkegaard’s works of love. New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hampson, Daphne. 2014. Kierkegaard: Exposition and critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1962. Works of love. Trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. New York: Harper Torchbooks. ———. 1983. Fear and trembling, Repetition. Ed. and trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1986. Philosophical fragments. Ed. and Trans. Edna H.  Hong and Howard V.  Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1988. Either/Or. Ed. and Trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1989a. The sickness unto death. Trans. Alistair Hannay. London: Penguin Classics. ———. 1989b. Stages on life’s way: Studies by various persons. Ed. and Trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1992. Concluding unscientific postscript to philosophical fragments. Ed. and Trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Komel, Dean. 2014. Gadamer and Kierkegaard: On contemporaneity. Filozofia 69 (5): 434–442. Krishek, Sharon. 2009. Kierkegaard on faith and love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 “Will the human being of the planetary epoch really be capable of living historically?” (Patočka 2022b, 322). 16

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Lippitt, John. 2012. Kierkegaard and the problem of special relationships: Ferreira, Krishek and the “God filter”. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 72 (3): 177–197. Morrison, Toni. 2004. Song of Solomon. New York: Vintage. Patočka, Jan. 1983. Platon et l’Europe: Séminaire privé du semestre d’été 1973. Trans. Erika Abrams. Lagrasse: Verdier. ———. 1996. Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Ed. James Dodd. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. ———. 2022a. A few remarks on the concept of “world history”. In The selected writings of Jan Patočka, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Erin Plunkett, 27–37. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2022b. An outline of history. In The selected writings of Jan Patočka, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Erin Plunkett, 307–322. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2022c. The dangers of technicization in science according to E. Husserl, and the essence of technology as danger according to M. Heidegger. In The selected writings of Jan Patočka, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Erin Plunkett, 281–294. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2022d. The natural world and phenomenology. In The selected writings of Jan Patočka, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Erin Plunkett, 107–138. London: Bloomsbury. Ritter, Martin. 2017. Patočka’s care of the soul reconsidered: Performing the soul through movement. Human Studies 40 (2): 233–247. ———. 2019. Into the world: The movement of Patočka’s phenomenology. Cham: Springer. Ruin, Hans. 2018. Being with the dead: Burial, ancestral politics, and the roots of historical consciousness. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chapter 10

Between Memory and History: Retracing Historical Knowledge Through a Phenomenology of Afterlife Lovisa Andén

How can Jan Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife enable us to understand the historiographical process in general and the role of testimony in the historiographical process, in particular? Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife outlines the personal and existential dimension of our relation to our past, offering an understanding of how the absent present of those who used to be there continues to form who we are to ourselves. However, it stops short of the question of how this relation expands the field of personal experience. If we, with Patočka, can assert that the relation to the dead defines our understanding of ourselves and our world, could we outline a similar relation between our historical knowledge and collective memory, that is, could we elaborate on how our collective relation to our past defines our collective identities and relations? Our institutionalized historical narratives are the result of a process of knowledge production, derived from what was once a living present and then a represented past. In historiographical discussions, historical knowledge is often defined in opposition to memories, through its distance to our immediate, personal relation to our past. Those discussions were famously undertaken by thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur, Marc Bloch and Pierre Nora.1 The aim of this paper is to  The relation between Ricoeur and Patočka has been discussed in recent years, in particular a special number of META from 2017 was dedicated to the relation between the two philosophers. The editors outline both their affinities in terms of influences, the similarities between their thoughts and the influence they had on one another (see Hagedorn and Marinescu 2017, 381). Even though Patočka has not written about Ricoeur’s philosophy, he had read his work, and the influence can be seen in some of Patočka’s objections to Husserl and Heidegger as well as in Patočka’s correspondences (Hagedorn and Marinescu 2017, 382). Furthermore, their affinities regarding their theories of afterlife are discussed by Christian Sternad. He stresses how a phenomenology of death 1

L. Andén (*) The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_10

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place the phenomenological analysis of death and of loss within discussions surrounding the relation between memory and historical knowledge. Marc Bloch presents the problem of defining history as one of delimiting the objects of study it encompasses. He rejects the proposed definition of history as a science of things past: it is to speak poorly (mal parler), because there could not possibly be a science that could encompass “a field so vast and so chaotic as that of things that has no other link between them, than the mere fact that they have been” (Bloch 1952, 16). Instead, Bloch proposes that history is the “science of men in time”: “There is only a science of men in time, and one that endlessly needs to unite the study of the dead with that of the living” (Bloch 1952, 29). How is this unifying act carried out? While Bloch does not further develop the relation between the dead and the living, the definition of history he proposes implies the reciprocity between the present and the past that will come to mark later historiographical discussions. In this article, I argue that testimonies can offer us a link between the dead and the living, the present and the past, and in doing so, they can retrieve our relation to a legacy that is already forming our lifeworld, but without being visible as such to us. The first part of this paper discusses how Patočka’s understanding of afterlife is rooted in his theory of intersubjectivity, and, furthermore, how the latter is influenced by the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Patočka describes the relation to the other as a relation of reciprocity, one where I am, from the very beginning, intertwined with the other, and my own self is defined by the relation I have with him. In his preface to the French translation of Heretical Essays (Patočka 1996; Ricoeur 1996), Ricoeur argues that Patočka’s place in the phenomenological tradition should be among the most prominent thinkers of his generation. Indeed, Ricoeur places the Heretical Essays in the same place in the phenomenological tradition as that occupied by The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 2009). Furthermore, he points to the similarities between Patočka and Merleau-Ponty: both elaborate on the phenomenological tradition as successors of Husserl and Heidegger, and both The Visible and the Invisible and the Heretical Essays show a path that is at the same time aligned with and divergent from the phenomenologies to which they are the most indebted. The first section of this chapter discusses the affinity between Patočka’s theory of intersubjectivity and that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whereas the second section examines how Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife is grounded in his theory of intersubjectivity. The third section discusses the relation between memory and history, relating these terms to the historiographical discussions undertaken by Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Nora, while the fourth part of the paper outlines how Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife offers a new way of understanding these historiographical discussions.

and the afterlife, for both Patočka and Ricoeur must begin with an account of intersubjectivity (Sternad 2017, 537).

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Loss and Retrieval The theme of Patočka’s “Phenomenology of afterlife” is to understand the relationship to those deceased as a twofold relationship of love and grief, of presence and absence. How do I relate to another as a lost other? In Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the mystery of the other is described as a mystery that will be irretrievable to us after his death: A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. (Dickens 1999, 11)

The other is to us, Dickens writes, like an unfathomable water, a water I can only access standing at the shore, where I glimpse treasures submerged underneath the surface as lights momentary make them visible. When death enters it is as if that surface is suddenly locked in eternal frost, and I can no more glimpse those secrets or those hopes, but, instead, something of them will always remain with me: “My friend is dead, my neighbor is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end” (Dickens 1999, 11). Dickens thus describes a paradoxical relationship of loss and of retrieval, and of how I, even in the absence of my dead friend or my dead love, always will continue to carry something of his individuality with me. Dickens’ descriptions capture one essential aspect of Patočka’s understanding of afterlife: how the other continues to live with us, among us, and how we, more or less consciously, continue to treasure those that have been someone for us. However, Patočka’s understanding of afterlife also outlines how something of me will always be lost when this someone is no longer there: what I was to him and what I was to myself as seen by him, as understood by him. Afterlife is thus characterized by the loss of two things: the loss of the mystery of the other, and of the loss of what I was only to him, only in his eyes, through his gaze. In Body, Community, Language, World, Patočka points to the relation to the deceased other as one of the basic relations of being together, among other relations such as cooperation, struggle, love and play (Patočka 1998, 66). The text “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” elaborates on how the relationship we once had to the deceased continues to constitute the field in which we live, how it continues to form us and how it continues to define who we are. Whereas the discussion of a phenomenology of death, stemming from Heidegger, focuses on the impossibility of experiencing one’s own death, an experience to which I cannot, by definition, have access, Patočka’s phenomenology focuses on the death of the other. Christian Sternad argues that Patočka’s understanding of intersubjectivity, one that is fundamentally different from Heidegger’s, lets him rephrase both the questions of death and afterlife in a way that evades the aporia of Heidegger’s

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analysis (Sternad 2017, 545). Intersubjectivity is not only a corner stone of subjectivity, but also a constituent of our lifeworld, a lifeworld that is extended by the afterlife of those who are no longer present there. In particular, Sternad stresses the understanding of subjectivity as a non-foundational concept of intersubjectivity, a relation of intertwinement between the self and other (Sternad 2017, 546). As I will argue, this analysis testifies to an affinity to the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty. The references to Merleau-Ponty in Body, Community, Language, World, are numerous. In particular, Patočka’s examinations of subjectivity, of the primacy of the body, and of the relation between subject and world as an original reversibility, are marked by both an influence of and an affinity to Merleau-Ponty (Patočka 1998, 29, 45, 47). The relation between the two philosophers has been the object of a number of studies in recent years, in particular regarding questions such as transcendence (see San 2012), the visible world (see Mensch 2007) and the incarnated body (see Barbaras 2021). Eddo Evink, who examines the similarities and differences of their understanding of intersubjectivity, stresses how influenced Patočka’s understanding was by that of Merleau-Ponty (Evink 2013). However, he also argues that Patočka developed Merleau-Ponty’s theories further in order to account for asymmetric relationships. I will instead focus on how the understanding of the primacy of intersubjectivity is extended in Patočka’s thought to the realm of afterlife, and how the very possibility of afterlife is enabled by this relation we have to others, a relation marked by a continuous entanglement between us and them. Both Merleau-Ponty and Patočka stress that our relationship to others is more direct than our relationship to ourselves: we are immediately open to the others, immediately with them. Furthermore, our relationship to ourselves goes through them, since it is only in my relationship to another that I can become a being for another, and, since the same is true for him, it is only through me that he can become himself as both a being for himself and a being for others. In a lecture held in 1951, Merleau-Ponty describes the intertwinement between me and the other as a chiasma, citing a description of love in Paul Valéry’s Tel Quel: As soon as the eyes meet, one is no longer quite two and it is difficult to remain alone. […] You take my image, my appearance; I take yours. You are not me, since you see me, and I do not see myself. What I lack is this me that you see. And what you lack is the you that I see. (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 231–232)2

The other completes me, because it is through his gaze that I see myself as seen, and when I look at him, I acknowledge him as being-seen. When we meet, one is not alone, and there are no longer two distinct selves, but oneself in the other and the other in self. In the course notes to Sur l’usage littéraire du langage, held 1952–1953, Merleau-Ponty returns to the same passages in Valéry, concluding that:

 Merleau-Ponty cites Paul Valéry’s Tel Quel I, (see Valéry 1982, 490). The translation has been modified, the original reads as follows: “Dès que les regards se prennent, l’on n’est plus tout à fait deux et il y a de la difficulté à demeurer seul. […] Tu prends mon image, mon apparence, je prends la tienne. Tu n’es pas moi, puisque tu me vois et que je ne me vois pas. Ce qui me manque, c’est ce moi que tu vois. Et à toi, ce qui manque, c’est toi que je vois.” (Merleau-Ponty 1960, 294).

