First Nature: The Problem of Nature in the Phenomenology of Merleau-ponty (Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology, 24) 9004548939, 9789004548930

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Alessio Rotundo obtained his doctorate in philosophy from Duquesne University, Pittsburgh in 2020. He studied philosophy at the University of Turin in Italy, the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the University of Kentucky under the Baden-Württemberg Stipendium, and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris supported by the Bourse Chateaubriand. He has served as Adjunct Professor at Xavier University of Louisiana and Loyola University New Orleans. His research interests and publications focus on topics in twentiethcentury Continental philosophy and the history of modern and contemporary philosophy, especially in the fields of phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics.

brill.com/scp issn 1875-2470

ISBN 978 90 04 54893 0

First Nature Alessio Rotundo

This book explores a radically integrative phenomenology of nature through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By revisiting novel empirical findings in the sciences and advances in scientific methods and concepts, Merleau-Ponty leads us to rediscover a first nature right at the heart of the subject. Alessio Rotundo traces and documents the presence of a double meaning of nature affecting Merleau-Ponty’s analyses across foundational aspects of human experience: sense perception, organic development and behavior, cognition, language, and history. Physical, biological, and psychological processes in nature are not merely scientific data; they provide the evidence for another, more primordial sense of nature.

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studies in contempor a ry phenomenology — 24

First Nature The Problem of Nature in the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty

Alessio Rotundo

First Nature

Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology Founding Editor Chris Bremmers (Radboud University, Nijmegen) Editorial Board Gert-Jan van der Heiden (Radboud University, Nijmegen) (Editor-in-chief) Antonio Cimino (Radboud University, Nijmegen) Advisory Board Arnaud Dewalque (University of Liège, Belgium) Theodore George (Texas A&M University, USA) Sophie Loidolt (Technical University Darmstadt, Germany) Jos de Mul (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) Peter Reynaert (University of Antwerp, Belgium) John Sallis (Boston College, USA) Hans-Rainer Sepp (Charles University, Prague) Tanja Staehler (University of Sussex, Brighton) Laszlo Tengelyi† (Bergische Universität, Wuppertal) Georgia Warnke (University of California, Riverside, USA) Sanem Yazıcıoğlu (Istanbul University, Turkey)

volume 24

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scp

First Nature The Problem of Nature in the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty

By

Alessio Rotundo

leiden | boston

The Open Access publication of this volume’s Introduction has been enabled by the generous support of the Parini – Chirio Foundation 2021 Grant for the Selection of Original Works. Volume pubblicato con il concorso di fondi assegnati dalla Fondazione Parini - Chirio con il Bando di concorso per la selezione di opere originali - anno 2021. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rotundo, Alessio, author. Title: First nature : the problem of nature in the phenomenology / by Alessio Rotundo. Description: Boston, Massachusetts : Brill, [2023] | Series: Studies in contemporary phenomenology, 1875-2470 ; vol 24 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023019920 | ISBN 9789004548930 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004548947 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenology. | Naturalism. | Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961. Classification: LCC B829.5 .R69 2023 | DDC 142/.7--dc23/eng/20230606 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019920

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1875-2470 isbn 978-90-04-54893-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-54894-7 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Alessio Rotundo. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Per Hanna

∵

The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. 1 Cor. 15:46

∵

Contents

Acknowledgments IX List of Abbreviations X



Introduction: Stating the Problem 1 1 Preliminary Remarks 1 2 Historical Contextualization 3 3 Renewed Setting of the Problem 7

1

Natura Sub Specie Structurae 12 1 Science between Technocracy and Aesthetics 12 2 The Disinterested and the Interested Onlooker 19 3 Naturizing and Naturized Consciousness 28 4 Phenomenology between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty 32

2

Pathway to First Nature Operative Intentionality from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty 38 1 Introduction 38 2 Phenomenology as Redoing of Transcendental Philosophy 40 3 Cartesian “Realism” 47 4 The Genetic Turn in Phenomenology 50 5 Operative Intentionality 54 6 Brief Methodic Reflection on the “Idea of Being” in Phenomenology 59 7 The Prejudice of the World 62 8 Operative Intentionality as Temporalizing 67 9 The Project of the Phenomenology of Perception as Enquiry into Operative Intentionality 74 10 The Discovery of Contingency and Transcendental Philosophy: Descartes and Kant 76 11 The Body Schema: Phenomenology of Perception I 80 12 The Notion of Spatial Level: Phenomenology of Perception II 86 13 Merleau-Ponty and Kant on Space 90

3

Orders of Experience 96 1 Introduction: The Eidetic of Experience and Language 96 2 Approaches to Language 98 3 The Act of Speech 101 4 Language as Ontological Experience 104

viii

Contents

5 6 7 8 9

Speaking of Fundamentals: The Promise of Language 111 Language and the Lifeworld: General Points from Phenomenology 113 The Problem of Einströmen 120 The Modal Ontology of the World 122 History in Lifeworld Phenomenology 126

4

Mundus Sensibilis Structural Ontology between Merleau-Ponty and the New Philosophy of Science 133 1 Introduction 133 2 Ontic Structural Realism 137 3 Syntactic and Semantic Views 140 4 Invariance between Physics and Phenomenology 142 5 Physics Deformalized 144 6 Observation and Objectivation 146 7 The Passage of Nature 149 8 Natural Dynamis between Physics and Perception 150 9 The Praxis of Nature, or What the Things Do 153

5

Nature and Logos 159 1 Introduction: Animal Nature 159 2 Biology and Ontology 164 3 Organic Totality 166 4 The Ontology of the Umwelt: Uexküll’s Notion of Umwelt 169 5 Behavior, Consciousness, and World 177 6 The Bivalent Ontology of the Umwelt  180 7 The Sphere of Life as Sphere of Intercorporeity 183 8 Towards a Philosophy in Double Dimensionality: Merleau-Ponty’s Esthesiology 192

6

The Institution of Nature 197 1 Introduction: Phenomenological Ontology and the Institution of Nature 197 2 Nature as Empirical and Transcendental Genesis 201 3 Towards Totality: Perceptual Faith and the Flesh 205 4 Tying It All Together: Nature as Leaf of Being 219



Bibliographical References and Works Cited 229 Index 236

Acknowledgments The present book is the revised version of a study that was originally presented as a doctoral thesis. My acknowledgments are due to the numerous friends and colleagues for their support and guidance during the preparation of this work. My gratitude goes to Professor Ronald Bruzina (1936-2019) for first showing me an entirely different dimension in philosophy. For my years at Duquesne University and beyond, I am especially grateful to Lanei Rodemeyer for teaching me Husserl; I am also grateful to Frederick Evans, Ronald Polansky, Daniel Selcer, Kelly Arenson, Jeffrey McCurry, and Joan Thompson for their guidance and assistance in many ways; I am also indebted to Matthew Yaw and Paul Zipfel for their companionship and conversation. I should also like to thank Anthony Steinbock for accepting to be part of the dissertation committee. My gratitude is especially due to David Hooks and Michael Kelly for their unremitting friendship, generosity, and encouragement. A special thank you goes also to Ann Begler and Judith Vollmer for their wholehearted friendship and breadth of mind. Whether in print or in person, I have matured much about my understanding of philosophy from Gaetano Chiurazzi at the University of Turin and Jan-Ivar Lindén at the University of Heidelberg. Grazie ai miei genitori e alle mie sorelle per avermi accompagnato con affetto e supporto durante il mio percorso nella filosofia. Lastly, thank you to Hanna, whose lithe mind has pricked many a bubble of mine and whose love shows me the way every day.

Abbreviations Works by Edmund Husserl in Husserliana (Den Haag/Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff/ Kluwer Academic Publishers/Springer): Hua I

Hua III/1

Hua IV

Hua VI

Hua VII Hua VIII Hua IX Hua XI

Hua XV Hua XVII

Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. by S. Strasser. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1973; English translation by Dorion Cairns, Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie 1. Halbband, ed. Karl Schuhmann. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1977. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1952; English translation by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, Dordrecht/Boston/London, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Collected Works; 2nd bk.), 1980. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel. 2d edition. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1962; English translation by David Carr, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1970. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Erste Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. by Rudolf Boehm. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1956. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. by Rudolf Boehm. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1959. Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester. 1925, ed. by Walter Biemel. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1968. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918–1926, ed. by Margot Fleischer. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil. 1929–35, ed. by Iso Kern. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Formale und transzendentale Logik, Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. Paul Janssen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974; English translation by Dorion Cairns, Formal and Transcendental Logic. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1969.

Abbreviations  Hua XIX

Hua XXIV Hua XXXI

Hua XXXIII

xi

Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. In zwei Bänden, ed. by Ursula Panzer. Halle: 1901; rev. ed. 1922. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie. Vorlesungen 1906/07, ed. by Ullrich Melle. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1985. Aktive Synthesen: Aus der Vorlesung “Transzendentale Logik” 1920/21. Ergänzungsband zu “Analysen zur passiven Synthesis” Ed. by Roland Breeur. The Hague, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. Die ‘Bernauer Manuskripte’ über das Zeitbewußtsein (1917/18), ed. by Rudolf Bernet & Dieter Lohmar. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.

Other Works by Edmund Husserl in Non-Husserliana Editions: EU Erfahrung und Urteil. Academia. Verlagsbuchandlung, Prag, 1939. Works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: CAL “La conscience et l’acquisition du langage” in Merleau-Ponty à la Sorbonne, résumé de cours 1949–1952. Cynara, 1988. IP L’institution La passivité. Paris, Belin, 2003; English translation by L. Lawlor and H. Massey, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955), Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2010. MSME Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. Cours au Collège de France. Notes, 1953. Genève, MetisPresses, 2011. N La Nature. Notes. Cours du Collège de France. Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1995; English translation by Robert Vallier, Nature. Course Notes from the Collège de France, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2003. NC Notes de cours 1959–1961. Paris, Gallimard, 1996. OE L’Œil et l’esprit. Paris, Gallimard, 1964. OG “Husserl aux limites de la phénoménologie,” in Merleau-Ponty. Notes de cours sur L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl suivi de Recherches sur la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty. Paris, Puf, 1998; English translation by L. Lawlor with B. Bergo, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2002. PhP Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris, Gallimard, 1945; English translation by Donald A. Landes, Phenomenology of Perception, London and New York, Routledge, 2012. PD Parcours Deux 1951–1961. Lagrasse, Verdier, 2001. PM La prose du monde. Paris, Gallimard, 1969 ; English translation by John O’Neill, The Prose of the World, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973.

xii

Abbreviations

PP

Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques. Lagrasse, Verdier, 2014. Le problème de la parole. Course au Collège de France. Notes, 1953–1954. Genève, MetisPresses, 2020. Résumé du cours. Collège de France 1952–1960. Paris, Gallimard, 1968; English translation by John O’Neill, Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1970. Signes. Paris, Gallimard, 1960. La structure du comportement. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1942; English translation by Alden L. Fisher, The Structure of Behavior, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2008 (9th printing). “Les Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie” in Œuvres. Paris, Gallimard, 2010. Le visible et l’invisible. Paris, Gallimard, 1964 ; English translation by Alphonso Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968.

PrPa RC

S SC

SHP VI

Works by Eugen Fink: VI. CM/1 VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 1 Die Idee einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre, ed. Hans Ebeling, Jann Holl, and Guy van Krerckhoven. Dordrecht, Boston, London, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988. English transaltion by Ronald Bruzina, Sixth Cartesian Meditation. The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995. VI. CM//2 VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 2: Ergänzungsband, ed. Guy van Kerckhoven. Husserliana Dokumente II/2. Dordrecht, Boston, London, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988. ND Nähe und Distanz. Freiburg/München, Verlag Karl Alber, 1976.

Introduction

Stating the Problem 1

Preliminary Remarks

Peri physeos is a title that appears for the first time in Plato. In the Phaedo ­Socrates tells us that as a youth he was “wonderfully desirous of that kind of wisdom called investigation of nature [περὶ φύσεως ἱστορίαν].” While this claim points us back to the pre-Socratic thinkers, it is only with Aristotle that the concept of nature is explicitly defined by way of contrast with artefact products or the products of techne.1 This delimitation of nature over against the products of human activity still determines our understanding of nature, which in many essential ways is deeply un-Aristotelian, as the modern dichotomy of “Nature” and “Spirit” testifies.2 Even deeply transformative philosophies of the twentieth century, such as phenomenology and hermeneutics, could be variously labeled “Platonist” or “existentialist” depending on the degree of integration or separation of natural and spiritual factors in their inquiries into the human being. While these titles are grossly misrepresentative of these efforts, or for that matter of any genuine philosophy, they could usefully mark in our current state of thought the extreme limits to be avoided while at the same time delimiting the field in which to pursue a renewed integration and complementarity of conflicting insights. “The problem of nature” is the indicative designation of the point of this integration. The study that follows sketches out a radically integrative phenomenology of nature through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By revisiting novel empirical findings in the sciences and advances in scientific methods and concepts, Merleau-Ponty leads us to the rediscovery of a first nature to be found right at the heart of the subject, that is, in the very onsetting and rich coursing of animal and human perception. Speaking of “first nature” and of its “rediscovery” may sound badly misleading in two respects. First, what is not meant is the conceptual unearthing of some primordial object or even structure that would be grounding, as absolute principle, all else coming after it. Second, the conceptuality involved in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of nature is forcefully aimed 1 See Gadamer 1993, 42. 2 In connection with Aristotle’s determination of the essence of physis, Heidegger notes: “Hier hat auch die später aufkommende Wesensbestimmung der Natur aus der Unterscheidung zum Geist und durch den ‘Geist’ ihre verborgene Wurzel.” Heidegger 1978, 241. © Alessio Rotundo, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004548947_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY NC 4.0 license.

2

Introduction

at unsettling and thinking away central modern assumptions about the relationship between consciousness and nature while projecting a philosophical enterprise that puts transcendental insights at the center of its investigation of nature. This preliminary double qualification of the philosophical sense of Merleau-Ponty’s studies on nature should be supplemented right at the outset with a further consideration about the seemingly obvious designation of Merleau-Ponty’s enterprise as “phenomenological.” This title rests on a widely familiar albeit too often poorly represented thesis about intentionality. When this is taken to refer to the activity of acts of “consciousness” directed towards objects in one’s surrounding as they are given in the self-reflective operation of a thematizing consciousness, then everyone is agreed that Merleau-Ponty from the beginning precisely works against this “spirit-”phenomenology as not finding a place for the natural sensuousness and materiality of incarnated life. The incorporation of intentionality in bodily organic life, however, yields projects aimed at naturalizing consciousness in terms that only shift the issue without shedding real light on the critically transformative operation Merleau-Ponty deploys in his analyses of perception, bodily intentionality, and nature. What one ends up with is a “nature-” or, if you will, “naturalized” phenomenology that may well offer sophisticated and insightful accounts of how one’s living organism interacts with one’s surroundings, but that misses the primary sense that intentionality assumes in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical enterprise, and which commands his understanding of phenomenology across various stages of radicalization. Consequently, what one must also fail to appreciate is the prime lesson that emerges from this enterprise about the fundamental status of our incarnated experience and life in the world and the full scope of the truth of naturalism that speaks through it.3 Once more, if nothing else, various versions of “spirit-”phenomenology and “nature-”phenomenology mark the extremes we should avoid and within which we are to recover a complementarity but also the whole problematic tension between intentionality as living and intentionality as thinking. The aim of the present study is to follow Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological inspiration for this integrative project and to show its systematic relevance and coherence for Merleau-Ponty’s rethinking of the phenomenon of nature as situated in the framework of a distinctive transcendental project. In so doing, the book traces and documents the presence of a constitutive double meaning of nature affecting Merleau-Ponty’s vast analyses of sense perception, organic 3 Jocelyn Benoist lucidly points to the sense of this “truth” in his “The Truth of Naturalism,” which is part of a collection of essays on Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy (2019), eds. E. Alloa, F. Chouraqui, R. Kaushik.

Stating the Problem

3

development and behavior, but also cognition, language, and history: nature as what is first and primordial is both the ensemble of genetic and productive processes that are attainable in experience (phenomenal nature) as well as that which enables this experience (transcendental nature). This study argues that the intriguing twofoldness of the problem of nature in Merleau-Ponty receives a methodological clarification and proves coherent if we pay attention to the way Merleau-Ponty understands the thrust of radicalization in play in Edmund Husserl’s later work in phenomenology, especially regarding his expansion of the notion of intentionality within transcendental philosophy. The mention of this Husserlian background of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy may seem redundant in light of the vast scholarly coverage of this theme, especially as the latter is a recurring, and perhaps too much recurring, fixture of scholarship on ­Merleau-Ponty. While the fact of this background is well known, essential particulars of that same background are not, in particular the centrality of operative intentionality as presented in Formal and Transcendental Logic for Merleau-Ponty’s reception of Husserl’s thought as well as for t­aking this thought beyond the usual and classic presentations of Husserl’s own phenomenology. The concept of operative intentionality is often referred to in MerleauPonty’s scholarship but the precise phenomenological and transcendental grounding of operative intentionality is equally often inadequately appreciated and understood. The widely limitative grasp of this concept, which is often restricted to the insistence on the importance of Husserl’s descriptions of perceptual experience in the second volume of Ideas, thus warrants this mention. 2

Historical Contextualization

To the extent that philosophy is the working out for oneself and the making one’s own of what others have said and thought, it is only by rethinking the thoughts of others that one carries thought further so that thought itself is never in principle finished as to claim ultimate definiteness. But if thought is the very stuff of a living human soul, one can also take the dramatic lesson of this non-closure to be that the possibility to arrive at the “borders” or the “­bottom” of the soul would demand accounting for the whole natural adherence of the soul with the reality in which it lives and thinks. But, again, if this adherence is fundamentally in the going and working before and during any going of our own, then the soul must confront a fundamental limitation as to the complete probing of the very ultimate current and depth of its own living existence as not givable for it with definitive finality. Thus, in whatever sense we may take philosophy ultimately to be about, if philosophizing begins in the

4

Introduction

actual living of one’s life, then it must remain essentially incompletable in its radical probing, i.e. the probing down to ultimate “roots,” of this very life. One could summarize in this way the conclusion, which was meant to be a mere beginning, of Husserl’s last project to present a comprehensive statement of his phenomenology and what phenomenology at its core was really about. It is therefore even more astonishing that at the point in which Husserl presents the statement about this non-finality of all philosophizing, including his own phenomenology as effort to critically reconfigure the principal lines of inquiry from the history of philosophy, he finds a point of coherent effort between his philosophy of transcendental subjectivity and the founding statement about the soul from the beginning of philosophy: “if we could equate this subjectivity with the ψυχή of Heraclitus, his saying would doubtless be true of it: ‘You will never find the boundaries of the soul, even if you follow every road; so deep is its ground.’”4 Thus, since in philosophy coherence is not a matter of systematically laying out doctrinal solutions but rather about the recognition of a continuity of integrated effort, in what follows I will outline a summary consideration about the kind of philosophical endeavors and lineage that the phenomenology of nature presented in this study in many ways continues but also reorients. “The borders of the soul you will not find in going, traveling each path; so deep is its logos.”5 Placed at the beginning of philosophical thought, this Heraclitean fragment connects the soul with the idea of the unlimited. The paradox expressed by Heraclitus’ fragment is striking if we take the capacities of the soul to set the limits of the experienceable while the soul itself goes beyond what can be fully and comprehensively experienced and known. This paradox, however, is especially instructive in relation to the traditional schematizing of the human being into parts, functions, or faculties. This schematizing is first laid out systematically by Aristotle who recognized that the operations of living beings are not “apeiron” or unbounded but rather they take place according to a certain proportion (“logos”) and within specific limits (“peras”).6 Aristotle 4 Hua VI, 173. 5 See Fragment 45 (DK22B45) in Mansfeld 1986, 272. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. W. Kranz, 12th ed. (Dublin and Zurich: Weidman, 1966), p. 161. 6 In the context of his critique of the materialist conceptions of the predecessors, Aristotle points to the unlimited (ἄπειρον) character of “matter” in order to claim that the soul is the cause of life in natural beings due to its “proportion” and “limit”: “[Fire] is in a way a ­contributory cause, but not the cause simply; rather it is the soul which is this. For the growth of fire is unlimited [εἰς ἄπειρον] while there is something to be burnt, but in all things which are naturally constituted there is a limit and proportion [ἔστι πέρας καὶ λόγος] both for size and for growth; and these belong to soul, but not to fire, and to principle [λόγου] rather than to matter [ὕλης].” De Anima II.4.416a13–18.

Stating the Problem

5

identifies these aspects as characteristic of the first appearance of life in general and their entelecheia he prote, the soul, as their principle.7 The soul, as principle of life, is principle of all the ways in which life is spoken of, as nutrition, growth, decay, perception, locomotion, intellect.8 This doctrine issues in the conception of the soul as a layered or many-storied structure as stratified according to its various operations.9 The decisive aspect of this ­conception is the determination of the relationships between the different layers or strata as a relationships of mutual dependence and autonomy.10 This conception is meant to argue for a fundamental unity of the soul’s functions under one structurally integral principle.11 Aquinas will latch on this Aristotelian line of thought in order to rethink and recast the Neoplatonic hypostatic doctrine and its basic notion of emanation (fluere) when it comes to the problem of the human soul. The conception of the soul’s powers in the broader framework of the doctrine of emanation makes each hypostasis dependent on the higher one and ultimately on the highest of all, from which the lower hypostases “hang.”12 The Neoplatonic model, applied to the powers of the soul, represents 7 8 9

10 11

12

De Anima II.1.412b5. De Anima II.2.413a20–24. Cf. the definition of the soul as “first actuality [entelecheia] of a natural body having life in potentiality” (412a27) or “first actuality of a natural organic body” (412b4–6). See Nicolai Hartmann’s essay on Die Anfänge des Schichtungsgedankens in der Alten Philosophie, in Kleinere Schriften, Band II (Berlin: de Gruyter: 1957). In his Aufbau der realen Welt (1940), Hartmann writes with regard to the De Anima, “Deutlich erkennt Aristoteles das Verhältnis dieser Stufen als ein solches der Überlagerung (also Schichtung). Denn das ist sein Hauptaugenmerk, zu zeigen, wie immer die höhere Stufe auf der niederen aufruht, ohne sie nicht bestehen kann, während diese ohne die höhere sehr wohl besteht (in der Pflanze z. B. die Vitalseele ohne Sinnlichkeit, im Tier die vitale und wahrnehmende Seele ohne Vernunft); nicht weniger aber ist es ihm darum zu tun, dass dennoch immer die höhere Stufe ihr eigenes, durchaus selbständiges Prinzip hat.” Hartmann 1967, 176. Hartmann 1957, 165. For Aristotle, the soul is that which makes the animal or plant “one and continuous by nature” (ἓν καὶ συνεχὲς φύσει) as opposed to what is put together by force (βίᾳ) like a heap. Aristotle therefore holds that it is not the body that is the actuality of the soul, but rather the soul that is the actuality of the living body, making it be what it is, i.e. a living body, and holding it together in its living unity. Cf. on this point Aristotle’s criticism of the ­Platonists in Meta. VIII.6: “what then, is it that makes man one; why is he one and not many, e.g. animal + biped, especially if there are, as some say, an animal-itself and a biped-itself?” Meta. VIII.6.10. The Platonist view breaks the unity of the object to be defined, the human being, and has the grievous consequence of making this substance a heap (σωρὸς) of substances (the idea of animal, the idea of biped, etc.). Aristotle’s criticism of Plato at the end of book 8 in the Metaphysics takes up the problem of the unity of definition by linking it to the problem of the unity of that which is to be defined. Hartmann 1957, 182.

6

Introduction

an inversion of the Aristotelian descriptive model concerning the soul. The emanation model removes all autonomy from the lower psychical operations and makes them completely dependent on the higher principles of reason and intellect. While Aristotle denies that the soul is a body, he also claims that the soul does not exist without a body and it is something belonging to a body (σώματος τι) and existing in a body (ἐν σώματι ὑπάρχει).13 Aquinas embraces this Aristotelian insight when he remarks that it pertains to the soul in its own right to be united to the body (quod secundum se convenit animae corpori uniri), so much so that “the human soul retains its proper being when separated from the body, having an aptitude and a natural inclination to be united to the body.”14 In sum, according to this tradition, a living human being is not a pure spiritual soul and rather has its perfection in the unity with a body and therefore in the context of pregiven sitedness in a natural world.15 The theory of the soul as part of natural philosophy in Aristotle as well as in the later Scholastic tradition is conceived within the framework of an ontology that has a firm grasp on a nature that is first and already integrally given as condition of life but also of knowledge.16 While the Platonic conception of the soul admits of a more radical separation between the sensible and the ideal, the Aristotelian notion of a possible “separation” (chorismos) of mind is embedded in a polysemic context in which the attempt to define and refine the account of soul as united to the body is in keeping with the probing of the soul’s specificity

13 14 15

16

De Anima II.2.414a19. ST Iª q. 76 a. 1 ad. 6. “The soul united to the body is more like God than the soul separated from the body because it possesses its own nature more perfectly.” Quaest. disp. de potentia Dei, q. 5 a. 10 ad. 5. In the context of Aquinas’s critical confrontation with the Neoplatonic tradition, it is important to stress Aquinas’s extremely spare usage of the term fluere in the whole corpus of his work. One of the occurrences of this term is significantly found in Iª q. 77 a. 6., which can be interpreted as a confrontation with his teacher Albert the Great concerning the problem of diversity in matter. According to Albert, following the Neoplatonic model, all diversity in matter proceeds or flows from diversity of form; according to Aquinas, on the contrary, not all but some diversity in matter proceeds or flows from diversity of form. The important aspect in this debate is that for Aquinas the soul, against Albert, does not function as a source or font of emanation for the determination of the nature of the body, but rather its individuality is bound to the distinctness of the particular body to which it belongs. In this Aristotelian tradition, the soul is not separate (οὐκ ἔστιν ἡ ψυχὴ χωριστὴ τοῦ σώματος, 413a4) as requiring that kind of body having life in potentiality in order to be what it is, i.e. its “form.” On the general topic of natural pregivenness, cf. the contribution of J­an-Ivar Lindén with the title “Intentionnalité et perception: une esquisse ­aristotélicienne” (2011–2012).

Stating the Problem

7

and thus with entertaining some sort of separateness.17 If the latter is mainly associated with the knowledge of the universal and with the presence of the divine in the human, then the study of the soul is as much object of physics as it also moves beyond physics. This study is appropriately said to be an investigation (“historian”) rather than a science proper as not readily fitting within a single domain of inquiry, thereby remaining in closer proximity to the pre-Socratic meditation about the paradoxicalities of the soul and nature than more modern approaches and their stronger metaphysical assumptions about “spirit”/“mind” and “matter.”18 In its theological frame, which made any human knowledge and ultimately philosophy into ancillae theologiae, pre-Cartesian Scholastic philosophy maintained rather a strong sense for one’s limitations as for the capacity to achieve comprehensive self-understanding, thereby staying close to the phenomena and challenging some of our modern preconceptions.19 The interest in this Aristotelian and Scholastic conceptuality, whose rich complications is not my intention to pursue further here, lies in the vivid attempt to develop an analysis that would account for the totality of the descriptive features of our natural being in the natural world outside of modern “spiritualisms” or “naturalisms” as conventionally represented by Cartesian dichotomies of body/soul or trichotomies of God/human being as human spirit/nature.20 3

Renewed Setting of the Problem

This study is a modest attempt to follow the rehabilitation and ­advancement of this Aristotelian conceptuality in the context of phenomenological ­philosophy. Thus, the present study inserts itself in the context of the thematic ­investigation of the sense and implications of the idea of natural belongingness in the history of metaphysics, which has the potential to call into question recent and current theories of mind and nature.21 One can argue that much of the philosophy of the twentieth century can be approached in terms of either a reaction to or a siding with various forms of naturalism. This is eminently the position of phenomenology, which sees in the counteraction against “­naturalism” the main step to be taken in order to initiate 17 18 19 20 21

See on this point, Polansky 2007, 168–170. Cf. Polansky 2007, 35, 26–27. Cf. Lindén 1997, 21n4. Cf. Hartmann 1957, 165. Cf. the comprehensive study on this topic by Jan-Ivar Lindén entitled Philosophie der Gewohnheit (1997).

8

Introduction

a genuine philosophical ­interrogation of the presuppositions of scientific inquiry, thereby accomplishing the inner telos of scientific inquiry itself. By naturalism, phenomenology, and H ­ usserlian phenomenology in particular, means to address a widely accepted metaphysical conception of nature as the domain of the purely physical. This is the “nature” construed by the modern mathematical science of nature in terms of quantitative material stuff worked by “forces” that get framed and schematized in the very spiritual formulas of mathematics.22 Since the birth of the modern age, the goal of science is to find efficient causes, and thus to explain our perceptual phenomena in terms of a reality underlying them. This results in a conflict between the objective reality determined by natural science and the merely subjective reality of perceptual experience. Subjective life becomes in modern accounts a byproduct of objective reality. Dominant trends in t­ wentieth-century philosophy, such as scientific realism and logical positivism, have in different guises continued to uphold this idea. These currents of thought believe that our subjective world picture is not the real world. The basic idea behind these approaches is this: the philosopher and the scientist belong to nature, but nature does not belong to them. Contemporary naturalistic theories have taken this idea to imply that the knowledge of nature demands liberation from any subjective contamination. Due to its specificity, the subjective perspective needs to be set aside, if we are to achieve a true or objective knowledge of reality. Objectivity can only be reached by abandoning individual behaviors and what appears as immediately meaningful to the human subject. The modern severing of ties between our experience of reality and our conception of the natural world is motivated by belief in a reality which is thought to be fundamentally independent from the experiencing and cognizing human subject. Despite the wide acceptance even today of various forms of naturalism, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a chorus of critics has emerged. In particular, the modern process of “disanthropomorphization” of nature has been held responsible for the spiritual crisis of modern ­humanity.23 We no ­longer live in certainty that our attempts at understanding reality, both philosophically and scientifically, refer to the same world that we experience in ordinary life. The understanding of nature remains therefore a key theme of philosophical concern today, especially fueled by debates about the ­environmental and technological implications of human relations with a dehumanized natural world. These debates span from apocalyptic and catastrophic 22 23

On the phenomenological reaction to “naturalism,” cf. Patočka 2016, 3ff.; Bruzina 2010, 91ff.; Ryckman 2005, 120–122. See Patočka 2016, 6.

Stating the Problem

9

claims regarding natural, socio-economic, and socio-political degradation, to utopian projects of technological omnipotence.24 The phenomenological orientation of thought before and after the Second World War was characterized by the attempt to generate an understanding of nature that opposed physicalistic (“naturalistic”) and psychologistic currents of thought, both of which took the objectivity of nature to designate a mind-independent reality. According to this phenomenological orientation, objectivity originates within the frame of subjective conditions reflecting the structures and operations of human experience. Following in the footsteps of transcendental idealism, phenomenology intended thereby to recuperate a unitary picture of the human subject that naturalism always threatened to split. Phenomenology draws inspiration from the conceptual framework of Kantianism and the fundamental intuition that the truth in the things and in the world that we can understand is of a different order than that of reality itself. This study follows this line of thought from a specific thematic and ­historical angle. By “nature” we usually understand both the reality that our natural ­sciences study according to methodically controllable procedures and the reality that we confront “outside” of our human cultural productions. We are no longer sure how to harmonize the experiences of science and culture with our ongoing experience of nature in ordinary life. In fact, we no longer know what this nature – prior to any theory – is. Phenomenological authors realized that any possibility of achieving an understanding of this primordial nature demanded that we radically revisit the modern tendency to separate knowledge and thought from the “nature” around us and the “nature” within us. In this separation, nature remains extrinsic to the concrete living of the cognizing and reflecting human subject. The method of phenomenology ­prescribes therefore to suspend our mostly unwarranted beliefs about the reality outside or inside of us. This method aims to describe the constitution of nature confronting me from without or animating me from within in terms of various relations of experience – of space and time in perception, and of their modifications in memory, in imagination, in theoretical thought, etc. – as they come to take on sense in our experience and not as they are uncritically preconceived in terms of mechanistic and naturalistic concepts. Historically, this manner of philosophizing was inaugurated by Edmund Husserl but ­underwent transformative recasting by a variety of leading philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 24

For a representative account of some of these debates, see the collection of essays entitled Trasformazioni del concetto di umanità (2020), eds. C. Di Martino, R. Redaelli, M. Russo.

