ludger hagedornthe act of appearing. But at this point, when he seems to be closest to
Heidegger, Patočka’s philosophy of the movement of human existence
leads in another direction. The allusion to ontological difference seems
to be merely a preliminary step towards the idea that the third move-
ment, the movement of transcendence, has its own clear orientation:
it is the movement of giving oneself and of giving oneself to others.
The following quotation nicely brings out this double step of a
“shaking,” of a mere negative transcendence, and the concomitant
“manifestation” of a true life in self-transgression:
Thus at the center of our world the point is to reach from a merely given
life to the emergence of a true life, and that is achieved in the movement
that shakes the objective rootedness and alienation in a role, in
objectification — at first a purely negative movement, one that shakes our
bondage to life, setting free without revealing anything further; then
with a movement that positively presents the essential — as life universal,
giving birth to all in all, evoking life in the other, a self-transcendence
toward the other and with him again to infinity.^14This transgression towards the other and through the other (or with
the other — “Mitsein”) is to be understood as a mutual event. The two
participating entities, I and the other, cross each other and open up
the space for a mutual enrichment:
I constitute myself in creating the other, as he in creating me, and no
stage is possible in which there would be no way from one to the other
and back. In the case of a struggle, I gain no higher self-awareness than
the negative one that I am no thing and, in general, no objectivity; in
the case of giving, devoting myself, I gain the awareness of myself as
essentially infinite, reproducing the whole in each part, generating
another being beside myself, not only a finite but a nonobjective one.
I evoke in the other the same movement, while the other remains free
and nonobjective by doing as much for his other, myself. I demonstrate
my not-being-finite by giving up my finite being, wholly giving it to
the other who returns to me his being in which mine is contained.
(ibid.)- Patočka, Jan, Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. E. Kohák, Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 262f (italicized by LH).