Postmortal Openness to Meaning

Human life ends with death, but not necessarily in all its forms. In the paper, I recall two basic ways in which it does not end and discuss in detail one in particular which persists in the further development of the projects, ideas and events which the dead person was identified with during his lifetime. I then show how this possible form of afterlife is ambivalently present in Patočka’s thought: Patočka specifies that what we have after death is a metaphysical quality of the dead, while on the other hand he calls for the interpretative decipherment of the life of the dead, that is, against an unchanging core of the deceased (a metaphysical essence), he acknowledges an interpretation that implies the possible change or development of the dead person. In the next section, I support the discussion of the form of postmortal life by mentioning a sketch of the concept of man in process philosophy and ancient Greek thought (using an interpretation advocated by Patočka himself). Finally, I revisit some death-related motifs in Patočka’s Heretical Essays, with the help of Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of these essays.