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There is thus a deep tie to the other: one part of me is in him. But as if there is no longer a juxtaposition, there is no identity because the other have that of me which I do not have. In this way, one is no longer alone, but neither are we two, but oneself in the other and the other in self. (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 83)

Only in the eyes of the other can I become myself, and only through my gaze can he see himself as being seen. When I first meet the other, he is not a stranger to me, since, in fact, I can see and hear him more directly than I can see and hear myself. In a lecture from 1951, Merleau-Ponty describes, with a paraphrase to Malraux, how I am to myself that “incomparable monster” since my voice, that I hear through my throat, sounds different from the voice of others (1964, 47). Patočka describes in similar terms how I only have an abstract awareness of my own outside, since I can only see myself indirectly, through a reflection in a mirror, and I hear my voice differently from how others hear it (Patočka this volume, /131/).3 We are thus implied in one another; my relationship to my own body passes through the other, and I am more immediately for the other than I am to myself. Both Merleau-Ponty and Patočka describe how the phenomenon of corporality, of being-as-body, is central to our relation to others: it is because I am an outside to myself, that I can be seen by others. Only when I experience myself in the eyes of the other do I receive my physicality back and only through his wishes and desires can I experience myself as a being for another: “Only through and in the other do lovers discover themselves as bodies, in and through the other do friends discover each their own virtues and imperfections, their own will and individuality” (Patočka this volume, /140/). To be outside of oneself, Patočka writes, is not to be alienated, but on the contrary, it signifies this openness to the other, through which I can only fully become myself. We do not only need the other as an object, but we need him to need us, to affect us, to be in reciprocity with us. The reciprocity with the other signifies also the possibility for us to awake the other: to make him become himself, “helping him live, suffer and be happy” (Patočka this volume, /141/), and in that way to make him exist more genuinely. This waking up is also reflected back to us: “by being for others, by being outside ourselves, we live in others, and not only metaphorically, but authentically” (/141/). We live in a shared life, towards a shared future, in a “mutual drama”, and the other “has become a kind of external organ of our own life” (/141, 137/). If, with Merleau-Ponty and with Patočka, we understand our being for ourselves as fundamentally dependent on the other, how is our being transformed when his look on us is no longer there? What does it mean that someone has been for someone else? asks Patočka. One consequence of the understanding of co-existence in Patočka and Merleau-Ponty is that the loss of the other also signifies a loss of oneself, of ourselves as seen by him, as heard by him. Whereas something of the other will always be with us, something of ourselves will always be lost with him. How do we live in and with this absence and this loss? The next section examines how

 The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation. 3

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Patočka develops a phenomenology of afterlife, a phenomenology that is grounded in his understanding of intersubjectivity, and one that, as I will argue, opens for a new approach to historiographical questions relating to collective memory and history.

Afterlife Between History and the Individual In his examination of Patočka’s thoughts on afterlife, Hans Ruin stresses that it seems to be partly animated by a personal experience of loss. Already the manuscript itself alludes to this experience since it takes the example of the memory of a father, the remarks on coming to terms with grief and the seducing power of false hope (Ruin 2014). However, Ruin also connects this personal and existential dimension of loss and of mourning to the question of the existential dimensions of history: “History would then be the permanent attempt to orient oneself not just within an abstract temporal stretch, but in an existential space constituted by a being-with-the-­ dead” (Ruin 2014). How could Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife be stretched to our being-with-the-dead in history? Or in other words, how can it contribute to our understanding of the relation between our ancestors and ourselves on the level of a larger community, a nation or an epoch? The aim of this section is to outline how Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife opens for an understanding of history and collective memory as grounded in a personal awareness of afterlife. After the death of someone, those who were close to the deceased undertake the task to master his absence. They have to incorporate his absence into their own lives, which, in turn, have been transformed by the disruption of the dead person’s reciprocity and synchrony. After his death, writes Patočka, “There is a vacuum left after this reciprocity, there is suddenly a wall against which our habitus of reciprocity is crashing” (this volume, /137/). When our reciprocities with the other are interrupted, our intention toward the other ends in a void: “the dead person does not reply, does not cooperate, does not co-perceive, does not execute anything” (/134/). We do not have the sense of “together” and he does not have the sense of participation in human enterprises, actions and interests. In order to prevent the presence of the other from becoming something past we can lock ourselves in a state of as-if, and create an illusory reciprocity, similar to that of a phantom limb. Just like we can create a pseudo-presence of a lost arm and feel it aching and moving, we can create an illusory pseudo-presence of the lost other. Even though we know for a fact that the other is no longer there, we live as if he were. The impulse of rejecting instead of accepting the death of the other is with us all the time, but usually it is hindered from taking hold of us because of our awareness of reality. We accept the fact that the reciprocity we used to have with the other is definitively lost and that he will never return. This conflict between the reality we need to accept and the desire to refuse it, is, Patočka writes, “what the pain of loss” really means (this volume, /141/). When we accept that the other is no longer

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there, we also see our lifeworld transformed, with the world we used to know forever changed. However, the fact that the other is no longer there in synchrony and reciprocity, does not mean that the other has been completely devoid of reciprocity after his death. Even though we no longer create future projects together, even though our life is no longer a “mutual drama,” there is still something left of our reciprocity. Even after his death, his being for me can continue to influence my being, and my actions toward the past person continue to be a realization of what he was to me. George Eliot famously describes this kind of reciprocity in Adam Bede: “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence” (Eliot 2005, 81). In some cases, we can realize more profoundly what the other was to us after his death. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time provides a particularly beautiful description of how the grief of the lost other transforms the one grieving. After the death of his grandmother, the narrator notices how his mother becomes more and more similar to the grandmother, until, at a certain point, she metamorphosizes into his grandmother. Bewildered, the narrator realizes he sees his grandmother in his mother: Perhaps, in our regret for her who is no more, there is a sort of autosuggestion that ends by bringing out on our features resemblances, which potentially we already bore, and above all a cessation of our most characteristically individual activity (in my mother, her common sense, the mocking gaiety that she inherited from her father) that we did not shrink, so long as the beloved person was alive, from exercising, even at her expense, and which counterbalanced the traits that we derived exclusively from her. (Proust 2021, 187)

The being with the other is thus not contained in a life shared, but it is an essential trait of the life we live after her, shaped by her legacy and by the ideas we still have of her. Indeed, for Proust, the influence that the other can exercise over us might even be greater after death: the mother treasures all things that remind her of her mother, in such a way that she transforms her own life into a life of preservation and conservation of the memories of the deceased. Proust thus shows what being with the dead can signify within the most personal sphere. In Patočka’s discussion, the question of afterlife encompasses both the personal and a more public sphere: it comprises both my relation to those closest to me and those who were merely my acquaintances. Our relation continues to be, after death, defined by what the other was for us while he was living. The same person will leave different legacies in each and every person that continues to treasure his memory. To someone he is a father and to someone else he is “Headmaster P.” Even though Patočka stresses that afterlife is “a primordially privative mode of life with another in all its basic forms” (this volume, /137/), he also presents an understanding of how we go from the personal sphere to the impersonal. While we represent the one with whom we had a personal relationship in the modus of “I can”, we relate to those whom we have never met in the modus of “I could” (/136/). Regardless of the extent of biographical information we have about the latter, we represent him to ourselves in a different manner (/136/). Furthermore, it is the

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relation to those deceased to whom we have had a personal relation that gives us an implicit awareness of those we did not know, and that make us understand them as someone who once was an actual person: “All those who are not close to the dead person have an implicit awareness of how we live with the dead in the case of closeness, in the form of an indeterminate horizon” (/136/). The dead other will always be someone that used to be someone that has perceived, dreamed and hoped, that once was present for me or for others, and with whom I participated in the same world. It is thus our personal experience of the death of those close to us that gives us a primordial experience of afterlife, an experience that makes it possible for us to understand historical persons and men of former times as such. I would like to stress here how this primordial awareness offers us an account of the difference between a fictional and a historical character: even though we only meet historical characters through their work or their biographies, they are still real to us through the implicit awareness we have of them as people that once lived, interacted and were present to others. This implicit awareness, in turn, stems from our personal experience of the death of those close to us. If we follow Bloch and define history as “the science of men in time”, and if we want to understand the reciprocity between those men in time and the men of our time, Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife provides us with an original historical awareness: with an awareness of those that lived before us as both personal and historical men.

Between Memory and History Patočka elaborates an understanding of how we live with the other after they are dead, and how they continue to live with us. Our memory of the deceased, of what they were to us and what we thought we were to them, continue to form who we are to ourselves and how we understand our present. If the afterlife of the others on the most personal sphere constitutes a certain kind of reciprocity, if we become ourselves through our relation to those that used to be there for us, could we say the same about the afterlife of historical persons in relation to our collective memory? Or, furthermore, could we understand history as a collective relation to our dead? In order to answer those questions, I will first elaborate on the relation between memory and history, and, secondly, on the role of testimony in the historiographical process. Both Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Nora describe historical knowledge as defined by its relation to memory. However, Nora describes the relation between history and spontaneous memory as antithetical: history is suspicious of memory “and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (Nora 1989, 9). When the past is reproduced through historiographical processes, we run the risk of construing a representation of the past, one that can be emblematic or meaningful, but one that is no longer true to the legacy we inherited from it in our concrete memory. Nora goes as far as to claim that: “History’s goal and ambition is not to exalt but to annihilate what has in reality taken place” (Nora 1989, 9).

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Furthermore, Nora describes a forgetfulness of our modern memory: since archives are used in the preservation of memory, we run the risk of losing our understanding of the past. The modern memory is defined by its relation to the archive (Nora 1989, 13). Instead of actively trying to understand our past, we try to record as much of it as possible. The archive thus attempts both to conserve the present and to preserve the past. As a consequence, memory relies increasingly on external traces and less on what was actually experienced (Nora 1989, 13). Furthermore, our society produces archives in a more deliberate way than ever before, with the availability of new technical means for reproduction and preservation. In recording the traces of the past, we no longer trace it back to a living present, rather we create representations of it, in which we can mirror ourselves and our present: “It is no longer genesis that we seek but instead the decipherment of what we are in the light of what we are no longer” (Nora 1989, 18). The very attempt to understand ourselves through our history runs the risk of obscuring the past it searches to examine. Furthermore, Nora warns that the act of recording the past without interpreting it will give us a reproduction of our past that becomes ever more incomprehensible to us. A society that is absorbed in its own historicity would be unable to produce historians or historical research since “it would satisfy itself with automatic self-­ recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself” (Nora 1989, 18). Our society gives, instead, the opposite task to history, according to Nora: it has torn itself from memory in its very obsession to understand itself historically, thereby giving a more prominent role to the historian. Our true memory or our authentic relation to the past is thus threatened from different sides in Nora’s analysis. On the one hand the archive threatens to expel memory to a realm of automatic processes. On the other hand, the historical uses of the past run the risk of over-interpreting and reconstruing the past as something it was not. Furthermore, Nora describes how already deliberate memories introduce a distance from our “true memory”. Our true memory inhabits our unspoken traditions, it is visible in our very gestures and habits. It is thus “who we are” in a way that is both manifest and not consciously displayed. Nora’s descriptions of the true memory bear similarities to that of the transformation of Proust’s mother: she does not consciously re-imagine her mother, but she re-enacts her mother through her very being, transforming herself into the one she is mourning. We could understand true memory in a similar way, that is, as our direct, immediate legacy, as a tradition that is us, one that we inherit in such a way that it is indistinguishable from who and what we are. As opposed to this memory, Nora describes a memory that has been transformed through its passage to history, transformed by a use of memory that is “voluntary and deliberate”, one that forms a memory distinct from who we are spontaneously (Nora 1989, 13). Is it then possible to intentionally reach our true memory? Could we re-trace ourselves and understand what we are as historical beings without creating an artificial reenactment of our present identity? In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur proposes a different understanding of the relation between memory and history than the one presented by Nora, one in which historical knowledge is grounded in memory. Ricoeur elaborates on the

