Abstract
The article analyses Patočka's unfinished lecture on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind given in the 1948-1949 summer semester. Patočka wished to give a systematic outline of the whole Phenomenology, but in the available time was only able to reach the chapter Die Verwirklichung des vernünftigen Selbstbewusstseins durch sich selbst (The Self-Realisation of Rational Self-Consciousness).
The manuscript of the lecture, which is held in the Jan Patočka archive, is therefore only a torso, but it is nevertheless a very interesting text, which shows the influence of the French existentialists, Kojeve and Hyppolite. Patočka also used the interpretation of W.
Dilthey. In the lecture, Patočka emphasises the motif of finished man as a destroying-creating being.
Patočka wished to read Phenomenology as a philosophical anthropology and as a philosophy of history in which the sense is not determined from the beginning, but which is created in the dramatic circumstances of history.