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δι
αν

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PATOČKA'S CRITIQUE OF HUSSERL: 
The Possibility of A-Subjective Phenomenology1

GABRIEL VIDAL

Phenomenology embodies the project of founding a new philosophical departure, 
one detached, if possible, from the mistakes—and especially of the biases—of 

former traditions and serves as a proper philosophical foundation.2 The founder of 
this tradition, Edmund Husserl, proposes breaking with the subjective excesses of 
idealism and the naïve schemes of realism. This implies the task of debunking two 
theses: on one hand, the idea that the subject is the creator of the objects that appear 
to him and, on the other, the idea of the absolute independence of objects, or the 
thesis of the thing in itself.3 The path taken by Husserl in order to debunk both theses 
aims to restore the connection between the two dimensions at stake—subjectivity, 
and objectivity—by putting at the forefront their correlation. To do this, we must 
abstain ourselves from anticipating any unproven thesis in our investigation and 
exclusively refer back to the description of appearances in themselves. This is because 
everything that has the slight possibility of entering into our consideration does so 

1 This article contains quotes that are originally in Spanish. All translations have been made by me in this case.
2 David Woodruff Smith, “Phenomenology,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 

Summer 2018 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
sum2018/entries/phenomenology/.

3 This mainly refers to Kant’s Thesis as outlined in Critique of pure reason Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure 
Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). However, It 
does not only refer to Kant’s interpretation, but to whatever doctrine that considers the object as completely 
independent of a subject’s knowledge or experience.



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insofar as it appears, and thus only the ways things appear will bring light to the 
mentioned correlation. Phenomenology asks us to attend exclusively to what is given 
in our description of it. Staying in this dimension of primitive donation4 of content is 
what gives phenomenology its rigor, to which Husserl remains faithful in the creation 
of this new science. 

Nonetheless, many posterior phenomenologists have criticized Husserl for 
overemphasizing one of the two poles of the correlation—namely, the subjective—
and so accusations of subjectivism became commonplace in transcendental 
phenomenology.5 The appearance seems to be constantly described in terms of a 
donation towards and made by the consciousness of a subject, and the acts by which 
the subject point to objects, but not the other way around.6 The problem is that 
most of the successors have simply disregarded Husserl’s point of view, and have 
restarted the task from mostly different considerations without taking into account 
his foundational concerns. Jan Patočka is one of the few authors who has revised the 
foundational problem of phenomenology from a properly Husserlian approach to 
mind. 

If we agree on the fact that Husserl was successful in setting the foundations of 
phenomenology, then we could claim that, if those foundations are incorrect, then 
further developments of phenomenology are completely misguided. However, 
if we can correct Husserlian phenomenology from its mistakes while keeping the 
foundation unaffected, then we can be reassured of phenomenology’s future. This 
is why the possibility of phenomenology itself may be at stake under Patočka’s 
criticism. If phenomenology, since its inception, already carried a bias in favor of 
subjectivism, then it was doomed to be a failed attempt at a new departure from 
former tradition. Patočka’s intention is, indeed, to correct this misguided inclination 
towards subjectivism in Husserl’s account, while keeping the fundamental features of 
phenomenology that allow us to recognize it as unaffected. 

I will proceed in showing the most important elements of Husserl’s phenomenology: 
constitution, epoché and reduction, the Husserlian description of perception, and 
the noesis/noema scheme. Then, I will show Patočka’s attacks to the previously 
mentioned points and how these critiques reveal a subjectivist tendency in Husserl, 
specifically in the gesture of reduction. Finally, I will demonstrate Patočka’s proposal 
of an a-subjective phenomenology that dispenses with reduction and explores a 
world-horizon as the a priori background of appearances. 

4 The original word is “donación”. It means something like “to be given as it is”. When a content is given to 
consciousness, or makes its presence into it, that’s a donation or (donación).

5 Robert J. Dostal, “Subjectivism, Philosophical Reflection and the Husserlian Phenomenological Account 
of Time,” in Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic: Philosphical Essays in Honor 
of Thomas M. Seebohm, ed. O. K. Wiegand et al. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2000), 53, https://doi.
org/10.1007/978-94-015-9446-2_4.