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production of historical knowledge, starting from experience and memory, which are orally or literarily presented in testimony, institutionalized in the archive, constituted as historical documents, assessed and evaluated by historians, who finalize the process in their writing of history books. Ricoeur thus divides the historiographical process into three phases. The first phase is labelled the “documentary phase”, encompassing all operations ranging from testimony to the institutionalized archives. The archives are conserved for the historian, by an institution that intends for trained historians to consult it. It is in the archive that the historian carries out the second part of the historiographical process: he evaluates, and critically assesses the documents gathered. The historical document is constituted as such, through the questions and assessments made by the historian. In the third phase, the historian presents his work in history books, to presumably anyone who can read, and through his writing the historical knowledge become a part of the public space. The history books, in turn, function as documents for other historians, and serve as material to be assessed and revised. This is the last stage in the process of history-writing, a writing that is never completed, but continually written and re-written. Even though Ricoeur places the production of historical knowledge in the archive, he places its roots in testimony and he asks whether the passage “into the archive, is, as regards its utility or its inconvenience for living memory, a remedy or a poison” (Ricoeur 2004, 168). Ricoeur relates his discussion to the debate on a crisis of testimony, arguing that it is only because we have confidence in some testimony that we can doubt others. Furthermore, he asks if a general crisis of testimony is bearable or even thinkable, because such a crisis would signify that history cut off all its ties to declarative memory. The role that Ricoeur ascribes to testimony is thus enigmatic: on one hand he stresses testimony as the passage from memory to history, as that of which, the historian makes history. On the other hand, this very notion seems to take the autonomy away from testimony. If it is only through testimony we can access the past, and those testimonies must be edited and revised by the historian before they can enter the sphere of proper historical knowledge, then we seem to exclude both testimonies and memories from historical knowledge as such. In this section we have seen how memory and history are both competing and interdependent ways of relating to our past. Whereas Nora discusses how the historiographical process threatens our authentic memory, Ricoeur re-traces historical knowledge back to memories and testimonies. The next section argues that Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife permits us to take one step further back, enabling us to retrace our historical awareness as such from our experiences of the afterlife of those close to us.

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Testimony and Afterlife This section discusses how Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife gives us the tools to understand testimony as the link between personal memory and historical knowledge. Testimony is often contrasted with evidence, while the increasing demand for the objective evidential value of historical source material downplays the value of testimony. In contemporary research in philosophy of history, Jonas Ahlskog describes a shift in the historian’s view on testimony and evidence: what has come to be called an evidence paradigm became hegemonic, from the end of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth century (Ahlskog 2017, 112). This shift is especially pronounced with the philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood. To Collingwood, the distinction between testimony and evidence is central to his understanding of the relation between the historian and his material (Ahlskog 2016, 181). According to Collingwood, evidence is seen as the other of testimony: the historical science begins where the trust in testimony ends. There is, he asserts, a Copernican revolution in history writing, one where the historian who formerly trusted the authority of testimony instead becomes an autonomous scientist. The very center of gravity has now moved from the authority of testimony to the authority of the historian who critically assesses evidence. In pre-revolutionary history writing, then, the witnesses provided the historian with all the information he could gather, but after the revolution, the testimony is, instead, used as evidence, and what they prove is now decided by the historian and not by the witness himself (Ahlskog 2016, 182). History as a modern science has no relation to testimony, rather, and ideally, it should free itself completely from it. I want here to point to the similarities between Collingwood’s argument and the argument made by Edmund Husserl in Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl 1978). Husserl famously describes how the natural sciences have excluded our subjective experiences from the realm of scientific knowledge, in order to safeguard the objectivity of their scientific claims to truth. However, Husserl warns that the natural sciences run the risk of losing their meaning to us if we uproot them completely from the concrete lifeworld in which they originated. This risk is particularly real, since new discoveries quickly become sedimented into scientific knowledge, thereby placing the scientist further and further away from the origin of his own science. This section argues that something similar is at play with the sedimentation of historical knowledge through the historiographical process: in the course of making history, we derive historical knowledge from experiences taking place in a concrete lifeworld, while excluding the same kind of experiences from the sphere of proper historical knowledge. When we produce historical knowledge, we aim at a certain kind of objectivity, and a certain kind of institutionalization of knowledge, one that distances us from the concrete experience of the past. A philosophy that re-connects sedimented historical narratives to their origin in a concrete experience will face problems that are analogous to those discussed by

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Husserl: it will, at first sight, seem as if it sacrifices the objectivity and scientific rigor that defines our very concept of science. However, retracing the historical knowledge back toward its origin can offer us a better understanding of the meaning of our scientific knowledge as such, as well as of the fields of knowledge it encompasses. If we are to search for the origin of historical knowledge, what we are tracing is the first transfer of a living experience to an experience of past-ness as such, and this is what Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife offers us: the possibility to re-connect our present field of experience with its first inscriptions of past-ness. In Ricoeur’s text La marque du passé, he searches for a new way of understanding the past as such, and, in particular, the past’s own temporality: what makes an object of the past into a memory? He discusses the inadequacy of historical metaphors, especially the metaphor of the mark. Metaphors such as marks and traces do not reflect the actual experience of the past; instead, we need to understand its presence to us in memory (Ricoeur 1998, 13). This question, in turn, entails the problem of representation: what does it mean to represent, is it to present yet again? To present the same thing twice, or to produce a reanimation or a reconstruction? If we are to understand it as a reconstruction, then, Ricoeur asks, how can we see it as distinct from a fiction or a construction of fantasy? At the heart of Ricoeur’s analysis we find the desire to understand that which makes the past into a real past, a memory of something that was once present. To speak of the past, writes Riceour, is to acknowledge that one central aspect of the object of memory is its permanent mark of loss. The very pastness of the past, he concludes, is the sense of loss, and the sense of loss is thus a defining criteria of pastness. However, this loss is made present to us, not through marks, but, as Ricoeur writes, through testimonies, thus stressing, yet again, the importance of testimony in the historiographical process. Could we, with Patočka, understand testimonies and archives as different modes of being with the dead, modes that continue to constitute both our individual field of experience and our collective historical situation? And if we do indeed start from that position, maybe we need to pose the question differently. For the past would no longer be a question about retrieving something lost, through traces and testimonies, but about understanding the present as it is formed by the loss of experiences and objects that have been. Our historiographical processes would then not aim at retrieving the past, but at retrieving ourselves, by examining how we define ourselves through our acts of constituting the past. The historiographical process as such would be more similar to an archeological process in the most husserlian sense of the term, and in writing history, we would turn not away but toward that present in which we live, a present that is indubitably defined by the different relations it has to its past. The most original of those relations, the one that makes it possible for us to be aware of a past as such might be our personal relation to the loss of the other, the loss of ourselves in and through this loss, the loss of what we used to be only in his presence, and of the absence he continues to be in us.

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Conclusion Drawing on the phenomenology of Jan Patočka, this article explores how we construe and define historical pastness, and how our historical past defines us and our present. The article argues that Patočka outlines an existential dimension of our relation to the past. Who we are, is first and foremost defined by our relations to others and those others include both those who are still among us and those who are no longer here. The dead continue, despite their absence, to be present in us and through us. After their death, our world will still be defined by how they used to inhabit it together with us. Patočka extends the very notion of lifeworld, so as not only to contain the world of the living, but also the afterlife of those who used to live there with us, and, furthermore, the afterlife of those who used to live there before us. This article argues that Patočka’s phenomenology opens for a new understanding of how we are situated in history, one where our personal experiences of death and of afterlife gives us a primordial awareness of ourselves and others as historical beings. Furthermore, the article discusses how the phenomenology of afterlife, first elaborated by Patočka, re-defines the relation between memory and history. In the historiographical discussions undertaken by Pierre Nora and Paul Ricoeur, historical knowledge is defined in relation to memory: while Nora describes history and memory as antithetical terms, Ricoeur grounds historical knowledge in memories and testimonies. With Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife, we can review the relation between memory and history: we can now understand personal memories as what give meaning to any and every historical discourse, and ourselves as oriented in a historical lifeworld through our personal experiences of death and afterlife.

References Ahlskog, Jonas. 2016. R.  G. Collingwood and the concept of testimony: A story about autonomy and reliance. Clio: Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 45 (2): 181–204. ———. 2017. The evidential paradigm in modern history. Storia della Storiografia 71 (1): 111–128. Barbaras, Renaud. 2021. Introduction to a phenomenology of life. Trans. Leonard Lawlor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bloch, Marc. 1952. Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien. Paris: Armand Colin. Dickens, Charles. 1999. A tale of two cities. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. Eliot, George. 2005. Adam Bede. In Four novels of George Eliot. Ware: Wordsworth. Evink, Eddo. 2013. Surrender and subjectivity: Merleau-Ponty and Patočka on intersubjectivity. Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy 5 (1): 13–28. Hagedorn, Ludger, and Paul Marinescu. 2017. Exploring the undisclosed meanings of time, history, and existence: Ricoeur and Patočka as philosophical interlocutors: Introduction by the editors. Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy 9 (2): 379–383.

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Husserl, Edmund. 1978. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Mensch, James. 2007. The a priori of the visible: Patočka and Merleau-Ponty. Studia Phaenomenologica 7: 259–283. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1960. Signes. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1964. Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The visible and the invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2009 [1964]. Le Visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2013. Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage. Genève: MētisPresses. Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations 26 (Special Issue, Memory and Counter-Memory): 7–24. Patočka, Jan. 1996. Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Ed. James Dodd. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1998. Body, community, language, world. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Ed. James Dodd. Chicago: Open Court. Proust, Marcel. 2021. In search of lost time: Volume 4, Sodom and Gomorrah. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Ed. William C. Carter. Yale: Yale University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1996. Preface to the French edition of Jan Patočka’s Heretical essays. In Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Trans. Erazim Kohák, ed. James Dodd, vii–xvi. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1998. La marque du passé. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 103: 7–31. ———. 2004. Memory, history, forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ruin, Hans. 2014. Life after death. https://www.iwm.at/transit-­online/life-­after-­death. San, Emre. 2012. La Transcendance comme problème phénoménologique: Lecture de Merleau-­ Ponty et Patočka. Paris: Mimesis. Sternad, Christian. 2017. The holding back of decline: Scheler, Patočka, and Ricoeur on death and afterlife. Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy 9 (2): 536–559. Valéry, Paul. 1982. Œuvres intimes. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard.

Chapter 11

Drawing a Line or Blurring the Contour Between Animate and Inanimate with Clarice Lispector and Jan Patočka Antony Fredriksson

For the spirit is not, as so often it is supposed by those who depict in a too convenient way, living from the ready-made. It is not the mere occupation with the sublime or the immaterial, but rather it is a relation to the world, living from comprehending the world as a whole, as attained in amplitude. (Patočka 2020, 40)

Introduction Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) is often regarded as one of the most important Jewish writers after Franz Kafka. She was born in Ukraine in 1920 and emigrated to Brazil with her family when she was only two years old. Her literary language is exceptional and draws from several sources. Her authorship is often compared with Virginia Woolf’s, but her special play with language also carries influences from Jewish mysticism, which was introduced to her by her father. The Passion According to G. H was published in 1964 and it is perhaps her most enigmatic book. Whereas her work has drawn some interest from philosophers,1 Lispector herself referred sparsely to philosophy. There are some exceptions: she quotes both Nietzsche and Spinoza, and the monist ontology of the latter had a clear influence on her writing. To compare Jan Patočka’s philosophy to her work is therefore a stretch.