10

Introduction

In this landscape, I consider Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological investigations about behavior, perception, and nature as offering a perspective of urgent contemporary interest. In his series of lecture courses at the Collège de France from 1956 to 1960 on the theme of La Nature, Merleau-Ponty works out a phenomenology of nature by paying close attention to recent discoveries in the sciences, from quantum physics to the new advances in embryological biology and ethology. Merleau-Ponty’s close study of how nature was already being studied in empirical science purports to counter naïve presuppositions in the philosophical understanding of nature. However, his analyses are carried out under the guidance of phenomenological principles regarding how to best analyze the relationship of consciousness and the world. These principles, to put it schematically, ruled out the idea of a mind-independent reality while also challenging a certain absolutizing modern conception of subjective consciousness. Phenomenology’s “psychological subjectivism” fits already into a certain tradition in philosophy that takes the phenomenality of the real as a starting point for the ontological elucidation of human experiencing in the world. On the other hand, however, the radicalization of self-understanding in phenomenology takes on the form of a demand for a total clarification of consciousness, so that phenomenology can be said to continue and, more importantly, even to bring to completion the whole endeavor of modern philosophy.25 A way to present Merleau-Ponty’s reconsideration of the “natural” can be that of reading it as a radicalized “transcendental logic” understood as “a priori logic” of the being said to be “natural.” Yet the “logic” here in play is 25

In the closing lines of his “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty claims that phenomenology, under the point of view of its “will to seize upon the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state” counfounds itself with the whole effort of modern thought. See PhP xvi. In Phénoménologie, sémantique et ontologie, Jocelyn Benoist, with reference to Franz Brentano’s rendering of the Aristotelian theory of truth, claims that in Aristotle’s conception of the grasping of simple things through simple acts, such as in the case of perception, we find the foundation of the phenomenological legacy that goes from Brentano through Husserl to Heidegger and that, as a result, the “modern period” of phenomenology is established upon the “ancient period” initiated by ­Aristotle’s philosophy. If phenomenology brings to completion the inner telos of modern philosophy, if phenomenology itself is established upon the ancient (Aristotelian) endeavor of studying the self in order to understand the world, then the accomplishment of modern philosophy in phenomenology is the accomplishment of the ancient philosophical project of clarifying truth and nature. It should be added that this project exhibits also a clear legacy between the ancient and modern concept of Logos as limited capacity that however can always transcend itself. This Logos, as Paolo Zellini says, appears to be very different than the dominating and controlling Logos interpreted by modern deconstructionist philosophies. See Chiurazzi 2017, 107, who refers to Zellini’s Numero e logos (Milano: Adelphi, 1980), 135–136.

Stating the Problem

11

“a priori” only in terms of its thrust towards what in fact precedes it, a “first nature” that always encompasses it and from which it itself comes. This “a priori logic” of nature then is fathomed to find a quite different “transcendental” than that of critical philosophy.26 If the latter solidifies into a metaphysics of nature whereby nature turns into an objective unity that gets constituted for a consciousness, we will have to see how Merleau-Ponty’s “a priori logic” can rethink the “constitution” of nature without falling back upon the contrary but equivalent metaphysics of nature of the realism of modern biology or of “atomistic psychology,” which rests on the prejudice of a nature existing in itself or of a being that is already determined in itself and whose determinations only need to be uncovered by a not further determined “observer.” By discerning a line of linkage that begins with La structure du ­comportement (1942) and continues through Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) on to the lecture courses on La nature (1956/57, 1957/58, 1959/60), and the writings s­urrounding that set of lectures, I show how Merleau-Ponty takes up ­Husserl’s ultimate project of working out the fundamental level of experiential sense-genesis in the systematic attempt to lay open the antecedency of sentient experience to concept-guided reflective thought.27 This study shows how Merleau-Ponty’s studies work out in detail a conception of the conditions of experience and knowledge that integrates the natural elements of human e­ xperiential materiality with the self-awareness of the living human, thereby counteracting dualist distinctions between the physical and the mental, but only if the “material” in question is understood in the way in which ­Merleau-Ponty reinterprets and recasts recent findings in biology as well as novel advances in psychology and neurology. As philosophy and natural ­science today advance our understanding of neurological processes and conscious life, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical interrogation of the constitution of nature in modern physics and biology remains exceptionally important for rehabilitating the idea of life’s corporeality and for finding the starting point for a ­comprehensive and transformative conception of nature and consciousness. 26

27

The positive significance of the transcendental deduction of the categories in Kant lies precisely in providing a logic of the physical world. The Critique of Pure Reason provides the logic of any nature whatsoever. See Heidegger 2006, § 3, 10–11, and also VI.CM/1, §1, 9–10. A closer analysis of Kant’s transcendenal logic, however, should show that, by starting from the epistomological results of modern science rather than from our belongingness to a nature, the contribution of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is limited to the elaboration of an a priori logic for the kind of nature known by the natural sciences, i.e. as a theory of the mathematico-geometric projection of spatio-temporality as the antecedent a priori opening upon nature. Cf. PhP 20, and Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Husserl’s Formale und transzendentale Logik.

Chapter 1

Natura Sub Specie Structurae 1

Science between Technocracy and Aesthetics

The cultural and ideological conflict between positivistic and idealistic ­tendencies at the beginning of the twentieth century exhibited a complex landscape of views on experience, reality, and knowledge, ranging from p ­ ositions such as Max Planck’s rational or critical realism to Ernst Mach’s pragmatic relativism.1 This situation of conflict in the philosophy of science and theory of knowledge renewed fundamental issues about sensation, perception, and their relationship to one another as well as problems related to central and peripheral processes of sensory experience and cognition. Around the same time, attempts were made to discover a middle path between positivism and idealism by such authors as William James, Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Edmund Husserl. These authors, in conjunction with the developments of experimental psychology at the turn of the century, began to introduce new categorial frameworks in science and philosophy that drew from the lived sphere of consciousness, and particularly from the aesthetic dimensions of sensation, perception, and memory, in order to overcome the opposition of nature and mind without sacrificing natural science. These attempts were motivated by the diffuse sense of a “crisis” of science as part of a larger problem of modernity stemming from the separation of science and experience that was felt at the beginning of the century and intensified after the First World War. These attempts contributed towards the shift from conceptions of science founded on technological categories to conceptions of science founded on aesthetic categories, which entailed profound philosophical implications.2 Hermann von Helmholtz, the leading sensory physiologist of the second half of the nineteenth century, compared sensory processes to a network of telegraph wires.3 He tied the possibility to establish and advance physiology as 1 In an address to the Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians held in Leiden in 1909, Planck attacked Mach’s philosophy of science in terms of an “anthropomorphism” unable to account for that which is “invariant” in nature as the goal for which science strives. See Ash 1995, 116–117. 2 On the distinction between “technocratic” and “aesthetic” conceptions of science, see Ash 1995, 4, 159–160, 166, 185, 197, 306, 309 et passim. 3 The telegraph analogy appears first in Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologischer Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863). © Alessio Rotundo, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004548947_003

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a science to the recognition of the rigorous and necessary lawfulness of natural phenomena right into the workings of our sensory apparatuses. Helmholtz interpreted sensations as the result of a process of triggering of nerve fibers specialized according to different senses (optical nerves, auditory nerves) and according to different sensations within the same sense (nerves responsible for the impression of different colors, pitch levels). In spite of his mechanistic account of sensation, Helmholtz interpreted the relationship between sensations and objects not in terms of a direct “copy” (Abbild) but rather in terms of the relationship of a “sign” (Zeichen) to the physical objects as “signified.”4 He rejected the doctrine of an innate harmony of the senses with the external world, which finds its paradigmatic formulation in Aristotle’s theory of aisthesis as aisthesis aistheseos. Rather, the correspondence between sensations and their objects is learned “through practice and experience.” We acquire knowledge of the qualitative and spatial differences in our perception through the regularity of occurrences of sense impressions. At this juncture, Helmholtz introduced the mediation of mental activity in order to account for the complex phenomena of sensory perception, from binocular vision to the localization of objects in space and the experience of size, distance, and depth of spatial objects. Helmholtz’s investigations on visual perception of space adopted Hermann Lotze’s theory of “local signs.” Lokalzeichen are physiological cues stemming from the movements of our own body and that attach to sense impressions. Helmholtz holds that the frequent repetition of the same succession of visual and tactile sensations in association with their “local signs” develops the disposition and ability to relate all spatial sensations to each other into a single ordered image resulting in the space we perceive. For Helmholtz this image is an inference or judgment that we draw unconsciously through practice and experience, in the same way in which we first learn our mother tongue by beginning to use it. By defining our perceptions of external objects as “signs,” which result from the repeated occurrence of same sequences of sense impressions, Helmholtz achieved two things at once. First, he weakened the idea of a correspondence between experience and the real world. Second, he emphasized the lawful ­regularity of our experiences. Helmholtz’s “theory of signs” exhibits a pivotal tension that is worth noting. Taken as a causal realist theory of perception, as he had at one point entertained, this theory would imply that the perceivers belong to the reality that they perceive. The perceiving subjects would be exposed to the effects of a causality responsible for the entirety of the causal 4 Helmholtz 1896, 393f.

14

Chapter 1

connections that they experience and know. This belonging to a pregiven world is also implied by the idea of a certain physiological and psychological organization that affords the possibility of the process of learning resulting in the ordered representation of our external world. On the one hand, this causal realist view of perception therefore stresses the idea of an interaction with the physical world to whose dynamics we are receptive as the basis needed to ­construe our spatial representations. On the other hand, the signitive view of perception weakens the idea of an external world to which we belong and rather points to a nonstrict Kantian view.5 This view emphasizes that perceptions are “signs” or appearances of a lawful uniformity of sensations. What matters here is not the reference to an external cause laying behind the appearances that we perceive but rather the regulated occurrence and mutual relation of the appearances themselves.6 Helmholtz, at least nominally, retains a Kantian account of space in relation to the psychophysical makeup as providing the a priori form for the intuition of space. Yet this is a nonstrict form of Kantianism, since the a priori psychophysical organization responsible for the representation of space is not tied to a pure (transcendental) consciousness as condition of possibility of experience and knowledge but is itself only discoverable by way of practice, habituation, and inference.7 The Kantian ideal of objectivity in scientific knowledge was maintained in the idea of rigorous necessity and invariability of natural laws.8 The idea of compelling force of the natural law – Helmholtz identifies the natural law with the term “force” (Kraft) – corresponds to the occurrence of conditions from which a certain effect must follow: the lawfulness of nature is a causal nexus independent

5 Ryckman refers to Helmholtz as a “nonstrict Kantian” in Ryckman 2005, 74. 6 “Für ein Zeichen genügt es, dass es zur Erscheinung komme, so oft der zu b­ ezeichnende Vorgang eintritt, ohne dass irgend welche andere Art von Uebereinstimmung, als die ­Gleichzeitigkeit des Auftretens zwischen ihnen existirt; nur von dieser letzteren Art ist die Correspondenz zwischen unseren Sinnesempfindungen und ihren Objecten.” Helmholtz 1896, 393. My emphasis. 7 Helmholtz’s nonstrict Kantianism is perhaps best represented by his geometrical papers from the late 1860s. See Ryckman 2005, 71–75. Ernst Cassirer holds that Helmholtz’s reformulation of the a priori as dependent on experimental science is indication of Helmholtz’s departure from Kantianism. See Cassirer 2005 [1918], “Hermann Cohen and the Renewal of Kantian Philosophy,” translated by Lydia Patton, Angelaki (Routledge) 10(1): 95–108. Article originally appeared in Kantstudien (1918) 17: 252–273. 8 Helmholtz speaks in relation to natural law in terms of “invariability of holding good” (­Ausnahmslosigkeit der Geltung) and of “stringent necessity” (zwingende Notwendigkeit). See Helmholtz 1896, 375–376.

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15

from our thought and will.9 At the same time, Helmholtz interprets the task of scientific thought as finding the “forces” or “causes of the appearances” (die Ursachen der Erscheinungen) with the aim to advance the project of human mastery of nature.10 Helmholtz’s epistemological perspective here takes on the ­technocratic ethos of modern science. In this sense, a scientific physiology and psychology of perception must identify the lawful patterns of appearances with regard to the functioning of our sense apparatuses. This can be done by detecting patterns of excitations on the sense organ through measuring the corresponding patterns of physical stimuli. This procedure would allow to recover the elementary sense impressions as causes of our perceptual ­inferences and also to arrive at a better knowledge of the workings of our perception, that is, to achieve increased mastery of the sensing natural powers and, as a result, a more efficient orientation in the world.11 Helmholtz’s instrumental and mechanistic approach to sensation aimed at establishing the worldview of the physicist in the context of the physiology and psychology of perception. This approach presupposed the longstanding elementism dominating modern science. This is the idea that every reality, whether physical or mental, is made up of discrete elements that combine. Applied to the phenomena of sensory physiology and the psychology of perception, elementist theories interpreted the relationship between “stimulus” and “sensation” in terms of a one-to-one relationship. Even Helmholtz, as we have seen, did not commit to an exact, point-for-point correspondence between physical world and sensory phenomena. Yet he adhered to a form of atomism that resorted to “involuntary inferences” in order to account for the experience of meaningful relationships such as those displayed in the perception of space, which one could not explain in terms of simple summations of discrete elements. The atomism of sensory psychology in the nineteenth century 9 10

11

“Die Gesetzlichkeit der Natur wird als causaler Zusammenhang aufgefasst, sobald wir die Unabhängigkeit derselben von unserem Denken und unserem Willen anerkennen.” ­Helmholtz 1896, 377. This notion of instrumental reason emerges clearly when Helmholtz speaks of achieving “victories over the natural powers” (Siege über die Naturkräfte) and about the “human striving after the progressive mastery over natural powers” (Verlangen nach fortschreitender Herrschaft des Menschen über die Naturmächte). Helmholtz 1896, 373–374. Cf. Ash 1995, 56–57. Timothy Lenoir can therefore speak of “rearing of the senses” (Erziehung der Sinne). Thus, the use of our moving body teaches us which spatial perceptions must follow from which bodily motions and the corresponding spatial sensations. See Helmholtz 1896, 394. This insight will be especially important for Helmholtz’s research on geometry, which follows and builds upon his research on visual perception from the late 1850s and early 1860s. Cf. Ryckman 2005, 72ff.

16

Chapter 1

aspired to map out the whole circuit of sensation, from stimulus through the so-called reflex arc yielding the sensation to the response of the perceiving organism. The relationship between sensation and perception as well as that between peripheral-physiological and central-psychological processes had its determining factor in the peripheral stimulation of the sense organ. In order to account for the things we actually perceive without ­falling back upon unverifiable hypotheses about “unconscious” psychological p ­ rocesses, it seemed that a radical recasting of elementism and therefore a revision of the ­nineteenth-century concept of “stimulus” was required. The idea that there is constancy of sense impressions, i.e. their fixed relationship to physical stimuli, working in terms of juxtaposition and succession according to unambiguous peripheral stimuli taken in isolation, was perhaps helpful as entry point into a more systematic study of sensory psychology that had until then be treated in mostly speculative terms. Yet the same assumption about how perception works carried over into sensory psychology the instrumental concept of natural (causal) lawfulness from what was taken to be proper scientific discourse. The work of revision of the traditional concept of “stimulus” appears therefore clearly tied to a more encompassing and ­profound revision of the mechanistic, instrumental, and spiritualistic assumptions of modern philosophy. This revision touched upon the geometrism and formalism of Cartesian ­philosophy, which attempted to take conceptual hold of reality by identifying matter with featureless extension while maintaining a theory of the two worlds of spatial extension and thought. The rationalistic deduction of the fundamental dynamics of the physical world in geometrical fashion, while rejecting physical atomism, was aimed at measurement of summative manifolds. The reduction of the natural world to geometry therefore followed the rationalizing tendencies of modern thought, which remain closely intertwined with instrumental ideals of domination of nature. If anything, it is a form of Cartesianism that is inherited by Helmholtz’s conception of natural law and applied by him in the domain of sensory physiology.12 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel’s natural philosophy was already a monumental response to the atomistic and dualistic tendencies of modern thought. Hegel articulated the phenomena and concepts of modern natural science following the categories of the absolute idea laid out in his logic. Yet Hegel’s natural-philosophical project is accompanied by the parallel critique of modern subjective consciousness. Hegel’s speculative idealism subjected all 12

Mitchell Ash stresses this point in the context of his discussion of Wolfgang Koehler’s Die physischen Gestalten. See Ash 1995, 175–176.

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17

Reflexions- and Subjektphilosophie to an explicit critique.13 The philosophy of reflection presupposed the idea of self-consciousness as starting point for an account of experience and science. A formalism and a ­psychologism attach to the standpoint of reflection, eminently when reflection undergoes radicalization, such as in Kant’s transcendental idealism. In its radicalized transcendental form, the philosophy of reflection establishes consciousness as pure self-consciousness as necessary condition of experience and knowledge. This is a formalism because our concrete experiential ­awareness, before the thematic interest of scientific life, such as in the most elementary cases of ­perception, does not seem to presuppose this strong sense of reflective consciousness.14 At the same time, the theory of reflection remains a “psychologism” since it makes the whole unity of the world dependent on the autonomous synthetic activity of subjective faculties. These two aspects will become the eminent targets of critical focus in the developments of transcendental philosophies in the twentieth century. Yet the roots of these developments are to be found in Hegel’s critique of subjective consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Hegel posits the reflective subject in its concrete individuality, that is, as part of a social, linguistic, and historical total context that fundamentally transcends the inner freedom of the reflecting individual. Thus included in a historical process that transcends it, the individual subjective consciousness finds in this very process the enabling conditions of its activity of reflection. Thus, any act of reflection is ultimately the act of a historical understanding. The natural philosophy of German idealism, and in particular that of Hegel, appears therefore less foreign or absurd to our scientific mindset if we consider it in light of the idea of objective or historical spirit as the context in which modern science originated and accrued into a determining force of our whole existence. In this way, Hegel attempted to unify experience, science, and philosophy in a project that was the last of this kind. But in Hegel this project was achieved in the idea that only spirit as a whole, i.e. the spirit that no longer knows any distinction between the subjective and the ­objective, is the ultimate or absolute reality. This philosophy of identity replies to the formalism and psychologism attaching to the philosophies of the subject. Yet it places not only a supra-personal but also a supra-temporal concept as fundamental for the entire historico-­ dialectical development of the spirit. This process of development has little to do with the intentions, plans, and d­ ispositions of the particular individuals, as it emerges clearly in Hegel’s philosophy of world history. Hegel’s standpoint of the concept remains problematic not just in connection to the question about 13 14

For a brief but poignant account of this critique, see Gadamer 1976, 111–113. On the relationship between knowledge and consciousness, cf. Scheler 1973, 293–295.

18

Chapter 1

the status of particular experience as ontologically inessential. The merging of world and reason in the concept is problematic for another and more fundamental reason: the spirit that has vanquished everything alien and objective and that is absolutely at home with itself has freed itself of the very paradox of temporality. The Naturphilosophie of German idealism conceived even the Other of spirit, i.e. nature, as an organic whole whose development is located within itself. In Hegel’s philosophy this idea presupposes the insight, formulated in the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit, that only the whole is true.15 The true whole is the spirit that no longer experiences any opposition, resistance, or limit. But the paradox of temporality consists in enabling a contact with myself in the living present while also establishing an irreconcilable distance between myself and the totality of implicit presuppositions anteceding and continuously determining my experience. This is also the reason why the critique of subjective spirit in the twentieth century, with its focus on the problem of time, as Gadamer argues, is not simply a repetition of Hegelian motives.16 These remarks adumbrate the far-reaching philosophical implications that the recasting of traditional conceptions of sensation, perception, and ­consciousness yield. The project to overcome the atomistic, dualistic, and instrumental approaches to nature and consciousness in modern philosophy and science did not seem to find in speculative idealistic systems a fully ­satisfactory approach. Nietzsche’s caustic critique of consciousness made the return to subjectivity ultimately problematic for any future philosophy. The question of the tie between science and lived experience could no longer simply assume the idea of a fully purified transcendental consciousness on the Kantian model nor that of a supra-historical concept. This becomes clear in the revival of transcendental idealism following the emergence of new theories in physics, such as relativity theory and then quantum mechanics; in the debate between intuitionistic and symbolic approaches to the status of mathematical entities in our experience; in the transcendental stance of Neo-­Kantianism and later of phenomenology; and last but not least in the investigation of the empirical features of subjectivity in twentieth-century psychology. The defining question in all these approaches remained that about the subjectivity involved in experience. The methods varied but it was clear that the starting point for a redefinition of the experiencing subject could no longer presuppose a reality as the actual cause of both physical and psychological events. 15 16

In the “Vorrede” to the Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hegel programmatically states: “Das Wahre ist das Ganze.” Hegel 2006, 15. See Gadamer 1976, in particular 115–116, 119, 128.

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Whether through methodic experimentation or direct phenomenological description, the idea was to begin with psychological formations as clues to problems of perception and cognition as well as to long-standing mind-body debates. This new approach, however, required a reformulation of the elements that are supposed to make up the psychological sphere of experience. If these elements, even if only heuristically, are still taken to be ultimately traceable to sensory units, peripheral processes, and mechanisms in the brain, then we would reintroduce a dualism of real causes and experienced appearances. The challenge of such reformulation emerges clearly if we consider that elementism of consciousness was dominant in the second half of the twentieth century and is still very much present in contemporary cognitive and neurophysiological ­discourses.17 As I hinted at above about the paradigmatic case of Helmholtz’s sensory physiology, technological, pragmatistic, and functional tendencies define elementist approaches. Thus, the task for new phenomenological and psychological approaches in the first half of the twentieth century could be described as achieving an aesthetic point of view, i.e. the point of view of the actually living subject experiencing an inherently ordered and meaningful reality that emerges in the dynamic interaction of organism and environment. The pivotal question that emerges at this point concerns the conceptual presuppositions that are brought to bear on this aesthetic approach and the various outcomes that follow from endorsing these presuppositions. 2

The Disinterested and the Interested Onlooker

In this study, I will deal with the special concept of nature that emerges from this situation. In particular, I will approach the aesthetic understanding of nature from a specific historical and thematic angle by focusing on the work of Merleau-Ponty. The latter is especially paradigmatic and illuminating because of its synthesis of different but related aesthetic approaches to questions of perception, knowledge, and experience. I shall single out three main strains of influence that play an orienting role in Merleau-Ponty’s thought: first, the Gestalt-psychological approach to perception and cognition; second, the ­Husserlian transcendental-phenomenological approach; third, the approach of the tradition of French introspective psychology. These three main motives work synergistically, influencing, correcting, and integrating each other. The 17

Cf. the empirical explanation of consciousness in Christof Koch’s Consciousness, ­ onfessions of a Romantic Reductionist, or the project of a “physiology of truth” in Pierre C Changeux’s L’Homme de vérité.

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result is an original view of nature that remains highly insightful today, as the resurgence of interest in Merleau-Ponty’s work on nature first and more recently on history and language shows. In the following considerations, I will articulate some of the principal moments that are in play in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about nature and mind from the beginning. These remarks will introduce us to Merleau-Ponty’s first important work as well as sketch a preliminary orientation for subsequent issues to be taken up in the next chapters. To put it concisely, the main underlying issue for aesthetic theories of experience is that of clearly demarcating an alternative to so-called archetypal accounts of our finite experience, that is, accounts that ultimately dispense with our finite modes of access to the experience of reality. In other words, the question is that of understanding our belonging to a world and to a nature as the essential condition of experience and cognition. From this basic premise it follows that whatever the experienced and cognized world ultimately looks like in our perception of it and in our theories, this experienced and cognized world cannot be identified with the world as the condition of our experiencing and cognizing modalities. This means, finally, that the world to which we belong exceeds our experience, description, and explanation. But if this is the basic idea of every realism, the world pre-existing with respect to our access to it is no longer identified with any of the determinations that realist theories generally attribute to this pre-existence. As a result, the study of conditioning factors of experience must remain necessarily unfinished. Merleau-Ponty’s study of these factors and of the subjectivity that undergoes their conditioning effects relied heavily on the insights gained by the innovative experimental techniques and conceptual elaborations of the psychologists of the Gestalt. Their quest was to recast the traditional meaning of objectivity as reality underlying the phenomenal appearances in our perception. The insight into the notion of Gestalt or “form” meant to capture such recasting by attributing a new sense of objectivity to our immediate perceptual behavior rather than to hypothesized realities behind the appearances. While Gestalt theory was thereby able to maintain the idea of a rigorous relationship of the perceiving psychophysiological organism with its environment, more preliminary approaches of Gestalt-psychology tended to assume the independent existence of this relationship as an objective structure that the investigator only needs to describe.18 This approach singled out the investigator from the relational structure and aimed to articulate descriptive and experimental 18

On this point, cf. for instance Wolfgang Koehler’s commitment to physicalism in Ash 1995, 181.

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observations as objective features of the perceptual situation. On the one hand, this way of proceeding proved extremely fruitful and was to a certain extent required by the phenomenal situation itself: when we see something we do not see that by which we see. On the other hand, however, the same approach had to remain limited in its pretensions to offer a comprehensive theory of experience and nature if it did not fully answer the question about the implicit and layered dynamics involved in the production of objective experience, including the role of subjectivity, both of the experimenting investigator and of the investigated perceiving subject. When Merleau-Ponty began to draw from the tradition of Gestalt-­psychology in order to answer his question about the relationship between nature and consciousness, he implicitly welcomed instances that integrated more ­traditional gestaltic approaches in the direction of biologistic and humanistic theories. This is especially clear in Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the term Gestalt as “structure,” which aligns terminologically with the intellectual reception of Gestalt-psychology among holistic and humanistic psychological theories of the 1920s in Germany.19 At the same time, Merleau-Ponty’s close reading of experimental findings in psychology and biology exhibits clearly his commitment to reconcile the demand of a theoretical and philosophical clarification of subjectivity with modern natural scientific thought. In the research context shared by experimental psychologists of the Gestalt, the study of animal or human perceptual and cognitive behavior had to meet standards of empirical verifiability. Yet “behavior,” as current term in methodological quantitative research approaches, is integrated in Gestalt theory with the breadth of experience that only a descriptive and more phenomenological approach can provide. The central question raised by the psychologists of the Gestalt was ultimately that of assessing and articulating the primacy of perception against the discontinuity and atomism of modern theories of sensation without turning to traditional forms of speculative or transcendental idealism. This problem 19

Karl Jaspers, Eduard Spranger, and Ludwig Klages challenged experimental Gestalt-­ psychology with “humanistic” views, see Ash 1995, 288ff. Eduard Spranger spoke of “­structural psychology.” For the challenge of holistic psychology to Gestalt-theory, Felix Krueger’s Ganzheitspsychologie and Erich Jaensch’s “biological” approach should be mentioned. See Ash 1995, 311–312. The place of neuropathologist Kurt Goldstein in ­Merleau-Ponty’s work is important from the beginning. Goldstein’s emphasis on the “whole” organism rather than the objective “whole” of organism and environment put him at odds with gestaltic approaches. See Ash 1995, 280–282. This shows, albeit indirectly, that Merleau-Ponty’s reception of Gestalt-psychology is complex and exhibits a proximity with the various degrees of complication that the history of reception of Gestalt-­psychology had gone through in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Chapter 1

and its philosophical implications are the guiding themes of Merleau-Ponty’s Structure of Behavior, to which I now turn. In this work, Merleau-Ponty pursues a study of nature that takes into account the belonging of the (human) subjects to the reality they experience. The last programmatic lines of the work, which take issue with the project of a critical philosophy on Kant’s model, testify of the wide scope of the inquiry: “it would be necessary to define transcendental philosophy anew in such a way as to integrate with it the very phenomenon of the real.”20 This program is to be achieved by revising the transcendental starting point. This is clear from the opening lines of the book, which advance the task to investigate the relations between consciousness and nature by starting “from below.” By this, Merleau-Ponty means to indicate the non-transcendental starting point of the analysis. He specifies that the study has to begin “by an analysis of the notion of behavior.”21 The aim of the study of behavior is to integrate nature or the phenomenon of the real in the dimension of consciousness. By beginning the analysis “from below” Merleau-Ponty is following a precise strategy that intends to carefully avoid the shortcuts of pure reflection.22 Reflection reveals to us that the seamless character of experience is linked to the presence of a subject. The objects of experience vary but the e­ xperiencing person remains identical through this variation. Starting with reflection has the advantage to skip, in one stroke, as it were, the main difficulty raised by the empiricist stance of naturalism. The difficulty lies in conceiving precisely the relatedness giving unitary articulation to the manifold and discrete moments of experience. This is a basic problem of those positions that maintain a rigorously empiricist stance. Without an adequate clarification of the integrated character of experience, it is the sense itself of the empirical upon which empiricism and naturalism base the validity of their claims that remains fundamentally unclarified. The confidence in the purely philosophical vantage point of reflective analysis, however, surreptitiously assumes a definition of consciousness as pure consciousness at the beginning of the analysis, whereas the meaning of consciousness and its interactions with nature is precisely what the analysis needs to establish.23 Merleau-Ponty’s counterstrategy, which draws from different approaches, as Théodore Geraets has shown, consists in beginning 20 21 22 23

SC 241. SC 2. SC 138. Merleau-Ponty defines “classical thought” as the thought for which the rationality of the world is a granted fact: “Si l’on appelle classique une pensée pour laquelle la rationnalité du monde va de soi…” S 243.

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rather from non-transcendental thought, that is, from the ­positive thought of the sciences.24 The Structure of Behavior begins as a study of behavior. Behavior is taken up as occurrence in the outside world. The path followed is therefore that of a careful delimitation of the analysis “to denominating the relations of the milieu and the organism as science itself defines them as they should be denominated,” that is, still assuming the perspective of a “disinterested spectator.”25 The project of rethinking the relations of consciousness and nature begins with an account of consciousness as seen from the outside.26 However, and this is crucial for the overall aim of the project, the notion of behavior, he explains, has the methodological advantage to be “neutral with respect to the classical distinctions of the ‘mental’ [psychique] and the ‘physiological’ [­physiologique].”27 The profound intuition of the notion of behavior consists therefore also in liberating natural phenomena, especially those pertaining to living nature, from the constraints of scientistic assumptions. The notion of behavior enables a thinking of the living being as in constant “exchange” (débat) with a physical and a social world.28 This exchange is what MerleauPonty designates with the notion of “existence.”29 The notion of behavior eschews the conception of consciousness in terms of a “plastic matter” that would receive its shape from an “outside,” i.e., from the action of sociological or physiological forces.30 As a result, in the course of the study Merleau-Ponty proposes to refer to the notion of “structure” in order to describe the exchange of consciousness and nature. These programmatic statements introduce an account of the new discoveries in physiology and in the psychology of the Gestalt. In this connection, ­Merleau-Ponty exhibits the relevance of the spatial distribution of the stimuli, 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

Théodore Geraets’ Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale: La Genèse de la p­ hilosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu’à la Phénoménologie de la perception is a thorough study that traces the various sources from which Merleau-Ponty wove together his Phenomenology of Perception, which includes authors as diverse as Kurt Goldstein, F.J.J. Buytendijk, Henri Bergson, Gabriel Marcel, as well as the influence of the thought of Husserl and Heidegger in France in the 1930s. Cf. in particular Chapter 1 of Geraets’ Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale on Merleau-Ponty’s formative years. SC 174–175. See Merleau-Ponty’s own summative statements about the project of The Structure of Behavior in PhP 249n1; PP 54; PD 13. SC 1–2. The notion of “exchange” is derived by Merleau-Ponty from Goldstein who speaks of Auseinandersetzung, i.e. “dealing with” but also “contention,” “dispute” or “confrontation” between the organism and the environmental world (Umwelt). See Noble 2008, 58. SC 3. SC 183–184.