6 George Alfred Schrader, “Philosophy and Reflection: Beyond Phenomenology,” The Review of Metaphysics 15, no. 
1 (1961): 92.



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II. Husserl’s Phenomenology

The necessity of showing the correlation is first seen in Logical Investigations,7 where 
Husserl engages in a critique of psychologism, which he claims reduces the logical 
dimension to that of empirical psychology, and completely disregards its apodictic 
and ideal character.8 In order to elucidate this issue, Husserl traces a distinction 
between the acts, which allows thoughts about content, and the contents themselves, 
whereas psychologism reduces all logic only to the acts.9 In this way, he shows that 
the same content can be conceived of, by employing completely different acts of 
thought (for example, the number “5” can be given to consciousness from conceiving 
five points as well as five lines). This demonstrates that in order to elucidate the 
issue of both the ideality and empirical reality of math and logic, it is necessary to 
pay attention to the correlation of contents and acts in a completely unbiased way, 
without advancing any thesis about it. Therefore, the inquiry will be about how it is 
possible that these ideal entities appear in consciousness, or how the apodictic can 
make its way “inside” something that is singular and contingent. The issue is solved 
when it is realized that, although ideal entities make their way into consciousness by 
means of acts, “the subject cannot constitute whatever signification, so constituent 
acts depend on the essence of the objects in consideration.”10 

Here, the concept of constitution is discovered. That is, contents appear; they are not 
constructed, but are rather brought into presence. Constituent acts are “what makes 
the object representable” and “do not entail anything else but the act of going out 
to encounter the entity, in such a way that this entity, in the same act by which it is 
encountered, can announce itself.”11

This way of conceiving the donation of objects makes Husserl think of consciousness 
differently. Consciousness is always a consciousness of something, such that the content 
of its consideration always accompanies it.12 It is not a closed-in-itself structure 
that is then filled with contents, but it is in itself the pointing towards the object. 
That activity defines consciousness’ essence. This is pure direction of consciousness 
towards the object—or intentionality—is the only thing that we can properly affirm 
about consciousness.13 This allows Husserl to affirm that constitution does not equal 
the construction of the object: the act is not, in some way, the absorption of the 
object inside a closed in consciousness, but is rather the appearance of the object to 

7 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations (Routledge, 2013).
8 Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford University Press, 2003), 8–9.
9 Robert Hanna, “Husserl’s Arguments against Logical Psychologism,” Edmund Husserl: Logische Untersuchungen, 

2008, 78.
10 Walter Biemel, “Las Fases Decisivas En El Desarrollo de La Filosofía de Husserl,” in Husserl. Tercer Coloquio 

Filosófico de Royaumont (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1968), 46.
11 Ibid., 47.
12 Carlo Ierna, “Making the Humanities Scientific: Brentano’s Project of Philosophy as Science,” in The Making of 

the Humanities. Volume III: The Making of the Modern Humanities, ed. Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn 
(Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 547.

13 A. David Smith, “Husserl and Externalism,” Synthese 160, no. 3 (2008): 319–20.



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an intentional consciousness (the object is pointed by intentionality and makes its 
presence). 

I have said that in order to describe ‘appearance as such,’ one must attend to what 
is given, refraining from fabricating conjectures outside that pure donation. This 
motivates Husserl, in Ideas I,14 to pin down what this refraining attitude consists in. 
He calls this the epoché, and by means of this epoché, we can: 

Put out of action the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the 
natural standpoint, we place in brackets whatever it includes respecting the 
nature of Being: this entire natural world therefore which is continuously 
‘there for us”, ‘present to our hand’, and will ever remain there, is a ‘fact-
world’ of which we continue to be conscious, even though it pleases us to 
put it in brackets.15