 One of the early philosophical readings of Lispector’s work was done by Hélène Cixous (see Negrete 2018, n. 7). For a recent source, see Magri 2021. 1

A. Fredriksson (*) University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_11

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Nevertheless, they seem to ask similar questions in very different forms of writing. In his essay “The Phenomenology of Afterlife”, Patočka is puzzled by the fact that our way of being is conditioned by the other. He emphasizes: how the other sees me will partly determine my understanding of myself. However, he also sees a complication in this relational constitution of the self, since I cannot ever have the same objective view on myself, as the one an other has on me. My self is co-constituted through the gaze of the other, but at the same time, I am the entity which is experiencing a “me-ness”. I am in some sense an object for myself through the gaze of the other, but this objecthood is, to use a term by Dan Zahavi, constantly accompanied by a certain “for-me-ness”: the experience of what it is like to be me (Zahavi 2017, 194). This discrepancy occupies Patočka; how can I grasp how the other sees me, and understand how the other’s view on me co-constitutes my understanding of myself, while at the same time maintaining my first-personal experience of being myself? In The Passion According to G.  H., Lispector’s main protagonist reflects on related questions concerning the boundaries between the self and the other. We encounter a highly fictional character, someone who has become so extremely self-­ absorbed that all encounters with others are described from a first-personal perspective as dramatic events. The book can be read as a description of someone called G. H. who has become self-centered to such a degree that the gaze of the other will pose a radical existential challenge. The constitutional fact of our way of being, which is highlighted by Patočka, in which the first-personal experience of self is co-constituted by the perspective of the other, leads to a certain unravelling in the protagonist. In encounters with the other, her self-understanding starts to tremble, as if she for the first time would understand that in the eyes of the other, she might appear in a radically different light, compared to the character that she wants to project. G. H. is solicited by the revelation that the self-understanding which she has composed might not at all be seen as she would imagine, through the gaze of the other. There are two such dramatic moments of revelation in the book. One in which she understands that her servant, named Janair, might have seen her as a wanton person, as somebody without distinct or interesting characteristics, i.e., as an insignificant, hardly likeable nobody. The second moment is more imaginative and obscure. She encounters a cockroach in her apartment and kills it. In the moment of death, G. H. is gripped by the gaze of the dying cockroach, which leads to a more radical unravelling of her self-understanding. The encounter with the primitive dying lifeform makes G. H. consider herself as a neutral material entity, as a thing or an “it” rather than an” I”. If we set aside the clearly different natures of Patočka’s and Lispector’s works there is still an affinity in the questions raised by these two texts. Patočka asks, “how does the other live in us?” (this volume, /130/).2 Lispector animates the existential challenge in this question by articulating how the gaze of the other can challenge or

 The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation. 2

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even momentarily destroy one’s self-understanding. Both writers operate with a renegotiation of the set polarity of subjecthood and objecthood. I will start by extracting a certain existential question from Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife and then relate this question to Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. They both address a painful experience of loss of reciprocity in our relationship with the other. Patočka’s essay reveals how we relate to others even after they have passed away, but in this case, it is no longer a reciprocal relation, as the deceased other has become an object of our thoughts, unable to address and solicit us due to the loss of animate life. Lispector’s novel can also be read as an analogy of the loss of reciprocity. The protagonist G.  H. relates to others as if they were irrelevant, neutral and passive – lacking characteristic qualities. The novel portrays how this inhuman way of understanding our relationality leads to an unravelling of the subject. The two texts describe a foundational reciprocity in our relations: how we as subjects are co-constituted through our relations with others, and how a collapse of this reciprocity will lead to an existential challenge.

Patočka and Objecthood One key topic for Patočka and the phenomenological tradition in general is to investigate the concept of self. A common tenet for phenomenology is that there is a core, an experiencing subject that cannot be reduced to objective qualities, characteristics or features. Dan Zahavi describes this experiential aspect of self as a quality of “the what-it-is-likeness of experience” (2017, 194). This phenomenal quality, what it is like to be me, cannot be reduced to specific objective qualities. Patočka aims at a similar distinction when he writes about subjective experience “not as something we look at”, but, rather as “something that we are” (this volume, /130–131/). We are in this sense a conglomerate of experiencing and experienced. That the subject is both experiencing and experienced might seem like an obvious fact, but Patočka understands that there is something immensely puzzling about this. By being animate subjects, we possess this nature of being both an object of experience and the experiencing entity. It is this foundational aspect of our being which is intriguing for Patočka, since it seems to reveal something uncanny about the way we relate to subjects who are no longer among the living. Patočka writes of our relation to someone who has passed away: A being which used to have its own originality and which is now only an object, the identical object of our relationships to it without reciprocity. Reciprocity is the basic factor of the synchrony of both originalities: the originality of the other’s being for me (with the awareness of his originality for himself) and my originality for the other (with his awareness that I am original in myself). (this volume, /134/)

Here he emphasizes that a deceased person has become “only an object” for me. When I relate to a person that has passed away I suddenly relate to an object, due to the lack of reciprocity: “The dead person does not reply, does not cooperate, does

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not co-perceive, does not execute anything, but he withdraws from all of this completely and becomes a mere object” (/134/). In this specific relationship the objecthood of the deceased other is due to the one-sidedness of our relation. The other cannot in this case respond or be part of reconstituting our relationship. And this leads to Patočka’s main question: “To what mode of being does the deceased pass?” (/133/) The deceased other is in this sense inanimate and non-responsive, but still carries a certain agency on us. In our memory and thoughts our relation lives on and we can still have some kind of relationship with a dead person, but it lacks reciprocity. An important aspect of this relation is that the deceased other has become only an object for us. A living person is also partly an object for us in that we relate to others as having certain objective qualities, a certain habitus and a certain way of being with “their look, their voice and accent, their gait, the inclination of their head” (Patočka this volume, /136/). These traits – our knowledge of the individuality and specific style of being of the other – may live on in our consciousness even after the other is no longer with us. I can remember the specific hoarse tone in the laughter of my dead friend as something particular only to him, like a signature identical only to his style of laughing. However, the animate other is something more than an object with a certain set of particular characteristics. Patočka writes about a certain awareness of the originality of the other for me, and vice versa the other’s awareness of my originality for him. We acknowledge that the living other has a self-understanding, and a certain potentiality to transcend our given and objective characterizations of them: “the other lives in possibilities that are still open, and our own life is stretched towards these possibilities and depends in its awakedness on them” (this volume, /141/). Patočka’s use of the concept of “originality” refers to the first-person experience of for-me-ness. In addition, it also articulates a certain creativity, which comes with the predicament of being an animate subject. To be animate means to be vital and lively, in contrast to the fixed and settled modality of the inanimate. Originality is a dynamic agency of the subject, the potential of establishing new paths and new ways of relating. Which in turn enables our relations with the other to be reciprocal and creative. Through the gaze of the other, I may discover myself anew, and in this sense I am now aware of myself and my virtues and imperfections in a way that would not be available to me without the other. This, in turn, requires that the other carries the potential of seeing me in an unexpected way. In reciprocity the other does not simply mirror my specific qualities, she does not function like a recording camera or microphone, but rather acts as an agent that engages with me in unpredictable ways (Patočka this volume, /134/). Patočka challenges the clear polarity between subject and object by showing that an animate human person does have a certain objecthood, but also the potentiality to become something beyond set traits and characteristics. The possibility of the reciprocal relation enables me to understand myself in a new light, the other liberates me from my self-sufficiency. Whereas a deceased other has lost the potentiality that grants us a possibility for a relationship in development.

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The Animate Subject Is Partly an Object Let me now turn to the objecthood of the living subject. Patočka claims that we relate to each other also as objects and that this seeing the other in an objective way, seeing the objecthood in the other, does not fall under an ethical failure. In opposition to some other phenomenologists, like Sartre and Levinas, for Patočka it is not inhumane to see objective qualities in the other, but rather a necessary modality of our relations, since for him there is nothing such as a pure subject (this volume, /139/). Even our self-understanding is dependent on relating to oneself as partly an object: It is indeed true that I have my own private inner time, which nobody else can share with me. But in this time I am constantly dealing with my organic foundation, my private activity is constantly making this foundation meaningful, and this making-meaningful has an objective character not only for another, but also for myself; in it, I am for myself constantly also an “object”, since I /although only in part/ see and touch myself, use my body in various ways, train it, work with its help etc. (this volume, /139/)

This parable of the objective aspect of the self, as exemplified by a body touching itself, has a long history in phenomenology and it originates from Husserl. Later on Merleau-Ponty formulated this idea of the ambiguous nature of our embodiment in the description of the right hand touching the left: When I touch my right hand with my left hand, the object “right hand” also has this strange property, itself, of sensing. As we have just seen, the two hands are never simultaneously both touched and touching. So when I press my two hands together, it is not a question of two sensations that I could feel together, as when we perceive two objects juxtaposed, but rather of an ambiguous organization where the two hands can alternate between the functions of “touching” and “touched.” (2012, 94)

Both Patočka and Merleau-Ponty articulate a critique against the idea of a pure subject. By emphasizing the foundational ambiguity in being experiencing and experienced – touching and being touched – they both align themselves in opposition to transcendental idealism. But more importantly, they both emphasize that even our ethical relations build on this ambiguity, of objective aspects of the other being precursory to our ethical relations. In the quotes above there is an interesting tension: Patočka describes death as becoming an object: “a being who used to have his own originality and who is now only an object.” But there is a complication to this, since even while we are living, we do relate to ourselves as objects: “I am for myself constantly also an ‘object.’” There are two senses of the concept of “object” here: 1. In the case of an I/You relationship with the deceased, the deceased You has become fixed in its objecthood. 2. Even as animate beings we relate to ourselves and others partly as objects. This ambiguity, which builds on the acknowledgement of the self as partly objectual, leads to a certain existential puzzlement. It is revealed that in my relation to myself there is a dynamic at play between the sensing and the sensed. I am that

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which senses and that which is sensed. And the latter passive objectual aspect of the self, that aspect of me “provides me a substitute for my objective seeing of myself, just as the horizon of things provides a substitute for seeing things from different sides.” (this volume, /139/) For Patočka the organic foundation of the body is that which makes a dialogical relationship to oneself possible. Since subjects are ambiguous in this way, the status of the self is not given and fixed but unstable. Whereas this non-givenness of the self gives us a certain prerequisite to develop, grow and change who we are, both in our self-understanding and in the eyes of others, phenomenological investigations also reveal how the ambiguity decentralizes the self. As Merleau-Ponty has it, “my life is made up of rhythms that do not have their reason in what I have chosen to be” (2012, 86). Inspired by Merleau-Ponty, Dylan Trigg describes this existential role of the organic body as anonymous: “In moods such as anxiety and in situations such as heart attacks, anonymity presents itself not as an innocuous structure of lived experience but an aspect of existence that serves to destabilize, threaten, and estrange the image we have of who we are.” (2021, 620) In this sense, we are not free to relate to our organic constituents as we choose, since the objective aspects have an agency beyond our will. And in certain situations, the objectivity in us may present us with challenges, the organic foundation might thwart my self-understanding and make me lose my orientation. This means that the dialogical relation within one’s self enables positive growth, reassessment and revitalization, but also opens up for the possibility of alienation, and even a loss of a sense of oneself. When we now move to Lispector’s work, this tension will resonate throughout the novel. The protagonist goes through a crisis in which her self-understanding becomes unhinged. Through encounters with beings that are radically other compared to her, and through facing her own organic and objective foundation, the narrator G.  H. describes how her self-understanding unfolds and has to be renegotiated.