24

Chapter 1

of their rhythm and of their intensity, thus, in a word, of the so-called “qualitative properties” or properties of “form.”31 In the Structure of Behavior, the notion of form allows us to rethink the relations between consciousness and nature in light of the findings (faits connus) made available by the new research in physiology and psychology both as regards “reflex behavior” (Chapitre I) and the “higher forms of behavior” (Chapitre II). The notion of form calls into ­question the naturalistic impasse of scientific knowledge in general and especially the physicalist conception of consciousness in psychology. The idea of form, to put it briefly, is intended to suspend the assumption that givens in the field of perception are the appearance of causal processes in natural substances in order to enable a description of perceptual givens as they actually appear. As regards sensing experience, Merleau-Ponty illustrates how the contemporary research in physiology undermines the classical theory of reflex and its idea of sensation in terms of a point-by-point process (as expressed for instance by the “constancy hypothesis”). According to this theory, to each stimulus there corresponds one and only one reaction.32 The critical examination of the theory of reflex in modern physiology however sheds light upon the following aspects: a) having shown that “the fate of an excitation is determined by its relation to the whole of the organic state and to the simultaneous or preceding excitations,”33 b) then “it is impossible to say ‘which started first’ in the exchange of stimuli and responses;”34 c) therefore, the exchange of the organism and the world is no longer to be explicated in terms of linear causality but, as Merleau-Ponty concludes, as a “circular causality,” thus constituting an integrated whole. The study of behavior, against Pavlov’s attempt to explain behavior in terms of the theory of reflexes and therefore to place behavior on the order of the physical, sheds light on its constitutive dynamic as something that cannot in principle be understood in terms of the all-ruling mechanism of physical ­causality (Chapitre I). The notion of behavior, therefore, problematizes the conception of the surrounding reality of the organism as sheer physical matter. Rather, reality is that which “matters” to the animal and to which the animal responds in a meaningful way, a reality that Merleau-Ponty defines as “structural.”35 In this reality, stimuli intervene according to what they mean within a certain arrangement and the reactions of the animal are shaped according to the configuration that the organism itself gives to the stimuli. To put it in 31 32 33 34 35

SC 10. SC 6–7. SC 13. SC 11. SC 139.

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Merleau-Ponty’s words, the reactions of the organism, which make up its behavior, are “gestures gifted with an internal unity […] a kinetic melody gifted with a meaning.”36 The same point is powerfully expressed at the end of the Second Chapter: “The world, inasmuch as it harbors living beings, ceases to be a material plenum consisting of juxtaposed parts; it opens up at the place where behavior appears.”37 At the same time, behavior opens up within the “material plenum” of the world and cannot be understood as detached from it. “Behavior is not a thing,” Merleau-Ponty concludes, “but neither is it an idea. It is not the envelope of a pure consciousness and, as the witness of behavior, I am not a pure consciousness. It is precisely this which we wanted to say in stating that behavior is a form.”38 After the first two chapters, the study of the relations of consciousness and nature from the perspective of a disinterested spectator exhibits such relations as “dialectical.”39 A “dialectical tension” subsists between the organism and its environment (Umwelt).40 In this relation, both sides, the organism and the surrounding environment, are globally invested, i.e. they participate in the relationship as “totalities,” “fields” or “forms.” This global investment is what Merleau-Ponty in the course of the Second Chapter begins to call a “­structure.”41 The introduction of the notion of structure achieves in particular two things: 1) it undermines the idea of reality as composed by regionally separated kinds – physical, living, and mental things – and, closely connected with this, 2) it undermines the idea of causal transmissions among individual realities. The joint critique of substantialism and causality, as the tenets of classical realism and physicalism, yields an anti-reductionistic account of the relationship between the fields of the physical, the living, and the psychic (Chapitre II.3).42 At the end of Chapter 3, the critique of the relation of efficient causality 36 37 38 39

SC 140. SC 136. The insertion is mine. SC 138. SC 161. This terminology stems from the reinterpretation of a Hegelian theme via Kojève’s lectures on Hegel and anticipates the sense of the integrative revaluation of the relationship between consciousness and nature that is the book’s conclusion. Cf. Benoist 2019, 115. 40 SC 171. 41 Rudolf Bernet notes the fact that this sudden change in terminology from “form” to “­structure” is not a random choice but rather indicates a new orientation in the ­investigation whereby Merleau-Ponty begins to submit the results of the preliminary descriptions inspired by the psychology of the “form” to a systematic philosophical ­interpretation. Bernet 2008, 37. 42 Cf. Table de matières in SC 246. For a summative exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the three orders of the physical, the vital, and the mental as Gestalten or “structures” as well as of their mutual relationship, see e.g. Bernet 2008, 37–41; Toadvine 2009, 25–37.

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between nature, life, and mind articulates a comprehensive conception of reality in which, Merleau-Ponty writes, each order “should be conceived as a recovery and a new structuring of the antecedent.”43 The application of the notion of structure, however, does not only function as a category of integration and differentiation among orders of reality. This notion also introduces us into the problems raised by descriptions that are carried out assuming the perspective of a disinterested observer. These issues are addressed in the fourth and last chapter of Merleau-Ponty’s first important work. With the introduction of the term “structure,” a shift takes place from the clear-cut perspective of a disinterested observer in the third person to a more ambiguous standpoint in which the third person perspective can no longer claim absolute autonomy with respect to the first person involvement of the observer in the phenomena observed. This shift takes place in the course of the Second Chapter in connection with the discussion of the cerebral localization of mental functions. In this context, the functioning of the brain is relegated to the observation of an external point of view while it is always only “I” who lives through perceptual and mental experiences. The same shift and complication in the grasp of living phenomena can be observed in the discussion of the vital structures at the junction where the appearance of a rudimentary consciousness in animals begins to emerge.44 The negative import of the notion of structure therefore consists in the critique of the physicalism reigning in the accounts of modern physiology and psychology. Merleau-Ponty holds that the psychologists of the Gestalt were also ultimately led to conceive the structural aspect of reality as embedded “in a nature taken in itself.”45 The critique of naturalism and of causal thinking did not change the realism of Gestalt theory, especially with regard to self-critical considerations of method and the theory of knowledge.46 As a result, the deep implications of structural formations in nature remained to be explicated. In sum, the psychologists of the Gestalt vastly explored one salient aspect p ­ ertaining to structure, i.e. the aspect of totality defining animate but also inanimate reality and their relations. The other salient aspect of ideality, the aspect which refers back to a consciousness for whom the structure exists, was rather left undisclosed. The last part of The Structure of Behavior latches explicitly on this second aspect. However, as I mentioned above, the 43 44 45 46

SC 199. For this observation, see Bernet 2008, 35, 42. “Mais, en parlant de formes physiques, la Gestalttheorie entend que l’on peut trouver des structures dans une nature prise en soi, pour en constituer l’esprit.” SC 151. On this point, I refer the reader to two crucial footnotes in SC 179–180 and again in PhP 62.

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integrative duplicity pertaining to the form, as both objective and phenomenal, is something that Merleau-Ponty works out in the course of the whole study. The definition of form as structure is meant precisely to capture and clarify this double aspect.47 As a result, a new kind of intellection than that of the disinterested onlooker imposes itself when dealing especially with living or mental structures.48 The life of an organism is directed towards the meaningful objects of its e­ nvironment in a specific living situation. The organism is essentially intentional in its behavior. In the behavior of the human being this intentional capacity extends considerably beyond the immediate living situation. The reality of living and human beings is not primarily “physical” in the sense in which this word is understood by the physical sciences, i.e. as a reality that is void of all attributes of value and action. Merleau-Ponty claims that “form is not a physical reality, but an object of perception,” or a “perceived whole.”49 In other words, any form, even that of a physical system or of a historical institution, “constitutes, alters and reorganizes itself before us like a spectacle.”50 The spectacle of reality is for someone. What is more, Merleau-Ponty expresses this fundamental relation of reality to a living subject, exhibited by the study of vital and mental behaviors, by defining form as an “ideal” unity or as a “signification.” Yet – this is the summative result of the research from the psychology of perception – this “consciousness” is not found as a pure disinterested spectator but it is rather a consciousness in relation with the world, in communication and constant exchange with it. Merleau-Ponty shows that the reality of the living is a reality endowed with deeply affective as well as practical and not just theoretical meaning. If the disinterested observer is found not at the point of departure of experience but at some point of its unfolding and development, then consciousness “in its nascent state” cannot be completely separated from the world. Rather consciousness is discovered at any given moment as attached to the world and invested by the same orders of reality that it singles out in its theoretical behavior.51 The tension in play in the way reflection proceeds between a third- and a first-person perspective also determines the ambiguity in establishing a clear division in levels between physical, vital, and mental realities. On the one hand, consciousness appears as structurally integrated with the lower material 47 48 49 50 51

Bimbenet speaks of the double integrality of a movement of “totalization” and of “­phenomenalization” characterizing the structure of living behavior. See Bimbenet 2004, 48–55. SC 168. Un ensemble perçu. SC 155. SC 241. SC 156.

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and vital orders. On the other hand, the study of behavior, by introducing the ­reality of meaning into the plenum of the world, discovers a consciousness that gathers the different material, vital and mental events under one idea. This discovery introduces us to a consciousness of significations. Merleau-Ponty thus concludes his analyses of the three orders of matter, life, and consciousness by establishing that “…the ‘physical,’ the ‘vital’ and the ‘mental’ do not represent three powers of being, but three dialectics […] each of them had to be conceived as a retaking and a ‘new’ structuration of the preceding one. From this comes the double aspect of the analysis which both liberated the higher from the lower and founded the former on the latter.” Yet, Merleau-Ponty adds, “It is this double relation which remains obscure…”52 3

Naturizing and Naturized Consciousness

Merleau-Ponty outlined the descriptive aspect of form by means of a c­ ritique of conceptions of causality thanks to recent discoveries in physiology and psychology. He also developed the implications of psychological findings for a renewed definition of consciousness. Renaud Barbaras argues that the form represents Merleau-Ponty’s version of a “reduction.”53 This is, to be sure, a peculiar version of the reduction because the field of consciousness that it leads to is reached by way of a study of behavior that calls into question the separation of the disinterested and of the interested onlooker with respect to the phenomena observed. Merleau-Ponty’s version of the reduction does not only critically target the naturalistic tendencies of the psychology of the form, but, by way of the positive findings made available by the idea of form, it also eschews the idea of a shift of attitude towards a transcendental idealism. These two moments go hand in hand in the notion of structure. Merleau-Ponty finds this double orientation of structure mirrored in a pivotal quote, which he draws from Fink’s doctoral thesis Vergegenwärtigung und Bild (1930), according to which “[w]ithout leaving the natural attitude one could show how the problems of totality (Ganzheitsprobleme) of the natural world, pursued to their

52 53

SC 199. Barbaras 2001. It is Merleau-Ponty himself who in the last pages of his study on The Structure of Behavior already defines his working through a detailed criticism of psychological theories towards the direct analysis of perceptual experience as a “phenomenological reduction”: “En revenant à la perception comme à un type d’expérience originaire, où se constitue le monde réel dans sa spécificité, c’est une inversion du mouvement naturel de la conscience que l’on s’impose.” SC 236. He then adds in a footnote: “Nous définissons ici la ‘réduction phénoménologique’ dans le sens que lui donne la dernière philosophie de Husserl.”

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root, end up instigating the passage to the transcendental attitude.”54 If the analysis of the first three chapters of The Structure of Behavior operate a sort of reduction, this reduction gives access to what Merleau-Ponty calls a perceptual consciousness. In the fourth and last chapter of the work, it is Merleau-Ponty’s intent to show the fundamental problem facing the study of perceptual consciousness – the problem that renders the double relation of the lower orders of reality with the higher orders of consciousness still “obscure.” The study of behavior was defined as an analysis that intended to start “from below.” As noted earlier, the motivation behind this purpose is methodological. Merleau-Ponty intends to proceed diairetically, as it were, or by division. This procedure consists in setting a starting point of the analysis that does not uncritically assume classical interpretive distinctions of reality in certain higher genera. Assuming the separation of ontological categories seems to imply the presupposition of a conception of knowledge that is dependent on the point of view of the disinterested observer. If we assume reality to be a totality ­separated in regions, then the task of knowledge coincides with the determination of a u ­ niversal gathering the multiplicity of regions under itself. Rather, M ­ erleau-Ponty stresses, the task is to proceed by way of “pure description.”55 This d­ escriptive strategy has the advantage of delimiting the focus of analysis to the factic living situation of the person doing the description. Contextualized in this way, the three orders of reality (matter, life, mind) appear as “inseparable terms bound together in the living unity of an experience.”56 Thus, this strategy is designed to locate a reality that precedes the separation of ­inorganic, organic, and mental nature as “three orders of events which are external to each ­other.”57 The body and the intentions of the ego, which find in bodily movements and gestures their realization, nature and soul, are revealed thereby as belonging together.58 The descriptive aspect of the structure of behavior leads us to understand the phenomenon of behavior as “a whole s­ ignificative for a consciousness which c­ onsiders it,” as a “meaning.”59 Yet, the same descriptions aim at making manifest in the unfolding of behavior “the view of a consciousness under our eyes, to show a mind which comes into the world.”60 The analysis of behavior as an analysis starting from below discovers a fundamental duplicity running through the orders of reality. All distinctions established in pure description are distinctions operated by and for a 54 SC 222. 55 SC 205. 56 Ibid. 57 SC 205. See also SC 204. 58 Merleau-Ponty writes that the three orders are “sectors of a unique field.” SC 204. 59 SC 241. 60 SC 225.

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consciousness. The notion of consciousness is thus determined as the “form of all forms.” In the terminology of Husserl, this form can be designated as a universal a priori correlate.61 At this point, however, precisely when the passage to the transcendental point of view is discovered, the problematic double aspect of the analysis announced above receives a clear statement. Merleau-Ponty frames the issue as that of “the relation between consciousness as universal milieu and consciousness enrooted in the subordinated dialectics.”62 In the relations between the “three dialectics”63 of the physical, the living, and the mental orders, the latter seems to claim a priority as the truth of the other two or, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “the human order of consciousness does not appear as a third order ­superimposed on the two others, but as their condition of possibility and their foundation.”64 At the same time, the human order is not indifferent to the presence of the o­ rganic-vegetative level, then “consciousness is not only and not always consciousness of truth.”65 Rather, the analysis of the previous chapters also exhibited consciousness as integrated with a certain “inertia” and “resistance,” an “imposition,” an “inherence” to an organism, a “passivity,” a “bond” with a body.66 Here is also where a first core of “nature” as other than the sheerly physical nature of naturalism begins to appear. By setting his starting point “from below,” Merleau-Ponty has safeguarded the result of his analysis about the relations of consciousness and nature. The discovery of an irreducible experience in the first person, and therefore of the intentionality of consciousness, does not automatically posit the whole of reality within the immanence of subjectivity. In this manner, Merleau-Ponty arrives in his first important work at a recast statement of the transcendental problematic. The Structure of Behavior carries out the passage from the natural to the transcendental considerations as a result of the interpretation of the findings from the new research in psychology and physiology. Yet, the “transcendental” sphere is not framed in terms of mental effectuations in a pure mind/spirit substance. At the end of The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty arrives thus at the formulation of the paradox that is posed to a radically transformed transcendental philosophy: “The natural ‘thing,’ the organism, the behavior of others and my own behavior exist only by their meaning; but this meaning which springs forth in them is not yet a Kantian object; the ­intentional life which ­constitutes them is not yet a representation; and the ‘comprehension’ which gives access to 61 62 63 64 65 66

Cf. Hua VI, § 48. SC 199. SC 199, 218. SC 218. SC 237. See also SC 220. SC 237, 226; 239; 225; 233; 234.

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them is not yet an intellection.”67 Merleau-Ponty circumscribes a fundamental tension of the result of his study on behavior: consciousness is defined as “universal life,” “milieu of the universe,” “tissue of ideal significations,” “co-extensive with the world,” “pure consciousness,” i.e. ultimately as source of a “naturizing knowledge.”68 Over against this “­consciousness in general,”69 the descriptions of behavior exhibit a consciousness as “individual,” as “flux of individual events,” as “part of the world,” i.e. as “naturized consciousness.”70 In a summative way, to put it in ­Merleau-Ponty’s own words, “[consciousness] seems to include two aspects: on the one hand it is milieu of the universe, presupposed by every affirmation of a world; on the other hand it is conditioned by it.”71 Such antinomy intrinsic to the notion of consciousness in its relation to nature is discovered as a result of the study of behavior as “form.” This study has led to the exhibition of what Merleau-Ponty calls “perceptual c­ onsciousness.”72 The result of The Structure of Behavior is a contribution towards the resolution of the alternative between the realist and idealist versions of the metaphysics of nature. Now Merleau-Ponty relocates the source of this alternative in the dual aspect of perceptual experience: “The perceived is grasped in an indivisible manner as ‘in-itself’ [en soi], that is, as gifted with an interior which I will never have finished exploring; and as ‘for-me’ [pour moi], that is, as given ‘in person’ through its momentary aspects.”73 Thus, as Merleau-Ponty outlines in the last pages of his work, “it is perceptual knowledge which must be interrogated in order to find in it a definitive clarification.”74 It is the knowledge of perceptual consciousness or the consciousness for which there is a reality as Gestalt, i.e. as phenomenal reality, with all the abiding impositionality intrinsic to it, that must still be interrogated. The Structure of Behavior showed the unsustainability of an idea of existence as dependent on a compositionally structured hierarchy of realities. This insight led us back to the idea of consciousness as basic connective element of the various orders of reality. The defense of non-reducible intentional patterns, however, raises the problem of dualism if intentional patterns are taken to be altogether liberated from the physical or vital orders of reality. The disintegration into an inchoate manifold that constantly threatens every physicalism, at least in its most positivistic versions, is shown to run parallel to the fully contained absoluteness 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

SC 241. SC 215, 232, 241. SC 228. SC 228, 232, 241, 216. SC 216. SC 227. Perceptual consciousness is defined as “consciousness of reality” (SC 202), which finds its correlate in the “perceived world” (SC 156) as “phenomenon of the real” (SC 241). SC 201. SC 227.

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of consciousness. By accepting the extension of Gestalt qualities from perception to action, Merleau-Ponty rather draws the philosophical implications from the discovery of the Gestalt quality of action in experimental and comparative psychology.75 If Gestalten are not only perceived, but the very action of perception or “behavior” directed towards them is gestaltic in its facticity, then this introduces the idea of an exposure-oriented behavior into the intentional model of consciousness. This meant that Brentano’s doctrine of object-­directed psychic acts was to be inflected in terms of an operative relationship between the perceived real (or phantasized) objects in a living environment and a perceiving and acting organism. Merleau-Ponty assumed this implication and intended to draw its radical consequences for our understanding of the modern ideas of subjective consciousness and of nature. The preliminary formulations about the possibility of the unity of experience, of the possibility of a “synthesis” of experience operated by a transcendental subjectivity, need to be reformulated in order to include the findings of the psychology of perception. 4

Phenomenology between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

In this chapter, my aim was to summarily follow the way in which MerleauPonty sets out his meditation about nature. The study of behavior raises the notions of form and structure to the defining features of natural phenomena. ­Merleau-Ponty discovers that the structural mode of existence of natural forms refers to the notion of subjective consciousness. This notion is however profoundly recast, which has important consequences also for the way the totality of nature is to be reappraised and understood. Merleau-­Ponty’s starting point “from below” is set in clear contrast with an analysis that is conducted on the level of transcendental research. He begins in fact with “positive” investigations, that is, investigations that are directed towards the objective data of science. Yet, thanks to the experimental findings of the physiology and ­psychology of perception, Merleau-Ponty’s approach to nature becomes phenomenological

75

Kurt Koffka drew the conclusion about the Gestalt quality of action in connection with his reformulation of perceptual theory on Gestalt grounds. See Beiträge zur Psychologie der Gestalt- und Bewegungeserlebnisse (1913), later reprinted in Koffka (ed.), Beiträge zur Psychologie der Gestalt (Leipzig, 1919). Wolfgang Koehler’s famous experiments on anthropoid apes on the island of Tenerife provided further evidence for Koffka’s conclusions from the perspective of comparative psychology. For a discussion of the context and ­specific contributions of Koffka and Koehler towards a Gestalt-psychology of action, see Ash 1995, 139–159.

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in a sense that is not purely Husserlian, if with this we assume a certain orthodox understanding of phenomenology. Against all facile critiques of modern detractors of the positivism of science and of its technique, Merleau-Ponty maintains the idea of a truth of n ­ aturalism, thereby siding with Husserl’s admiration for the proceedings of the sciences. Husserl not only devotes much of his philosophical efforts to renewing the task of a foundation of the idea of science. He also has a special admiration for the most characteristic theoretical science, i.e. mathematics. One only has to look at the role that mathematics plays in Husserl’s theory of logic, especially in light of his definition of logic as the theory of science. For Husserl, the intention is clearly that of radicalizing the meditation on the genuine task of science by placing the investigation on a plane that is no longer affected by the blinders of the sciences’ objective or technical focus.76 In short, the reflective attitude of the philosopher must intervene in order to complement the objective attitude of the scientist. Turning now to Merleau-Ponty, we find an analogous yet also different direction of thought. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty’s claim of a truth of naturalism is framed by the critique of the naturalistic focus of the sciences. More fundamentally, like Husserl, Merleau-Ponty directs his critical efforts towards the objective focus of the sciences, which he traces ultimately to the scientific presupposition of nature as a fully determinate being “in itself.” Moreover, both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty believe that any radical inquiry into objective ­science, its methods, and results implies an itinerary leading up to its own overcoming as techne into philosophical considerations that are carried out on a level other than that of the pure positive interest of the scientist. On the other hand, however, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty differ considerably in their understanding of the ultimate status of these philosophical considerations. For Husserl, the task of bringing the thematic focus of the sciences to fundamental self-­clarification is in principle always possible in terms of a transcendental reflection that surpasses every presupposition of the natural attitude. For Merleau-Ponty, on the contrary, the positivity attaching to the natural attitude of the sciences receives a more pivotal meaning for the self-clarification of scientific endeavors. To put it in the most concise way possible, the a priori of reflection loses its value in Merleau-Ponty’s hands through the experimental results of contemporary biology, physics, and of the gestaltic phenomenology that was taking shape in the experimental investigations of the psychology of the form. These results point for him to the radical mundane character of all experience as presupposing the existence of the world. This 76

On this point, see notably Husserl’s Introduction to Formal and Transcendental Logic.

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presupposition, however, implies that the level of intentional analysis carried out in the transcendental order of reflection can no longer be considered to constitute the presuppositionless ground Husserl is trying to establish. The presupposition of the world receives a more problematic status than that presented in Husserl’s earlier versions of phenomenology. Since the presupposition of the world defines for Husserl the correlate of the natural attitude, this problematic aspect is especially salient for the understanding of the role and status of the natural attitude in phenomenology. In light of this situation, regarding the question about how to understand Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Fabrice Colonna speaks of a “phenomenological misunderstanding” consisting in the tendency of much literature to read Merleau-Ponty through the phenomenology inherited from Husserl.77 It is not my intention to enter into a detailed confrontation with Colonna’s claim. The following chapters will offer clues to rectify and integrate Colonna’s ­position. Here let me only note that Colonna offers a patient and enlightening commentary of the central role that experimental psychology, and in particular Gestalt-psychology, plays in the overall development of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Colonna provides selected evidence for what he takes to be a distortion of the phenomenological reduction in Merleau-Ponty. This ­distortion should challenge the designation of Merleau-Ponty’s strategy as “phenomenological.”78 Moreover, the central idea of an operative intentionality in M ­ erleau-Ponty would prove to be inspired by the investigations of the psychology of the form rather than having its more direct source in Husserl’s work.79 Colonna’s assessment may be adequate if we refer to a certain Husserlian orthodoxy, which, however, is doubtful Husserl has ever practiced himself. In this, Husserl’s rigor should not be confounded with a form of orthodoxy, which is characteristic not of Husserl’s actual work but, if you will, of some ramifications of Husserlian scholarship. If the main point in this debate remains Husserl’s fixation on a dimension of subjective immanence,80 Colonna himself discerns lucidly the Husserlian inputs in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and speaks of an ambiguity with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s r­ eception of Husserlian themes.81 77 78 79 80 81

See the section with the title “Le malentendu phénoménologique” in Colonna 2014, 68–75. Cf. also Colonna 2014, 87, 99–100, 114–115, 195, 242. Colonna 2014, 72. Colonna 2014, 73. Colonna 2014, 115. Colonna points to Husserl’s notion of a “formal ontology” and of the “anything-whatever” (141–142, 149), the notion of lekton (146), the notion of Lebenswelt (150–153), Husserl’s treatment of language and of intersubjectivity (337–339), the notion of the infinite (379), the notion of time (389–392, 413–415), and the idea of the singularity of the world (431–433). In the essay entitled La phénoménologie dans le dernier ouvrage de Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Taminiaux offers a lucid statement about the continuity of Merleau-Ponty’s reflection

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Finally, Colonna clearly recognizes Merleau-Ponty’s insight into the convergence between psychology and phenomenology.82 This is of course a central theme of Husserlian phenomenology, which I cannot take up here.83 Rather I would like to suggest that the convergence that Merleau-Ponty sees between psychology (but also biology) and phenomenology, together with the questions relative to the relationship between ontological and transcendental approaches, are continuously spurred by developments in play in Husserl’s own investigations. In the following chapters, my task is to achieve an understanding of the basic aspects relative to Merleau-Ponty’s return to a truth of naturalism. In ­Chapters 2 and 3, I will approach my objective by fleshing out some paradigmatic moments of Husserlian research that are in play in Mer­ leau-Ponty’s thought. First, I will turn to Husserl’s notion of operative intentionality. Colonna stresses the marginality of this notion in the context of Husserlian phenomenology and rather ascribes the Merleau-Pontian inspiration for this notion to the experimental research of Gestalt-psychology.84 I reverse this claim in two steps: first, operative intentionality is a notion that is often referred to in Merleau-Ponty’s scholarship but whose phenomenological grounding is equally often poorly appreciated and understood. I ascribe this state of affairs to the little attention that the literature has so far directed towards the actual argument and context where this notion is introduced by Husserl. Therefore, in Chapter 2, I look into the way in which

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on phenomenological themes from Husserl. The meditation on Husserlian themes (­reduction, eidetic method, intentionality, world, Stiftung, Nachvollziehung, Fundierung, field of presence, passive synthesis) is presented here as load-bearing axis to recast the conception of constituting subjective consciousness. Colonna 2014, 72. Husserl’s philosophical work from the Logical Investigations onward can be characterized, not solely but for an essential part, as “anti-psychologistic” (Bachelard 1968). Yet, as we know, the situation is not that simple. Husserl’s early psychologism, in Philosophie der Arithmetik (1890), finds an anti-psychologistic reaction, in the Prolegomena (1900), which, however, is also devoted to recasting the nature and scope of psychology as a science. The second volume of the Logische Untersuchungen (1901) takes up a subjective focus on the mental processes in which logical formations originate as objects. In the Logische Untersuchungen, Husserl defines this phenomenological task as a “descriptive psychology.” The subjective focus that Husserl is after, however, does not lie in the psychological origin, as empirical, but in the epistemo-critical origin of the themes of logic. Husserl himself makes this distinction in a report from 1903, while also operating a self-critical assessment about the definition of phenomenology as descriptive pscyhology. The second edition of Logische Untersuchungen (1913) removes this definition altogether. And yet, in various texts, Husserl will keep presenting descriptive psychology as a starting point or way into phenomenology. On this latter point, cf. Bachelard 1968, 117. Colonna 2014, 73.

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this notion concretely emerges in Husserl’s Formal and ­Transcendental Logic. Second, I turn to the way in which operative intentionality is manifest in Merleau-Ponty’s argument in Phenomenology of Perception. Operative intentionality radicalizes the articulation of gestaltic themes, especially the ideas of body schema, the figure-ground structure of experience, and the notion of level (niveau). In this analysis, however, one also begins to see the sort of transformation of Husserl’s tasks in Merleau-Ponty’s radical refashioning of investigational findings and factors in phenomenology. These studies, in line with the radicalizing thematization of operative intentionality, shed light upon Merleau-Ponty’s clear shifting of the limitation of the account of reality as the problem regarding conditions of possibility (“that without which”) into what seems to be his real main concern, namely the problem of individuation, the problem of spatial and temporal determination within the world not just in terms of formal conditions, but also as enabling features (“that by means of which”) wherein individuated beings come about, in ­essential form and full concreteness. The study of nature needs to make clear that the “constitution” of a nature confronting me from without or animating me from within is the result of my own (performing) living in and through it and thus ­cannot ultimately be addressed in terms of the constituted result of an object-­ oriented consciousness. This realization raises of course the problem of how to express the context of “operative,” “performative” consciousness in thematic and specific differentiation. Chapter 3 sketches out therefore an account of how to understand the disclosive linguistic dynamics as both worded expression and meaning consolidation in the context of the awareness intrinsic to operative consciousness. This account again has transformative force with respect to Husserlian notions such as lifeworld, the problem of “flowing into” (“­Einströmen”), and the question of the proto-modal character of experience as fleshing out a metaphysics of history. Chapters 2 and 3, therefore, issue into a conception of phenomenology that both rectifies and complements Colonna’s judgment about the “phenomenology” of Merleau-Ponty while at the same time concretely clarifying the role played by some pivotal Husserlian sources that are in play in Merleau-Ponty’s approach to nature and consciousness. This preparatory work allows me to take up M ­ erleau-Ponty’s treatment of the concept of nature in his lecture courses at the Collège de France. Chapter 4 and 5 elaborate on salient moments of this treatment, in particular focusing on physical and animal nature. The chapters also begin to outline Merleau-­ Ponty’s philosophical proposal emerging from the studies on nature as making the famous notion of “flesh” its explicit focus. Finally, Chapter 6 offers a schematic map of the place and role of the studies on nature in the third and final set of lectures on La Nature and the contemporaneous project on The Visible

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and the Invisible. What I hope emerges from the interpretation of these final texts is the clear recognition of the paradoxicality that a radical account of nature entails and that gets fleshed out in nature’s constitutive double meaning: 1) nature as ensemble of genetic and productive processes that are attainable in ­experience (­phenomenal nature) and 2) nature as that which enables this experience (transcendental nature). My thesis is that the two meanings of nature, when taken together, offer a guide to Merleau-Ponty’s final philosophical formulations about “flesh” and the “visible” and the “­invisible.” The aim of the following considerations is to trace the salient conceptual and ­methodological complications entailed by this conception as clear effort of reorientation and radical reinvestigation of human being as coming to be of living human spirit in nature. I argue that the bivalence of the problem of nature in Merleau-Ponty does not break with the legacy of transcendental arguments, but rather responds to and develops in both creative autonomy and thematic dependence central radicalizing lines of inquiry within ­transcendental phenomenology.

