Alien, Crisis, Home. Patočka’s phenomenological critique of Eliade

The main subject of the paper is Jan Patočka’s critique of Mircea Eliade’s standpoint on the sacred/profane conceived as the fundamental ontological dichotomy. It is argued that such a critique entails a phenomenological account of the originary space of personhood, the latter being part and parcel of Patočka’s phenomenology of the life-world. By drawing in particular on his essay on space, where Patočka’s reading of Eliade explicitly appears, on the Heretical essays, and on the Supplement to The Natural World, this paper attempts to show how the sacred/profane dichotomy is phenomenologically further founded on the basic structures of the life-world, which are elicited by an analysis of the three movements of human life, namely, rooting, protection-and-preservation, and openness.