Janair and the Inversion of the Gaze of the Other I will extract two events from The Passion according to G. H. that lead the reader in a philosophical meditation concerning subjecthood. The first one is the initial awakening of the main character, which forces her to understand herself in the light of the gaze of the other. When we enter the language of Lispector, it is clear from the start that we are not reading an ordinary novel. Most clearly, the conceptuality and the style of expression are characterized by what it lacks in comparison with more common forms of literary prose. It does not have a narrative structure. There is no classical narrative arc. And it lacks most indexical designations: personal names (with two exceptions: G. H. and Janair), place names and temporal determinations. In Lispector, we find an embracing of contingency and the open-endedness of the lived experience of life. Her prose aims at going beyond the readily determined and clearly constructed. Lispector expresses this sentiment in Agua Viva: “When I find the word strange, it

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is there that it attains sense. And when I find life strange, it is there that life begins.” (1973, 76) Her style of writing aims at capturing this feeling of strangeness and uncertainty. From the start we are addressed by expressions of uncertainty and disorientation. The opening line in The Passion According to G. H. sets the tone for our reading: “I’M SEARCHING, I’M SEARCHING. I’m trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else” (2014, 3). It signals that the reader will struggle with the task of following a narrator for whom the world is not yet formed as a clearly structured entity, but rather one of contingency (see Negrete 2018, 15). The book begins with the narrator G. H. cleaning the room that her maid Janair used to live in. Janair has recently quit her job and left the room that has served both as a cleaning closet and a bedroom. On one of the walls G. H. discovers a primitive coal drawing depicting a man, a woman, and a dog. From this moment, the novel turns into an existential meditation, an inner dialogue about the limits and layers of the self. When G. H. finds the drawing, she notices the coarsely drawn contours of the figures. They are badly proportioned, without symmetry, and evoke a sense of primitiveness in which the definition of the self is vague and coarse. G. H. senses a rawness. In that room, she threads into something uncivilized. This transgression has to be understood against the backdrop of G.  H.’s and Janair’s relationship. G. H. is a somewhat wealthy artist living in a well-designed penthouse apartment in Rio de Janeiro. Her relationship with the maid has been strained. Janair represents an ethnic underclass that G. H. has regarded as inferior and other compared to her own social world. And initially, G.  H. does not even remember the face of her servant: “The memory of the absent maid constrained me. I wanted to remember her face, and to my astonishment couldn’t […]. The recollection of her face escaped me, it had to be a temporary lapse” (p. 32). G. H. has to exhort her memory even to remember the name of the maid: “But her name – right, right, I finally remembered: Janair” (p. 32). From the perspective of the protagonist, Janair is a person without qualities, not a person to like or despise, but more clearly someone without distinction. The episode describes a certain shift. At first G. H. cannot even remember the name of the maid, she had always regarded the maid in neutral terms “as if she had no presence” (p. 33). Through the coarse drawing, G. H. understands that this gaze is reciprocal, Janair had depicted her as an undistinguished contour, with a lack of qualities. G. H.’s inhuman gaze on Janair is turned around, making G. H. understand herself in similar inhuman terms, stripped of her personality and her characteristics. This realization contains a horrific truth. When entering the room, it is as if the dehumanizing gaze is turned back at G. H. She understands that Janair probably did not like her, and that this tension between them now manifests in the space of the empty room and in the coarse drawing. G.  H. is thus entering a perspective that reveals her own self-absorption, and how her persona is dependent on her self-­ sufficiency and only maintained by the gazes of her peers: “I looked at the mural where I was likely depicted … I, the Man. And as for the dog – was that the epithet she gave me? For years I had only been judged by my peers and by my own milieu

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that was, as a whole, made of myself and for myself. Janair was the first truly outside person of whose gaze I was becoming aware” (p. 32). On the surface the encounter signifies the ethical challenge implicit in the reciprocal nature of our relations. G.  H.’s inhuman gaze on Janair carries with it the potential of herself being regarded as insignificant in the eyes of the other. Her identity – her understanding of herself as someone particular with certain traits and a certain social position – starts to lose its foothold. And she knows that it is she herself that initiated this inhuman gaze that now comes to solicit her: “In a way my discomfort was amusing: it had never occurred to me that, in Janair’s muteness, there might have been a reprimand of my life, which her silence might have called ‘a wanton life’? how had she judged me?” (p.  32) It is remarkable that here the immoral attitude does not reside in dislike, contempt or even hate, but rather in disregard, neutrality and lack of care. In the moment of realization, Janair had become the “indifferent enemy” (p. 32). Not an active, vicious and malignant interlocutor, but rather a neutral, passive and impersonal presence, which challenges the whole identity of G. H. Fernande Negrete describes this often occuring modality in Lispector’s writing as “a plane of life beyond the ‘human montage’” (2018, 2). There is a modality of our experience which does not depend on our constructions of identity and personality – a mode of being that is neutral and anonymous. The revelation that we are able to be present for each other, the world and our selves, without characteristics – that we can pertain a neutral gaze – sparks another existential episode. The encounter with the absence of Janair is followed by another encounter, which draws the reader deeper into this existential gray zone.

The Cockroach and the Inhuman Gaze The episode with the uncanny drawing in Janair’s room is followed by G. H. encountering a cockroach that is crawling out from a closet in her apartment. G. H. is paralyzed by the presence of the cockroach. What scares her at first is again a kind of clear lack of characteristics, the primitiveness and inhumanity of the roach: It was a face without a contour. The antennae stuck out in whiskers on either side of its mouth. Its brown mouth was well-drawn. The long and slender whiskers were moving slow and dry. Its black faceted eyes were looking. It was a cockroach as old as a fossilized fish. It was a cockroach as old as salamanders and chimeras and griffins and leviathans. (p. 48)

It reminds her of something ancient and rudimentary, a composition of elements that somehow add up to a living creature. But also of the fact that in her meticulously ordered and clean penthouse flat, there still was a space that had gone unnoticed. That “this room had escaped” (p.  39) and become infested by the unclean roach. The feeling of a place that has been soiled by the presence of the non-human and primitive insect brings back memories of her past, of a childhood in poverty in which roaches and bedbugs were constant usurpers of her living space.

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A primal fear is awakened in the protagonist. She is paralyzed at first, but the emotion develops through different stages. The crippling state of paralysis evolves into a sense of absolute awareness, a feeling of presence and vitality. G. H. understands that even in the primitive life-form of the roach there is a sense of vitality, “the awareness of living, inextricable from its body” (p. 43). This is not to be read as some form of reflexive consciousness, as in being aware of being alive. But rather a sense of awareness that is undivided. A sense of being alive without reflection, without identity and self-consciousness. It is a revelation of being “on the level of nature” (p. 46). Not being a part of nature, but being nature itself, a vital embodied force that strives only for survival. Not being aware of, but simply being aware: “the awareness that, more than awareness of life, was the actual process of life inside me” (p. 43). This perspective change, in which fear develops from petrification to vitality and empowerment, is the dramatic build up to the pivotal moment in which G. H. regains her confidence and attacks by slamming the door and crushing the roach between the door and the door-post: I lifted my hand as if to swear an oath, and in a single blow slammed the door on the half-­ emerged body of the cockroach ——————— As I did I had also closed my eyes. And that’s how I remained, trembling all over. What had I done? Maybe then I already knew that I didn’t mean what had I done to the cockroach but: what had I done to myself? (p. 46)

Another transgression unfolds: fear and disgust in the form of paralysis turns into vitality and hate, which paradoxically also leads to an understanding of kinship between G. H. and the roach. The primitive life-form of the roach makes G. H. understand that even she shares something of this way of being: “the actual process of life inside me”. And her act of aggression is again also an attack that turns on herself: “what had I done to myself?” She finds a kinship with the roach through the realization that also her life is founded upon material processes. By attacking the roach, she feels empowered, but is again reminded that the lack of human traits that she finds disgusting in the roach are also present in her. And to make things worse, the roach does not die from her first attack, it merely gets squished and starts to extract a white matter, but is still moving and looks at her: The roach with the white matter was looking at me. I don’t know if it was seeing me, I don’t know what a roach sees. But we were looking at each other, and also I don’t know what a woman sees. But if its eyes weren’t seeing me, its existence was existing me – in the primary world I had entered, beings exist others as a way of seeing one another. (p. 73)

In this breaking down of grammar – “beings exist others” – we get close to Patočka’s question concerning how we should articulate the ways in which “the other exist in me”. But Lispector’s expression is more radical, it signifies a complete dissolution of the border between the self and the other. This idea is related to a form of monism in which vitality is a universal feature  – non-restricted by a categorical subject/ object dualism  – rather than to the relational understanding of subjectivity that

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Patočka advocates. When the roach, now existing on the brink of death, looks at her with its eyes and its life-form that are composed in a very different way than hers, she is grasped by its sense of being. She herself becomes roach-like in the encounter. Whereas Patočka investigates “the fact of our being for others” (this volume, /131/), in Lispector’s account, G. H. is no longer a being for the other. The transgression is more radical, she is inhabited by the other. G. H. has lost the sense of self through which a normal relationality can be established.3 And this loss of identity has come about through her act of aggression. The attempt to kill the roach, which fails, has brought her to a gray-zone between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, self and other. As in her encounter with Janair – or more exactly her encounter with the absence of Janair – the episode with the cockroach signifies a revelation in which her gaze is turned back at her. Seeing the cockroach as an assembly of matter awakens the revelation that also her body is an assemblage of proteins, of blood, of hair, of nails, i.e., of something with an objectual character. Her human life is in this sense not exceptional in comparison with the roach, it is an assembly of something that cannot be categorized as either animate or inanimate: “[S]o I was discovering that, though compact, a roach is composed of layers and brown layers, fine as onionskin, as if each could be lifted by a fingernail and still there would always be another underneath, and then another” (p. 49). If life can consist of these layers of material sedimentation, what then, if anything, distinguishes the roach or her own body from the world of inanimate objects: And then I looked at the door handle. After that I looked at the wood of the wardrobe. I looked at the glass of the window. Just look at what everything is: it’s a piece of thing, a piece of iron, of gravel, of glass. […] The treasure was a piece of metal, it was a piece of whitewash from the wall, it was a piece of matter made into roach. (p. 141)

This revelation reverberates throughout the book. G. H. becomes unraveled when facing this fact that a certain materiality, void of anything we would call self, still is constitutive of what we call “self”. The episodes in which G. H. is met by the gaze of the roach reminds her that her own body consist of an material assemblage, and it resonates with an earlier revelation: I had felt this astonishment before: it was the same one I had experienced when I saw my own blood outside of me, and I had marveled at it. Since the blood I was seeing outside of me, that blood I was drawn to with such wonder: it was mine. (p. 153)

When blood pours out from a wound beyond her living body, it is revealed as a lifeless material substance. The life-constituting blood, when it departs the body, appears as a material in the category with all other material. In this sense, there is an anonymous, material process of life that stands as a backdrop to first-personal experience.