This does not imply the denial of the existence of the world, but implies, rather, its 
independence as a reality in itself. In this case, it would be possible for the world to be 
independent of any constituent act. Denying this thesis, then, allows one to make the 
world appear to an intentional consciousness instead of speculating about it without 
evidence. What appears to the intentional consciousness constitutes evidence,16 and 
what does not appear to it is just subjective construction. So, one can see that the 
epoché not only implies a suspension of the thesis of the independence of the world, 
but that it also implies a reduction to the intentional field of consciousness.17 In fact, 
everything that appears into our consideration does so insofar as it is assessed by this 
intentional field, which the epoché only takes out of its anonymity. By being faithful 
to this epoché, we do not make conjectures about what appears; we only describe 
what appears before the intentional field through constituent acts. If anything is to 
possess phenomenological validity, then a constituent act is required. This is what 
commitment to the epoché means: being faithful to the phenomenological reduction 
by always asking for the constituent act of the object in question.18

Later in his endeavor, Husserl again describes perception under the new concepts 
reviewed in the section above. After we commit to epoché, we develop a consciousness 
that points to objects in a completely equal correlation, where the object is neither 
created by the subject nor exists in a partial transcendence. Therefore, now the 
description of perception, reduced to the intentional field of consciousness, no 
longer risks becoming either subjectivism or realism. Therefore, perception will be 
constituted by three stages: hyletic, noetic and noematic. The hyletical stage refers 
to hylé as the basic matter of perception; namely, the pure sensation that makes no 

14 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Routledge, 2014).
15 Ibid., 110.
16 Ülker Öktem, “Husserl’s Evidence Problem,” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 9, no. 1 (May 1, 2009): 3, 

https://doi.org/10.1080/20797222.2009.11433986. 
17 Steven Crowell, “Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic Externalism,” Synthese 160, no. 3 

(2008): 339.
18 Husserl, Ideas, 364.



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reference to any object whatsoever, in the purely experienced sensation.19 In this 
sense, it consists of a cogitatio that is a mere ingredient of consciousness, where the 
ingredient is what makes the private current20 of the subject’s experiences. This purely 
immanent hylé is later animated by noesis, which is the stage in which the purely 
experienced becomes a trait of a thing.21 For example, the pure green becomes the 
green of a leaf. In this stage hylé no longer makes reference to itself, but instead 
points towards an object. In this stage, intentionality starts operating and allows 
consciousness to get outside of itself. Finally, noesis allows the noema to enter, which 
is the pointed object donated by an intuition.22 In the noetical moment, we point to 
the object, which by means of intuition, then allows the object to make itself present 
in the noematical stage. We can even describe falsity and truth within this schema: 
I can point noetically towards something that does not present itself noematically. 
In other words, I prepend a signification that does not correspond to the given 
intuition. Only when the signification is filled with a corresponding intuition does 
the constitution of the object become successful.23

Although the former description underlies an effort to attribute equal importance 
to the subject and object roles respectively, it probably seems that the object is given 
only by means of acts of consciousness. Thus, it becomes dubious if things that 
appear to the subject are transcendent to it. There is a chance that everything will be 
components of consciousness. Husserl solves the issue by introducing the concept 
of foreshortening.24 There’s a substantial difference between merely immanent 
experiences and proper perceptions. Immanent experiences are given in a completely 
adequate way to the subject; they are conceived in a completely transparent way.25 
In other words, the thing is immediately and completely ended in all its possibilities 
of being perceived by the subject. Perceptions, on the other hand, are always only 
shown partially; one can never end all the possible perspectives that the object has to 
offer.26 This means that perceptions are given inadequately. This foreshortened way 
of being brought into presence guarantees its exteriority since “an experience is only 
possible as a living experience but not as anything spatial.”27

19 Patrick Whitehead, “Phenomenology Without Correlationism: Husserl’s Hyletic Material,” Indo-Pacific Journal of 
Phenomenology 15, no. 2 (October 26, 2015): 6, https://doi.org/10.1080/20797222.2015.1101830.

20 By ‘private current’ I mean the subject’s own flow of consciousness that is available only to himself. His thoughts, 
emotions, mental images and other things in motion constitute this private current.

21 Kenneth Williford, “Husserl’s Hyletic Data and Phenomenal Consciousness,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive 
Sciences 12, no. 3 (September 1, 2013): 502, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9297-z.

22 Ibid.
23 Lambert Zuidervaart, “Synthetic Evidence and Objective Identity: The Contemporary Significance of Early 

Husserl’s Conception of Truth,” European Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2018): 125, https://doi.org/10.1111/
ejop.12192.