Chapter 2

Pathway to First Nature

Operative Intentionality from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty

1 Introduction In La structure du comportement, Merleau-Ponty draws from the psychological notion of “form” in order to rethink the relationships between the orders of the physical, the physiological and the psychical. He makes explicit the philosophical implications of this approach, which pivot around the possibility of formulating a “concrete theory of spirit.”1 The project of tracing the genesis of what we designate as valid “truth” in our theories of knowledge to the “sense” emerging in the perceptual behavior of a living organism is meant to clarify the aporetic conclusions resulting from traditional dichotomies between “nature” and “spirit.” The study of behavioral form marks therefore a powerful beginning for working out indivisibly the unfolding of what had hitherto been contrasting and incompatible ultimate “regions” of being, e.g. corporeality and mind, nature and consciousness. The formulation of the transcendental problem at the end of La structure du comportement, and only after the detailed analysis and interpretation of the results of experimental psychology and biology, recognizes that the project of a transcendental foundation of experience and knowledge ought to begin with the explication of the emergent perceptual and cognitive operations that reflection aims at tracing to fundamental conditioning factors in a transcendental account. In way of anticipation, two aspects need to be clearly highlighted in ­connection with the powerful notion of “form” that makes its appearance in La structure du comportement. These aspects already set in motion a recasting of the notion of consciousness. First, the notion of structure. According to the very definition elaborated by Ehrenfels in his On Gestalt Qualities (1890), the notion of “form” expresses the relation among certain elements whose nexus or cohesion results in a whole of peculiar character. In a vast experimental program, the psychology of the Gestalt aimed at providing experimental evidence for the primacy of such wholes in our experience as “fields” or “situations” exhibiting their own 1 MSME 45. © Alessio Rotundo, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004548947_004

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objective relations. These relations could not in principle be parceled out analytically into ready-made and clearly identifiable atomic conditions or elements that would explain them but exhibited an originality requiring clarification. As I pointed out above, Merleau-Ponty took up this perspective in his refashioning of the relationship between nature and consciousness while also integrating the idea of “form” in the direction of a structural perspective that was in line with specific holistic developments of Gestalt-psychology in the 1920s. In particular, the terminological reading of Gestalt as “structure” corresponds in Merleau-Ponty with a transition of focus towards the transcendental conditions of knowledge of forms for the experiential subject. At the same time, the standpoint of the analysis of “form” carries into the transcendental mode of questioning a dramatic transformation of the subjective actus that is traditionally operative in transcendental approaches: i.e. as the act of apprehensive categorial formation of an amorphous and inert material. In particular, as regards the Kantian transcendental approach which is the main critical reference of La structure du comportement, it is the idea of a transcendental apperception or of a pure self-consciousness that undergoes critical recasting. In this sense, the pre-phenomenological character of this work is rather already fully phenomenological as it shares the insight of phenomenology into a mode of experience that does not coincide with unwarranted presuppositions about the character of inwardness of subjective consciousness. This aspect points to a notion of the intentionality of consciousness in terms of an intentionality of “field,” of “situation,” or “horizon.” Second, the aspect of pregivenness. Traditionally, transcendentalism has interpreted the “concept” as principle of unity of our experience. The limitation of conceptual activity to the intellectual faculty, however, falls short of a full clarification of this unity if the concept is interpreted as “pure category” and thus as separated from the contingent and troubling dynamics of actual living experience. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the emergence of sense in living consciousness relocates the regulatory function of the concept from the pure thought of a transcendental subjectivity into the system of intentional ­references orienting the active behavior of a living organism. The origin of the “concept” coincides accordingly with the appearance of a framework of ­prominent moments in the life of the (human) animal without which there would not be any structuration of experience and therefore no experience whatsoever. This subjective orientation, both on the perceptual-motoric and on the cognitive level, does not play out in the immanence of a “pure,” that is, a priori consciousness. In his Critique, Kant elaborated a system of subjective syntheses as conditions under which physical and spatial objects as well as a nature in general must appear. But Kant aimed to justify the objectifying tendencies of

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the modern scientific paradigm. The analysis of the ­transcendental synthesis of experience was therefore accomplished with the discovery of a transcendental apperception as necessary condition for the experience of the transcendent, i.e. objective aspect of external nature. In Kant, the transcendental account of the pregiven and mind-independent aspect of the natural realities that science investigates espouses at the same time the separation of the objective world from subjectivity as the presupposition for a truly objective science. In La structure du comportement, the adequate account of the antecedent aspect of reality with respect to consciousness passes through a critical confrontation with the modern idea of subjective consciousness as pure ­consciousness. The interpretation of novel discoveries both from ­biology and psychology serves the purpose of rethinking the immanence of consciousness in relation to the transcendence of nature. Despite the positive or “naïve” character of the experimental research inspiring Merleau-­Ponty’s study of behavior, the rehabilitation of the relation of consciousness and nature as radically anteceding any explicit take on the status of “immanence,” places Merleau-Ponty’s first important work within a squarely phenomenological approach. In whatever manner I will ultimately define the subjective orientation in connection with the world, this correlation is a totality already endowed with lawful regularities that I do not myself ­produce. The world is already formed as this or that before any explicit conceptual application. The “field” of experience antecedes any activity of consciousness. Consciousness finds a field of action as already there and in so doing it discovers itself as firmly rooted in this field. In what follows, I show that Merleau-Ponty’s recasting of the notion of ­consciousness pivots around these two main moments. What emerges from this recasting is the way in which sense becomes a fundamental way of being which is at the same time a “going on” of a unique kind, akin more to the dynamics of biological life than the “mental” work of reflective thematization, of act-­intentional thought. The centrality of biological life must be here understood in the way in which Merleau-Ponty reinterprets the findings of modern physiology and of the psychology of the form. It is the thematic deepening of the unique way in which human life and being are a dynamic of going-on, that is, as human nature in the natural experiential world, which represents ­Merleau-Ponty’s constant frame of reference for the clarification of the problem presented in The Structure of Behavior. 2

Phenomenology as Redoing of Transcendental Philosophy

In his first two important works, Merleau-Ponty lays the groundwork that allows him to reconceive the contrast between the regions of nature and spirit.

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In this connection, it is fitting to remind us that, for Merleau-Ponty, modern ontologies can be interpreted as variations on the “diplopia” affecting C ­ artesian philosophy.2 By “diplopia,” Merleau-Ponty means the double take on reality as both objective and phenomenal.3 As we move around in our world, the reality that we encounter in our experience exhibits a certain degree of regularity. When something stands out in our awareness, it immediately shows a typicality or an orientation towards stability. Even before science intervenes with tools and methods designed to formalize reality and render it accessible to a community of researchers, our perception and locomotory functions have already produced points of ­reference that work as stable orienting signposts for our experience and action. The origin of the conceptual aspect of experience can be therefore located already on the level of perceptual and locomotive behavior. The unity of the object of our desire, e.g. food, remains the stable content of our desiring behavior that aims at a source of nourishment. This is the identical (“objective”) core of a varying experience, and the phenomenological idea of an intentional act draws its foundational motive from this idea. From these remarks the connection and mutual reference of the stable and varying moments of our experience emerges clearly. The one cannot be thought without the other. The change of perspective defining the flow of experience (its “phenomenality”) contributes to the way in which the object appears to us as object. The object remains the constant desideratum of the movement of experience.4 When Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “diplopia” of philosophy, he means to give a summative statement about the difficulty encountered by philosophy to account for both aspects as belonging to the same experience. In the ­summary for the second lecture course on the concept of nature (1957–1958), MerleauPonty puts this twofold conception of reality under the titles of a positive and a negative philosophy: the former is centered around the permanence of the object and the latter is centered around the variation of appearances.5 What is 2 “Diplopia” is a medical term that literally means “seeing double” (Gr. διπλοῦς “double” and root ὀπ- “to see”). As Merleau-Ponty references in his Résumés de cours (RC 127), the expression stems from Maurice Blondel who speaks of an “ontological diplopia” (1935). See N 179. 3 Alfred North Whitehead speaks of a “bifurcation of nature” in his Concept of Nature (1920). The “bifurcation” refers to the idea of a separation between objects and the way we perceive them. 4 Husserl writes that an intentional object is only conceivable as modalized objectivity while the objectivity itself, as object-pole, is recognized as the same through all its modi. See Hua VIII, 412. Regarding the external object of perception, Husserl also writes that “[w]e always have the external object in the flesh [leibhaft] (we see, grasp, seize it), and yet it is always at an infinite distance mentally [in unendlicher Geistesferne].” Hua XI, 21. 5 RC 126–127.

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more, he seems to be fully aware of the fact that such “diplopia” cannot hope to be resolved in either direction. Rather it is a matter of gaining “total possession” of it, as he writes, “like the regard takes possession of monocular images to turn them into one single seeing.”6 This formulation is programmatic and the nature of this program has been clearly underway since the Phenomenology of Perception. In the final claims of the preface to this work, Merleau-Ponty points to phenomenology as a philosophy confounding itself with the movement of modern philosophy. Phenomenology, therefore, itself a variant of the Cartesian diplopia, is all the same presented by Merleau-Ponty from early on as the way to accomplish the diplopic movement animating modern philosophy. More fundamentally, if the consequences of its intentions are drawn beyond a preliminary stage of presentation, I hope to show that phenomenology needs to be understood as the way to take possession of what Etienne Bimbenet calls the “constitutive diplopia of human existence.”7 Phenomenology, we hear from the preface to the Phenomenology of ­Perception, is defined by a double aspect: first, it is a philosophy of essences, i.e. a philosophy that endeavors to understand and define the essence of perception, consciousness, etc.; secondly, however, it is a philosophy of ­ ­existence, whereby these essences are placed back into existence. The eidetic orientation of H ­ usserl’s phenomenology maintains a descriptive orientation, i.e. an orientation that remains anchored in experience by means of its method, the eidetic variation.8 Husserl speaks of “ideation,” which implies that the “ideality” already present in the object of perception, i.e. the unity of the object, is not extracted from a completely determined world whose s­ tructures are already in place and working. The presumption of such a world needs to be extracted by way of example and therefore it needs to move through what is factual in order to arrive at a rigorous detailing of the nature of what is “ideal,” i.e. of the unity of the thing. The essences fixed by ideation are not already given but need to be extracted from the factuality of experience. It is this descriptive orientation that allows Husserl to discover and then articulate in detailed analyses the intentional aspect pertaining to all experience. The changing of perspective in experience becomes in Husserl paradigmatic for delineating an adequate illustration of the functionings of intentionality. 6 RC 127; cf. also PhP, 266, 269–270, 380; VI 186. 7 Bimbenet 2008, 93. 8 “[Husserl] made philosophy an inventory of the ‘essences’ which, in every domain of ­experience, resist our efforts at an imaginative variation and are thus the invariants of the domain in question. But, even at this time, he dealt with essences as they are experienced by us, as they emerge from our intentional life.” RC 148–149.

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It is not my intention to engage in an extended analysis of the ways in which Husserl understands intentionality, which, as Heidegger reminds us, is not the title for a solution, but rather the title of a problem. Instead I will briefly sketch the sense that intentionality assumes in Husserl’s preliminary phenomenological analyses. This sketch should only work as a critical point of reference for the kind of post-preliminary way in which Husserl begins to frame his analyses in the studies following Ideas I and that shall play an important role in ­Merleau-Ponty’s own way to proceed descriptively in the study of perception. If it is true that, as Fink remarks, the actual thing of sensible perception is the “prototype” of the phenomenological “thing itself,” then this clarifies that, in its preliminary version, the procedure of the eidetic variation shows us the inadequacy of each experiential perspective, e.g. the fact that an object can present itself to experiencing consciousness only in perspectival profiles or Abschattungen.9 This inadequacy seems to imply the possibility that such perception could, at least ideally, become adequate as summing up in itself all possible views on the object. With Etienne Bimbenet we could ask: “Do we not find behind such negative formulation a way to define the perspectival profiling of perception with respect to a grasp that would be ideally objective, a grasp that would survey space and would be free of all point of view?”10 To be sure, the negative formulation about the inadequacy of each and every perspective on the object must be understood in the context of Husserl’s relativization of the concept of evidence as involving degrees of adequacy, which must also recast the notion of apodictic evidence.11 As I will show shortly, this is a point that has deeper implications for the phenomenological project than the common – and to be sure legitimate – critique of the Cartesian motive animating Husserlian phenomenology and consisting in positing an absolute consciousness as Archimedean point outside of the world. The phenomenological injunction to get under one’s analytic focus the “matters themselves” (“zu den Sachen selbst!”) intends to draw from experience 9 See ND 143. Cf. Colonna 2014, 240–241. 10 Bimbenet 2008, 88n3. 11 The negative formulation pivoting around the idea of adequate givenness of the object of external perception stems from the fact that, as Husserl writes in the Cartesian ­Meditations, “no imaginable synthesis of this kind is completed as an adequate evidence: any such synthesis must always involve unfulfilled, expectant and accompanying ­meanings.” (Hua I, 96). Cf. Bachelard 1968, 103–106. This state of affairs finds its fundamental explication if read in light of the analyses on passivity. On the level of passivity, Husserl writes, “the intuition, on the one hand, brings empty horizon-intentions into play and the intuition, on the other, provides the appropriate fullness for these empty ­horizon-intentions.” Hua  XI, 70.

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itself the basic schema for the phenomenological way of proceeding. Perceptual experience gives objects from particular sides and not others. In one same experience we access the object of perception as it itself is there (Es selbst, Selbst da, Selbstgebung).12 But this direct experience entails both an aspect that is actually exhibiting (the side actually perceived) and an aspect that is not actually exhibiting but only indicating the object (the sides that are momentarily not perceived). Both is equally essential for sensible perception.13 Perceptual experience is constantly determining further that which it perceives. At the same time, perception is also continuously determining the object by following the specific paths indicated by actual perception. This is due to the fact that perception is not simply perception of this or that but rather it is “active,” prefiguring, anticipating, that is, perception is fundamentally intentional. The intentional character of perception does not simply indicate the “interested” directionality pertaining to experience but signals the intrinsic tendency of all experience to realize or fulfill its expectations, i.e. to find the continuity and integrity of the object itself beyond the objective features that are still hidden, indeterminate, and that could always potentially undermine objective reality. This means that the schema working in the intentional behavior of perception is oriented towards complete determination understood as closest proximity with and therefore full unconcealment of the object as it itself is.14 Husserl designates this moment with the term “fulfillment.” This is the telos defining the primordial modality of intentionality. In short, the paradigm of perceptual experience is framed by the basic relationship between proximity and distance, having present and making present, i.e. by the idea of a fundamental modalization of experience. This same paradigm must therefore also frame the higher-level experience of phenomenological reflection, so that the intentional analysis of phenomenology also tends towards bringing the correlation between consciousness and what consciousness is consciousness of to 12 13

14

Cf. e.g. Hua XVII, 316/315. The references to Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic in this study indicate the Husserliana volume (Hua XVII) followed by the pagination in the German edition in the Husserliana and by the page number of the English translation. “It is clear that a non-intuitive side pointing beyond or indicating is what c­ haracterizes the side actually seen as a mere side, and what provides for the fact that the side is not taken for the thing, but rather, that something transcending the side is intended in ­consciousness as perceived, by which precisely that is actually seen.” Hua XI, 4. This aspect is clearly highlighted in Held 1966, who refers in this connection to ­commentaries by Landgrebe and Fink. See Held 1966, 6ff., 13, 71. For a paradigmatic exposition of the degrees of clarity attaching to all experience of the self of an object, cf. Hua XI, § 44 with the title “Bewahrheitung von Selbstgebung durch ihre Ausbreitung in den Außenhorizont einerseits und durch Approximation an die Idee absoluter Klarheit andererseits.”

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fulfilling self-givenness of insight. This fulfilling self-givenness defines therefore the kind of exhibiting evidence that phenomenology sets as its standard of scientific rigor, i.e. as apodictic evidence. At this juncture the paradigm of perception broadly construed, that is, as applied to the very investigative procedure of phenomenology, shows its limitations and points to profound implications: this paradigm, namely, as itself conditioned by the ultimate conditioning factors of experience exhibited in reflection, is in principle incapable of seizing upon these very factors conceptually. The reason of this fundamental limitation lies in the fact that the investigation of ultimate conditioning factors is enabled by a reflection that is not only directed towards but also integrally emerging from the process of experience as already conditioned. Put in other words, this is the issue of how the phenomenological work of self-giving demonstration can carry out its evidencing task to access intuitively the constitutive sources from which the material of intuition, that is, phenomena, are constituted in the first place.15 Before moving into the next section, I shall offer some remarks that are helpful to frame this whole problematic point in more detail. The mutual and rigorous dependency in play in Husserl’s analyses between the act of intention (the noesis) and its content (the noema) speaks the deep truth of the correlative nature of experience discovered by the phenomenological reduction. Yet, in preliminary stages, Husserl subordinates the correlation to the structure of a constituting activity of the acts of consciousness, that is, to their sense-­ bestowing activity. If under the title of the “phenomenological reduction” we understand a reduction to the sphere of immanence, then the phenomenological way of proceeding must appear as an analysis of the structures of experience according to the modes of givenness of an object to a reflecting consciousness. Reflective analysis is thereby vowed to detect and fix its objects as immanent objects of a consciousness, whereby the moments of the object coexist in front of reflective thought and therefore find their ultimate unity and full sense only in the present of consciousness.16 15

16

The actual scope of this problematic cannot be fully probed at this point. The ­principal direction of this probing will be the subject of §§3–8 of this Chapter. In way of ­anticipation, the issue is effectively and summarily captured by Klaus Held in the ­following passage, which fixates a central point of the present study: “Nun hat es für die Phänomenologie nur Sinn, über Gegenstände im Wie ihres Gegebenseins zu sprechen. So entsteht folgende Lage: die radikalisierte Reflexion auf die Seinsweise des fungierenden Ich verweist gemäß dem Sinn ihrer eigenen Fragestellung auf Gegebenheiten, durch die sie selbst genetisch bedingt ist, die also ‘vor’ ihrer eigenen Aktivität liegen. Was jedoch diese Gegebenheiten sind, kann sich nur aus dem Wie ihrer Reflektiertheit ergeben.” Held 1966, 96. See PhP 474.

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This way of proceeding, however, sets the field of investigation under a t­ wofold constraint. First, the investigation is limited to the analysis of “constitution of objects” (Gegenstandskonstitution). Furthermore, the ­investigation is limited to an even narrower “presentialistic” analysis. It is phenomenology’s pivotal achievement to frame its analysis in terms of an intentional method, which transforms all questions of being in questions of correlation. In this manner, phenomenology achieves a liberation from the dogmatic fixation on objects by interpreting them as constituted unities in relation to subjective manifolds. The subject-object relation, however, works as limiting feature in the analysis when the transitive relation of experience characterizing the correlation is not interpreted as a particular epistemological feature, but rather as representative for the understanding of the totality of living consciousness. In this case, the intentional act of the egoic subject is established as the determining moment of the whole transcendental process of constitution. Correspondingly, that which emerges from such process must appear in terms of an object. It is such conception of “transcendental subjectivity” that makes up the basic conceptual framework of preliminary versions of Husserl’s eidetic.17 The latter aims at a clarification of the whole of reality through a reflective method proceeding by means of a series of intuitions of essence (Wesensanschauung). Such clarification issues therefore into what has the aspiration to be an apriori science of reason.18 However, this science of phenomenology, that aspires to reach the utmost radicality of understanding, is guided in its preliminary formulations by a specific sense of essence yielded from an epistemological interpretation adhering to the paradigmatic epistemic structure of the ­subject-object relation. In this chapter, I show that the shift from a phenomenology of ­act-­ intentionality to a phenomenology of “non-act” or “operative” i­ntentionality in the Phenomenology of Perception should be read in the light of Husserl’s programmatic critique of experience from Formal and Transcendental Logic. The chapter shows in particular that in the Phenomenology of Perception 17

18

The determination of sense in terms of the seizing of the essence in reflection, if the direction of epistemic accessibility is privileged as paradigmatic for the whole of ­consciousness, must issue into the conception according to which the principle of unity of experience – its “sense” – is bestowed by what appears to be the mental activity of a subjective consciousness. It could even be argued that it is the implicit validity of an “absolute region of consciousness” (Ideas I) that grounds the idea that the unity and sense of experience can be ultimately exhibited in terms of a manifold of modes of identification (even if the latter certainly assume in Husserl a different signification than that of immutable structures of a “pure reason”). VI. CM/2, 238.

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Merleau-Ponty makes explicit Husserl’s recasting of the notion of intentionality as entailing a shift from a philosophy of reflection to a philosophy of temporalizing constitution. The chapter concludes with a demonstration of this claim by following Merleau-Ponty’s meditation on the notion of “spatial level” as “form” of experience in a sense that is representative of his reformulation of the modern notion of the transcendental in philosophy. 3

Cartesian “Realism”

In a late text from 1935, Husserl interprets critically the idea of philosophy as “world-view” (Weltanschauung). This idea of philosophy emerges as a new manifestation of skepticism, which is especially parlous since it espouses the general contemporary lack of faith in the possibility of philosophy as ­apodictically rigorous science.19 Husserl’s programmatical commitment to the concrete work of description and demonstrative exhibiting is meant to show that a science based on apodictically rigorous principles can be achieved. In the first of several references to Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty sums up one of the basic points resulting from Husserl’s critique of logic by pointing to the fact that Husserl says here that there is no apodictic evidence.20 Is Merleau-Ponty attributing to Husserl an understanding of philosophy that directly contradicts Husserl’s unequivocal and until the very end unwavering commitment to philosophy as science? If we limit our focus to the surface of Merleau-­Ponty’s claim, then we seem compelled to conclude that this is in fact the case: if ­Husserl says that there is no apodictic evidence, then Husserl’s own philosophy, in spite of his explicit remarks in this regard, would also only just be a “world-view.” Husserl’s texts, in particular those engaged in a deeply recasting and transforming of the sense of preliminary methods and concepts, would be the testimony of a “schizophrenic” philosophy, i.e. a philosophy that keeps dreaming to become apodictically rigorous while in reality existing as a “worldview” among others. As I shall show shortly, this reading does not prove tenable in light of the specific way in which Husserl developed and deepened the meaning of philosophy as apodictically rigorous science. Merleau-Ponty was extremely receptive of this evolution in Husserl’s thought and his claim underscored the new sense of philosophy emerging from it. Merleau-Ponty’s 19 “Philosophie als Wissenschaft, als ernstliche, strenge, ja apodiktisch strenge Wissenschaft – der Traum ist ausgeträumt.” Hua VI, 508. 20 PhP xi.

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claim needs to be situated in the context of the reworking of the concept of apodicticity that Husserl carries out in Formal and Transcendental Logic, to which I now turn. In historical considerations that anticipate on the more extensive treatment in the Crisis, Husserl gives Descartes a special place in the history of philosophy. Descartes represents a watershed in the history of modern thinking because of the results yielded by his attempt to realize the idea of the grounding of science through a radical criticism of experience as “what gives [the sciences] beforehand the factual existence of the world.”21 For this reason, Descartes needs to be located, according to Husserl, in that stage of the modern age in which the idea of a science fully capable of accounting for its proceedings and achievements by reference to ultimative normative principles was still very much alive.22 But there are two elements in Descartes’ description of the ego, of “that I, understood as the ultimately constitutive subjectivity” existing “for myself with apodictic necessity,”23 which make his attempt inadequate in spite of the epochal character of his criticism for the development of transcendental philosophy. First of all, Descartes’ focus on the idea of deception with regard to the things of sensible or “external” experience caused him to lose sight of the genuine evidence in play in experience as “an original giving of something-­ itself [eine originale Selbstgebung].”24 What is more, however, is that the actual historical impact of Descartes’ discovery of transcendental subjectivity consists in a “most faithful” and “ineradicable error” resulting in what has up until now been an irreconcilable bifurcation of realist and idealist philosophies.25 According to Husserl, the ego cogito is identified by Descartes with the essence of the human psyche (mens sive animus), which, however, is itself a part of the world (it is substantia).26 This error prompts Husserl to speak of a “realism” of Descartes. Descartes’ realism posits a first real indubitable being from which all the remaining beings, as a whole, are derived deductively by using logical procedures. The problem with this approach arises, however, if we think that the validity of the logical principles thus applied is thereby unquestionably presupposed while they are precisely what should have been clarified beforehand 21 Hua XVII, § 93, 234–238/227–231. 22 Hua XVII, 6–7/2. 23 Hua XVII, 258/251. 24 Hua XVII, 288/282. 25 “Sogleich dieser Cartesianische Anfang mit der großen, aber nur in Halbheit durchbrochenen Entdeckung der transzendentalen Subjektivität ist durch die verhängnisvollste und bis heute unausrottbar gebliebene Verirrung getrübt...” Hua XVII, 235/227. 26 Hua XVII, 235–36/227–28. Cf. also few lines down, “The decisive point in this confusion [...] is the confounding of the ego with the reality of the I as a human psyche.” Hua XVII, 238/231.

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by an actual return to experience.27 In other words, D ­ escartes, according to Husserl’s interpretation, commits an error that can be considered the common thread of modern philosophy, both on the realist and on the idealist side. Both sides presuppose the ego as the basis of all cognition but then conflate the transcendental dimension, which is discovered with the ego cogito, with worldly aspects (the ego as human psyche), thereby failing to take hold of the order of the transcendental that was just discovered. When the transcendental consciousness is confounded with that aspect of our human psyche that properly makes us human, with the same aspect that we encounter and acknowledge in others, then we have circumscribed the proper theme of psychology. A philosophy that posits this theme as the basis of its cognitions would turn into a philosophy of immanence.28 As a result of the Cartesian criticism of experience just outlined, the idea of apodictic evidence undergoes a fundamental restriction very difficult to undo when it is conceived as a “feeling of evidence” springing forth out of the generally confused context of subjective life.29 This idea of evidence leaves unquestioned how what is thus perceived distinctly and clearly takes up the sense of objective transcendence which is beyond all doubt. The so-called “feeling of evidence” is rather itself non-evident so long a clarification of the complex layering of the “multiplicities of consciousness” (Bewusstseinsmannigfaltigkeiten) bringing about such “feeling” is still missing.30 In other words, an intentional analysis is needed that sheds light upon the “syntheses of transition” (synthetische Übergänge) out of which the sense of a clear and distinct evidence comes about as having an identity surpassing any subjective way in which an object endowed with such sense can be seized upon.31 It is implied in this expansion of the notion of evidence that the kind of evidence belonging to an ideal object and that belonging to a real object may turn out to present analogous but also quite different structures or syntheses.32 However, such an analysis is precisely 27

This, in sum, is the point made by Husserl in § 93.b. “Missing of the transcendental sense of the Cartesian reduction to the ego.” 28 Immanenzphilosophie. See Fink, “Was will die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls?,” in Fink 1966, 174–175. 29 Hua XVII, 165/157. 30 Hua XVII, 172/163. 31 It is worth noting that Merleau-Ponty will emphasize the role of the “syntheses of ­transition” all along the Phenomenology of Perception. See in particular the chapter on “Space” and on “The Thing and the Natural World.” The expression occurs in PhP 39, 307, 380, 480, 484. 32 On this, see Hua XVII, §§ 58, “The evidence of ideal objects analogous to that of individual objects.” The main point of difference between an “ideal” and a “real” object is said to pertain to the individuated character of the latter, i.e. the fact that a real object is always

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what Descartes did not offer with the result that the proper evidence of external or sensible objects remained undisclosed as well as any further research about the principles founding the validity of logical principles. 4

The Genetic Turn in Phenomenology

In spite of the radical insight into the idea of a pure consciousness, D ­ escartes’ critique of experience, which aims at establishing an absolutely certain ­foundation for scientific thinking, remains dogmatic since it relies on the ­prototypical evidence of logico-mathematical cognition that the critique is supposed to be grounding and explicating. The treatment of these matters, namely of just how the ideality of logico-mathematical thinking is to be accounted for ­constitutively, is precisely what Husserl began to undertake after the stage of the Logical Investigations. The latter did not yet recognize explicitly the ­constitutive level of analysis. At the stage of phenomenological inquiry in which Formal and Transcendental Logic was written, however, we observe that the level of constitutive analysis itself is considerably deepened, especially if compared to the standpoint of Ideas (1913). The first volume of the Ideas-project mainly focused on constitutional ­problems pertaining to the transcendence of the “world” as what is constantly presupposed by the positive sciences, and by traditional logical theories.33 The transcendental phenomenology of Ideas therefore focused on the role of intentionality within the stream of experience under the explicit preliminary exclusion of the question about just how this experiential stream as well as the unities constituted therein come about temporally. Already at the time of Ideas, Husserl had recognized the absolutely fundamental role of time in the context of constitutive-phenomenological analyses of experience.34 Yet in light of the sheer complexity of the analysis of time, it is comprehensible that he felt at first compelled to leave this central theme out of the introductory considerations into his phenomenological philosophy. The initial systematic presentation of a phenomenological theory of intentionality was limited to determinable in terms of a relation to time and space, which ideal objects lack. See also Hua XVII, 166–67/158. 33 The constitution of the world, as the leading theme of Ideen I, is investigated in “purely egological” analyses, that is, it sets out in the most general and entry-level terms ­available to a phenomenology as transcendental philosophy. Husserl designates this basic ­transcendental domain of investigation as rein-egologische or transzendental-­ solipsistische Phänomenologie. See Hua XVII, 276/269–270. 34 Cf. Ideen I, § 81.

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the analysis of constitutive acts of consciousness (perceptions, recollections, phantasy, picture-consciousness, etc.) having their correlate in certain determinate objective contents. As a result, intentional analysis appeared initially as analysis of object-perception, which on this entry-level was also taken to be paradigmatic for the entire experiential domain as it must follow from the idea of constitution as ego-centered “doing” or “performance” (Leistung). Thus, the starting point of intentional analysis are unities or objects that are found in experience as already fully formed “products.” One only needs to bring the experiential unities to clear givenness starting from whatever manner of givenness they are found in experience, explicate them in relation to their correlative modes of conscious apprehension, which provide the type of experience to be had of a certain category of objects. Husserl defines this mode of explication as “static.”35 Compared with this conceptual and methodological framework, Formal and Transcendental Logic is working with a notion of intentionality that has undergone radical recasting as a result of the analyses of time and of experiential genesis. Husserl’s interest in this topic goes back to the pre-­transcendental stage of his phenomenology, as it is attested by the 1905 lectures on “The ­Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.” But a more radical turn began in 1917–1918, when Husserl shifted focus from the temporal constitution of unities within the experiential stream (“immanent time”) to take up the much more problematic question about the temporal constitution of this stream in its very going-on as streaming.36 This research has been edited under the heading of “Bernau Manuscripts,” from the village retreat near Freiburg where Husserl conducted his renewed studies on time.37 We can neither go into any treatment of this pivotal set of manuscripts nor give an interpretation of how specific advances in the manuscripts have directly

35 “‘Static’ analysis is guided by the unity of the supposed object [Einheit des vermeinten Gegenstandes]. It starts from the unclear manners of givenness and, following the reference made by them as intentional modifications, it strives toward what is clear [das Klare].” Hua XVII, 316/316. “Static analysis takes the object-sense and, starting from its manners of givenness, follows up and explicates the ‘proper and actual’ sense, consulting those manners of givenness as intentional references to the possible ‘It Itself’ [Es selbst]” Hua XVII, 318/318. Cf. Hua XVII, 263/256–257. For the distinction between “static” and “genetic” phenomenology, see also the essay entitled “Statische und genetische phänomenologische Methode” from 1921 in Hua XI, 336ff. 36 For an insightful and clear summary of this trajectory of Husserl’s time-analysis research and the implications for his phenomenological program, see Bruzina 1993. 37 Die ‘Bernauer Manuskripte’ über das Zeitbewußtsein (1917/18). Edited by Rudolf Bernet & Dieter Lohmar. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.

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contributed to transform and deepen Husserl’s notion of i­ntentionality.38 What I shall do instead is to concentrate on the most noticeable feature of the integration of temporalizing genesis into the scope of phenomenological analysis emerging from the kind of transformative advances formulated in the Bernau manuscripts. Pointing to this feature will give us a preliminary idea of the recast notion of intentionality of experience that Husserl took to be foundational precisely of the truth-value of logic and ideal formations in Formal and Transcendental Logic. This fundamental feature is best illustrated in relation to a concrete advance pertaining to the (by the early 1920s) well-worn explication of retention and its analogue application to remembering. Initially Husserl had described retention as a kind of holding onto some determinate and objective content. This holding-onto however has a limit corresponding to the zero-point of intensity, such as in the case of an auditory tone, which corresponds to the null-state of objective content (i.e. the moment at which no actual sound is heard). In the set of materials produced shortly after the Bernau texts in preparation of a series of lecture on “Transcendental Logic,”39 Husserl highlights most clearly the new direction of analysis in two appendixes, which deal with the distinction between clarity and concealment making up our experience of objects. Husserl frames this distinction in terms of a spectrum or gradation of clarity and concealment in which objects come to appearance. He observes now that when we hear a tone and the tone then becomes confused, this confusion does not concern the objective content of the tone as such. The tone, say a c, remains the same, but it has become obscure.40 Husserl makes his new standpoint on the matter unequivocally clear in this passage: Fundamental here is the insight that we cannot emphasize strongly enough, namely, that this concealment is not a masking by or an overlay with moments that are alien with respect to content, or even by or with moments of the object. The fog of unclarity within the deeper levels of its penumbra is not on the order of an object, it is not an objectlike ­blackening.41 38

Even if not itself a comprehensive reading of the Bernau writings, I shall refer the reader again to Bruzina 1993 for some indicative elements of this connection between the ­Bernau time-analyses and the recasting of intentionality. 39 The lectures were given in 1920/21, 1923, 1925/26, 1928/29. 40 “When tones become unclear, the unclarity is not a tonal confusion; an obscurely ­reproduced loud tone is not a soft tone, nor is it, in place of c a mixture of another tonal quality or timbre.” Hua XI, 384. 41 Hua XI, 384. The passage quoted here from Appendix 10, “Possession of the Self and ­Concealment in Remembering. Reproduction and Retention.”