 Patočka acknowledges this kind of loss of self as something abnormal: “if its boundary fell, the difference between I and You would fall, too” (this volume, /132/). 3

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These experiences of loss of a sense of self and transgressions into neutrality and objecthood stem from earlier events in G. H’s life. She connects the episode with the roach to an earlier unwanted pregnancy and the painful abortion she had to go through. She finds connections to sexual experiences, and she reflects on the relations between modern and pre-modern ways of life. However, there is something specific – a kind of philosophical core-question – that reverberates throughout the book. What if we scale away all layers of our identity, remove the scaffolding of the self or deconstruct the human montage: what is left, if anything is left, how are we to articulate it? In this unfolding, the experience of G. H. is described both as the primitive and vital quality of pure awareness, and as the horrifying and crippling sense of a loss of self – a descent into neutrality: The neutral is inexplicable and alive, try to understand me: just as protoplasm and semen and protein are of a living neutral. (p. 104) The great neutral reality of what I was living was overtaking me with its extreme objectivity. (p. 101) The horror of the neutral life that lives and moves. (p. 91)

All these expressions allude to the experience that exists beyond our thinking and reflecting nature, beyond identity and personality. Fernanda Negrete describes it as “the experience of being moved by and coming intimately close to the impersonal” (2018, 11). We can find a related notion in Paul Ricœur: “In effect, it is extraordinary that life functions in me without me […] the circulation of my blood and the beating of my heart do not depend on me” (2007, 418). The fact that we can distinguish between, for example, breathing consciously and intentionally and respiration that functions within my body independently of my conscious awareness and efforts, reveals that there is a certain kind of ambiguity at play, which resembles a subject-object relationship in some ways. When I breathe consciously, my mind is engaged and agential in this activity, as if I would relate to the diaphragm and my lungs as I relate to other objects. But I can also just breathe. The breath goes on despite of me, independently of my thinking and my intentional agency. Some powers of my body are autonomous, but they are not beyond what I call me. In the case of the bloodstream this becomes even more obvious, it circulates autonomously and animates my body, without any effort or agency from what I call self. G. H.’s revelation is that: life, even my life, goes on independently of what I call “me”. When G. H.’s personal identity is peeled away, an animate materiality is still present in her and through this experience she can re-establish a feeling of kinship even with the most primitive beings like the cockroach. This revelation resonates with Patočka’s claim that “I am for myself constantly also an ‘object’” (this volume, /139/). When he writes about the private activity of “dealing with my organic foundation” (/139/), he alludes to the anonymous life of the body. Whether we consciously and intentionally use our body or live unreflectively in subjective experience, the body is something we are, it is a constant anchor for our subjectivity. And whereas our personal identity and the scaffolding of our

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subjectivity may change or even dissolve, the materiality and (in one sense of the term) objectivity of us as corporeal beings remain. In opposition to Sartre (and Husserl and Kant), for Patočka the self is not isolated from others, it is not transcendental. Quite the opposite, through our embodiment we are kin. This objectual aspect of the self is organic, material and embodied, and it is through this shared material fabric that we are inevitably related to each other. Admittedly these two accounts are not compatible through and through. Patočka articulates a relational ontology (intersubjectivity) in which “the other exists in me”, i.e., my subjectivity is co-constituted through my relationships, even in cases when the other is deceased. In Lispector’s novel, the boundary between the I and the other has completely collapsed through a dissolvement of the subject. She describes this transgression as: “beings exist others” and “Its existence was existing me”. This is not a situation in which the other has ceased to address one actively (as in Patočka), but rather an event through which the distinction between the I and the other has collapsed. However, I think the two texts reveal different aspects of a certain reciprocity that is foundational for the making and unmaking of our subjectivity. Patočka laments the loss of reciprocity in relations to the deceased, whereas Lispector’s protagonist goes through a deep existential crisis due to a loss of a certain “for-me-ness” – her selfhood has dissolved and with it the possibility for the relationality between the I and the other. Through this experience of crisis, the protagonist discovers a deep kinship with the world. Here is a similarity to an earlier essay by Patočka. In his essay “Life in Balance, Life in Amplitude” he writes: “Man appears to be most human and in his highest human function where the seemingly fixed form of life is scattered and where everything problematic, unsteady and extreme, which is hidden under the surface of normal living, is recovered” (2020, 32). Like Lispector, Patočka embraces a certain readiness to face contingency and crisis as a form of authentic life. In the concluding part I will briefly draw upon this sentiment that is common for both authors, as I think it is essential for us to understand that they shared a motivation in their writing.

Conclusion Patočka warned us of the notion of pure subjectivity. He emphasizes the relationality of our self-understanding, i.e., that we are constantly captured by the other and thus co-created in our encounters. Even to the extent that it is only through the other that we can understand ourselves as bodies and as individuals with certain qualities. Lispector’s novel is a radical exemplification of this process. G. H.’s encounters with Janair, and later on with the roach, are described as momentous events in which her self-understanding is radically renegotiated. In both cases G. H. is faced by a mute and passive other, but even in the encounter with the anonymous other, she is grasped by this neutrality, and when this inhuman gaze grasps her it leads to an existential crisis. The novel portrays and brings to light the inevitable effect that the

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other has on the self. Through the neutral gaze, G. H. becomes unraveled and at a certain point it seems as if she would lose her orientation completely. But in the end this unravelling, even though it is painful and disorienting, leads her to see clearer. To understand the material processes of life as the vital force that animates her body in the same way as it animates other bodies – however different they might appear in their constitution – does not in the end lead to alienation, but rather to an understanding of the kinship of all life. I read Lispector’s novel as a description of a person who has become intoxicated by her sense of identity to such an extent that all perspectives and responses from an other entail radical and painful solicitations that lead to disorientation. By trying to keep up her appearances, her self-understanding and her integrity in relation to what she conceives as other – the primitive, the non-human and the neutral – she becomes volatile. The unravelling frees her from this self-centeredness and re-establishes her understanding of kinship with the world and others. The deconstruction of her human montage is a process of liberation, but this path takes her through a painful unmaking of self, which in the end brings her closer to the world that she has kept afar by clinging onto her identity. In Patočka we can find a similar sentiment. His struggles, both in life and in philosophy, were perhaps of a different kind than those of the fictional character in The Passion According to G. H. However, he quite clearly advocates a readiness to challenge the set and comfortable paths of life, in order for us to see more clearly. In his early essay he describes a certain existential pain which brings us to see life more truthfully, beyond the comfortable structures that are usual and obvious. Patočka writes:” [H]e who has been transformed by pain, no longer has a yearning for the vulgar bliss and tough power of the day” (2020, 41). Most obviously this is a comment on the totalitarian rule under which Patočka was living,4 but in extension it is a comment on the revelatory aspect of existential pain. He articulates how breaking with the normal and set order brings you into discomfort, but at the same time, this dissent from the humanistic understanding of human life as refined, rational and organized, brings you closer to life, helps one “find unity precisely without firm ground” (2020, 62). He advocates a life in amplitude, a notion that resists the clearly defined attributes of identity.5

References Lispector, Clarice. 1973. Agua Viva; Ficção. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Artenova. ———. 2014. The passion according to G. H. Trans. Idra Novey. London: Penguin Classics.

 It was published after Czechoslovakia was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1939 (see Eric Manton in Patočka 2020, 73). 5  This publication has been supported by grant no. 22-15446S “ECEGADMAT” of the Czech Science Foundation. 4

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Magri, Elisa. 2021. Social sensitivity and the ethics of attention. European Journal of Philosophy 1: 1–15. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of perception. Trans. Donald A.  Landes. New York: Routledge. Negrete, Fernanda. 2018. Approaching impersonal life with Clarice Lispector. Humanities 55: 1–18. Patočka, Jan. 2020. Living in problematicity. Trans. Eric Manton. Prague: Oikoymenh. Ricœur, Paul. 2007. Freedom and nature: The voluntary and the involuntary. Trans. Erazim V. Kohák. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Trigg, Dylan. 2021. “It happens, but I’m not there”: On the phenomenology of childbirth. Human Studies 44: 615–633. Zahavi, Dan. 2017. Thin, thinner, thinnest: Defining the minimal self. In Embodiment, enaction, and culture: Investigating the constitution of the shared world, ed. Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs, and Christian Tewes, 193–201. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Chapter 12

“Unresting Death, a Whole Day Nearer Now”: Parfit and Patočka on Death and False Consolations Niklas Forsberg

Sweet Consoling Theorization (Killing Death) Jan Patočka opens his essay “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” by noticing that the topic of death is usually approached as a question about “the mortality or immortality of the soul.” (Patočka this volume, /130/)1 As one approaches death from this angle, one of the central questions must be how one can live on, and what can live on, after the body is gone. But, in contrast to this, Patočka also notices that it is trivially true to say that the other never leaves “wholly” but “lives in us.” This aspect of afterlife, Patočka contends, has been thoroughly neglected in philosophy. (/130/) So, he makes that question his central one. Patočka never published “The Phenomenology of Afterlife,” but not, as far as I can see, because he wasn’t pleased with his thoughts in it, but simply because he did not complete it. After his explorations of some of the ways in which the (dead) other lives in us, the text ends with an “Addendum” containing incomplete sentences and words gesturing toward topics that he now thinks need to be addressed. But here, so it seems to me, the difficulties that he is gesturing toward seem to throw us back to the territory he thought was well-trodden already: issues about my death, the particularity of death, and the difficulties surrounding the notions of a monadic self. The text thus seems to make a circular movement, and the fact that the text was never completed means that the circle remains to be closed. After afterlife, we are brought back to the beginning, and called upon to rethink death – and revisit the  The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation. 1

N. Forsberg (*) University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 G. Strandberg, H. Strandberg (eds.), Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death, Contributions to Phenomenology 128, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_12

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aspects of death that Patočka initially said everyone had already talked about. The phenomenological explorations of how the other lives within us after his/her death, will open up for an exercise of rethinking my death too. So, let’s return to the beginning, to formulations of the kinds of worries about death that are monadic and focused on the death of me, and then turn to ask what kind of clarity Patočka’s reflections on the ways in which the other lives on can bring to those topics. It is hard to avoid beginning with Epicurus famous statement – “If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not” – as one approaches the end, death, theoretically. Epicurus’s statement is formed with exactly the kind of obviousness and confidence that makes it seem irresistible, borrowing thrust from the trope of tautology. As such, it lends itself to the status of an inscription, as words carved into stone that we all have to relate to. It seems obvious: “Where Death is, I am not. Where I am, death is not.” More importantly, it invites comforting thoughts. My misery will end. Sure, my happiness will end too, but we probably don’t fear the loss of happiness in the same way as we fear continuous presence of misery and pain. If death really means that I am gone, then death means that there no longer is an “I” that can suffer. For anyone of us who have learned to endure severe pain and walked trailed by the darker shadows, this thought is, or can at least seem, very comforting. When we find ourselves face to face with the end of it all, it feels good to be able to say that “It’s going to be OK. It is simply similar to when sleep finally finds you, when body and soul are tired and weary.” Death is great relief. At the very least, it won’t hurt. Life hurts. That will stop. You will be dead. But think about how much of this supposedly consoling phrase is written as a meeting between two individualities: in an I-You form. Death concerns me, the “I.” Death him- or herself, is often presented in a personalized form. It is described as an entity with an identity that is somewhere. Individuals everywhere. My death is between me and death – and one can almost see him coming, like Bengt Ekerot in The Seventh Seal (Bergman 1957). There’s something very self-centered about this image of death as something that is experienced in an I-You relation. I will not hurt. You cannot hurt me. Non-life cannot harm life. Life and death, me and you, are two separated individualities from beginning to end. Death is thus introduced as a question about individuality. The reassuring thought that Epicurus then offers is that when death comes, I will not be there. Death is the only “you” that you can be certain not to meet. But that comfort still comes at a cost – and a fairly high cost at it – you will, after all, be dead. Death is by no means gone. But at this point, the comforting sound of the Epicurean death-stanza is drastically reduced. There is little rest to be found in acknowledging that death means that you are gone. To many (but probably not all), that’s exactly the problem. Show the devil the door, and he crawls back through a window at the back. I, like the devil, will come back to this. In a way, this is where Derek Parfit picks up the stick and carries it “further,” in an “analytical” manner. Parfit is someone who clearly seeks the Epicurean consolation, but seems to feel that the Epicurean view doesn’t quite give the consolation he wants, or that it needs to be “spelled out” in a way that makes evident why “death-­ as-­non-being” really is comforting.