24 The original term for this mode of appearance is Abschattung, and it refers to things that are given as not showing 
all of its sides. The reference painting tries to portray the idea of an unfinished sketch or perspective. Renaud 
Barbaras, Introducción a una fenomenología de la vida: intencionalidad y deseo (Encuentro, 2013), 43.

25 Juha Himanka, “Husserl’s Two Truths: Adequate and Apodictic Evidence,” Phänomenologische Forschungen, 2005, 
93.

26 María Paredes, “Percepción y Atención. Una Aproximación Fenomenológica,” Azafea: Revista de Filosofía; Vol. 14 
(2012), 2014, 84–85, http://revistas.usal.es/index.php/0213-3563/article/view/11680.

27 Husserl, Ideas, 41.



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Here, the distinction between acts and contents is raised again: even though the 
thing is given through multiple and different foreshortenings, it nevertheless points 
towards a unique object. Perception is already accompanied by the realization 
that the perspectives refer to the same object. We do not need to complete all the 
possible perspectives, nor do we need the mediation of a secondary abstraction 
or to provide a metaphysical explanation for this realization. In other words, the 
unity of the object is already given in perception by the many perspectives. This 
is called apprehension unity.28 Both the possibility of the unity of the object and 
the foreshortened exteriority guarantee that things are not created by the subject. 
However, this is not a completely transcendent transcendence29 in the sense that does 
not imply the independent existence of a world, but, rather, it implies exteriority for 
the intentional consciousness. In this sense, the external constitutes a transcendence 
inside immanence,30 which is verified thanks to unprejudiced scrutiny of appearance 
that, therefore, it is inclined neither towards the subjectivist idealist thesis nor the 
realism of things in themselves.

III. Patočka’s Critique

We must emphasize that, for Husserl, in the act of perception, only experiences 
are components of consciousness. Perception as such, however, including the 
foreshortenings and apprehension of unity, has an objective character. This betrays, 
according to Patočka, the explanation that Husserl himself proposed as a distinction 
for experiences and perception. Husserl says that the foreshortened donation of 
things guarantees the external character, and, so, everything that is given adequately 
constitutes consciousness’ components. Indeed, foreshortenings are given to the 
subject as empirical data, which lacks signification. But in the case of what is also 
supposed to be given as objective—namely the apprehension of unity—the donation 
is neither forefronted nor empirical data, “but apprehension itself is affirmed; it is 
not any affluence of new sensations, but it has the character of an act, a mode of 
consciousness or a state of the spirit.”31 Since apprehension itself does not correspond 
to any proper intuition and is nothing empirical, one must conclude that constitutes 
signification itself. As such, it has the character of being an act of the subject and 
appears with the same apodictic evidence that is characteristic of the subjective 
experience. Therefore, apprehension taken as such corresponds to an adequate 

28 Smith, “Husserl and Externalism” 326.
29 By ‘transcendent transcendence,’ I mean that the objectivity or externality of the thing has to resort to something 

that is beyond (or outside of ) consciousness. This is why it is a ‘transcendent transcendence’, and is directly 
opposed to ‘immanent transcendence’ (a Husserlian notion), which assures the externality of the thing without 
resorting to something beyond consciousness.

30 Dermot Moran, “Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and 
Karl Jaspers,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, May 1, 2008, 268, https://doi.org/10.5840/
acpq20088224.

31 Jan Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana (Encuentro, 2004), 103.



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experience (not a foreshortened one) so that there is nothing indicating its external 
or objective character:

To summarize: sensations and the acts that apprehend them or perceive 
them are lived, but they do not appear objectively; they are not seen, heard 
or perceived with any «sensory faculty». We have before our eyes Husserl’s 
subjectivism in germinal state.32

These critiques demystify the supposedly objective character of apprehension of unity 
and, therefore, it loses its status as a perception, since apprehension is not an intuition 
of anything, but an act of signification, void of any empirical content. In light of this, 
apprehension enters the field of what constitutes consciousness, assuming we are 
faithful to Husserl’s own explanation:

Subjective being does not foreshorten, it merely shows itself as what it is. 
Therefore, in the first place, the phenomenical sphere is divided into two 
stages: what appears in its modes of being given, on one hand, and the 
supposed subjective basis of this appearance, on the other hand.33 

In his project, Husserl restarts the former conception of consciousness, which is 
characterized by considering the subjective modes of being as intramental and the 
objective as extramental—or, in Husserlian terms, what is component and what 
is spatiotemporal. Though Patočka doesn’t explicitly elucidate how this critique 
affects the noema/noesis schema, it can be easily understood. Noesis as such is not 
empirical; it is an animation of data that imbues noema/noesis with the capacity 
to have a direction towards an object. Due to this lack of empirical data—and 
the possibility of being foreshortened—one concludes that noesis is an adequate 
experience, a component. Noesis, thus, takes the side of the subjective (and noema of 
the objective), and the appearing process splits in two again. Finally, this confusion 
irradiates to hyletical data, since one cannot determine if they are components or 
foreshortenings. There are two equally probable answers: hyletical data are either 
foreshortened perspectives that acquire signification thanks to noesis, or they are 
components of consciousness that become externally directed thanks to noesis.

The aforementioned misunderstandings and contradictions rest, however, in a more 
fundamental mistake, according to Patočka. The great achievement of Husserl is, 
indeed, the discovery of the “phenomenological field” and the birth of describing the 
appearance as such in that field, but: 

It is true here that Husserl has not abandoned the fundamental idea 
of a general correlation between appearances and what appears, he has 
even reinforced and elevated the entire philosophical endeavor to the 
methodical. However, a curious combination of Cartesian and Kantian 
ideas alongside the original idea of an intuitive foundation of knowledge 

32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 105.



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that transcends argumentation lead here to the idea of a phenomenological 
reduction to the pure immanence of consciousness.34

Indeed, Husserl tries to attend to appearances as such and to correlation, but when 
he tries to constitute this knowledge as a rigorous science, “he attempts, in a curious 
analogy with the cartesian concern with doubt, to methodically highlight and secure 
this dimension.”35

The procedure chosen to do this, for Descartes, implies remitting to the apodictic 
dimension of the subject. In other words, the reduction to pure immanence is 
fundamentally an alternative term for the subjective, since it relies on an equal 
correlation of subject and object, and is thereby accompanied by the additional claim 
because it is an intentional field. But as was aforementioned, claiming its intentional 
nature does not solve the problem—the correlation of subject and object is always 
marked by the objectifying acts of the subject. This means that intentionality is only 
directed from the subject to the object, but not vice versa. All things considered, 
we find that the classical bifurcation of the world is accidentally replicated, now in 
the distinction between what is component and what is spatiotemporal. This is a 
dichotomy that intentionality alone cannot dissolve—it merely transports it. 

One could say that in order the prevent the claim of an in-itself world,  Husserl 
constantly refers to the appearance of the former only for a consciousness, but this has 
resulted in reducing appearances to the subjective experience, without considering 
the possibility that admitting that the autonomy of the phenomenical field is not 
equivalent to restarting the thesis of the thing in itself. The merely methodological 
commitment of evading the thing in itself started to slip into more serious claims of 
subjectivism.

Husserl, in fact, tries to describe appearances as such, and is aware that in order to 
describe the universal a priori of correlation, it is not possible to reduce appearances as 
such to any of the entities that appear in this field. That would imply the absurd claim 
that the appearance itself depends on the things that this field produces. However, 
in order to evade the thesis of the thing in itself, Husserl relies excessively on the 
dimension of immanent consciousness, in which he finds that there is complete and 
indubitable evidence. So he ends up relying completely on the self:

The intention points, therefore, to appearances as such, to the phenomenical 
sphere. But this intent is sketched in terms that come from the sphere 
of the subjective: he tries to speak about a reduction to pure immanence 
instead of putting on display the field of appearances as such.36

Even though its initial motivation is always to stay true to the correlation, objectivity 
ends up being defined as “something that appears in living and is transcendent to 
34 Ibid., 114.
35 Ibid., 106.
36 Ibid.