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In the continuation of the passage, Husserl holds that a determinate experiential item, such as a tone in external perception, or a memory, is given as modification within a gradation ranging between absolute clarity and ­absolute obscurity. The absolute maximum of clarity is for each determinate intentional item its optimal appearance, i.e. the grade of highest clarity or filling concerning the experienced content.42 Absolute obscurity, however, does not really c­ oncern the self-presentation of any determinate item, it is no longer any kind of ­presenting: “an absolutely obscure remembering would no longer be a remembering, so too, a tone sensed or heard in absolute silence is no longer there in a manner conforming to sensation; the sensation of an absolute zero-point of intensity is no longer a sensing.”43 The point that Husserl is emphasizing in the passage quoted above, however, is that the unclarity affecting a determinate experiential item between the sphere of clarity (of fulfillment) and the point of absolute obscurity also cannot be simply assigned to the objective content of experience as a state of some such determinate item. The nebulous givenness (die nebelhafte Gegebenheit), Husserl writes, is not a self-presentation without further ado, [it is not a] pure self-­ presentation of the object; it is precisely obscured, concealed by a haze. To be sure, the object does reappear through the haze or fog, but precisely because its genuine, clear self-appearings appear through it, and in it and through this, the object.44 The fog of unclarity is not the unclarity of some determinate objective content, but the space or horizon of possible determinability and presentability of objective contents. These few but signal indications are paradigmatic for the new direction that Husserl’s phenomenological program had initiated in ­Bernau. What emerges here is that the integration of temporalizing genesis into the scope of phenomenological analysis deepens the well-worn modality of static explication, thereby revealing new essential features pertaining to a general theory of intentionality. Accordingly, intentionality is not simply a kind of presenting but rather a process in which being conscious of something 42

“[T]he normal, clear givenness with its distinctions of proximity and distance or of approaching and moving away from; these are distinctions of a gradation that is not a gradation of relative clarity, but rather is a gradation of a greater or lesser fulfillment and filling concerning the seen content with regard to every identical seen moment of such a series – within clarity.” Hua XI, 383, emphasis mine. This passage stems from Appendix 9, “Both Variations of Modes of Givenness: (1) of Proximity and Distance within Clarity (2) of Obscurity as Veiledness, Nebulousness.” 43 Hua XI, 384. 44 Hua XI, 383–384. Appendix 9.

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as present thereness is best described as consciousness tending out to something and moving away from something.45 Even just this brief indication points to considerable challenges regarding the status to be attributed to egoic subjectivity as center of constitutive functions, especially if this subjectivity is conceived on the model of ordinary “I”-centered experience and intending of some object-thematic determinacy. The latter is the model for intentional analyses within static phenomenology. But this model is no longer adequate for the kind of experiential framework emerging from the integration of temporal dynamics in the very presenting activity of consciousness. It can be argued that Husserl did not immediately abandoned a model of explanation of experience based on act-thematic cognition of determinate objective items.46 It is nonetheless clear that the opening made in the Bernau manuscripts led Husserl to a reconsideration and re-characterization of this preliminary explanatory model, as it is attested by the new directions and insights of his phenomenological program in the 1920s and 1930s. This more fundamental conception of intentionality is very much in play in Formal and Transcendental Logic. In the next section, I shall take up what I take to be the most salient features of this new “functioning” intentionality. 5

Operative Intentionality

In the context of Husserl’s criticism of Descartes, the recast notion of intentionality into what Husserl calls in Formal and Transcendental Logic a “functioning” or “operative intentionality” (fungierende Intentionalität) is the absolute presupposition for achieving a radical expansion of the notion of evidence.47 In brief, Husserl shows that “evidence” is ultimately to be understood as operative intentionality. A critique of evidence must exhibit the experiential horizons that are implied in having an evident something, especially in the explicit thematic cognition of logical thinking. These are the “horizons,” namely, where any determinate something comes to be experienced in its manifest thereness 45

Cf. the relevant passage in the Bernau Manuscripts: “Wir hätten etwa zu sagen, das letztkonstituierende Bewusstsein, das den einheitlichen Strom ausmacht, ist in jeder Phase (Ux+, Ux-) Bewusstsein-von; Intention auf etwas hin und Intention von etwas weg; oder auch gerichtete Tendenz, positiv und negativ gerichtet. Das Gerichtetsein, die Tendenz-auf, das ist Grundcharakter des Bewusstseins-von in seinem ursprünglichsten Wesensbestand.” Hua XXXIII, 38. 46 Cf. Bruzina 1993, 371. 47 Hua XVII, 165/157.

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in the first place by way of perceptual experience and in specific modes of living-practical and sense-modal awareness and differentiation. Therefore the critique points to a kind of intentionality that Husserl calls “horizon-­ intentionality.” Husserl writes: “These horizons, then, are ‘­presuppositions’ which, as intentional implicates included in the constituting intentionality, continually determine the objective sense of the immediate experiential surroundings,” from which he concludes that such “presuppositions” have not the character of premises or of “idealizing” presuppositions of logic.48 Instead, as chapter 4 of part II of Formal and Transcendental Logic attempts to show, they have the character of “experiential” presuppositions. “Experience,” Husserl continues, “is the consciousness of being with the matters themselves [bei den Sachen selbst zu sein].”49 This being-with is so primordial that no deception, “the non-being of what is experienced,” can abolish “the universal presumption of normal harmony […] a universe of being at all times remains for me beyond all doubt: a universe of being that I miss, and can miss, only occasionally and in details.”50 As a correlate to a “universe of being” there emerges a “universal experiential basis […] as a harmonious unity of possible experience.”51 The notion of operative intentionality is meant to describe precisely this most fundamental correlation as the correlation of a living intentionality (lebendige Intentionalität), which, Husserl says, “as functioning (fungierende) in this living way, it may be non-thematic, undisclosed, and thus beyond my ken.”52 What should be noticed in this connection is also that the inquiry into this “evidence of experience” must necessarily proceed in stages, so that even the first discovery of it, thanks to the phenomenological reduction,53 especially in its most

48 Hua XVII, 207–08/199–200. Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Husserl’s notion of “horizon” in VI 195. 49 Hua XVII, 239/232. 50 Hua XVII, 242/235. Cf. the following passage expressing the same point, “Evidence of ­experience is therefore always presupposed by the process […] Even an ostensibly ­apodictic evidence can become disclosed as deception and, in that event, presupposes a similar evidence by which it is ‘shattered.’” Hua XVII, 164/156. 51 Hua XVII, 226/218. 52 Hua XVII, 242/235. Translation modified. Here is the whole important passage, “Die ­lebendige Intentionalität trägt mich, zeichnet vor, bestimmt mich praktisch in m ­ einem ganzen Verhalten, auch in meinem natürlich denkenden, ob Sein oder Schein ­ergebenden, mag sie auch als lebendig fungierende unthematisch, unenthüllt und somit meinem ­Wissen entzogen sein.” 53 An account of the basic meaning of the phenomenological reduction in its main moments is given by Husserl in Ideas I, Part 2, Section 1, chs. 3 and 4.

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preliminary phases, does not rule out the possibility of a further change or even abolition of the phenomenological truths first established.54 It is the main import of Formal and Transcendental Logic to indicate that an adequate concept of evidence can only be found in connection with a deepened understanding of intentionality as “operative” in the sense outlined above. Finally, in order to express this always already accomplished experience that gets continuously done beneath any thematic focus, Husserl chooses the word “teleology.” Intentionality, he writes, is a “teleological function” that characterizes the whole life of consciousness.55 This is a peculiar sort of teleology, however, due to the fact that the “telos” at stake in this teleology has always already been attained. This is a delicate point, a point that is echoed in many ways also in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “perceptual faith.” Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual faith indicates the awareness that any starting point for consciousness is preceded by a field from which consciousness itself emerges, a field that is pregiven and therefore already in play and “attained” by consciousness whenever it begins to direct itself towards any object. However, at the same time, this faith does not refer to an already determinate and preformed being. This is faith in a being that is in a continuous state of forming in ways that are not and in principle cannot be foretold in advance.56 Husserl rather states that consciousness begins its life with an orientation towards “reason.” Now we know that the “telos” meant here is the “universe of being,” the totality of “things themselves” as the realized and undisplaceable universal presumption of normal harmony in the course of the harmonious unity of possible experience, i.e. Husserl’s concept of operative intentionality. Consciousness has already 54

This is just the sense of Fink’s characterization of phenomenological analysis as provisional (vorläufig). In Vergegenwärtigung und Bild, Fink writes, “Die phänomenlogische Analyse ist vorläufig. Damit meinen wir die Bezogenheit des phänomenologischen Apriori auf seine Entwurfsituation, die jeweils innegehaltene reduktive Stufe. Wesensmöglichkeiten haben selbst Grenzen ihrer Relevanz, haben eine bestimmte ‘Tragweite.’ Z. B. apodiktisch einsichtige Möglichkeiten, so wie wir sie in der egologischen E ­ xplikation aussprechen können, mögen etwa eine Umwandlung oder gar Aufhebung erfahren durch den Übergang in die transzendentale Problematik der Intersubjektivität.” See Fink 1966, 16. Husserl stresses the provisionalness (Vorläufigkeit) of the investigations into “origins” in Formal and Transcendental Logic, Hua XVII, 277/270–71. The same idea of “­provisionalness” is already expressed by Husserl in the Logical Investigations. Husserl defines the specificity of his phenomenological investigations into the subjective grounds of pure logic in contrast to the linear or systematic way of proceeding of any scientific discipline. Phenomenological investigations, rather, proceed in zigzags (Hua XIX, 22). Cf. Bachelard 1968, 80–81. 55 Hua XVII, p. 251/245. See also pp. 168–69/160, 269/262–63. 56 On this point about Merleau-Ponty’s “perceptual faith,” cf. Morris 2018, 202–203, 205–209.

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“attained” being, but the point here is to stress that consciousness does this in a way that cannot be reduced to any particular way in which consciousness can attain or have beings. Husserl expresses this point by saying that consciousness’ orientation (Angelegtsein) towards reason is a permanent tendency (durchgehende Tendenz).57 But the teleology that refers to a reason beyond all particular coherences or ruptures of experience is not yet a reference to a reason that is already determinate. What I just described is that “teleology” referred to by Merleau-Ponty in the last sentence of The Philosopher and His Shadow, “which is written and thought about in quotation marks – that jointing and framing of Being which is being realized through man.”58 The great achievement and constant desideratum of phenomenology however is not to let this teleology rest on itself, but precisely to set one’s sight on it and its constantly achieved movement. This is why it would be appropriate to describe Husserl’s phenomenology in its attempt to confront the teleology of consciousness in terms of an “archeology.”59 All experience, not only pre-scientific but also theoretical and scientific experience, includes in itself a “sedimented history” that needs to be uncovered if an adequate understanding of the notion of evidence is to be achieved.60 The thrust toward the “origin,” the “fundamental” or the “genesis” is finally also described by Husserl in a juridical way of speaking. Husserl describes the fundamental form of evidence that a criticism of experience is led to uncover as the “creative primordial institution of rightness, of truth as correctness” (schöpferische Urstiftung des Rechtes, der Wahrheit als Richtigkeit).61 He writes: [T]ranscendence lies in the proper essence of the experience itself. What it signifies can be learned only by interrogating experience; just as what a legal property-right signifies and what demonstrates it at any time (incidentally, a matter that itself belongs within our province) can be found out only by going back and examining the “primal instituting” [Urstiftung] of that right […] Experience is the primal instituting [Urstiftung] of the being-for-us of objects as having their objective sense.62

57 Hua XVII, 169/160. 58 S 228. Translation modified. 59 Fink 1966, 199. 60 Sedimentierte Geschichte, see Hua XVII, § 97, 252/245. 61 Hua XVII, 167/159. He also uses the expression Urstiftende Intentionalität, see Hua XVII, 227/219. 62 Hua XVII, 172–73/164.

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“Operative intentionality” has been described as horizonal, as living, as teleological, as historical, as primordially institutive. Husserl’s critique and expansion of the notion of evidence takes on thereby the character of an analysis that radically starts “from below.” This way of speaking is justified in the way Husserl criticizes the Cartesian positions as being theories “from on high,” i.e. theories that assume some putative absolutely existent being functioning as the starting point of their cognitions but operating with presuppositions that are left unquestioned.63 After accomplishing the reduction to the ego and thereby opening up “a new sort of possibility of cognition and being,”64 Descartes elaborated a “theory from on high,” the main traits of which have been sketched above with reference to Husserl’s criticism of Descartes’ “realism.” As we have seen in connection with Husserl’s deepening of the theory of evidence, it is his description of evidence as functioning intentionality that allows Merleau-Ponty to claim that for Husserl, in effect, there is no apodictic evidence. To sum up, there is no apodictic evidence if with this expression one understands an apodicticity that claims to be absolutely free from all deception in the sense of eidetic science or of internal experience. Therefore, neither the a priori sciences (e.g. logic, mathematics) nor the reduction to inner self-­ experience (Descartes’ egology), whose insights claimed to achieve “ostensibly apodictic evidence,” can claim the title of first philosophy. Husserl’s analysis of evidence in Formal and Transcendental Logic operates a pivotal shifting from the idea of ultimately apodictic, therefore grounding evidence, to an idea of “apodicticity” that is the result of a most radical recasting of the idea of being as the idea resulting from a phenomenological explication of experience. ­Neither the evidence given in the cognitive mode of a priori science nor, alternatively, the evidence given in the “internal perception” of the human psyche as long as it perceives itself – the latter being the Cartesian approach65 – emerge as radical enough to work as a starting point of philosophy. Phenomenological explication operates a fundamental relativizing of inner-worldly being with respect to its evidence and thereby opens up the possibility to conceive of a “being” whose explication alone would ground true apodicticity and evidence, i.e. a truly “absolute” being. 63 Hua XVII, 286/280. See also 169/161, 251/244. 64 Hua XVII, 238/230. 65 See on the apodicticity of a priori sciences, Fink, VI.CM/1, 167/150; VI. CM/2, 112–113. See on the apodicticity of “immanent” or “internal perception,” Husserl, Hua XVII, 165–66/157; Fink, VI.CM/2, 113. In both cases, however, “apodicticity” is shown to have a world-bound character. A good summative account of this argument can be found in Fink, VI.CM/2, 148–158. The references to VI. CM/1 indicate the pagination of the original German edition followed by the pagination of the English translation.

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6 Brief Methodic Reflection on the “Idea of Being” in Phenomenology A question should be raised at this point: if the notion of apodictic evidence is resituated as having relative status, thereby recasting the traditional p ­ rimary status attributed to the ideal in active determinative cognition, then in which sense can one still speak of “apodictic” evidence and, in particular, with respect to which being? In his set of revisions of Husserl’s Meditation I (1931), Eugen Fink addresses poignantly the issue at stake here when he asks, “In which unquestioned sense of ‘being’ is generally understood the term ‘existence’ [Existenz] in the expression ‘apodictic existence’ [apodiktische Existenz]; what is the all-embracing horizon within which the question about an apodictically evident being moves from the start?”66 These questions only have the purpose to exacerbate the radically new sense of “evidence” in that which Husserl describes as “evidence of experience” above. No “real” nor any “ideal” being can in principle claim apriority in cognition as having the sense of absolute apodictic evidence. The reasons for this have been sketched out in the p ­ revious section: “operative intentionality” is the term encompassing the whole ­system of living or operative experiential effectuations in which any identifiable “something” would come to be experienced as actually and manifestly there through the rich variability and coherence of experiential modalities that are in play before the explicit, reflective action of theoretically-minded awareness directed towards anything.67 If living, operative intentionality is meant to map out the whole set of functioning living components of experiential awareness, then the experience of any real or ideal object presupposes further dimensions that need to be disclosed in order for the theory of cognition and science to claim to be really presuppositionless and to have arrived at that

66 “In welchem unfraglichen Sinn von ‘Sein’ ist gemeinhin ‘Existenz’ im Ausdruck ‘­apodiktische Evidenz’ verstanden; welches ist der umspannende Horizont, i­nnerhalb dessen sich die Frage nach einem apodiktisch evidenten Seienden von vornherein bewegt?” VI. CM/2, 111. My translation. 67 In a remark from 1920/21 summarizing the whole endeavor behind the radical project of a transcendental logic, Husserl offers a helpful telegraphic precis of this “antecedency” status with regard to logical and cognitive activity: “Das System der selbstgebenden ­Erlebnisse aufsuchen, in denen es zur reinen Selbstgebung kommen würde, heißt also, die Idee der reinen Ausweisung konkret konstruieren, soweit sie vor aller logischen Aktivität des Ich gedacht werden kann – und gedacht werden muß, damit der tragende Grund für jede mögliche Erkenntnis (als tätig bestimmende Erkenntnis) der Welt bestehe.” Hua XI, 432. Emphasis mine.

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“absolute” principle of knowledge grounding rigorously every other knowledge in its ultimate intelligibility.68 Following this line of investigation, then, the fundamental experiential situation had to come into view under a renewed light and e­ xamined carefully, namely the starting-point whose conditioning force is barely ever felt and that set in motion Husserl’s whole phenomenological enterprise in its first systematic presentation in Ideas. This beginning situation is the world and starting with it is the primary step towards the clarification of what gives absolute foundation to cognition and science on the basis of evidence. This also means however that every attempt to achieve such absolute foundation had to practically fail by not calling into question the all-embracing horizon within which experience moves from the start.69 Phenomenological analysis intends therefore to begin with an explicit recognition of the universal horizon of the world, thereby also opening up for the first time the possibility of an understanding of this phenomenon.70 As we saw in the previous sections, this task depends on achieving a genuine transcendental standpoint that would grant adequacy of access regarding the on-going experiential structures to be explicated as fundamental to cognitive operations of rational, reflective, and logical thought, and that would grant sufficient openness of self-­critical reconsideration within a firmly coherent methodological procedure. The “phenomenological reduction” is in phenomenology what enables to achieve this level of transcendental adequacy.71 We have also seen that the phenomenological reduction breaks open the all-embracing experiential framework in its universal scope by placing both the “objective” or “transcendent” externality of experienced things and equally the psychic internality of “subjective” experience on the side of the world. It is in light of this radicality that aims at the all-embracing not-yet-dichotomous horizon of experience that Fink feels compelled to raise his question about the sense to be attributed to what is said to 68 69 70 71

Cf. Hua XVII, 252/245. “Der überhaupt nie als solcher abgehobene und eigens zum Problem gemachte ­Universalhorizont aller Seinsfrage ist die dem natürlichen Menschen mit natürlichem Recht also geltende Welt.” VI.CM/2, 111. “Mit dem Ingangbringen der phänomenologischen Analyse aber fällt der Universalhorizont der ‘Welt.’” Fink 1966, 9. Cf. Husserl’s statement at the end of his discussion of “The subjective grounding of logic as a problem belonging to transcendental philosophy,” when he writes that “having been led from knowledge and science to logic as a theory of science, and led onward from the actual grounding of logic to a theory of logical or scientific reason, we now face the all-embracing problem of trascendental philosophy – of transcendental philosophy in its only pure and radical form, that of a transcendental phenomenology.” Hua XVII, 238/231.

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exist apodictically, namely after the reconsideration that this sense of “apodictic being” would have to undergo in light of that other “being” or “dimension” found on the fundamental level wherefrom any that-which-is comes about as an identifiable and conceivable “something” in the first place. The question, in other words, is whether even speaking of an “existing” something at the level of foundational dynamic experiential structures makes any sense whatsoever. However, the idea of being is not given up as such. In the VI. Cartesian Meditation, Fink makes this point very clear when he discusses the idea of an “explicit reduction of the Idea of being.”72 He writes, But we will not get free of bondship to the Idea of being by simply abandoning the concept of being. For we would thereby lose the last possibility of making verifiable explications and assertions in regard to transcendental subjectivity. We would fall into the danger of an incurable ‘mysticism.’ Only by reducing the Idea of being itself and forming a new transcendental concept of being will we escape from captivation [­Befangenheit] in the natural Idea of being.73 It is too complex to analyze everything that this answer entails. A brief consideration of this passage shall suffice to offer a minimal orientation along the line of thought developed here by Fink, which is of crucial relevance also for specific developments of Merleau-Ponty’s own understanding of phenomenology. There is one main matter at issue that has again to do with the kind of natural placement within which the dimension of all that is is encountered and understood as such. If we keep this constant placement in view, then ­phenomenologizing experience does not abandon the concept of being in its radicalizing investigations, but rather only brings “the natural Idea of being” (die natürliche Seinsidee) to explicit thematic focus. This requires some liberation from the placement or captivation in the “natural Idea.” What is meant by this, we now know, is that phenomenologizing experience turns the totality of the world into its theme. It is the phenomenological reduction that opens up the comprehension of the world as the pregiven situation from which all pre-thematic as well as all thematizing experience must begin. Proceeding in this way, phenomenology aims at an understanding of both the captivating situation and of the coming about of this situation itself, whose clarification is the task of a theory of world-constitution. Yet the kind of “being” found on this level of analysis must be said to be transcendental as conditioning factor for 72 73

VI. CM/1, 82/73. VI. CM/1, 83–84/74–75.

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any being falling under the natural Idea of being, now thematized phenomenologically. As a result, the reduced natural Idea of being discloses the fact that on the level of the primordial all-embracing horizon, and even more so on the level of its constitutive origination, one cannot base a radical theory of cognition and being on any individual (Descartes’ ego) or even regional (material ontologies) or formal (logic, mathesis universalis) sort of being (i.e. “being” as ultimately understood in the mundane-objective sense). Rather phenomenologizing experience takes as its theme the world and its constitution, which, we hear from Fink, “is not ‘in itself’ existent but also not nonexistent.”74 Again, Fink poignantly gives the fundamental reason that justifies this way of speaking when he says that “If everything existent – according to the transcendental insight of phenomenology – is nothing other than a constitutive having-­cometo-be [Gewordenheit], then the coming-to-be [Werden] of the existent in constitution is itself not already existent.”75 7

The Prejudice of the World

The last section features remarks that are a paradigmatic token, albeit in the argumentative shape given to it by Fink, of the kind of post-preliminary reconsiderations and issues in play in the thrust of radicalization stamping the developments of Husserl’s phenomenological project from Formal and ­Transcendental Logic to the Crisis. In a methodically rigorous phenomenological way of proceeding one must thus reach that new sort of possibility of cognition and being that Descartes failed to take hold of once he made a first breakthrough into it by way of his reduction to the experiencing ego. The ­radicalized critical appraisal of research themes and issues following the self-critical relativization of egological immanence implied a series of

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VI. CM/1, 82/73. VI. CM/1, 82/73. It is worthwhile mentioning the marginal note (n. 239) that is added by Husserl to the passage just quoted. Husserl writes, “Obviously too, however, not a ­coming-to-be in the sense of a wordly coming-to-be, of a mode of what exists as a [­process of] happening – but again an analogue to it.” In particular, Fink will draw further radical implications from this thought in the direction of what he calls a “meontic” concept of being. The opening onto the “meontic” was for Fink a rigorous consequence of the self-critical considerations of method conducted in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, as the draft of a preface to this work indicates. See “Entwurf eines Vorwortes,” VI. CM/1, 183.

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conceptual and methodological shiftings, all of which Husserl himself did not always explicitly thematize or was willing to accept.76 As indicated above, the critical expansion of the feature of ­intentionality found at play in experience when taken in its on-going coursing recasts the idea of evidence with respect to the putatively apodictic egological self-­ containment of consciousness. This shift, which is represented by formulating intentionality as “functioning,” “performative,” “living,” relativizes traditional conceptions of cognitive and more specifically of logical validity with respect to the non-dichotomous, non-thematic experiential dimension of living engagement with that which is in the process of acquiring validity or of holding good manifestly and concretely in a living sensing situation. Husserl uses the term Geltungsleben in order to summarize a point he has been developing since the beginning of the 1920s with the project of formulating a transcendental logic, which he frames in terms of investigating the formation of knowledge in perception.77 In light of the dramatic advances displayed in the course of this project, it is clear that the standing of the “world” at the very onset of the phenomenological undertaking had to emerge with renewed problematic potential, especially as in Husserl’s published writings the phenomenon of the world represents 76

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This stance of Husserl’s phenomenology in front of dramatic and potentially transformative changes both in method and concepts emerges in an especially instructive way in the documentary evidence of Husserl’s exchanges with Fink, in particular as Fink’s work as Husserl’s last assistant was mainly entrusted with the task of achieving a summative and systematic presentation of phenomenology that would integrate Husserl’s post-Ideas I monumental manuscript production – together with the implications contained therein, some of which Husserl had not suspected. For a magistral treatment of this whole situation, the reader should consult Bruzina 2004, as well as the many essays Bruzina has devoted to this topic. Working through Bruzina’s texts is an imperative undertaking for all those interested in understanding the direction of issues at the center of Husserl’s late proposals in phenomenology. “Mit anderen Worten: Kein Sein und So-sein für mich, ob als Wirklichkeit oder Möglichkeit, es sei denn als mir geltend. Dieses mir Gelten ist eben ein Titel für eine – nicht bloß von oben her postulierte, obschon zunächst verborgene, aber dann auch zu erschließende – Mannigfaltigkeit meiner wirklichen und möglichen Leistungen, mit sich wesensmäßig vorzeichnenden Ideen der Einstimmigkeit ins Unendliche und endgültigen Seins. Was mir irgend als seiender Gegenstand entgegentritt, hat für mich, so muß ich aber auch, mein eigenes Bewußtseinsleben als Geltungsleben konsequent auslegend, anerkennen, seinen ganzen Seinssinn aus meiner leistenden Intentionalität empfangen, nicht ein Schatten davon bleibt ihr entzogen.” Hua XVII, 241. In the Lectures on Passive and Active Synthesis from 1920/21, Husserl begins explicitly to investigate the “foundation of ­passivity” (Untergrund von Passivität) and what he calls the “formation of knowledge in perception” (Erkenntnisbildung in der Wahmehmung), see Hua XXXI, 4, 18.

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the initial entryway to phenomenology.78 What this amounts to, however, is that the interpretation of the “world” in these writings is precisely approached from the standpoint that is supposed to lead us to phenomenology. More fundamentally, what this means is that taking the world to be simply the object of a blinding naiveté that needs to be lifted in order to begin the phenomenological labor would no longer be acceptable.79 But if the preliminary or entry-level interpretation of the world is no longer acceptable as it stands, then also the general standpoint on which that interpretation depends needs to be reconsidered on a post-preliminary stage of phenomenological investigation. As a result, the “natural idea of being” itself, which the whole of the world is meant to comprise, together with its correlate, i.e. what Husserl called in Ideen the “general thesis of the natural attitude,” both require renewed reconsideration.80 It is this fundamental realization that we find explicitly at work in key ­phrasings not of Husserl but of authors such as Fink and Merleau-Ponty, who however aimed at giving a fuller and more adequate formulation to the insights and implications of the trajectory that Husserl’s own phenomenology was ­taking. An instance of this is Fink’s term “captivation in the world” (­Weltbefangenheit) to indicate the basic situation of full placement of a living sentient and conscious being in the world as the fundamental mode of experience described by the notion of “operative intentionality.”81 Merleau-Ponty defines it rather as the “prejudice of the world” (préjugé du monde).82 While this expression has been generally taken as signifying the straightforward belief in 78 79 80

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82

For an orientative representation of the set of issues surrounding the theme of the world in phenomenology, cf. Bruzina’s essay with the title “Redoing the Phenomenology of the World in the Freiburg Workshop, 1930–1934” (Bruzina 1998). Cf, Bruzina 1998, 42, 45, 52 et passim. See Husserl, Ideas I, § 30. Cf. also Fink’s “Vergegenwärtigung und Bild,” in Fink 1966, 12. Luft points out that the notion of natural attitude in Husserl undergoes a shift between an early text such as Ideas I and the later writings. Initially, the natural attitude represents a transitional stage towards transcendental philosophy. Later, however, the natural attitude receives a genuine “right” of standing, which, Luft adds, must be understood in order to give an adequate account of late themes such as the “life-world” and the theory of “enworlding” (Verweltlichung). See Luft 2002, 72n84. On the term Weltbefangenheit, see Fink, “Was will die Phänomenologie Edmund H ­ usserls?,” in Fink 1966, 159. Cf. on this point Bruzina’s remark in his introduction to the translation of the Sixth Meditation in Fink 1995, lxxxix-xc, footnotes 191–192; Bruzina 1998, 57–60; Bruzina 2002, 181, 194ff. In all these instances Bruzina links this term to ­Merleau-Ponty’s préjugé du monde. Bruzina points to VI. CM/1, 46 and 81 as textual e­ vidence for this linkage and to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the Sixth Meditation in 1942, i.e. while he was in the process of drafting the Phenomenology of Perception. For the expression préjugé du monde, see Merleau-Ponty, PhP 11, 62, 296, 316. Cf. on this point Bruzina 2002, 194.

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the world as totality of objectively existing things, which the thematic focus of the sciences presupposes to be completely determined, there is another richer sense that is in play in Merleau-Ponty’s usage of this term. The idea of a prejudice of the world as idea of a ready-made reality of existing things and events is indeed justified to the extent that, for his analysis of perception, ­Merleau-Ponty draws from the critique of psychologistic atomism coming from Gestalt-­ psychology, which he in turn critiques for overlooking a much more pernicious prejudice, i.e. that of “determinate being.”83 ­However, Merleau-­Ponty’s notion of a prejudice of the world is articulated in the ­Phenomenology of Perception in a way that retraces Husserl’s criticism of evidence and experience in Formal and Transcendental Logic. This is very clear right at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Perception, right after the passage in which Merleau-Ponty refers back to Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, The world is not that which I think but that which I live. I am open to the world, I unquestionably communicate with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. I can never fully justify the permanent thesis of my life that “There is a world,” or rather, “There is the world.” This facticity of the world is what establishes the Weltlichkeit der Welt [worldliness of the world], what makes it such that the world is the world, just as the facticity of the cogito is not an imperfection in it, but rather what assures of my existence.84 The prejudice of the world features in this passage as “permanent thesis of my life,” which, however, is here clearly not a thematic thesis at all. This “pre-­judice” (pré-jugé) does not have the character of a “judgment.” The world-­prejudice is not a limited stance that one unwittingly takes on oneself and that one can simply modify or undo by taking a distance from it and becoming aware of it. The world-prejudice antecedes all possibility of explicit thematic focus but also any particular mode of pre-thematic psychic life as oriented towards this or that thing of the world. This prejudice is not a logical thesis, but neither is it a psychological event. In no way therefore can “prejudice” in this context be interpreted mentally or psychologically, even in the sense of a fully developed phenomenological psychology. If this were the case, then we would be obliged to espouse an introspective approach, more or less overtly asserting that the 83 84

PhP 62 fn. 1. See also S 206: “For the natural attitude is anything but naturalistic […] Our most natural life as men intends an ontological milieu which is different from that of being in itself…” See Barbaras 2001 and Moinat 2012, 106. PhP xi–xii. Translation modified.