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For Parfit, comfort is found when we understand individuality (the essence of the “I” that will face death) correctly. It is not only death that needs to be transformed into a radical non-being, but, in a way, the I itself too. According to him, it is only because we “intuitively” think (analytic philosophers tend to think that we always go about having “intuitions” about things) of the “I” in a non-reductive way that facing death seems so horrific to us. In the paper “Personal Identity” (from 1971) Parfit describes “Egoism” as “the fear not of near but of distant death, the regret that so much of one’s only life should have gone by.” (Parfit 1971, 27) This is, perhaps, a rather peculiar way of explicating the concept of egoism, but I think it is worth taking seriously. When death is an imminent threat, that is what is in our focus; we instinctively struggle for survival. When death is distant, we start worrying about how one is perceived, for how long one’s supply will last, if there is a point at which one’s income may get below the acceptable, and so on. That is, when death is distant, gathering things for me becomes (or may become) important; so Parfit seems to think anyway. The fact that large portions of one’s only life may already have passed is thus a sign that I could and should have gathered more, I should have built up a larger supply, and perhaps even established a better reputation and legacy. What Parfit then goes on to say is that egoism  – as a form of fear of distant death – is far from natural or merely instinctive, but is rooted in a specific view of personal identity. So, if we get rid of the faulty view of personal identity, we will also get rid of egoism. The problem, for him, is that we tend to think of the “I” – my individuality – in non-reductive ways. Our “intuitions” are, Parfit assumes, that “I” am something more than the kinds of stuff that physically and biologically happens in and to my body, and it is this belief that, according to him, makes death seem grim. What we should adopt, Parfit argues, is rather the unintuitive reductivist view: “I” am nothing more than “the existence of a brain and a body, and the occurrence of interrelated physical and mental events.” (Parfit 1984, 210) There is no “further fact” about me. That’s just naïve intuitions, wishful thinking, according to Parfit. Now, this may sound, well, reductive, to some of us. But that’s exactly the point. It’s supposed to be. Parfit takes this bleak image of the individual to be really good news, comforting even. Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others. (Parfit 1984, 281)

The idea that egoism – as excessive care for the self – becomes less of a problem here is rooted in the belief that there’s not much of an “I” to worry about. What “I” am, under this description (as nothing more than “the existence of a brain and a body, and the occurrence of interrelated physical and mental events”), is indeed truly uninteresting. And since there is not much to care for when it comes to “me,” Parfit feels that he can focus on others.

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Obviously, one must ask what this “concern for the lives of others” actually amounts to. The most obvious way of asking that question is this: if I am nothing more than processes in the brain, and if that is a reason not to bother much about “me,” then why on earth should I bother about the lives of others, for they are “individuals” too, and as such, nothing more than “the existence of a brain and a body, and the occurrence of interrelated physical and mental events.” (Parfit 1984, 210) If that really is all there is to any and all individuals, what would “care for the other” amount to? To the extent that “I” am uninteresting, all others “I’s” should be equally uninteresting. So, how are we to understand the notions of “concern” and “care” for other people here? And what kind of understanding of the very idea of “having a life” does this way of thinking harbor? Who is caring for whom? What does “caring” and “concern” mean here, if it describes the relation between two entities that fundamentally and essentially are nothing but “interrelated physical and mental events”? What can care and concern for such “entities” mean, for them, to them? Parfit does have a story about what “living such a life” might mean, but it’s not a very rich one. “Having a life” must mean, minimally at least, “having a future self” – that is, it is a temporal concept. And Parfit’s way of spelling out that temporality is by saying that, according to his preferred reductionist view, having a future self simply means: “the holding of more particular facts.” (Parfit 1984, 210) His pang for reductions is vivid here: this is, so it seems to me at least, just another instance of his insistence that “there is no further fact.” Now, how is this connected to death? When I believed the Non-Reductionist View, I also cared more about my inevitable death. After my death, there will [be] no one living who will be me. I can now redescribe this fact. Though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connections as those involved in experience-­memory, or in the carrying of an earlier intention. Some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways. There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad. (Parfit 1984, 281)

What this means, and Parfit is fully aware of this, is that when “individuality” is understood in this “reductive” way; death can be re-described  – and it is only through this act of re-describing that death now seems less frightening. Parfit even goes so far as to say that he has managed to “kill” death by redescription. Consider the fact that, in a few years, I shall be dead. This fact can seem depressing. But the reality is only this. After a certain time, none of the thoughts and experiences that occur will be directly causally related to this brain, or be connected in certain ways to these present experiences. That is all this fact involves. And, in that redescription, my death seems to disappear. (Parfit 1995, 45)

About the final sentence here  – “In that redescription my death seems to disappear”  – I think it’s pivotal that we take note of two things. One is the “in that

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redescription.” The other is “seems.” For of course, this redescription is a pretty demanding one. And, even if we agree to view death “under that description,” it merely seems as if death disappears. But, of course, it does not. Death does not go away – no matter how reductive we push ourselves to be. It’s only through high-­ level theorizing that death stops to haunt us. Show the devil the door, and he crawls back through a window at the back. I assume that you all see that I think there’s something utterly evasive about Parfit’s thought-movements. One reason why one may begin to think so, is of course the idea of “reductivism” itself. I think one would be well advised to approach all philosophical theories that aspire to be, and salute, reductive forms of understanding, while they, at the same time, make ambitious claims about generality, with some sort of hesitancy. (It requires a specific attitude to say: “Yes, I prefer the less rich description. That has to be closer to the truth!”) And that makes me wonder what kind of consolation this really offers. For it seems to me clear that consolation can only be attained at the cost of theorizing reality away. From within Parfit’s philosophical idiom, things obviously look a bit different – and I must admit that I don’t feel entirely at home within this idiom. But there, within it, there are a number of distinct ways of understanding and approaching these claims. For example, we may ask if acts of redescribing and actively reducing our understanding of what an individual is are problematic from an ontological point of view – that is, if this reductive picture errs in its reductivist description of what an individual is. One thing that I take to be true is that this picture is not blatantly false. We are bundles of atoms. We have bodies and brains, and “interrelated physical and mental events” (Parfit 1984, 210) do happen. So, the reduction is clearly possible. Redescriptions always are. What the ontological issue is about, is not about the redescription itself, but the scope of it; the peculiar addendum: “there is no further fact.” For when we care for others, we do not care for bodies and brains or bundles of atoms. I don’t think Parfit cared about others in that way either (to the extent that it makes sense to care in such a way in the first place), and I think we owe it to Parfit to assume that his care for others was real, authentic, and we also owe it to Parfit to think that he actually did worry less about his own death after “adopting” the reductivist stance. I think Parfit is wrong ontologically speaking, and I will say a bit more about that shortly, but I wouldn’t want to say that his reductive re-redescription itself is false, or not possible to make. I can’t get around the thought that reductive ontologies possibly can’t get the full picture. But, to Parfit’s defense, I am quite certain that neither did he. Thus, there is a sense in which we need to dive into questions about human psychology as well. A more fair description of Parfit’s view – which I think can be seen more clearly in his rather poetic prose than in his austere definitions – is that he thought that by endorsing this reductive view of human individuality, he gave himself reasons to not feel so worried. Call this a self-justificatory practice, if you like. Thus, his real claim is: if you look at human individuals in this reductive way, you also have reasons to worry less.

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So, we all agree that the representation of human individuality that he gives is rather meager. Parfit must think so too. That means that the real question is one about getting our moral psychology right. Are we ready to say that being informed about these parfitian reasons to fear death less makes us fear death less? On what grounds can one say that Parfit is right or wrong about how death now affects us? Furthermore, there’s a question about how death should affect us to be asked too. I am quite convinced that Parfit would think so anyway. He describes ways of thinking about individuality that lessens egoism and makes death disappear. Who would not want that? But is the rather personal, and psychological, “effect” that “If I think like this, I am not as inclined to be afraid” a satisfactory way of dealing with these issues?

Body qua Körper and Body qua Leib One way to start thinking about human psychology, and how that is related to various “ontological stances,” is to note just how little of our everyday interactions with one another depends on stances we have taken. Even if we can take a reductive stance and say that death now looks less frightening when I put on these glasses – there’s a question about how much of death’s reality that actually remains intact whence that stance is taken. Or put it this way: to what extent is our understanding of death already intertwined with the richer picture of individuality and human life that Parfit decided to remove by an intellectual act of reduction? Parfit seems to assume that death (itself) means the same if we view it in relation to the reductive image as it does if we view it in relation to a richer, fuller, image of individuality; as if it is obvious that the sense of the concept remains unchanged if we abstract significant aspects of the lived praxis in which the concept takes shape (that we may find disturbing.) But is that so? I am inclined to say that not only has Parfit redescribed “individuality,” he has also redescribed, or reinvented, death. If we rephrase Partif’s reductive view, we may say that he stresses that what dies is merely my body, and there’s no further fact about me than that. The body merely changes shape, decays. Of course, there are “further facts” about the dead, even from Parfit’s point of view. There will be memories, thought patters, ideas and connections that have been made, changed, or dissolved. What is liberating for Parfit is that they basically have nothing to do with death. Parfit seems to want to be able to say that death only concerns my body, and since there’s no soul, I have nothing to worry about. But what is this body that dies? At this point, it is helpful to borrow one distinction that Husserl called attention to, and that Merleau-Ponty picked up and revitalized, between Körper and Leib (see e.g. Husserl 1990, Chapter 3; Merleau-Ponty 1968). “Körper” is, one may say, mere body – the body that is available to objective descriptions and measurements; and the sense it makes to talk about body in those terms are clearly visible in wordings such as “My body was a the department meeting, but my soul was not,” or “My

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body weighs 75 kilos.” This is one way of thinking about embodiment. It is looking at our embodiment from an external point of view. Embodiment qua Leib describes our embodiment in a different way. If Körper describes “I have a body,” Leib describes “I am a body.” This is the embodied existence we meet in “I love you”; “Yes, more, please”; “Stop it, you are hurting me.” When somebody vomits because of depression, it’s not the Körper that throws up, it’s the Leib. So, let us now ask: what is death in relation to Körper and Leib? One way to start thinking about that question – to what extent is our notion of death formed in relation to body qua Körper, and to what extent is it formed in relation to body qua Leib? – is to return to Parfit’s effort to redescribe death away with these notions of embodiment in mind and ask what it is that has been removed in the reductivist redescription. So let’s return to this passage, which describes Parfit’s image of afterlife, as it were – his further, future self, that supposedly can be redescribed as experiences that are remotely related to the existence of processes in his body and brain – experiences of him, after he is gone: There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad. (Parfit 1984, 281)

