The event of the being of the world as a whole in Jaroslava Pešková’s philosophy

Abstract

The event of the being of the world as a whole in Jaroslava Pešková’s philosophy. – This article reconstructs the basic conceptual framework of Jaroslava Pešková’s philosophy and clarifies the meaning of her recurring formula “the happening of the being of the world as a whole”. Rather than treating it as a set of ontic predicates, the paper interprets it as a shorthand for a single comprehensive nexus in which the world appears both as a horizon of sense and as the unity of complex relations. Focusing on texts from the early 1980s onward, the study traces how Pešková appropriates key phenomenological resources (especially Patočka, Heidegger, Husserl, and Fink) in order to rethink historicity, temporality, and the human being as essentially “possibility-oriented”. These ontological motifs are then shown to underpin her practical-philosophical aim: the cultivation of decision-making against the reduction of education and freedom to instrumental control, and against technological narrowing of the horizon. Particular attention is paid to the return to presuppositions, to the past as an ever-present ground of responsible action, and to the way responsibility is tied to historical embeddedness and identity (including Czech identity). The conclusion argues that Pešková’s formula names a dynamic unity of transcendence in which disclosure of sense is inseparable from a simultaneous re-concealment of alternative possibilities.