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world can be made, at least in principle, into a component of my own awareness of things, which, however, still remains within the world. Yet, as it emerges in Merleau-Ponty’s own analysis, a purely psychological analysis, on the model of the one carried out in the first three chapters of the introduction of the Phenomenology of Perception, would already point to aspects of my psychic experience that would demand the passage to a different kind of analysis. This analysis, which is more adequately defined as transcendental, must exhibit findings that would ultimately function as explanatory also with respect to the findings of a phenomenological psychology. I already indicated above that in an early reference to Fink in Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty points out that without leaving the regard directed to “the problems of totality [Ganzheitsprobleme] of the natural world,” i.e. the regard of the natural attitude, one is led to the transcendental attitude.85 The prejudices conditioning certain moments of a single event or of entire stretches of my life are embedded in a much more radical pre-judice of the world that sustains all “natural” ingenuities and preconceptions. Merleau-Ponty repeats this connection between the psychological and the transcendental point of view in the pivotal fourth chapter of the introduction to the Phenomenology of Perception. In the third section of this chapter, with the title “Phenomenal Field and Transcendental Philosophy,” he indicates that psychological reflection, once begun, gets carried away by its own momentum.86 These pivotal remarks are telling of the fact that Merleau-Ponty’s extensive concentration on studies of Gestalt-psychology remains propaedeutic to a dimension of thought that is not limited to “a circulation of self-contained psychical states”87 nor ultimately to the “thematization of psychological immanence.”88 Let me just note in passing that this theme of a double sense of the ­prejudice of the world as well as the problematic raised by it will gain in ­visibility in ­ Merleau-Ponty’s subsequent work. In particular, this theme becomes ­prominent to rethink anew the problematic of transcendental constitution, as the essay on Le Philosophe et son ombre shows.89 In short, the idea of world-­ prejudice recasts the sequential conception of founding and founded layers of constitution.90 In this connection, it is particularly significant that Husserl’s late concept of the life-world carries out this same recasting function in the 85 86 87 88 89 90

SC 222n2. Cf. also S 207–208. PhP 73. PhP 74. VI 74. See the reference to the “natural attitude” in S 206, as well as the reference to Husserl’s Ideas II and the notion of Selbstvergessenheit (“self-forgetfulness”) in S 217–219. See also Richir 2008, 170–172.

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way this fundamental mode of experience no longer appears as mental foundation of sense, but rather as what is responsible for anything, founding or founded, to come to determinate appearance.91 This is a lesson that we clearly find captured by the idea of prejudice of the world in the Phenomenology of Perception and by the integration of the notion of sedimentation into the movement of constitution of the world.92 It is as this irretrievable (“transcendental”) prejudice that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of prejudice of the world should thus be understood and with it his notion of the “operative” that he received both from Husserl and Fink.93 In fact, it should emerge from the present survey on the notion of operative intentionality, as introduced by Husserl in Formal and Transcendental Logic, that this notion represents the pivotal presupposition for understanding the setting and development of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis in the Phenomenology of Perception, both as regards the study of human embodiment, which is the thematic focus of that work, and ultimately with regard to the analysis of time, which represents the final framing of the whole analysis. 8

Operative Intentionality as Temporalizing

This line of thought opens up a complex set of issues that cannot be fully treated at this point; but a brief indication of the direction followed by M ­ erleau-Ponty in the search for the base-level mode of one’s own living consciousness in the world, i.e. “operative intentionality,” shall suffice for outlining in preparatory fashion the investigative framework of the Phenomenology of Perception. With respect to human experiencing within the world, i.e. the theme that ­Merleau-Ponty is constantly trying to bring to adequate conceptual articulation in that work, one needs to realize that the basic condition for coming to discriminative presentation and givenness of an object, on the one side, and for the subject’s capability of retention of objects in identity and constancy, on the other, is precisely the structure of time, i.e. the temporality structuring the life of the experiencing subject. Jumping ahead to the analysis of time in the “Temporality” chapter, we begin to see that the whole rich variability on 91 92

93

See Steinbock 1996, 94, 103. See PhP 151–152, 249. In the “Cogito” chapter, Merleau-Ponty refers to Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic when discussing the idea of a “sedimented history.” (PhP 453). If every cogito is always already entangled in a history, the body and its sensible nature is also defined as an “implicit or sedimented science.” (PhP 275). PhP xiii, 478.

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the level of sentient experience Merleau-Ponty so carefully elaborates in his studies on perception is found displayed in the fundamentally complex and dynamically coherent form of time. The problems and ambiguities that one encounters when dealing with phenomena of sensing experience, with the relationship between body and mind, with the experience of nature or of other people are firmly rooted in the process of coming to determinacy of the field of experientiality as temporal. Thus, the ambiguities of experience also find their ultimate reason and clarification in this temporal process. Since this process is the very coursing of experience in my very living of it, it is immediately clear that time cannot be conceived in terms of any of the attributions of processes in physical nature or in psychic interiority as these are themselves events “in” time. The kind of process that Merleau-Ponty is discussing is the elusive coursing of time itself on the level of the experiencing by which I get to encounter any determinate event or any determinate something. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: “Time is thought of by us before the parts of time, temporal relations make possible events in time.”94 Moreover, since time is not just the already meaningful and qualitatively articulated even if not yet object-thematic experience I have of the things around me (and in me) but rather it is the very structuring of such experience, then the reflection on time is a reflection on a dimension that is at work before any framing of experience in subjective or objective components. If this is so, then the analysis of time makes explicit something that we already know: namely, that on the level of performing or living intentionality one is ipso facto no longer operating with pre-phenomenological conceptions about the causal workings of preexisting physical or psychic units but also not anymore with the entry-level phenomenological correlation-schema of subject and object as foundational to frame the total field of appearances in experience. This same insight however points to a further, deeper realization that is clearly in play at the heart of the “Temporality” chapter. While I am myself the subject where I find the very coursing of time, that is, in my own non-­ dichotomous pre-thematic living and experiencing of and in the world, I am not myself the author of time!95 Thus, if time is “someone,”96 as Merleau-Ponty argues, that is, if my experiencing as structured integrated going-on in present, past, and future is where the phenomenon of time becomes manifest, as masterfully illustrated by Husserl’s famous time-consciousness diagram, what is 94 95 96

PhP 474. “…il est visible, en effet, que je ne suis pas l’auteur du temps, pas plus que de battements de mon coeur, ce n’est pas moi qui prends l’initiative de la temporalisation.” PhP 488. “Nous disons que le temps est quelqu’un…” PhP 482.

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going on here is not an action done by me. This is a point forcefully stressed by Merleau-Ponty’s juxtaposition of two of Husserl’s own terms: “operative intentionality” and “passive synthesis” of time. After clearly identifying the “network of intentionalities” involved in the temporal process with “operative intentionality” as more fundamental than the customary “intentionality of act” of static phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty makes explicit in the rest of the chapter that “operative intentionality” coincides with Zeitigung.97 Merleau-Ponty’s analysis makes it clear that the temporal flow structuring the living going-on of consciousness is an operation that enables the specific coming to givenness or presenting of objects in perceptual or thematic focus. This is indicated by the term “field of presence,”98 which captures the inclusion of the horizons of the past and of the future in the present now. This inclusion sheds light on the kind of “subjectivity” involved in the “functioning” character of intentionality, which is a point along the lines of what I already touched upon above in connection with Husserl’s “Bernau” manuscripts. The current “egoic” “now” has a field component with which it is fully integrated. My present may very well be defined by the occupations of the moment, which give to the totality of time both its tact and its “sense;” my present then may very well, and it mostly does, extend beyond this minute or hour to the whole of a day, a year, and my whole life as organized by its tasks, concerns, affections, and losses. Merleau-Ponty makes these very points, but he also stresses that this present is a “surround” (entourage) that I count on rather than being an instance of the ego-centered “ensouling” or “imposition of sense” upon some inert sensuous data (according to Husserl’s very first approach to time-­consciousness). Time-consciousness is not temporal because of any of the temporal features found in the consideration of the consciousness of the continuity and identifiable constancy of an experiential object, but rather because it is itself a 97

98

This term appears specifically in connection with Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Heidegger 2006, 350). The relevant passages establishing the connection between “operative intentionality” and “temporalization” are placed at the beginning of the main argument in the “Temporality” chapter: 1) “Le temps n’est pas une ligne, mais un reseau d’intentionnalités.” (PhP 477); 2) “En langage husserlien, au-dessous de l’ ‘­intentionnalité d’acte’ qui est la conscience thétique d’un objet, et qui, par exemple, dans la mémoire intellectuelle, convertit le ceci en idée, il nous faut reconnaître une intentionnalité ‘opérante’ (fungierende Intentionalität), qui rend possible la première…” (PhP 478); 3) “Pour avoir un passé ou un avenir, nous n’avons pas à réunir par un acte intellectual une série d’Abschattungen, ells ont comme une unité naturelle et primordial, et c’est le passé ou l’avenir lui-même qui s’annonce à travers elles. Tel est le paradoxe de ce qu’on pourrait appeler avec Husserl la ‘synthèse passive’ du temps, – d’un mot qui n’est évidemment pas une solution, mais un index pour designer un problème.” (PhP 479). Champ de présence. PhP 475.

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fundamental flow within which both the continuity of an experiential object and any identifiable features that it may display form up. As a result, the intentionality at play in the consciousness of time is characterized by an originary ambiguity, as Merleau-Ponty writes: “to retain is to hold onto, but at a distance.”99 One can see something of this point already referred to in an earlier crucial passage in Phenomenology of Perception right at the transition from the Second to the Third Part of that work. There Merleau-Ponty grounds the phenomena discussed in the first two parts of the book in “that ambiguous life in which the forms of transcendence have their Ursprung…”100 The ambiguity is clearly stated as the question of how the “presence to myself (Urpräsenz), which defines me and conditions all presence of what is other than myself, can be at the same time de-presentification (Entgegenwärtigung) and projects myself outside myself.”101 Merleau-Ponty refers to Part III of the Crisis of the European Sciences when speaking of “primordial presence” and “de-presentifying.” Yet the latter is an early term that Fink used in his dissertation with the title Vergegewärtigung und Bild and the occurrence of this same term in the Crisis is likely an interpolation resulting from Fink’s transcription and reworking of this text.102 What is relevant for us to notice in the present context, however, is that this expression gives us the final clue to interpret the notion of “prejudice of the world” in the terms of a fundamental “de-­presentification” attaching to every original presence, thereby providing the pivotal clue for the interpretation of operative intentionality as ultimately temporalizing. Merleau-Ponty’s astute move in the “Temporality” chapter is that of squarely centering the overarching problematic declared at the end of the “Preface,” i.e. 99

“La perspective temporelle, la confusion des lointains, cette sorte de ‘ratatinement’ du passé dont la limite est l’oubli, ne sont pas des accidents de la mémoire, n’expriment pas la dégradation dans l’existence empirique d’une conscience du temps en principe totale, ils en expriment l’ambiguïté initiale: retenir, c’est tenir, mais à distance.” PhP 483–484. 100 PhP 418. 101 PhP 417. 102 Hua VI, 189. “Die Selbstzeitigung sozusagen durch Ent-Gegenwärtigung (durch ­Wiedererinnerung) hat ihre Analogie in meiner Ent-Fremdung (Einfühlung als eine Ent-­Gegenwärtigung höherer Stufe – die meiner Urpräsenz in eine bloß vergegenwärtigte Urpräsenz).” In the “Textkritische Anmerkungen” to Husserliana VI, Walter Biemel records the changes both by Husserl and Fink to Part III A and B of the Crisis. These changes are both in the form of deletions and insertions. The published text is based on Fink’s t­ ranscription of Husserl’s Crisis-manuscripts. Biemel indicates that Husserl’s original manuscripts for Part III of the Crisis have not survived. Thus, it is not possible to assign with absolute certainty which contribution is only Husserl’s or Fink’s. Merleau-Ponty was able to read Part III of the Crisis during a stay in Leuven in the Spring of 1939, where he also had the chance to meet with Fink.

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that of the interrelation of “reason” and “world,” in the basic integrative movement of time in which the human being is fully carried together with the totality of this being’s sentient and cognitive capabilities. My present as the dimension where I putatively would find the highest instantiation of focal experiencing both of myself as well as of anything else in the world (Descartes’ clara et distincta perceptio) is already structured in such a way as to feature a constant determinate entity in my grasping of it as fully integrated with the “non-egoic” field component of any present, that is, the world. Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of the temporality of consciousness in terms of “field”-presence makes it clear that the three-way integrative temporal dynamic is the source of any sense in experience. As precisely such cohesive structure, time must therefore antecede the distinction in experiential “immanent” and “transcendent” components and needs to be interpreted accordingly. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes just this point, as in the following passage: In the present, in perception, my being and my consciousness are one; not that my being is reduced to the knowledge that I have of it and that is clearly laid out in front of me – in fact, it is quite the opposite, since perception is opaque, and brings into play (beneath everything I know) my sensory fields and my primitive complicities with the world. My being and my consciousness are one because “to be conscious” is here nothing other than “being toward…” [être à…], and because my consciousness of existing merges with the actual gesture of “ex-sistence” [ex-sistance]. We indubitably communicate with ourselves by communicating with the world. We hold time in its entirety and we are present to ourselves because we are present in and toward the world.103 “Presence” emerges here not at all as a pointlike “atom” or as the core-form of noetic-noematic “immanence” but rather as the very integrative structuring of the elementary non-dichotomous operative dimension of living consciousness in the world in the concrete manifold modalities of this living experiencing. The tripartite on-going temporal “field of presence” (i.e. the experiential present inclusive of the de-presenting retentional and protentional horizons) is precisely the genetic coursing “process” or “action” that forms and sustains experiential sense in my living in and with the world, i.e. the very “process” or “action” of operative intentionality. This “action” is what is already in play in the various but integrated sense-qualified modalities (“mes champs sensoriels, 103

PhP 485.

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mes complicités primitives avec le monde”) in which something begins to be experienced in my present experiential perception of it before, or beneath, the action of cognizing, reflecting, or thinking any determinate thing or event (“au-dessous de ce que je connais”). With the analysis of time as developed around the notion of “présence,” or the “living present,” as Merleau-Ponty names it at the end of the “­Temporality” chapter, we reach the level of the “true transcendental,” namely the “ultimate consciousness” or “ultimate subjectivity” behind which we are no longer allowed to place anything or anyone, since this is the level of the originative sense-formation in experience.104 But if we are caught up in this structured coursing of the living present, which is the on-going perceptual living in the world that I am, then this gives rise to a further question regarding the very possibility to access and describe this fundamental temporalizing level of my own perceptual experiencing as it goes on, as it were, “in the act.” ­Merleau-Ponty clearly addresses the issue when he asks the following question: “S’il en est ainsi, et si la conscience s’enracine dans l’être et dans le temps en y assumant une situation, comment pouvons-nous la décrire?”105 The question reaches at the very methodological core of a phenomenology of perception, whose explicit aim is that of accessing, disclosing, and describing the ultimate (i.e. truly transcendental) source of human experiential and cognitive living in the world. The issue is sharply formulated in the form of a self-objection in the critical final paragraphs at the end of Part Two of Phenomenology of Perception: phenomenological description leads us to something that we cannot think.106 The reason for this is that the very experiential and intellectual capabilities that define our orientation in the world and upon which are based our descriptions and explanations of the ultimate experiential source of sense in self-thematic philosophical efforts presuppose the very action of this source as intrinsic to them in order to “work” as such capabilities and efforts. By raising the issue of description of the truly ultimate transcendental, Merleau-Ponty realizes two things. First, that one cannot without ambiguity place “consciousness” as the ultimate and originative transcendental source if “consciousness” is conceived in terms of “powers” or “actions” modeled upon what results from that originative source, e.g. in terms of human powers or actions. But to this first realization, 104

105 106

This is a matter explicitly in play in Husserl’s own thinking about time and Merleau-Ponty is clearly aware of this, as his own references to Husserl’s Lectures on Internal Time-­ Consciousness show. See PhP 483n1 and Merleau-Ponty’s take on this point again in PhP 485 and 487. PhP 485. Merleau-Ponty asks this question right after the last passage quoted above. “On dira peut-être qu’un contradiction ne peut être mise au centre de la philosophie et que toutes nos descriptions, n’étant pas pensables, ne veulent rien dire du tout.” PhP 419.

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Merleau-Ponty adds a second, equally fundamental one, namely, that there is simply no other way to think ultimate consciousness than by way of what gets realized “through” or “in” it (even if here the sense of these prepositions must remain itself unclear and problematic and clearly not to be understood in any cause-effect sort of activity). Two passages from the “Temporality” chapter should aid us offer a characterization of this problematic double realization: [Consciousness] must be a comprehensive project or a view of time and of the world that – in order to appear and in order to explicitly become what it implicitly is, namely, consciousness – needs to develop within the multiple. Neither the indivisible power, nor its distinct manifestations should be conceived separately; consciousness is neither one nor the other, it is both; it is the very movement of temporalization…107 If even our purest reflections in fact retrospectively appear to us as in time, and if our reflections upon the flow are inserted into the flow, this is because the most precise consciousness of which we are capable is always found to be affected by itself or given to itself, and because the word consciousness has no sense outside of this duality.108 What is meant in these passages is that while ultimate transcendental ­consciousness is identified with the workings of time as generative of the totality of human experience in the world, and therefore never to be given as a happening or action within this experience, the very coursing of temporal experience in the world as originative of sense in our manifold sense-qualified performance of it is to be taken not as something other than but as the very realization of that ultimate “true transcendental.” Thus, rather than take the seemingly hopeless phenomenological procedure of description as intrinsically contradictory in its intentions and goals, Merleau-Ponty argues that this very procedure, when carried out coherently under the effect of the reduction, would gain a more radical understanding of the originative experiential ­situation in the world that phenomenological philosophy aims to disclose and clarify. These descriptions must be the opportunity for us to define an ­understanding and a reflection more radical than objective thought. To phenomenology understood as a direct description, a phenomenology of 107 108

PhP 485. Emphasis mine. PhP 488. Emphasis mine.

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phenomenology must be added. We must return to the cogito in order to seek there a more fundamental Logos than that of objective thought, one that provides objective thought with its relative justification and, at the same time, puts it in its place.109 This conclusion stamps the whole work with a doubleness of sense that will only gain in sharpness and articulation in the following years, culminating in the project of Le visible et l’invisible. These brief conclusive remarks regarding the nature of operative intentionality, even if only in outline, are meant to at least indicate the full scope of an analysis of operative intentionality and point in the direction in which we should understand the claim that all problems of transcendence find their solution only with the analysis of time,110 beyond which, Merleau-Ponty also adds, there is nothing else to understand111 or, we may rather say, starting from which everything else begins to be understood. 9 The Project of the Phenomenology of Perception as Enquiry into Operative Intentionality As a necessary implication of the previous considerations, the enabling and gaining of another kind of understanding with regard to the basic experiential dimension in its doubleness as the central phenomenological theme cannot remain on the level of a general conceptual statement of it. This understanding can and must only be opened up and achieved in the concrete work of investigation and disclosure of those structural forms of sense-origination and sense-determinacy that are exhibited in the way things come to be experienced in our living and cognizing of them. This is precisely the work Husserl was carrying out in Formal and Transcendental Logic in the characterization of operative intentionality as temporalizing pre-cognitive situational living ­experience as fundamental for the consolidation, manifestness, and differentiation of what comes to be experienced and therefore also cognized in explicit thematic fashion. If Kant’s fundamental intuition that the unity constituting the essence of the concept is the primordially synthetic unity of apperception – the unity of the “I think,” the consciousness of oneself – then Husserl’s transcendental logic can be read as the project to investigate further into this fundamental intuition. 109 110 111

PhP 419. PhP 495. PhP 419.

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Husserl’s investigation into the grounds of logic leads to the d­ istinction between the intentionality of acts, the only kind of intentionality recognized by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, and an operative intentionality, which characterizes the natural and ante-predicative unity of the world and of our life.112 In this distinction is summarized the whole sense of Husserl’s transcendental turn that fell upon Merleau-Ponty and others to make manifest in its implications and scope. The Phenomenology of Perception is a prime example that aims at bringing to appropriate conceptual articulation this new sense of intentionality, of the relation broached by Formal and Transcendental Logic between the ego who experiences and knows and the object. Merleau-Ponty formulates his project in the Phenomenology of Perception as that of “radically rethinking consciousness beyond the framework of ­representation,” that is, as “a being into the thing [être à la chose] by means of the body.”113 This project thus presents itself as developing the task of ­investigating the various aspects pertaining to the perceptual consciousness discovered in The Structure of Behavior. In the introduction to the Phenomenology of P­ erception, the project thus begins by exhibiting the uncritical objective attitude of regard, as the prejudice common to both empiricism and intellectualism, by way of a critique of the classical prejudices implied in the modern notions of “sensation,” “association,” “projection of memories,” and “attention.”114 The analyses taking up pathological cases, such as those of the “phantom limb” and of the patient Schneider in the first part of the work (with the title Le corps) serve the purpose of showing the fundamental role of corporeal e­ ngagement in the world of the perceiver by highlighting a dissociation between the objective and the affective aspects of a situation.115 In this way, however, the analysis of pathological cases aims at making manifest what is actually in play in the normal exercise of bodily functions.116 In the second part of the Phenomenology of Perception, on the “perceived world” (Le monde 112 PhP xiii. 113 “La conscience est l’être à la chose par l’intermédiaire du corps.” (PhP 161). Cf. VI 51 where the same claim is made in connection with the notion of “perceptual faith.” Cf. also Merleau-Ponty’s note in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, where Merleau-Ponty stresses Husserl’s reformulation of “constitution” and “intentional analytic” in terms of “constitution through the low, through ‘inferior levels,’ of time, of the body, etc.” OG 61–62. 114 See Geraets 1971, 150. 115 In the cases of patients affected by phantom-limb, we observe that their felt experience is dissociated from their knowledge of the situation. In the case of patient Schneider, we observe the opposite dissociation. With Schneider, the knowledge of a situation is intact, but the sense- or felt-value of the situation is lost. 116 See Waldenfels 2000, 12, 328 et passim.

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perçu), it becomes clear that the analysis of pathologies plays in this work a propaedeutic function for exhibiting the establishment of a “spatial level,” which Merleau-Ponty also calls more generally “anchorage” or “milieu.”117 It is this “level” or “milieu” that is disrupted with the emergence of pathologies. Furthermore, in the chapter on “Space,” the study of oriented space, depth, and motion, issuing into a treatment of the so-called anthropological spaces (spatiality of the night, of sleep, of morality, of the myth, of sexuality), needs to be read in line with the study of pathologies as the analysis of those phenomena which break our fixation with objective being in order to reveal the integrative sources of objective space. In sum, in this work Merleau-Ponty investigates the structure of “representational” acts (vorstelligmachende Akte), in Husserlian vocabulary, in the light of the structure of non-objective or not yet objective being. In so doing, Merleau-Ponty is following explicitly the line of investigation opened up by Husserl in Formal and Transcendental Logic and its recasting of the notion of act-intentionality towards a form of non-act-intentionality. In the next section, I shall offer a short digression that functions as a ­transition to the subsequent considerations of this chapter and also as a brief clarification of the historical background in connection to which both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty elaborated their work. 10 The Discovery of Contingency and Transcendental Philosophy: Descartes and Kant The limited focus of the first volume of the Logical Investigations on the necessary truths (vérités de raison) and on the formations with which logic is concerned is already expanded in the second volume with a critical study of correlative subjective processes. Here the problem of “ideal being” is approached in terms of an intentional analysis of its givenness. Husserl speaks of a “lived experience of truth.” The problem of a foundation of logic is centered in Husserl’s first major work around the idea of sense-bestowing acts. These “acts” of Husserl’s Logical Investigations are certainly not to be understood as a sheer intellectual activity. Husserl’s semiological theory expounded in the First Investigation is not limited to the predicative experience of judging acts, but rather extends to a prepredicative sphere.118 However, the first grasping (Auffassung) of sensible givens, the grasping of the lived sensible material 117 118

Niveau spatial, PhP 287ff.; ancrage, PhP 180, 288ff., 323ff., 379, et passim; the word milieu is to be found all along the Phenomenology of Perception. Steinbock 1995, 74.

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(das erlebte Empfindungsmaterial, die erlebte Empfindungskomplexion) still is in need of a meaning-bestowing act if the thing is to appear as such, i.e. as this alien intention. In the technical vocabulary of the Logical Investigations, this means that seizing upon the content of an intention turns the thing into a meaningful indication or “expression” (Ausdruck).119 As I e­ laborated above, Husserl did not stop at this first tentative approach to the problem of ideal objectivities. He revised his earlier analysis in the context of an explicit ­transcendental philosophy. This work of revision had a double effect: first, it confirmed the anti-psychologistic orientation of subjective investigations (what Husserl calls in Formal and Transcendental Logic the “transcendental criticism of cognition”120) ; second, at the same time, this revision also recast the notion of the “transcendental” with respect to the way in which this notion had been developed by the modern tradition. This progression of Husserlian philosophy is summarized paradigmatically by the critique of evidence and experience in Formal and Transcendental Logic. The meticulous analysis of concrete phenomena backing up this critique finds its methodological justification and motivation within a theory of rationality and truth. The progressive integration of contingent truths (vérités de fait) within transcendental logic expresses the insight that these truths – that of perception, of the lived body, of the lifeworld – are not “events” or “things” among things, but what can be called functions or operations by which events and things come to be for us in the first place. Transcendental philosophy represents a pivotal advancement with respect to the metaphysics of substance in that it moves beyond the investigation of the “common reason” of things, i.e. that which is common to a group of things or their ousia, in order to inquire into the genesis of ousia itself. The purpose of transcendental philosophy is that of exhibiting what holds the unity of “substance” and of “substances” together. Transcendentalism introduces a 119

For a detailed account of Husserl’s “intellectualism,” which relies especially on the ­ reliminary expressions of Husserl’s phenomenology (Logical Investigations and Ideas I), p see Levinas 1963, in particular 91–100, but also 141, 174, 184, 192, 203, 219–223. The main aspect of Husserl’s early intellectualism can be condensed in the distinction that he draws in § 15 of the Logical Investigations between “intentional lived-experience” and “non-intentional lived-experience.” A lived-experience, such as a perception, is intentional because it “intends” something, it is directed towards something and it is therefore ready to be articulated in a predicative form. Non-intentional lived-experiences are such precisely because no act has yet “qualified” the “matter” of experience, i.e. the latter has not yet taken up objective form. These are the experiences of diffused joy or pain that have no specific objective correlative. 120 Hua XVII, 179/171.

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central contingency in the theory of reason by introducing a variable at the core of the real that cannot itself be represented like any “real thing” that falls under our experience. This variable, that of subjectivity, introduces thereby a ­fundamental contingency at the heart of reality, i.e. the contingency of experience. Transcendental philosophy, we could say, investigates the syn-ousia (Fink), i.e. the unity of substance and subject. Kant calls the “unconditional necessity” that our reason is led to envision as the ultimate support or ground of all things the “true abyss of the human reason.” Kant posited this unconditional factor beyond being. In this way, however, our experience resumes in itself the vertiginous character of a contingent event.121 The history of transcendental philosophy shows the difficult work of arriving at a proper understanding of this contingency without reducing it in one stroke into the product of an absolute reason, divine (Descartes) or human (Kant). Cartesian philosophy discovers a being (the sum) that must be presupposed by any cogito. Descartes’ insight is that the experience of any object, as long as it goes on, is not separable from an operative element, which is thus posited as something that must exist, in this case, my own ego. The idea of certainty that functions as main driving motive in Descartes’ strategy does not only point to Descartes’ project of a foundation of the sciences, but it also bears the much deeper sense of discovering a dimension that is not of the same order of the cogitata but that rather works as their condition of possibility. The ego sum is inferred as the result of an argument that never encounters such a thing as the ego but only a certain activity of the cogito. The sum is what needs to be presupposed by every such activity. One could paraphrase a later formulation by Kant by saying that the ego sum must accompany all my cogitata. It is not accidental that Descartes’ doubt should lead us to limit our judgments to the realm of the cogito, that is, of thought, as the first and only field where a truth can be found. This aspect fits neatly into his overall distinction between the natural light of the intellect and the natural inclination that pertains to the senses and in general to the bodily aspect of our experience. This is not without consequences for the understanding of the sum and for the sense of apodicticity attached to it. Husserl has shown precisely the limitations of such approach in his critique of Descartes’ “realism.” If Descartes’ discovery of the ego sum has the effect of reinterpreting the Aristotelian soul as pure consciousness, this discovery represents both an advancement and a regression with respect to the understanding of the subjective processes involved in experience. The advancement consists in the fact 121

Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the significance of Kant’s transcendentalism as a form of calling into question the idea of an infinite “naturazing” being in N 59–60.

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that the sum points to a more radical dimension of experience as condition of the latter but that it never appears itself in experience. The regression, on the other hand, consists in the interpretation of the sum in the light of the model of self-conscious reflective thought. The transcendentalism of Kant’s philosophy is the explicit development of the motive of a pure consciousness. At the same time, Kant aims at overcoming the Cartesian ambiguity of consciousness both as consciousness of objects and as self-consciousness. This ambiguity is overcome by Kant’s differentiation between an empirical and a transcendental apperception.122 Kant’s effort consisted in determining the conditions of possibility of the truths of mathematics and physics, which is to say, of constant factors in variation (the physical law across the experiments) and in repetition (the mathematical theorem as reproduced in different places and at different times). These truths are therefore “idealizations.” This is also the reason why Merleau-Ponty can claim that the only kind of intentionality acknowledged by Kant’s Critique of Pure ­Reason is that of act-intentionality. The transcendental relation broached by Kant is therefore in need of a further integration and development. The process of “purification” of the notion of subjectivity leads in Kant to the formulation of a transcendental subject. This discovery, however, runs the risk of misinterpreting the transcendental relation thus established between subject and reality. In brief, the pivotal move of Husserl’s phenomenology is to undo the process of purification of the disturbing natural and historical aspects pertaining to human existence by purifying transcendental philosophy of the subject of idealizations. The proper understanding of the contingency that enters the focus of philosophy with transcendental philosophy depends therefore on the proper conception of subjectivity and of the subjective processes involved in experience. The notion of the transcendental subject undergoes a ­radical transformation in phenomenology from the subject of an absolute reason to the subject of a relational reason, that is, the subject of a reason that accounts for the contingency of reality without squaring it immediately under a common denominator.123 It is precisely the development in this conception that took Husserl from his beginnings, characterized by a form of absolutism and the “logicistic” philosophy of the Logical Investigations, to the later ­conceptions with their focus on life and history. In the course of the treatment 122

123

For the last summative statements about the evolution of Descartes’ and Kant’s idea of a subjective consciousness in the direction of a purification of the subject, I refer the reader to Lindén 2017. For the distinction between consciousness of objects and self-­ consciousness, see Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, B 411–412. See Chiurazzi 2017, 70.

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of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty offers an interpretation of the development of Husserl’s thought as divided into three main stages: the “eidetic” or “logicist” stage, the stage of Ideas, and the “existentialist” stage.124 He holds that the main shift from the traditional understanding of intentionality still in play in the first two stages towards the recast notion of operative intentionality of the last period is marked by Husserl’s overcoming of the ­Kantianism of some of his texts.125 11

The Body Schema: Phenomenology of Perception I

Let us therefore return to the Phenomenology of Perception in order to look more closely at some pivotal moments of its argument. In this part of my exposition, I will point to some paradigmatic analyses as evidence for the underlying strategy that Merleau-Ponty is following in this book. The combination of the first two parts of the Phenomenology of Perception on “The Body” and on “The Perceived World” aims at investigating the plausibility and the implications of the notion of perceptual consciousness, i.e. of a consciousness that is not immediately one with itself but whose unity (as transcendental) is revealed only in man’s concrete engagement in a world. The Phenomenology of Perception hinges on a systematic attempt to clarify the deep connection – that Merleau-Ponty sometimes also calls a “communication” or “communion” – between living body and world, as the division of the work shows: the theme of Part 1 is “The Body” and the theme of Part 2 is “The Perceived World.” To put it briefly, this clarification aims at modifying the classical conceptual framework according to which the subject-object correlation is the condition without which nothing would exist for anyone.126 The living body plays here a fundamental role in exhibiting the features defining the coming about of the milieu of experience. In this work, phenomena of perception are studied from a point of view internal to behavior, that is, in relation to the perceptual experience of the human body as the site of a perception that can be exhibited in its on-going endogenous process. The analysis of the basic ties of the living body to its world thereby pivots more specifically around the aesthetic central-sphere and on the tactile and kinesthetic capacities of bodily being as concretely orienting itself in the sense-rich context of a world.