Parfit notes that his life will create patterns, as it were, in the weave of lives that are not his, and that there are both things and relations that exceed his reductivist image of individuality. And I cannot help but noticing that Parfit seems to find comfort not only in his redescribed reduced and diminished self but also in his legacy – his influences and things done “as the result of my advice.” This is not to be ridiculed; but it creates a crack, as it were, in the theory since part of the comfort that he actually sees lies precisely in the kinds of things that must be described as that kind of “further facts” that he claims do not exist. His embodied thoughts, Parfit as Leib, lives on, even though he has struggled quite hard to show that death only means that I go from Körper to Körper. Another way to say this is: as soon as Parfit allows himself to let some phenomenology enter his theorizing, the idea that a life, an embodied being, can be reduced to a Körper, begins to crumble. And I am inclined to say that what we can see through these cracks is that Parfit did fear death. To be fair: I think that Parfit knew this. His claim is not necessarily that “I have discovered what death really is” but “I have found a way to think about my demise, that gives me reasons to fear it less.” He is well aware that it is the adoption of a theoretical perspective that gives him consolation. To this, I want to reply: If this works for you, that may be good enough. It serves a point. But can we readily assume that death can be reduced to an object that we take a stance toward? What happens if we allow more phenomenology in? What happens if we allow ourselves to look at how the notions of death and afterlife are formed, lived, before we “take a stance toward them”? What is fear of death and concern about one’s afterlife like before they have been made an object for theory?

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Relentless Death At this point I want to turn our attention to a poem by Philip Larkin called Aubade: Aubade I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse —The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape,

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Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house. (Larkin 2013)

An Aubaude is normally a song about the dusk to dawn cycles within which lovers move. Larkin’s poem can indeed be said to be an Aubade, even though its tone is not especially cheerful. But it is still about how we are forced to part from the one’s we love. Each morning, a new parting. We wake up to “soundless darkness.” The inevitable stares us in the face. Unresting death. I will not attempt to do a literary analysis of the poem – I leave that to another kind of scholar. What interests me is that Larkin offers us a very different perspective on the themes that Parfit explores. Death never rests, it is ceaselessly active like the sun and the moon, as dawns and dusks. There are the same concerns about “the good not done,” and “the love not given,” that Parfit saw as effects of a false and unnatural egoism. But when Larkin explores precisely the kinds of thoughts that Parfit found liberating, the idea that there is “the existence of a brain and a body, and the occurrence of interrelated physical and mental events” (Parfit 1984, 210) – which, in Larkin’s poems comes out as the idea that “No rational being can fear a thing it will not feel” – Larkin finds no relief, no comfort. The image of death that Parfit’s redescription gives rise to is met with a “That is what we fear.” That, even death redescribed, is relentlessly going from door to door, like postmen. “No taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with.” In response to the redescribed individuality and redescribed death that Parfit finds reassuring, Larkin responds: But that is exactly it! That is exactly why death hurts us. No matter how many attempts we do to redescribe death, to reduce it to mere disappearance, to simply state that life is the complete opposite to non-life, death is still death, death’s finality will still remain. That I will be gone is exactly what we fear. How can the responses be so different? One answer lies in the mere fact that Parfit’s redescription portrays our embodied lives as Körper, whereas Larkin’s poems – full of touches, smells, vision, people drinking to forget or cope, and emotions, nerves  – recasts the same fear embodied as Leib. Sure, Parfit is right that Körper transforms, disintegrates. But Leib dies too. There are, however, two more aspects that I think we need to bring into view in order to attain some clarity here. One has already been mentioned: Parfit seems to think that we can understand the concept of death itself in a clear and rich enough way by thinking of it in physicalistic and reductionistic accounts of body qua Körper. I have suggested that what the concept of death actually means to us cannot survive such a reductionistic understanding of individuality. Embodied life qua Leib, brings death back to us as something we have to live with, and live through, quite regardless of how much of me that dies the Parfitian death. So, what is it that goes wrong in the Parfitian analysis? Is it merely the choice of a reductive

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perspective? No. There are also philosophico-methodological assumptions that lead us wrong here. In particular: the philosophical urge for clear and precise definitions of our concepts tends to block our capacities to actually see what is involved in our lives with concepts, through concepts, how deep into the constantly changing fabric of words and deeds and situations and histories that our words reach (see e.g. Forsberg 2022). So, one way in which I think Parfit misleads us is due to him thinking that death is best understood in relation to his reductionistic perspective, whereas I think that we need to think that what death is and means cannot be understood without looking at a great number of things  – and our embodied existences qua Leib is just one of them. Another absolutely crucial feature is the fact that Parfit (and Larkin too, to be fair) picture death as something that concerns the “I.” Death is between me and death. There can be no doubt that one’s own death is one of the most central deaths one has to think about. But is the I-You relation between me and death thereby to be understood as formative of the concept of death? I don’t mean to suggest that it doesn’t play a massive role in the formation of our concept. But what about all the practices and rituals and losses and broken bonds that death brings that do not directly relate to my own demise? To what extent is the fear of my own death formative of our concept of death? Listen for example, to these lines from Simone Weil’s notebooks: To lose somebody: we suffer at the thought that the dead one, the absent one, should have become something imaginary, something false. We must go down into ourselves where the desire that is not imaginary resides. (…) The loss of contact with reality – there lies evil, there lies grief (…) The remedy is to use the loss itself as an intermediary for attaining reality. The presence of the dead one is imaginary, but his absence is real, it is henceforth his manner of appearing. (Simone Weil, Notebooks, quoted in Murdoch 2003, 502)

It is the last sentence in particular that I want to focus on now. “The presence of the dead one is imaginary, but his absence is real, it is henceforth his manner of appearing.” Yes, the other is gone, the person dead, but the absence is indeed very, very real. And who could possibly deny that one of the most central ways we have for attaining any kind of understanding of death always comes through the death of others … We first face death through the deaths of others, and we learn to live with those deaths by living with them – that is, continuing to live with their deaths, their absences, as presences in our lives. What death means to us, is, cannot be understood without this formative encounter. So, even though one may find the Epicurean stanza consoling, and even though one may think that Parfit gives us good reasons to fear our own deaths a little less, we still have good reasons to wonder if these images of death as something that concerns me, the “I,” actually helps, or how far it takes us. For what is this form of consolation worth, if it touches only upon a small aspect of what we fear? Is it perhaps also possible that the consolations we felt were based on us simply not getting, or even avoiding, some very central aspects of the very phenomena we were trying to grasp?

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This is, I think, the point at which Patočka, and phenomenology, comes onto the scene, and why Patočka’s reflections on death and afterlife had its particular focus.

 eing with Others, Dying with Others, and the Hollowness B of (False) Consolations As I said at the very beginning, Patočka opens his essay “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” by noticing that the question of afterlife often is “reduced to the issue of the mortality or immortality of the soul” (this volume, /130/). One could say that Parfit reasons first and foremost within this idiom: Since there is no further fact, no soul that can live on, I don’t need to worry much about my death. What phenomenology teaches us, and what also guides Patočka, is the thought that “Human existence does not exist on its own and by itself,” to borrow a formulation from Hans Ruin (2019, 16). It is important to recognize that this fact that we exist with and through others, does not only mean that we exist in relation to others, but also that we die in relation to others and that the dead lives with us – the lesson from Weil – as absences. Studying those absent others, and how we live with them after them, is thus a part of what it means to understand not only our being, but the concept of death itself. Patočka: All those who are not close to the dead person have an implicit awareness of how we live with the dead in the case of closeness, in the form of an indeterminate horizon. Those who have an original awareness of life with the dead are those close to him; they undertake the task to master this absence, to incorporate it somehow into their own lives which have been rather profoundly modified by the ceasing of the dead person’s available towardness. (this volume, /136–137/)

What death is comes into view as one explores and explicates the ways in which we live with the dead. These are features of the concept of death that are, so it seems to me, absolutely central and crucial. These are also features that are lacking in Parfit’s concept of death, since he has redescribed them away. And that should lead us to ask what “death” he killed by redescribing it. Looking into the manifold ways in which death is part of life shows, I am inclined to say, that Parfit did not redescribe our “death” away. It was a false consolation. It should also be said, however, that the exploration of how the dead lives with us is an exploration that will, in a certain sense, go beyond the Heideggerian existential of being-toward-death (Heidegger 2001, Division 2:1), a notion that now appears to be tied in somewhat similar ways to my death. At the very least, one should raise the question – and I do not mean to suggest that I have the full answer to it – about to what extent Heidegger’s hyphenated “being-toward-death” also builds on the idea that death first and foremost concerns my being’s demise, and that he too exhibits a blindness to the ways in which our concept of death is formed by how we live with the dead, and how the dead lives with us.

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One preliminary “result” of these reflections is that they make manifest one way in which we often go wrong in philosophy because we readily assume that we are in command of our own concepts. And that is no surprise. There is a sense in which we all know what death means. It is therefore tempting to use the use (meaning: “employing the sense”) closest to one’s own heart – say, my own fear of my own death – as a model for what death means and therefore is. The problem is, though, that even though we find a way to cope with that particular inflection of the concept, it is still possible – indeed, quite likely – that we thereby have created a false, simplified, image. It gave us consolation, but a false one. A second thing that these reflections point to is that if we cannot readily assume that the central aspects of our lives with words are those that are closest to us, in plain view, those that seems to affect us the most; then we must also say that the philosophical investigations into our lives with words must include the effort to at least try to not trust one’s own inclinations. Doubt yourself. Your fear of death may indeed blind you to what death is. Instead of planning your funeral and writing your will, and instead of making peace with the fact that death will come to my door too, like the postman, perhaps we need to look at who takes care of the graves when the grave’s caretakers are dead too, and to look closely, anthropologically even, at the rites at other sites.2 But death is relentless, and to stress that the dead live with us will in no way bring them back. They only live with us as dead. So, as we learn to think more and wider about how death comes into our lives (how death is so much more than just the endpoint of a life), we should perhaps not assume that this will bring us consolation at last. this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.

Show the devil the door, and he crawls back through a window at the back.

References Bergman, Ingmar (Director). 1957. Det sjunde inseglet. Svensk filmindustri. Forsberg, Niklas. 2022. Lectures on a philosophy less ordinary: Language and morality in J. L. Austin’s philosophy. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Being and time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Husserl, Edmund. 1990. Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: Second book, studies in the phenomenology of constitution. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. The Hague: Nijhoff. Larkin, Philip. 2013. In The complete poems, ed. Archie Burnett. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  This is one of the major merits of (Ruin 2019).

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The visible and the invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Murdoch, Iris. 2003. Metaphysics as a guide to morals. London: Vintage Classics. Parfit, Derek. 1971. Personal identity. The Philosophical Review 80 (1): 3–27. ———. 1984. Reasons and persons. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995. The unimportance of identity. In Identity, ed. Henry Harris, 13–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruin, Hans. 2019. Being with the dead: Burial, ancestral politics, and the roots of historical consciousness. Stanford: Stanford University Press.