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the ingredient stream of experiences.”37 In this way, the constitution of things—
which claims to debunk that objects are created by consciousness or that things in 
themselves exist independently—is impossible if we do it from the presupposition 
that everything is put under the assessment of the immanence of intentional 
consciousness. It can be said, then, that this “transcendence inside immanence” fails:

Ultimately, the whole problem of constitution is irresolvable. How can 
‘living as such’, as it is originally given in reflection, start to make something 
an objective, transcendent appearance? One cannot have intellectual 
evidence about it—it can only be accepted as a brute fact. Nothing should 
be questioned about it if it were not, in fact, an ultimately intuitable fact, 
but rather, an authentic fact, and not a construction.38 

Indeed, Husserl’s conjecture that the psychic is internal comes, according to Patočka, 
from Brentano’s interpretation of Cartesianism:

If the intentional object is not immanent but precisely transcendent 
to the subject, and the Brentanian apprehension of the psychic as an 
internal object remains, then it follows, necessarily, that the fundamental 
distinction is between lived experience and phenomena. Living experience 
does not appear, but is already there as a component that flows through 
time and causes the appearance of things. By virtue of living experiences 
transcendences appear.39

This means that the subjective (psychic) is not one of the many kinds of entities that 
appear by means of the appearance as such, but, rather, is a privileged dimension that 
is the cause of the appearance in general. By this mistake, the procedure of epoché is 
also misunderstood because it is presupposed that epoché implies a “reduction” to the 
immanence of the subject. This is based on the misguided belief that if consciousness 
is intentional, then it is no longer closed in itself because is only direction towards 
the object. However, this is not possible if the psychic/internal mode of conceiving 
it is not abandoned. If not abandoned, the transcendent and immanent restart the 
intramental/extramental distinction that it purports to overcome.40

IV. Patočka’s proposal

From the critique previously sketched, it is clear that the main attack resides in the 
understanding of the investigation of appearance as reduced to the immanence of 
consciousness. This produces all the problems that, in the end, are attributed to 
subjectivism. However, it is true that the investigation of appearances requires a 

37 Ibid., 107.
38 Ibid., 108.
39 Ibid., 124.
40 Husserl pretended to demonstrate that sources of knowledge for phenomenology were not internal nor external 

Biagio G. Tassone, “The Relevance of Husserl’s Phenomenological Exploration of Interiority to Contemporary 
Epistemology,” Palgrave Communications 3 (July 11, 2017): 8.



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disconnect from any possible thesis about the world41 and must remain faithful only 
to describing appearance as such:  

[…] Phenomenology itself should be a science: an a priori science of the 
essential legalities that govern the appearance process of what appears as 
such […] it is not an argumentative basis that resorts to the self as the 
ultimate explicative concept, but a revealing foundation that legitimizes 
the idea of foundation as such.42

If phenomenology is supposed to be given the task of describing appearances as such, 
then this appearance cannot be based on one of the entities that appear, since that 
would require what is needed for explanation to reside within the explanation. From 
this point of view, both the subjective and the objective are things that made its 
presence in the phenomenological field as any other. This phenomenical field is, 
therefore, autonomous,43 it is the condition of possibility for the apparition of every 
entity, but this field itself is no entity. Husserl’s mistake is reducing it to one of the 
entities that appear:

There is a phenomenological field, a phenomenological being itself, which 
cannot be reduced to any entity that appears within it. Therefore, it can 
never be explained by the entity, even if this is objective, as in nature, or 
subjective, as in the self.44

It follows that in order to describe appearances as such without biases, one must 
abstain from positing any thesis that we had with respect to appearance. That is 
precisely the role of the epoché, which “[…] claims that a thesis is neither attempted 
nor purported, but that one only experiences the freedom to use it or not to use 
it.”45 It does not follow, however, from this abstention, that one should commit to a 
“reduction”; this requirement is added by Husserl in order to bring himself back to 
an indubitable sphere. In this sense, the reduction to the sphere of the self should 
actually be one of the theses that we should abstain ourselves from positing. Thanks 
to this way of thinking about the epoché, Patočka considers the possibility of posing 
a new question: “What would happen if the epoché did not stop before the thesis 
of the own self, but was understood as completely universal?”46 If epoché becomes 
completely universal now, it can open the way for ‘appearance itself ’ to make its 
appearance, without the obstacles of taking it as being originated from the self. In 
fact, “maybe the immediacy of the donation of the self is not a prejudice and the 
experience of one’s own self, just as the experience of external things, has its a priori, 

41 Oded Balaban, “Epoché: Meaning, Object, and Existence in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology World-
Wide: Foundations — Expanding Dynamics — Life-Engagements. A Guide for Research and Study, ed. A. Ales Bello 
et al. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002), 111, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0473-2_10.