124 125 126

See Geraets 1971, 157. PhP 320. PhP 253.

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Our considerations so far have highlighted that the way anything at all begins to form up as sense for us in full concreteness, the way anything at all begins to matter to us as carrying or making sense in the coherent experiential living that I am, is not any result of “mental” workings or of the “spiritual” action of a supra-natural substance. Rather, the subject’s engagement with life-mattering things in a meaningful context is indissolubly linked with living corporeality as operative multi-modal system of sensing capabilities. My sensations are not just a collection of points. Rather they form a system that is fully integrated with the way my living body is actively in play in making manifest the near and the far, the above and the below, the variations in distinctness and indeterminacy of color, pattern, brightness or darkness in vision, for instance, or of noisy or orderly patterned, high-pitched or low in sound. This whole operative system of lived-bodily sensations must be in place and working in order for perceptual objects to appear as the familiar mattering objects of our actions. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty captures this point with the psychological notion of “body schema” (schéma corporel). The important role of this notion, Merleau-Ponty will comment in a later text, lies in the fact that it “takes seriously the union of the soul and of the body.”127 But this is also the reason why this notion has the potential to displace our usual assumptions about the relations between “subjects” and “objects” or, ontologically speaking, between the “real” and the “ideal,” “nature” and “spirit.”128 The schematic character of the body expresses the felt (“operative”) self-awareness of my own living body that I never make explicit in the very doing of my life’s activities. If I consider the simplest event of holding a pen in my hand while writing, the first thing to notice is that the action of drawing letters on the paper presupposes a certain position of my fingers around the pen, the bending of my whole hand, the pressure exercised by the arm, the balanced posture of shoulders and torso, not to speak of the continuous scanning motion of my eyes, or the movements of the head, plus, involved in all this, my body’s various shiftings and the shifting of the thing handled or of something in the background, as when the pen feels slippery or when my chair is not properly placed or is no longer placed so as to make my writing

127 128

N 287. “Mais la notion du schéma corporel est ambiguë comme toutes celles qui apparaissent aux tournants de la science. Elles ne pourraient être entièrement développées que ­moyennant une réforme des méthodes. Elles sont donc d’abord employées dans un sens qui n’est pas leur sens plein et c’est leur développement immanent qui fait éclater les méthodes anciennes.” PhP 114.

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comfortable.129 This many-sided and deeply dynamic event usually takes place with comprehensive ease without me having to stop and think or choose what is needed in order to get done the action of writing with a pen on a paper.130 This non-thematic, non-conceptual, non-reflective yet all-pervasive working of our bodily sense-modalities enables the innumerable daily pursuing and dealing but also avoiding of real objects and events. Contrary to Descartes, for whom perceptual experience ultimately coincides with judgment, the body schema expresses rather a “pre-logical unity.”131 The idea of body schema indicates a dynamic unity (spatio-temporal, intersensorial, sensorial-motoric) that undergoes a process of formation into a specific style of functioning according to the tasks of the organism and that therefore remains open to the acquisition of new and different styles and in general to a process of enrichment of determination and reorganization. This sense is precisely what psychological theories of association or of “form” do not capture.132 These theories remain dependent on the theory of representation. Merleau-Ponty’s main critique here is that both theories still fabricate the dynamic unity of the body schema through the particular contents of experience that are connected and acquire unity by the body schema’s activity. Rather, Merleau-Ponty forcefully defines this activity as an “absolute knowledge,” by which he means to emphasize its operation of origination giving rise to the contextual determinacies of specific actions and of fixation on specific objects.133

129 Cf. a selection of experiences analyzed by Merleau-Ponty: my arm laying next to the ­ashtray (PhP 114); standing in front of one’s desk or holding a pipe (PhP 116); walking through a familiar place or looking at a cube (PhP 236). 130 “Les psychologies disent souvent que le schéma corporel est dynamique. Ramené à un sens précis, ce terme veut dire que mon corps m’apparaît comme posture en vue d’une certaine tâche actuelle ou possible.” PhP 116. 131 PhP 269. 132 In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty develops his understanding of the “body schema” in contrast to the theory of association and “Gestalt” theory, respectively. PhP 114–117. 133 “Je sais où est ma pipe d’un savoir absolu, et par là je sais où est ma main et où est mon corps […] Le mot ‘ici’ appliqué à mon corps ne désigne pas une position déterminée par rapport à d’autres positions ou par rapport à des coordonnées extérieures, mais l’installation des premières coordonnées, l’ancrage du corps actif dans un objet, la situation du corps en face de ses tâches.” PhP 117. In the hinge section between Part 1 and Part 2 of ­Phenomenology of Perception, and in connection with the theory of the “body schema,” Merleau-Ponty reiterates the idea of this experience as “another knowledge” than objective knowledge: “La théorie du schéma corporel est implicitement une théorie de la perception. Nous avons réapprit à sentir notre corps, nous avons retrouvé sous le savoir objectif et distant du corps cet autre savoir que nous en avons parce qu’il est toujours avec

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In the lectures at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty will return to this point. The study of the body schema reveals a most fundamental sense of the subject’s engagement in a context in terms of “praxis”: “The body schema is essentially ground of a praxis, pre-objective spatiality on the ground of which the actual objects of action are delineated.”134 This fundamental link between sense-perception and motoric or kinesthetic self-awareness becomes especially evident with the study of the pathologies of the body schema: “Apraxic subjects show by way of a lack an activity that is present in everyone, although hardly visible, which constructs ‘virtual space’ as a system of correspondence among properties of my actual field and those that would be for me if I was situated elsewhere or for another.”135 The study of pathological dysfunctions of the body schema, by locating a virtuality that is already operative on the level of the structuring of actual perception expresses a sense of “imminence” innervating the whole of reality that can be met with in experience. The livedbody is “explorative unity,”136 Merleau-Ponty says, who thereby sheds light on the living character of a virtuality in its making that has not yet the consistency of the “virtual space” of culture and its “objectivity.”137 This living unity is not obtained by means of a judgment, but il faut attendre que ça “prenne,”138 as it is shown by Paul Schilder’s experiences such as the redoubling of the ­tactile-body by means of the visual-body and the cases affected by autotopagnosia or alloaesthesia. In any case what these experiences are meant to show is that the unity or totality of the lived-body “is not something static, but changes continually according to particular tasks which the individual has in his motility.”139 As a result, the lived-body is said to constantly engage in a process of transitions into new total states. In particular, the schema entails the following

134 135

136 137 138 139

nous et que nous sommes corps.” PhP 239. This crucial point is already introduced in the paragraph on “kinesthetic sensations” in PhP 110. “[L]e schema corporel est essentiallement fond d’une praxis, spatialité pré-objective et sur le fond de laquelle se dessinent les objects actuels de l’action” (MSME 138–139; RC 16). “Apraxiques montrent par défaut activité présente chez tous, quoique peu visible, qui construit ‘espace virtuel,’ système de correspondences entre propriétés de mon champ actuel et ce qui seraient ces propriétés pour moi situé ailleurs ou pour un autre.” MSME 52. Cf. MSME 145. MSME 135. MSME 52. Cf. John J. Drummond, “Objects’ Optimal Appearances and the Immediate Awareness of Space in Vision,” in Man and World 16 (Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), p. 177f. MSME 135. Schilder 1999, 80. Right in the Preface Schilder states the fundamental premise of his approach to the study of the appearance of the human body: “Perception and action, impression and expression, thus form a unit, and insight and action become closely ­correlated to each other.” Schilder 1999, 8.

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pivotal aspects: 1) it is an “absolute here” providing spatial references before any consciousness of objective positions; 2) yet it is also a “centrifugal” unity realized in spite of the incomplete or non-homogeneous tactual sensations of one’s own body (parts which are tense over the bones, parts which are in connections with the outside world);140 3) it is a “dynamic” unity, its determination arising in movement and decreasing in rest; 4) it develops a “typical” or “privileged” unity through two main factors, that is, following Schilder, the persistence of muscle tone and the persistence of sensory impression.141 These four points are summarized by Merleau-Ponty by saying that the body schema emerges as a pre-logical, non-ideal totality or, to say the same thing in different words, as “totality of action”: “But totality of action: it is ours because its parts build a synergy. Synergy for what kind of actions? Not for this or that action upon this or that singular object, but for types of action or gestures: grasping, bending the fingers.”142 As a result, the recognition of the originality of what Merleau-Ponty in the Visible and the Invisible will call the “spirit of praxis,”143 must modify the view according to which space is centered around a “zero-point,” the central “here” of the lived-body (Ideas II, § 41) towards a view according to which the livedbody is not just a “zero-point” but rather a “niveau,” a “dimension”144 or, to say it with Levinas, “The lived-body, zero-point of representation, is beyond this zero-point, already within the world that it constitutes, side-by-side with it while placing itself in front of it.”145 This means that any appearance is not just motivated by “kinestheses,” as Husserl has it, but any appearance is k­ inesthetic in nature to the extent that one could legitimately speak of a “motor appearance”146 and the motor capacity, Merleau-Ponty says, is lumière, “light” of perception.147

140 141 142

See Schilder 1999, 85. Schilder 1999, 83. “Mais totalité d’action: il est nôtre parce que ses parties sont en synergie. Synergie pour quelles actions? Non pour telle ou telle action sur tel ou tel object singulier, mais pour types d’action ou gestes: prendre, fléchir les doigts.” MSME 150. 143 VI 230. 144 MSME 131. 145 Levinas, Intentionnalité et sensation, in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, Paris, Vrin, 1949, p. 160, cited in Barbaras 1998, 229. Barbaras writes that the “schema” is not just a system of sensations “indicating a spatial aspect,” (for instance, this body here and now as if it were a point on a system of coordinates) but rather is “a manner of directing oneself towards the thing.” Barbaras 1998, 230. 146 Barbaras 1998, 230. 147 MSME 125.

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In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty already summarized the core idea issuing from these descriptions, which essentially states that the synthesis of the object rests on the synthesis of one’s own body.148 The synthesis of one’s own body, however, is tied to a fundamental motor function, which is what the idea of the “body schema” or “body image” describes. The body schema describes a fundamental dynamic that points beyond the body as purely self-contained power of an insulated subject to its anteceding exchange with a world. Merleau-Ponty also expresses this point when he defines the logic of the body schema as a logic of “interrogation and reply,” that is, a logic that is neither self-contained in the spontaneous autonomy of consciousness nor is determined in advance in the objective contents of the thing.149 Note what has happened here on a conceptual and methodological level: if we kept considering the body, which is the site of perception, as some readymade and already available and determinate power, then the behaviorist interpretation of sensation would impose itself almost automatically. But, as Merleau-Ponty writes, the “theory of the body schema is implicitly a theory of perception.” The theory of the body schema makes perception itself something not already given in advance, as a transparent power, that presupposes the idea of the body as a simple instrument of knowledge. Rather, perception emerges from this study as a dynamic operation that does not proceed by following an already pre-established path.150 Later Merleau-Ponty will say that “perception reveals to us an ­ontology.”151 Yet this ontology gets already concretely foreshadowed by the analysis ­centered around the structure and living behavior of embodied human experience. What we learn from Merleau-Ponty’s investigations is that this living nature is not describable, at least on the ground-level of its original coming about, in terms of physical cause-effect interactions. Now not only this “nature” as it becomes manifest in our living bodiliness with its multi-modal system of sense-­qualities and sense-capabilities is a first sense of nature that is not immediately i­dentical with the causal interplay of sheer physical forces between material masses. But also there is an aspect of “spirit” already in play before the articulation of s­ pecific actions on singular objects, especially 148 PhP 237. 149 N 281. 150 I think David Morris finds a simple but profound way to express this when he writes that phenomena of perception “appear as oriented by and against paths not taken, and this not is itself revisable and tentative, not specified once and for all or apart from what is ­happening, and also not specified in some pure consciousness or negation that stands outside the field of sense.” Morris 2018, 125. 151 N 64.

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if this action is understood as acting within and upon an “objective” space. What this “spirit” means, however, cannot be determined starting from traditional metaphysical determinations that take spirit as some intellectual substance or reason or concept in usual opposition to or in any case acting upon the base level of natural sensing life and lifeless material nature. Rather, what “spirit” amounts to can be accounted for phenomenologically only by finding something like “spirit” in the very exercise of my sense-qualified and sense-qualitizing capabilities right on the first level giving rise to experiential being upon which one can then gain both practical purchase and cognitive comprehension.152 The notion of “body schema” brings to expression this fundamental dimension of “living connection” or “involvement with the world” as fundamental for our knowledge of both ourselves and of the things we experience in explicit spiritual focus: “The only way we have of knowing what a painting is and what a thing is, is by looking at them, and their signification is only revealed if we look at them from a certain point of view, from a certain distance, and in a certain direction [sens], in short, if we put our involvement with the world at the service of the spectacle.”153 The ontology that perception reveals finds therefore further articulation in the passage from the study of embodied experience, through its characteristic modes of expression (motion, sexuality, language), to the study of the anteceding inherence of the embodied subject in a world. This transition raises explicit methodological issues that Merleau-Ponty begins to incorporate as defining moments of his own argument in Phenomenology of Perception. 12

The Notion of Spatial Level: Phenomenology of Perception II

The methodology of Merleau-Ponty’s analyses thus begins to be concretely fleshed out if we pay attention to the kind of integrative non-dichotomous study of the multi-dimensional sense-qualified corporeal experiencing of a human 152

153

I borrow the neologism “qualitizing” from Bruzina 2010. With this term, which is taken from Husserl’s use of the substantivized adjective Qualifiziertheit, Bruzina intends to emphasize the recast sense of “spiritualization” in play especially in Husserl’s late ­analyses of time. See Bruzina 2010, 111, 119, and 108n28. PhP 491. Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s conclusive definition of the “body schema”: “[L]e ‘schéma corporel’ est finalement une manière d’exprimer que mon corps est au monde.” PhP 117. This should be read in connection with the following passage: “La chose et le monde me sont donnés avec les parties de mon corps, non par une ‘geométrie naturelle,’ mais dans une connexion vivante comparable ou plutôt identique à celle qui existe entre les parties de mon corps lui-même.” PhP 237. Emphasis in this last passage mine.

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being in the multi-faceted setting of the experienced world as indispensable for the actual effectuation of a perception of an object in our surrounding. The foundational role of the experiential dimension described by the body schema lies in its “aesthetic” character, which provides the basic concrete situational factors of meaning allowing for an actual something to be perceived in evidence as manifestly there. The body schema is the “synergic system” of my body as pre-cognitive and pre-thematic operation already in play in and with the world. The theory of the body schema discovers the constitution of an oriented space, that is, a space that is primarily traversed by actional vectors determined by what the lived-body has to do, which leads Merleau-Ponty to understand the schema as the ground of a praxis. He writes, “my body has its purchase on the world when my perception offers me a spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible and when my motor intentions, as they play out, receive from the world the responses they were expecting.”154 The livedbody adopts a level of perception and action where it can function optimally.155 Merleau-Ponty expands this idea of a space of orientation into the idea of a “spatial level,” or also of an “anchorage” or “milieu.” As should follow from the analysis of the body schema, the spatial level that is raised to a norm of perception and action is not yet objective space. The spatial milieu is not already a determinate measurable dimension. The relations between the factors of orientation, distance, and variation of appearance are not subject to an invariable relation and a constant (computational) law ruling their mutual relationship, which, finally, can be conceived and put into a formula.156 As we hear from the Phenomenology of Perception, “What matters for the orientation of the spectacle is not my body as it is de facto, as a thing in objective space, but my body as a system of possible actions, as a virtual body whose phenomenal ‘location’ is defined by its task and its situation. My body is located where it has something to do,” or to put it in other words, where it has “a possible habitation.”157 The spatial level is not a fixed system that is simply there, it is not an “objective

154 155 156 157

PhP 289–290. On the motor and living meaning of sensation in PhP 242–245. PhP 290, 348, 367; MSME 53, 73. PhP 347, 349. PhP 289; cf. PhP 118–119, 162, 164, 359; MSME 58, 73. In this connection I would like to point the reader also to David Morris’ account of what he calls, based on Edward Casey’s work, the “power of place.” Morris illustrates the idea of what I call here “spatial level” by an insightful reference to the case of immune systems. He writes, “We have to think of organisms and immune systems as engendering sense by first of all dividing up place in ways that are oriented by organisms as bounding themselves, not spaces given in advance.” Morris 2018, 172.

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system of the world,” but rather it consists in the articulation of a field.158 The level of spatial experience that results from this process is variable.159 However, as cases of phantom-limb syndrome show, the spatial level with its actional forces or “points of anchorage” can also still function as the norm of perception and action without further integration of new situational demands. The subject affected by phantom limb has not effected the transition into the new situation in which the stimuli to move the hand or to bend the fingers will be substituted for stimuli requiring a different kind of movement. M ­ erleau-Ponty speaks in this case of a “scholastic of existence.”160 The adoption of a milieu and the development of habitual behavior can also turn into an obstacle to action when the disruption of the “essential coexistence” (Wesenskoexistenz) of organism and milieu is not followed by a new process of adaptation, to be here understood as the “adoptation” of a new milieu.161 The important thing to stress here again is that perception as familiar encounter with objects is a more “abstract” function in relation to the establishment of a “perceptual ground” as structural condition of this function. Every single perception “implies a more secret act by which we elaborate our milieu.”162 This means that when we get to experience any object in the act of perception, we are already fully caught in the relevant kind of unity of non-­ conceptual self-awareness as incarnated in body-schema manifold actional dynamics and the whole continuously flowing sense-modal determinacies that enable my focal experiencing of any something as there, such as the table in front of me or the house across the street. Aristotle already expressed this when he wrote that every aisthesis is aisthesis aistheseos. ­Modern philosophies have often interpreted this activity as the subjective filling of meaning affecting a material manifold. This is why even the sophisticated Kantian version 158 159 160 161

162

The “field”-character of experience is essential from the very on-setting of its sensing capability. See PhP 250–251. PhP 355–356, 359. PhP 99. See Waldenfels 2000, 29. Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “movement of fixation” as a “prospective activity,” PhP 267–268, 276–277, et passim. Merleau-Ponty uses the term “fixation” in a technical sense with respect to the setting of regard on one object out of the two ocular images. In the chapter on “Space,” however, he expands this use to what he calls the fixation of the subject in a milieu and in the world. See, e.g., PhP 325, 328. The expression Wesenskoexistenz appears in PhP 360; cf. also SC 239. “Toute perception suppose un certain passé du sujet qui perçoit et la fonction abstraite de perception, comme rencontre des objects, implique un acte plus secret par lequel nous élaborons notre milieu.” PhP 326. Earlier in the “Space”-chapter, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “sol perceptif,” “fond de ma vie,” “milieu général” (PhP 290), and here of “champ perceptif” (PhP 325).

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of S­ ubjektphilosophie could be critiqued in terms of a “psychologism of the faculties of the soul” (Husserl). The unity of the perceiving and the perceived does not contain “reflection” as the reflection of an “I” or “consciousness” in the modern sense. In other words, one must be careful in not introducing conceptual determinations arising from intellectual reflection at the bottom of perception as foundational for the theoretical or scientific determination and identification of features or structures of experience.163 This means that the conceptual elaboration of objective thought, which starts from the position of objects in order to think space, is in principle unable to account for the basic form of oriented space as our original experience of space. The experiments of Stratton show this with respect to sensual contents as the experiments of Wertheimer do with respect to the sensing body.164 Both (body and sensible contents) are not spatial in themselves, but receive their orientation from “the general level of experience.”165 The experiments of psychology, however, also establish a fundamental relativity of space, then every spatial milieu is not a ready-made objective landscape, but depends on the system of orientation preceding it.166 The transition occurs when certain new “points of anchorage” are promoted to the status of dimensions and norms.167 The new points of anchorage, Merleau-Ponty will say in the lectures at the Collège de France, “represent a certain gap from the norm, gap that tends to impose itself as a norm. Promoting the gaps to norms means to stop seeing them as figures in order to see them as dimensions.”168 With the establishing of

163

Both the idea of a “matter of cognition” and of “synthetic unity of apperception” are result of a “conceptual formulation of experience,” which, therefore, Merleau-Ponty holds, ­cannot acquire status of primordiality. See PhP 278. The point here, and all along in Phenomenology of Perception, is that of considering experience “before every conceptual elaboration,” PhP 282. 164 The British psychologist G. M. Stratton carried out experiments on spatial orientation by using corrective glasses which inverted images upside down. These experiments were conducted few years before those of M. Wertheimer. Merleau-Ponty comments on these experiments in PhP 282–287. See also PhP 323; MSME 73. 165 PhP 288. 166 “Reste à savoir ce qu’est au juste ce niveau qui se précède toujours lui-même, toute ­constitution d’un niveau supposant un autre niveau préétabli, – comment les ‘points d’ancrage,’ du milieu d’un certain espace auquel ils doivent leur stabilité, nous invitent à en c­ onstituer un autre, et enfin ce que c’est que le ‘haut’ et le ‘bas,’ si ce ne sont pas de simples noms pour désigner une orientation en soi des contenus sensoriels.” PhP 288. See MSME 79. 167 MSME 58. 168 MSME 73.

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a dimension or level of perception and action, however, there is the advent of points of reference that from now on function absolutely.169 An important conclusion imposes itself at this point. If a spatial level is always preceded by another spatial level and presupposes the latter, then space is always already constituted and spatiality is always already acquired by every explicit experience of space and of spatial things.170 This conclusion, however, raises only more forcefully the central problem of the “Space”-­chapter, namely “to understand how this milieu, which serves as the background of every act of consciousness, is constituted.”171 This problem cannot be a question of establishing a first level of spatial experience or, as Merleau-Ponty also puts it, a “level of all levels.”172 When rehearsing the conception of lived space from Phenomenology of Perception in his lectures at the Collège de France, M ­ erleau-Ponty makes his critical target more specific by referring to “the Kantian idea of a level of all levels.”173 I shall not attempt to display the interpretive complexities surrounding this reference, but further details about Kant’s own standpoint should clarify Merleau-Ponty’s argumentative direction. 13

Merleau-Ponty and Kant on Space

The standpoint of Kant’s philosophy, as already mentioned, remains that of a philosophy of reflection, which takes space as intuition, that is, as structure or condition integral to the system of experience itself. But since Kant interprets intuition as faculty of relations, the spatial world is neither an object nor an empty container of objects nor even the sum of all external objects, but rather a system of relations.174 While space does not represent a property of things or the system of relations of objects with one another, in Kant’s approach there remains the problem of how to understand this spatial system of relations as a system of objects relating to the intuiting subject.175 Now, this is the juncture prompting Merleau-Ponty’s critique. In his critique of formalist accounts 169 170 171 172 173 174

175

PhP 324; MSME 73. PhP 291, 293, 294. PhP 319. PhP 293. MSME 83. In the section on the “General Remarks on Transcendental Aesthetics,” Kant observes that “alles, was in unserem Erkenntnis zur Anschauung gehört […] nichts als bloße Verhältnisse enthalte,” B 66. For the idea of space as not a property of objects or as property of objects in relation to one another, see B 42. See on this point B 67.

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of space in the preparatory notes for the lectures at the Collège de France, ­Merleau-Ponty says that “the theory of the formal [intuition] leads the form of the intuition (‘the way in which we are affected’) to be a production of the understanding.”176 At this point, some more details can be brought in to give additional context to this claim. Merleau-Ponty is here addressing one of the core problems of Kant’s t­ heory of intuition concerning space and time as relational totalities. In particular, what is here touched upon is the problem of the distinction Kant makes between “form of intuition” and “formal intuition.” The problem goes back to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In § 26, when discussing more in detail the very first kind of synthesis applied to a sensible manifold, which Kant calls the “­synthesis of the apprehension,” he also remarks that the “form of intuition” (space and time) provides only the manifold of intuition while the “formal intuition” provides the “unity of representation” as what gives space and time as intuitions for the first time.177 The “unity of representation” is said to come before the “concept,” but also to presuppose a synthesis that does not belong to the “senses.” Kant says that the synthesis of apprehension is given with the form of intuition, but not in it. As it turns out, this synthesis is operated by the power of imagination, introduced in § 24, which Kant places on the side of the understanding. In other words, in the synthesis of apprehension Kant recognizes a non-conceptual use of the understanding that he analyzes more closely in the “Analytic of Principles” when discussing the doctrine of the schematism.178 In order to obtain the experiential justification of truly objective space as the domain of investigation of modern science, however, Kant ultimately subordinates spatial intuition to the synthetic unity of apperception and its pure functions of categorial concepts. This is necessary in Kant’s strategy: ­transcendental apperception is required as necessary condition of the unity of experience and of nature as homogenous form of space as it is represented by modern scientific theories. What matters for our current discussion is the fact that this conceptual framework fleshes out the concern relative to the idea of a level of all levels in experience. Merleau-Ponty’s point is that the account of the relational character of space, as form of intuition, is not radical enough if we simply take it as system of relations equivalent in all directions: this is v­ irtual space, a “pure object placed in front of a pure mind,” it is “­homogeneous” or “ubiquitous space.”179 176 177 178 179

MSME 75. See B 160. Cf. on this point Carbone 1998, 166n1. MSME 72, 83.

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Thus, Kant’s transcendental aesthetics is characterized by a fundamental but rich ambiguity. On the one hand, Kant ties the spatial intuition that establishes our spatial experience for the first time to a non-conceptual use of the understanding. The sensible manifold is in the synthesis of apprehension not immediately subsumed under formal concepts and universal ideas, but rather on the level of this “synopsis” or “empirical synthesis,” as Kant calls it, the matter and the form of knowledge are found to be homogeneous, that is, ultimately, not separated. We therefore find in Kant an approach that aims at investigating the primordial experience of space beyond the distinction of form and content, of pure concept and sensible intuition.180 On the other hand, this approach is subordinated to the possibility to account for scientific knowledge of mathematical and physical objects according to the Euclidean conception of space and a Newtonian conception of physical nature. This scientific sense of ­objectivity guides Kant’s conception of a single space as infinite ­continuous magnitude as the condition of possibility for achieving full, that is, necessary and universal evidence attaching to the scientific object. But if sensible experience is thought to be only possible inasmuch as it occurs within space thus conceived, then space as form of intuition and sensible experience itself become a product of the understanding, without the categories of which no space nor sensible experience of any object can be conceived. Thus, it is not in the standpoint of the Transcendental Analytic and its theory of a priori categories as pure concepts of the understanding that ­Merleau-Ponty finds Kant’s final word on space. The standpoint of the Analytic is ultimately that of a world-less subject conceived as imago dei positing the world.181 In the effort to determine the conditions of possibility of mathematics and physics, the Transcendental Analytic aims at establishing a level of all levels, whereby space emerges as continuous magnitude that can only appear to our limited cognition as potential limitlessness of continuation in intuition.182 180

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Merleau-Ponty clearly sees this when he declares the following: “Nous avons à rechercher l’expérience originaire de l’espace en deçà de la distinction de la forme et du contenu,” (PhP 287) and then, at the point where he states the central problem of the “Space”-­ chapter, he claims that the notion of “synopsis” is preferable to the notion of “synthesis,” (PhP 319n1). “Nous ne sommes pas obligés d’investir à priori le monde des conditions sans lesquelles il ne saurait être pensé, car, pour pouvoir être pensé, il doit d’abord n’être pas ignoré, exister pour moi, c’est-à-dire être donné, et l’esthétique transcendantale ne se confondrait avec l’analytique transcendantale que si j’étais un Dieu qui pose le monde et non pas un homme qui s’y trouve jeté et qui, dans tous les sens du mot, ‘tient à lui.’” PhP 254. This point is made by Fink in a comment on Kant’s concept of the world. See Bruzina 1998, 86.

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In the Transcendental Dialectic, however, one clearly sees the impossibility of arriving at an ultimate or unbounded level from the standpoint of experience. In the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty remarks, Kant conceives the world as an open and indefinite unity in which I am situated.183 The representation of a total synthesis of the sequence of spatial appearances, as shown in the chapter on the “Antinomies of Pure Reason,” is a transcendental idea, that is, an idea that the concepts of the understanding are in principle unable to represent.184 For Kant in fact claims that starting from experience one cannot think the beginning or the end of the world.185 To conclude, if space is not a sum but a totality, a system, as Kant has shown, space is also not at once a totality or a system solely for the understanding: “Above/below, right/left are certainly a system, not a sum, but a system that is not for the understanding, i.e. a system that is not immediately identical with respect to variable contents.”186 At the end of the Second Part of the ­Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty makes explicit that the “new conception of reflection” found in phenomenology can and must critique the idea of space or time as “sum of being” (une sommation de l’être), and thus produce the “genealogy” of the unity of space and of time by starting from “effective experience”: “In particular the idea of a unique space and that of a unique time, resting on that of a sum of being, which Kant has rightly critiqued in the Transcendental Dialectic, needs to be bracketed and produce its genealogy starting from our effective experience.”187 The new conception of reflection consists in establishing the description of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as the point of departure of reflection. Merleau-Ponty lucidly recognizes that the treatment of the lifeworld in Husserl’s late philosophy coincides with the increased awareness of the problematic represented by the shift from the unthematic (natural) dimension of experience to the thematic (phenomenological) dimension of reflection. This realization is not without consequences for the determination of the general level of experience that phenomenology purports to bring to full elucidation. The general level of experience, as a result, cannot be a pure form or a pure a priori. The squarely transcendental question about the condition of spatial experience concerns precisely the orientation,

183 184 185 186 187

“Le monde est une unité ouverte et indéfinie où je suis situé, comme Kant l’indique dans la Dialectique transcendantale, mais comme il semble l’oublier dans l’Analytique.” PhP 351. See B 396. See Waldenfels 2000, 125. MSME 72. Cf. PhP 255. PhP 255.

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distance, and change of perspectives defining our experience of things from the very beginning as an experience situated in the world.188 In conclusion, phenomenology rediscovers beneath the Kantian idea of a level of all levels the true universal milieu which Merleau-Ponty calls the “world.” The latter corresponds to a general level of experience or of intentionality that Husserl and then Merleau-Ponty define as “operative”: In the hollow space of the subject himself [Au creux du sujet lui-même], we thus discovered the presence of the world, such that the subject could no longer be understood as a synthetic activity, but rather as ek-stase, and that every act of signification or of Sinn-gebung appeared as derived and secondary in relation to this pregnancy of signification in the signs that might well define the world. We uncovered beneath act or thetic intentionality, and in fact as its very condition of possibility – an ­operative intentionality already at work prior to every thesis and every judgment; we discovered a ‘Logos of the aesthetic world,’ or a ‘hidden art

188 We read in the Phenomenology of Perception that “it is the proper character of idealism to admit that all signification is centrifugal, that it is an act of signification or of ­Sinn-­gebung, and that there is no natural sign.” PhP 490. One of Merleau-Ponty’s main thematic leitmotivs is the critique of “analytic thought” as the thought that interrupts the unity of transition from one moment to the other in experience and then seeks in the mind the guarantee of a unity which experience had already achieved. The perspective of “analysis” is one from the outside, i.e. it coincides with the perspective of the disinterested observer (S 86). The main point of Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of a certain notion of “analysis” is that an analytic procedure can only find in the object – perceptual, spatial, linguistic, etc. – what it has already put into it (PhP 501, S 97; cf. also S 83, 206, 211, 214; PM 10, 24, 164.) This expression can be found in the preface to the second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant writes that all we cognize a priori about things is what we ourselves put into them. (B xiii. Cf. also B 130, where Kant claims that consciousness can only analyze what it has previously synthesized. See PhP 148n2.) To this form of idealism Merleau-Ponty opposes the conception of a “natural sign” which rather aims at giving full conceptual articulation to the sense of the “operative” discovered by Husserl. By natural sign, Merleau-Ponty means a sign that returns to us more than what we have put into it. The expression “natural sign” is found in PhP 490 and 419n1. Cf. also UAC 21. The definition of this sign as that which returns to us more than what we have put into it is in S 118; cf. also PM 193. The conception of a natural sign is meant to express “this pregnancy of signification in the signs that we might well define the world.” (PhP 490). On this point, cf. also Waldenfels 2000, 210–212. The conception of the “natural sign” can be said to express the thesis that only transcendental philosophy brings to full legitimation the contingency of existence and therefore that only a transcendentalism rightly understood can ultimately account for the concepts of nature, history and life.

