At the beginning of his book Body, Community, Language, World, Jan Patočka claims that the human body has never been considered worthy of reflection throughout the entire (Western) philosophical tradition. Human corporeity has been largely excluded from philosophical reflections since the times of Plato’s conception of the human as a being divided between a mortal body and an immortal soul. Yet there is one thinker who had, as early as the nineteenth century, described the history of philosophy, from Plato to Hegel, as a history of the loss of human corporeity. This philosopher was Ludwig Feuerbach. While Patočka follows the path of phenomenological anthropology, Feuerbach tries to return the sense of corporeity to the human being through the rehabilitation of sensuous perceptions and emotions. Despite their different approaches to the problem, Patočka and Feuerbach both agree with the notion that intersubjectivity, based on the corporeity of two autonomous subjects, stands outside of any cognitive pattern. They both persist in their efforts to bring the human body back into philosophy as a relevant source of experience because they both understand that the human body remains a universal symbol across all cultures and societies.

在他的书《身体、社区、语言、世界》的开头, Jan Patočka 声称，在整个（西方）哲学传统中，人体从未被认为值得反思。自从柏拉图将人类概念划分为有死的身体和不朽的灵魂以来，人类的肉体在很大程度上被排除在哲学思考之外。然而，早在 19 世纪，就有一位思想家将哲学史，从柏拉图到黑格尔，描述为人类肉体丧失的历史。这位哲学家就是路德维希·费尔巴哈。帕托奇卡走的是现象学人类学的道路，而费尔巴哈则试图通过感官知觉和情感的恢复，将肉体感归还给人类。尽管他们解决问题的方法不同，帕托奇卡和费尔巴哈都同意这样一种观点，即基于两个自主主体的实体性的主体间性，站在任何认知模式之外。他们都坚持努力将人体带回哲学作为相关经验的来源，因为他们都明白人体仍然是所有文化和社会中的普遍象征。