42 Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana, 113.
43 Dušan Hruška, “Patočka and English Sensualism and Its Place in Modern Philosophy,” Folia Philosophica 37, no. 

0 (July 4, 2016): 28, http://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/FOLIA/article/view/4732.
44 Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana, 129.
45 Ibid., 244.
46 Ibid., 247.



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an a priori that allows the appearance of the self.”47 So, if we make epoché universal, 
we gain two things at once: freeing ‘appearances as such’ from the chains of the self 
and, by doing so, revealing the authentic essence of this previously misunderstood 
self. If we want to unfold this a priori, which is a condition for the possibility of the 
subjective as well as the objective, then we must universalize epoché in such a way that 
“it is a phenomenology void of reduction, but not without the epoché.”48 In other 
words, it is an a-subjective phenomenology.

This renouncement of reduction now allows us to open the phenomenological field 
as such, as an autonomous a priori, to whom objects and subjects appear on the same 
grounds: “We arrive in this way to the conditions of possibility of the appearance 
of what already appears; we do not remain quiet before what appears, but we allow 
appearance to make its appearance.”49 This phenomenological field is no longer a 
mere stream of experiences, but a world-background, a vast horizon of meaning that 
only manifests, shows and bring things to presence:

A universal structure of appearance that is not reducible to what appears, in 
its singular being, is what we call world, which we have the right to name, 
since it is found in the epoché. However, it is neither negated nor doubted 
by the epoché, but brought into the light, and out of anonymity, by it.50

Thanks to an epoché void of reduction, appearances as such can be unfolded, 
showing itself as a proto-horizon of the world “in an infinity that cannot be updated. 
Perception does not flow in a sequence of more and more perceptual donations, 
but, from the beginning, it rests on a totality that is present even when is not being 
perceived.”51 In other words, a particular actualization of that horizon of totality 
does not account, on its own, for the fact that there is something. This, however, 
is already manifested by the fact that “the universal totality of what appears, which 
Patočka sometimes calls ‘unapparent immensity,’ belongs to the own structure of 
appearance, which means that every appearance is necessarily a co-appearance of that 
totality.”52 Every particular appearance presupposes this infinite world background as 
the condition of its possibility in such a way that one must conclude that this world 
is neither objective nor subjective, but a-subjective. 

This way of conceiving the world allows Patočka to formulate an original conception 
of the subject. Patočka points to Descartes as the discoverer of the cogito, which is the 
subject revealed to itself by means of its own acts, through its existence.53 Descartes 

47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 249.
49 Ibid., 247.
50 Ibid., 248.
51 Ibid., 29.
52 Barbaras, Introducción a una fenomenología de la vida, 139.
53 Jan Patočka, “The Natural World and Phenomenology,” in Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 1989), 247.



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attempts to add a thing-like essence (a thing that acts, thinks, and wants),54 in such 
a way that constitutes a special thing between other things that lack a self or ego. 
This introspectionalist55 way of conceiving the object motivates him to consider the 
subject as something internal, a closed-in-itself ego to which external objects oppose 
is inherited by Brentano,56 and, finally, by Husserl. Instead of this ego, Patočka will 
emphasize the cogito:

Without a doubt, the ‘ego’ as ‘ego cogito’ is proven to be immediately true. 
But this certainty lacks any content, except for this: it is that which appears 
that makes its appearance. The phenomenological field appears before this 
ego.57

This does not mean, however, that the cogito is the foundational entity of appearance, 
because as we have already said, appearance cannot be reduced to any entity. What 
Patočka is trying to say is that the subject acts only as an organizational center58 of this 
protohorizon of world. The subject is, in some way, the indexical of appearance—the 
‘here’ of appearance.59 It indicates the direction of the appearance, but appearance 
always ontologically precedes the subject and presents itself before him, not through 
him:

Showing itself in him is no human doing: man neither produces nor shows 
its own being (its own ‘light’) or its own transparency, the interest for it 
or its own comprehension. In one’s own being, being in general is already 
in action.60

 Now, the essential features of the subject become available through phenomenological 
description. By means of this, we discover that the subject is an entity in the world 
whose fundamental ontological feature is that it “cares for its being and exists through 
time and in movement. This points even beyond the sphere of the self.”61 This entity 
lives within the possibilities of appearance and clings to them in its existence, in such 
a way that its being is explained by the phenomenical field, but not the other way 
around.62

Thanks to this conception of the subject and appearance, now Patočka can replace 
the Husserlian account of perception with his own corrections. In Patočka’s account, 
it is not the case that different perspectives appear and then are unified by an act of 

54 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (OUP Oxford, 
2008), 20.

55 Ibid., 97-98.
56 Dermot Moran, “The Inaugural Address: Brentano’s Thesis,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary 

Volumes 70 (1996): 2.
57 Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana, 129. 
58 Ibid., 248.
59 Indexicals are terms that have a demonstrative function, namely, they indicate direction, place, position, 

etc, relative to a context or point of reference. Paradigmatic cases are “here” and “now”. David Kaplan, 
“Demonstratives,” in Themes From Kaplan, ed. Joseph Almog, John Perry, and Howard Wettstein (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 1989), 490.

60 Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana, 110.
61 Ibid., 111.
62 Barbaras, Introducción a una fenomenología de la vida, 157.



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consciousness. What is actually the case is that before me appear characteristics that 
“I attribute to the thing itself as its own notes and others that, although they are also 
there, they are not there as belonging to the thing, but, in some way, as helping the 
thing appear.”63 Some of the data exist as a property of the thing and belongs, and 
the rest of the data lack reference to that thing, which is not a property of the thing 
itself. This means that two types of data, which are equally objective, appear to me, 
at least in the sense that they are different to me. However, some of it appears with 
confusing traits, or lacks reference to its object. Characters that appear as belonging 
to a thing are thing-like traits, and the ones that lack reference to its object are non-
thing-like traits. Thing-like and non-thing-like traits are just as objective, and for 
non-thing-like characters to become thing-like characters, an act of the subject is 
not necessary. Patočka compares this to the image of awakening from a dream, in 
which even “before what is being lived shows contours of things to me, sensations 
overwhelm me as I am passively taken by them. Does not something very different 
to things appear there; namely, a chaos, a fog, but all of that in an objective way?”64

Finally, the noesis/noema scheme is also corrected. As we saw before, this scheme 
implies putting beforehand an empty signification (noesis) that needs to be 
corresponded by an intuition (noema). The mistake here is to consider this empty 
signification as an act of the subject, instead of as a structure of a-subjective appearance. 
What is actually the case is that there is a universal structure of emptiness/fulfillment 
that is not limited only to perception, and is not an act of any subject, but always 
operates every time a negative meaning is asking to be completed: “it can also happen 
that any object, existent thing, or thing-like process fails to appear.”65

Conclusion

I have demonstrated that Patočka’s critique (and many of the subjectivist accusations 
made towards Husserl) can be held, since they reveal many presuppositions that 
operate in the background of Husserlian theories of appearance. The fundamental 
conclusion from this critique is that the epoché does not imply reduction. Thus, 
we can envision an a-subjective phenomenology that reveals the independence of a 
world-horizon without restarting the natural attitude towards the world. 

Nonetheless, this correction to Husserl’s project is not a mere disregarding, but is, 
rather, a correction that keeps and shows the true aspect of many of Husserl’s theories. 
In a certain way, we can see Patočka as an inheritor who critically continues the task 
started by the first phenomenologist. Patočka expresses this intent, saying that: 

63 Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana, 126.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 132.



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Maybe the last will of the creator of phenomenology should be considered: 
effecting the catharsis of the phenomenological and giving back to 
phenomenology its original sense of an investigation of appearances-as-
such.66 ◆

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