Differential Anthropology: World-antecedence, Coexistence and Nature in Eugen Fink and Jan Patočka

A bilateral German-Czech research grant project “Differential Anthropology: World-antecedence, Coexistence and Nature in Eugen Fink and Jan Patočka” supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Czech Science Foundation (project no. 24-13817L). Supervised by Professor Alexander Schnell at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and Professor Hans Rainer Sepp at the Charles University, Faculty of Humanties.

October 2024 – September 2027

Abstract

In the context of a renewed interest in philosophical-anthropological issues, the problem whether a super-ordinated structure of the world exists has attracted specific interest from the “New Materialisms”. This project aims to contribute to this discussion with the perspective of a Differential Anthropology based on Eugen Fink and Jan Patočka. Both conceive of the human being in terms of its differential relation to the world. As a superordinate third, the world relates the human being to itself while remaining positively ungraspable for understanding. Its difference grounds the human being and his world-relation. Thus, both authors share paradigmatic interests of the New Ontologies and Materialisms: to refuse reducing world to the perspective of human beings and to undermine rigid nature-culture dualisms. In contrast to the latter, they avoid the false alternative of understanding world as either irreducibly superordinate or reduced to human beings. Differential Anthropology thus is an original, systematic position allowing for a critique of current approaches.

Short project description

The partial projects are brought together by their objective of reconstructing a differential Anthropology based on Eugen Fink und Jan Patočka under the systematic aspects of “world-antecedence”, “co-existence” and “nature” and to further highlight it as a fruitful position in the debate on the relation of human being and world. With that, a bridge between Phenomenology and Anthropology is built. This allows a reformulation of the question of the human subject from the perspective of world-belonging (see Karel Novotny’s and Cathrin Nielsen’s partial projects). On the other hand, the project proves the long-neglected compatibility of phenomenological approaches with New Ontologies and New Materialisms (“material turn”), which also speak out against reducing the world to a human perspective. In doing so, the critical discussion further shows a variety of conceivable, methodologically fundamental (project Alexander Schnell), as well as conceptional shortcomings or dilemmas of Object Oriented Ontology (project Hans Rainer Sepp), to which a differential Anthropology may offer a creative corrective. Based on Fink (projects A. Schnell, C. Nielsen, Sandro Herr) and Patočka (project K. Novotný, H. R. Sepp, Lutz Niemann) world may be conceived in a way that allows the affirmation of a relation to it as a whole, this, however, in a differential manner so that the particularity and diversity of access as well as the inexhaustibility of its relation are underlined. 

This opens a way to conduct philosophical-anthropological research in the 21^st Century that shows the human being in its subjectivity with respect to a superordinate reality. The closer investigation of the difference-philosophical approach to world presented here is promising since it can be made fruitful as a unifying link between different worlds, nature and the human being, which does not endanger their diverse life forms (project S. Herr). This shows very clearly in a critical dialogue with neo-materialistic concepts of world (on Haraway and Latour see project L. Niemann; on Barad see project C. Nielsen).