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in the depths of the human soul,’ and that, like every art, only knows itself in its results.189 The idea of operative intentionality, which is put to work in the Phenomenology of Perception, allows us to determine the phenomenon of space as a structural phenomenon and exhibits the full scope of the notion of “level.” The primordial level is on the horizon of all our perceptions, but it is a horizon which, as a matter of principle, can never be attained and thematized in an explicit perception. Each of the consecutive levels in which we live appears when we anchor ourselves in the respective ‘milieu’ which is proposing itself to us. For its part, this milieu is spatially defined only in relation to a previously given level. Thus the series of our experiences, all the way back to our first experience, transmits an already acquired spatiality. In turn, our first perception was able to be spatial only by referring to an orientation that preceded it. Hence, that first perception must have already found us at work in a world.190 Husserl’s descriptions of the relationship between nature and spirit, his ­analysis of the role of bodiliness in Ideas II, and his final descriptions of the lifeworld had to issue into a more radical understanding of the antecedency of sentient experience to concept-guided reflective thought. The notion of ­operative intentionality is meant to capture this antecedency status of the “natural and pre-predicative unity of the world and of our life,” as we hear from the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception and as it is exhibited in this work with r­eference to the basic structural moments pertaining to the general level of experience such as space, material sensuousness or nature, the other, and, at the bottom of them all, temporality. If this is true, however, then Merleau-­Ponty’s passages in the Phenomenology of Perception should be read as the making manifest of the program of a critique of experience that ­Husserl introduced in Formal and Transcendental Logic. This program had massive implications with respect to the determination of the point of departure of phenomenological analyses and their way of proceeding, even if Husserl might have not always completely fathomed their scope and adjusted the vocabulary to suit them. It had to fall upon other phenomenologists such as Fink and Merleau-Ponty himself, as the present chapter attempted to show, to render explicit and develop the implications of this program. 189 190

PhP 490. PhP 293.

Chapter 3

Orders of Experience 1

Introduction: The Eidetic of Experience and Language

The analyses elaborated so extensively in Phenomenology of Perception rehabilitate the Kantian title of “transcendental aesthetics” to indicate ­ the kind of fundamental experiential sense that emerges and is in play in ­perception. This is a new sense of “aesthetics” than first formulated in Kant’s conceptual framework.1 The logico-eidetic activity here does not aim at laying out an eidetics of pure reason imparting its categories to experience. Rather ­Merleau-Ponty is after the very eidetics of the experiential world that is presupposed by ­theoretical and scientific determinations. This eidetics of e­ xperience is what phenomenological reflection ultimately attempts to discover.2 The task, however, presupposes the new definition of the “a priori” as found in ­phenomenology.3 Merleau-Ponty could find this new theory of the a priori clearly featured in Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, where Husserl equates the task of a transcendental aesthetics with “the eidetic description of the allembracing Apriori, without which no Objects could appear unitarily in mere experience, prior to categorial actions.” This “allembracing ­Apriori” results to be determinable only as starting from the world “as a world given in ‘pure experience,’” whose primary stratum responsible for the unity of the experienced world and of a “Nature” is “the aesthetic Apriori of spatio-­ temporality.”4 ­Following Merleau-Ponty’s suggestive indication, however, Kant foreshadows this idea of the a priori in the Transcendental Dialectic, that is, there where Kant offers the theory of a regulative use of the “world” as a priori idea of reason, namely in a sense of the a priori that differs from the constitutive use of the categories as a priori conditions of possible experience. In this 1 That this is the case is signaled by Merleau-Ponty’s use of the expression “Logos of the ­aesthetic world,” which is an expression that Husserl uses in the “Conclusion” to Formal and Transcendental Logic after naming the “ground-level in a world-logic” precisely “transcendental aesthetics,” to be taken “in a new sense of the phrase” than “Kant’s narrowly restricted transcendental aesthetics.” See Hua XVII 297/292. 2 Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s brief definition of phenomenology in his lecture course entitled “La philosophie aujourd’hui”: “La recherche du Wesen […] est explicitation d’une expérience. Il s’agit d’une ‘phénoménologie,’ i.e. d’exprimer l’être tel qu’il est rencontré en fait.” NC 67. 3 PhP 255–256. 4 Hua XVII, 297/292. © Alessio Rotundo, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004548947_005

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case, then, the world reassumes the sense of a pregiveness that no experience of objects can make fully intuitable.5 At this point we are still dealing with the dimension of experience that ­Merleau-Ponty takes to be fundamental to conceptual and ideal meaning, that is, the meaning that is fully in play in our scientific and theoretical dealings, which include of course those of philosophy and of phenomenology itself. In this context, however, the “founded” status of meaning when it is taken as meaning, i.e. as meaning made explicit in reflective focus and explication, appears to be still underdetermined. The Phenomenology of Perception developed extensively and forcefully the idea that our intellectual endeavors must arise from a whole living situation, which involves both our active corporeal life and its engagement in a world with other persons. The reformulation of the Cartesian cogito in the “Cogito” chapter sums up this conclusion from the descriptive analyses of the first two parts of that work. This conclusion essentially states that the duality of the cogito, which Descartes takes as either self-consciousness or consciousness of objects, is rather to be taken as an inseparable unity. The invisible operation that simply gets done throughout my entire life and that the cogito intends to capture, that is, this presence of myself to myself, the feeling of my own existence, i.e. my self-consciousness, is not conceivable without certain appearances beginning to be coherent, and it is certainly not clearly grasped as a concept or as an idea without the possibility to put this coherence into words, that is, finally, without there being something that becomes visible. This would not be the case, and the whole living situation in which “something” comes to be manifestly there for me would be dispensable, only in an interpretation of the cogito in terms of eternity, which leads to the absurd definition of the cogito as God.6 If we do not accept this conclusion, then the whole system of experience is rehabilitated. This is in nuce what Merleau-Ponty demonstrates in the “Cogito” chapter.7 The living aspect of this situation, especially as originative of the whole domain of conceptuality and ideality, is now precisely what remains in need of further clarification. This is a matter which Merleau-Ponty took up especially after 1945, and the focus of which he himself indicates in a later note included in the set of manuscripts known as Le visible et l’invisible. In a note from February 5 Cf. K. Loewith 1967, 77–78, 79–80, 81–82. The resolution of the cosmological antinomies in the regulative “idea” of the world should be put in an intriguing continuation and contrast with Nietzsche’s affirmation about the dissolution of the idea of a “true” world of ideas, including the idea of the world itself. Cf. Loewith 1967, 88n14. 6 See PhP 424–428. 7 PhP 423–468.

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1959, he writes that “In disclosing [the tacit cogito] as I did in the Ph.P. I did not arrive at a solution (my chapter on the Cogito is not c­ onnected with the chapter on speech [parole]): on the contrary I posed a problem. The tacit Cogito should make understood how language [langage] is not ­impossible, but it cannot make understood how it is possible.”8 This is an important comment, for it does two things: 1) it succinctly states the program that M ­ erleau-Ponty had pursued in the studies following the Phenomenology of Perception, which consisted in explicitly establishing the connection between the “tacit Cogito” and speech; 2) it indicates the aim that these post-1945 studies had to achieve, namely making understood how language is possible. Language is not impossible because the formulation of any meaning, such as a geometrical theorem or the very idea of the cogito, requires a whole field of experiential sense, but also words and articulated significations, thus it requires a whole sedimented history enabling its meaningful identification as a true idea, and, finally, it requires the self-effacing power of language.9 Yet, the point of realization on the part of Merleau-Ponty is that the disclosure of the eidetics of experience, as carried out by the deployment of human linguistic capabilities, must now be investigated more precisely with respect to the very linguistic dynamic enabling this disclosure. 2

Approaches to Language

The first thing to notice is that the fundamental experiential situation broached in the analyses of the Phenomenology of Perception allows us to examine the presuppositional schemas in which the relationship between the speaking subject, the spoken word, and its meaning is already set in the analyses of language pursued in approaches as diverse as linguistics, child-­ psychology, the pathology of language, and literary language. The first lesson that Merleau-Ponty draws from the treatment of these approaches to language is that our conceptions of language are themselves already couched in a basic form of understanding as linguistic. This is the kind of understanding that works as privileged access to the world on the part of humans as speaking animals. There results therefore the fact that the clarification of this primordial linguistic situation cannot ultimately be explicated by any specific conception of language as precisely couched in and as therefore essentially dependent on our primary linguistic understanding. What I shall aim to do next is to cover 8 VI 229. 9 See PhP 453 for the expression “histoire sédimentée.”

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in summary some salient points of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of language. This treatment, it is important to keep in mind, is less a systematic statement about the nature of language itself, which can be hardly broached in this study, than rather an indication of the nature of the problem or problems arising from a radical investigation of language. What emerges from Merleau-Ponty’s preliminary accounts of language is the problem of conceiving the kind of being to ascribe to the process of ­speaking and to the speaking subject, without either identifying language with an object of thought, which is deemed not essential to thought as such, or determining language from the status it has as a product resulting from chance events and historical shifts of meaning.10 At the same time, even if in passing, M ­ erleau-Ponty makes mention of a third option, which he refers to as that of “logical positivism.” This is the perspective that can be loosely associated with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle (Schlick, Reichenbach, ­Carnap).11 To put it briefly, logical positivism appears as a mixture of elements from the two aforementioned options. For logical positivism language is both ideal (as “pure syntax” or “algorithm” governed by universal rules of formation and t­ ransformation of propositions) and empirical (language is result of a semantic evolution of conventionally established signs). This double aspect of language is expression of the core thesis of logical positivism, which ­consists in separating, within the theory of knowledge, purely tautological “analytical” and empirical “synthetic” components while upholding the idea of a “coordination” between concepts (having a purely semiotic function) and reality (understood

10 11

These two positions are summarized by Merleau-Ponty with reference, respectively, to Husserl’s early stance on language and to linguistics in Sur la phénoménologie du langage. See S 105–107. Merleau-Ponty refers to the “logical positivism” of the Vienna Circle already in the “­Preface” to the Phenomenology of Perception. See PhP, ix–x. In the course on Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, he states that “An entirely defined language (an algorithm like that of logical positivism) would be sterile.” (CAL 47). A further mention of “logical positivism” is made in his course on Le problème de la parole (1954). Here ­Merleau-Ponty names Carnap. See PrPa 50–51. In this latter course, we also find critical references to other formalistic approaches to language such as that of the School of ­Warsaw (PrPa 50), the School of Copenhagen (ibid. 74), and the so-called American school of language (ibid.). Finally, Colonna (2014) quotes two passages from unpublished manuscripts that capture the overall critical stance of Merleau-Ponty towards a positivist treatment of language, designating the latter as “extreme dogmatism, a shameless idealism.” As a result, for him, the analytic of language is not the anti-metaphysics that it aspires to be. Rather, it is “forgetfulness” and “covering up” of metaphysics. See Colonna 2014, 26–28.

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as fully formed external set of objects, whether perceived or inferred qualities, properties, or relations).12 What these approaches get only incompletely or not at all, is that they ­presuppose a kind of explicative schema that frames the relationship between linguistic expression (word), meaning, and thing in terms of the dualism of “inner” and “outer” elements, with the linguistic expression typically assigned to a dimension of “real” physicality while the meaning is assimilated to the realm of “ideality” of mind.13 Merleau-Ponty’s early formulations about language do not leave any doubt about the radically different approach that he intends to take in his analysis of language. This analysis would lead us no less to overcome once and for all the dichotomy of subject and object.14 But this also means that the phenomenon of language cannot be m ­ ethodologically approached by starting from the usual ways to explicate language simply in terms of a signitive relation according to epistemological standpoints, ­variously interpreted. What is needed, therefore, is a shift in the whole approach to language that would lift this stricture, together with its dualistic feature, and resituate the analysis of the phenomenon of language at the level of the new grounding of experience established as “operative” by the studies of perception. Then it becomes clear that at this fundamental experiential level, the appearance of language cannot be explicated according to the schema that pits the ordo cognoscendi against the ordo essendi as precisely derivative from that experiential level. The question of language must be probed rather at the level of basic linkage of cognitio and esse, i.e. at the ontological level at which “something” is recognized as manifestly there, as “something-which-is” and around which I orient my own existence in perceptual awareness. This level of experience clearly antecedes explicit cognitive activity and reflective assertions, but it is the level which also works as the ground for the emergence of both cognition and articulated conceptual meaning.

12 13

14

For more historical context and details on the core thesis of logical empiricism, see ­ yckman 2005, 29–30, 53–54, 95–96 et passim. R Husserl describes “the concrete phenomenon of the sense-informed expression” as breaking up in “physical phenomenon” and “meaning” bestowed by “acts.” He writes that “In virtue of such acts, the expression is more than a merely sounded word. It means something…” See Hua XIX, § 9, “Die phänomenologischen Unterscheidungen zwischen ­physischer Ausdruckserscheinung, sinngebendem und sinnerfüllendem Akt.” PhP 203.

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The Act of Speech

At this more radical level of analytic regard, the analysis conforming to the way language is represented as “external” medium that gives expression to the distinct determinacy of meaning on the part of an “internal” act of thinking is no longer adequate to determine the kind of being belonging to the process of speaking and the speaking subject. This framing could have sufficed for studying meaning as it occurs in highly formal settings such as logic and mathematics. This was indeed Husserl’s point of departure in the Logical Investigations, which had to remain for him the point of reference for a conception of language until his late philosophy.15 Merleau-Ponty’s own way to set up the issue of language points us to the fundamental question about the very relationship between ideality and the living situation of a sentient human being as it takes place and goes on in linguistic expression. The activity by which human beings raise their perceptual recognition of processes and states of affairs in being to cognitive form and determinate sense, but also the activity by which humans reflect on their own experiencing by way of concepts, ideas, and in general articulated meaning is something that gets done precisely through acquisition, deployment, and mastering of language, all of which is already inclusive of the deeply material organic physicality of speech, both as utterance and as written trace. The radicalizing recasting of the question of language expands therefore the focus on language in its whole richness and variety of expressive functions. In order to carry out this reopening and expansion of language, Merleau-Ponty relocates the whole phenomenon of linguistic sense-having and sense-­making fully in the context of the actual speaking subject who is in the process of ­making sense determinate to oneself and to others: We are far from the initial position of the Logical Investigations, where the existence of a given, particular language was founded on ideal ­existence, a universal grammar, the essence of language. Here the possibility of an ideal existence and of communication between particular subjects is finally founded on the act of speaking as it is realized in writing or in the spoken word.16 15

16

See in particular Logical Investigation I entitled “Expression and Meaning.” Cf. Bruzina 2004, 453–454. See also Logical Investigation IV, which deals with the “Idea of a Pure Grammar.” Cf. S 105–106 and S 128–129. Husserl’s late pronouncement on language in the “Origin of Geometry” remains devoted to the explication of the experience of ideal objectivity in geometry, whereby language emerges as structural feature of ideality. SHP 1252. This passage stems from the course notes taken down by students at the occasion of the first part of a lecture Merleau-Ponty delivered at the Sorbonne in 1950–1951

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This is an idea that by no means Merleau-Ponty presents as being foreign to Husserl’s own approach to language as much as Husserl himself in the last years turned to the actual speaking activity as integral feature for achieving and dealing with ideal objectivity in scientific and theoretical work.17 ­Husserl’s laying open of the dimension of speaking action is even evocative of MerleauPonty’s own distinction between the word as “speaking” (la parole parlante) and the word as “spoken” (la parole parlé) in Phenomenology of Perception.18 Yet

17

18

with the title “Les Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie.” As was use at the time, the students’ notes were approved by Merleau-Ponty himself and published twice by the B ­ ulletin de psychologie (a first time immediately after the delivery of the lectures in 1950–1951 and a second time in 1964, after Merleau-Ponty’s death). The Centre de documentation universitaire also published a set of notes of this same lecture in 1952. The two texts of the Bulletin and of the Centre differ slightly in phrasing and development of selected references. See the Note de l’éditeur in Merleau-Ponty à la Sorbonne, résumé de cours 1949–1952 (Cynara 1988). My references stem from the text established by the Centre de documentation universitaire, published by Gallimard in Œuvres as part of a collection of principal texts by Merleau-Ponty (2010). The view expressed by the passage just quoted, incidentally or not, is also clearly featured in Fink’s own assessment of ­Husserl’s conception of language from a note written in 1939 or 1940: “Husserl oriented [his analysis] on the ‘­sentence’ outside living speech, so that speech became an instance of possible speech (More exactly, the mode of positing, a special way of intending).” Eugen-Fink-­ Archiv XXVIII, A/II/13. This passage is quoted in Bruzina 1996, 96. For Derrida (La voix et le phénomène, 1967), the way Husserl begins his phenomenology with an analysis of linguistic expression predetermines the metaphysical cast of his phenomenology against the latter’s attempt at neutrality. This is Husserl’s position in “Origin of Geometry”: “Eben die in der Geometrie thematischen idealen Gegenständlichkeiten betrifft nun unser Problem: Wie kommt die geometrische Idealität (ebenso wie die aller Wissenschaften) von ihrem originären innerpersonalen Ursprung, in welchem sie Gebilde im Bewußtseinsraum der ersten Erfinderseele ist, zu ihrer idealen Objektivität? Im voraus sehen wir: mittels der Sprache, in der sie sozusagen ihren Sprachleib erhält.” Hua VI, 368–369. Merleau-Ponty offers a detailed reading of this passage in OG 41–58. PhP 229. It is well-known that the other important source for the study of the category of “speech” in Merleau-Ponty’s thought is the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. See S 133; SNS 152. Starting from the late 1940s, Saussure played a critical role in the shaping of Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of language, but also of perception and history. Saussure is not listed in the bibliography of The Structure of Behavior nor in that of the Phenomenology of Perception. The first substantive mentions of Saussure can be found in La métaphysique dans l’homme from 1947, in the course on “Language and Communication” from 1948, and in the course on “La conscience et l’acquisition du langage” from 1949. According to Merleau-Ponty, Saussure’s linguistics rehabilitates avant la lettre the idea of language as a natural system of communication against various later attempts to describe language as a series of historically heaping facts that all the same are believed to be governed by pure laws that would explicate their factual relations. In Le métaphysique dans l’homme (1947), Merleau-Ponty writes that Saussure’s linguistics calls into question the idea of language as “the ideal of a system of laws” while qualifying the idea of language as “object of nature,” i.e. as “sum of facts without ‘interiority.’” See SNS 152. Cf. also S 49–50. In Le philosophe et la

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Merleau-Ponty takes Husserl’s phenomenological account of the role of linguistic living action as a) passively receiving a meaning in a pre-­theoretical situation and as 2) fulfilling itself in actual acts of speaking only by reactivating this meaning and by externalizing it in utterances, to essentially imply that language is means of appearing of thought and not mere accompaniment of thought: Penser, ce n’est plus retrouver, en deçà des phénomènes particuliers tels que le langage, une conscience qui disposerait d’une façon explicite de tout ce qui est necessaire pour les constituer; c’est prendre conscience de ce paradoxe que nous ne nous affranchissons du particulier qu’en reprenant à notre compte une situation linguistique qui est à la fois et indissolubliment limitation et accès à l’universel.19

19

sociologie (1951), Merleau-Ponty draws from H.-J. Pos’ essay entitled Phénoménologie et Linguistique (1939) in order to make the same point in connection with the p ­ henomenology of language: phenomenology reasserts the primacy of “living language,” which Merleau-Ponty compares to an “organ,” over against the scientific approach to langauge. The latter decomposes language in a “sum of linguistic facts.” See S 131. ­Merleau-Ponty again makes the same point in the conference paper Sur la phénoménologie du langage delivered in Brussels in 1951. See S 106–107. In this conference paper, in the essay on ­Husserl published in the same year, entitled Le philosophe et la sociologie, and in the lecture course on Le sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie (1951–1952), Merleau-Ponty draws explicit parallels around the theme of language between Husserl’s phenomenology and Saussure’s structural linguistics. On the proximity of Husserl and Saussure, see S 133, SHP 1252. This coming together of phenomenology and linguistics entails profound consequences not only for a theory of language but, in light of Merleau-Ponty’s own pronouncements, also for a theory of intersubjectivity, history, reason, and of philosophy itself. Merleau-Ponty writes: “C’est qui m’est einsegné par la phénoménologie du langage, ce n’est pas seulement une curiosité psychologique.” S 110. In La phénoménologie du l­angage, considerations about Husserl’s phenomenology of language lead to the explicitation of a conception of intersubjectivity, rationality, and philosophy (S 107). In the inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, entitled Éloge de la philosophie, Merleau-Ponty thinks that Saussure’s linguistics would offer the paradigm for a new philosophy of history (E 64). This view was already anticipated in the Sorbonne lectures. Saussure’s linguistics ­encounters “the principal philosophical problem of the relationship between the individual and the social (CAL 82), which, if generalized, Merleau-Ponty asserts, could issue into a true conception of the “philosophy of history” (CAL 85). In the Prose of the World, Saussure’s “diacritical” conception of speech is seen as laying the basis of a new understanding of expression and reason (PM 33–65, 145). The concept of diacritical sign and the diacritical dimension of meaning summarize the theory of language that Merleau-Ponty finds being elaborated in Saussure’s linguistics: the concept of “diacritical” is meant to capture speech as a living operation, that is, as activity embedded in operative life. For the diacritical dimension of meaning, see S 49–50, 54–55, 110–111; MSME 117–118; PrPa 58n2, 66–69, 81–84. For late ontological applications of this idea, see VI 131, 255. Merleau-Ponty speaks of an “operative life” (vie opérante) of language in SNS 154. In Le problème de la parole, he makes again reference to the “operation of speech” as “living speech.” See PrPa 83–85. SHP 1249–1250.

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If this statement can be taken as the summative conclusion that MerleauPonty sees Husserl outlining in the last works,20 this same statement raises the demand to clarify and deepen the main point about language in the present context, namely that the linguistic situation is the very stuff of thought, especially since Husserl did not further look into the nature and status of this pregivenness of language beyond the recognition of its necessary role as already available system of articulation of meanings.21 For if language is constitutive of thought, if, in other words, what is in play in the linguistic situation is the assimilation of expression and meaning not as entities added to each other but rather as inseparable moments constitutive of speaking experience, on the one hand, and as inseparable moments that remain fully integrated with a surrounding linguistic environment and tradition, on the other hand, then thought itself is fully rooted in such linguistic situation as inherently both material and historical. But if material (in the broad sense of living organic physicality, e.g. in the production of sounds in speech) and historical factors (the particular language or languages I learned to speak and listen and respond to), thus if something of the natural world as well as of the historical world impinges structurally upon thought, especially if considered in its cognitive rational performance, then this raises the problem about the kind of universality that thinking activity is supposed to open unto, and whether something like an access to the universal can even be admitted within the context of natural and cultural limitations.22 4

Language as Ontological Experience

There are two essentially interrelated aspects to this issue that I shall now briefly address. One is the aspect of the pre-availability of language, its being already there prior to any actual expression. The other is the aspect of the concept and conceptuality in general as involving permanence, invariance, 20 21

22

Specific reference to Formal and Transcendental Logic and the text on the “Origin of Geometry” can be found for instance in SHP 1250–1251 but also in S 110, S 132. On the pre-availability of language, see in particular Hua VI, 374–375. For some salient passages exhibiting Husserl’s intentional self-limitation in pursuing a more radical inquiry into the phenomenon of language in the “Origin of Geometry,” see Bruzina 1996, 94. In this connection, Merleau-Ponty also quotes a relevant passage in SHP 1252. This question concerns of course the whole issue of relativism as an important and difficult one. This issue has been a major theme of focus for both post-Husserlian phenomenology and contemporary hermeneutic philosophy, especially affecting projects aiming at establishing any kind of absolute truth by way of autonomous rational agents.

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and identity. A full analysis of both aspects would require more extensive and detailed considerations that can be given here but some summative indications around the issue of the relationship between language and thought will shed light on an important element in the situation of conceptual cognition, taken here as synonymous to rational activity. As regards the first point, the pre-given character of language as medium or deposit of words and articulated meanings is not simply a dormant system that can be switched on when I wish to give determination to a thought, make it available to others, and secure its sameness in the form of “information” that I can return to and that can be passed along. The presupposition here is that word and meaning would not translate into each other but rather that they are perfectly synonymous. In this case of perfect synonymity one can, at least in principle, effortlessly move from word to meaning (as when I listen to someone or read a text) and from meaning to word (as when I speak to someone or write a text) without adding or subtracting anything to what has been said and brought to expression. Incidentally, this presupposition would make problematic to explain how different languages can communicate with each other unless, again, we were to presuppose a relationship of perfect synonymity between the unit word-meaning in one language and its corresponding translation in another language. In these cases, we would have to treat each language as a self-enclosed system with particular meanings that are a­ rticulated in perfect correspondence to particular words. A language (my native language) would be a set of atomic elements that could be put in univocal relationship with other atomic elements in a different set (the foreign language). A superficial look at any actual language clearly shows the absurdity of this view. Not only any word usually admits of a plurality of meanings while one meaning can often be expressed in different ways, but any one word in a language has also always several corresponding translations in another.23 The dissociation of thought from the historical roots of language, which usually implies a conception of perfect synonymity between words and meanings, must lead to these significant aporetic conclusions, thereby compromising the very possibility to clarify the problem of the universality of communication and thought. The point of view of the actual speaking operation of language calls into question this tacit equivalence of word and meaning. Merleau-Ponty again refers to Husserl’s later research when he writes that “to speak is not 23

“Indeed, human language takes place in signs that are not rigid, as animals’ expressive signs are, but remain variable, not only in the sense that there are different languages, but also in the sense that within the same language the same expression can designate different things and different expressions the same thing.” Gadamer 1976, 60.

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at all to translate a thought into words,” and then continues, “it is to intend a certain object by way of speech.”24 The intention to speak revolves around a constant or identical something or meaning and this is what we usually understand under what we call an “idea” or “concept” or “theory.” But speaking is not a mere “translation,” i.e. a thought that ideally would not be fundamentally altered by the fact to be coupled with a linguistic body. Speaking is rather an actual trans-lation, to be here understood literally as a dimension of m ­ ovement or vital activity in which something achieves and maintains constancy and identity only as a result of a rich and variable dynamism, including the highly dynamic process of the passing of time. In the Résumé of the course on La Parole, Merleau-Ponty writes therefore that “to speak or to write is truly to translate an experience, which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.”25 In other words, one could say that speaking is not sufficiently defined as a “whence.” The subject who speaks, as a matter of fact, “ignores the past.”26 As a literal form of translation, speaking is rather a “whither”: “Language is for the subject who speaks a means of expression, means of communicating to other people some intention that goes towards the future.”27 The difficulty of expression, of thought itself and its ­communicability both to ourselves and to others, which is never secured against a possible rest of misunderstanding and even failure, reveals not only what may at first appear as a form of empirical and contingent limitation but exhibits also and above all the incremental nature of thought, its movement towards a “more,” its constant turning towards something new and as yet unknown. In living expressive efforts we do not experience simply the application of certain signs to certain meanings. Rather a certain meaning-intention comes to stand for us in the expression, it becomes manifest to us, and it is retained for future expressive efforts. The capacity to let something come to a stand is precisely the performance of language.28 Merleau-Ponty points out this fundamental feature of language when he writes that “Exprimer, pour le sujet parlant, c’est prendre conscience; il n’exprime pas seulement pour les autres, il exprime pour savoir lui-même ce qu’il vise.”29 Language is the process that brings about manifestness, that is, identity and constancy, in ­understanding 24 25 26 27 28 29

SHP 1250. RC 41. SHP 1248. Oeuvres 1248. There is a striking and intriguing analogy in this idea of the “coming to stand” of thought in language with Aristotle’s conception of the “epagoge” or “formation of the universal.” On this point, see Gadamer 1976, 14. S 113. On this point, see the whole argument in S 113–115.

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and thinking. At this juncture, the first point about the pre-available aspect of language ties integrally with the second point about the aspect of permanence and identity of linguistic meaning. The idea of a productivity of language has to do with the formation and acquisition of a logical experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty has studied this feature of productivity of language eminently in connection with the process of language acquisition in children.30 That study intended to follow the process by which the constellation of non-linguistic patterns of experience integrates and crystallizes around a concept and therefore makes understanding and ultimately rational activity possible. Learning to speak is not simply a copy, or imitation, of what is said.31 Classical theories of language have variously apperceived that the acquisition and understanding of speech involves the appropriation for oneself of linguistic behavior that one observes outside of oneself. The imitation of expressive gestures would have the effect to introduce articulation and organization among auditive data that at first appear in chaotic and indistinct form.32 Appropriation of speech requires active reproduction of the expressive operations that are perceived around us. Already on the sensory-motoric level, however, learning to speak is something else than an increasingly articulated and refined motor-schematic repetition of sounds, sounds that would remain essentially unchanged in their sensible content.33 This theory of imitation may improve on the intellectualist theory according to which a representation of the causes of expressive behavior must be presupposed for the successful translation of visual or auditive data into speech. No such representation however takes place in the child.34 The motor and muscular imitative “schemas” that are summoned as necessary conditions for the acquisition and understanding of language, 30 31 32

33 34

Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language (1949–1950). An important part of the first section of the course on Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language focuses on a study of the phenomenon of imitation. See CAL 30–48. This, in extremely abbreviated form, is Henri Bergson’s account of the understanding of speech in Matière et mémoire. Bergson speaks of a “motor schema” accompanying the understanding of speech. This “motor schema” is the tendency to repeat the articulated movement of another person’s speech in outline and according to salient features. The result is that the practice and refinement of this imitation introduces order and coherence in the auditive sensations. According to Bergson, at least on the sensory-motoric level, every understanding of speech must presuppose the exercise and development of a “motor schema.” For an account of Bergson’s theory, see Gurwitsch 2002, 225. See Gurwitsch’s critique of Bergson’s theory of the “motor schema” in Gurwitsch 2002, 226. Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the classical linguistic theory of representation in MPS 31. Bergson’s theory of the “motor schema” is also meant to reply critically to the linguistic theory of representation. See Gurwitsch 2002, 223.

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by the same token, introduce a hypothetical, that is, hidden psychological factor aiming to explain the progressive process of learning in experience. A schematic sensory-motoric imitation is assumed to be in place and working each time effective understanding of expressive communication takes place. In reality, however, the accomplished action of understanding speech does not require that any such schema intervenes to articulate the mass of initially chaotic auditive data. Rather, the increasing complexity and differentiation that can be observed in the process of language acquisition and development entails the general restructuration of both motor and perceptual factors. What this concretely means is that the auditive data are for the child who has learned to speak completely different than the auditive data perceived by the child who does not speak yet.35 The two children are dealing with different phenomena altogether. What is in play in the imitation of speech is not the action of a motor function as variable factor with respect to the set of sensible data as constant parameter. The imitation of articulatory gestures, Merleau-Ponty notes, consists rather in the assimilation of new sounds to the sounds that the child already heard and spoke.36 This assimilation, which involves a reorganization both on the perceptual and the motoric level, once accomplished, therefore brings about a complete restructuration and reorganization of the whole auditive and phonetic experience. From a phenomenal point of view, which is that adopted by Merleau-Ponty in his study of language, the sound that appeared at first as chaotic and without any distinguishable features has been really transformed and, properly speaking, nothing of its previous sensible content is still the same.37 What has changed is that the sounds have now assumed for the child a “value of use” in a global situation of meaningful interactions with the environment that they previously lacked.38 These considerations apply insights from the psychology of Gestalt to the study of language acquisition and show on the level of speech something that 35

36 37

38

Cf. Gurwitsch on this point: “La différence entre une personne qui connaît une certaine langue et une autre qui ne la connaît pas, ne se réduit pas à des tendances motrices que le mêmes données auditives mettent en jeu chez la première, alors que ces tendances motrices font défaut chez la ­seconde. Cette différence consiste non seulement en ceci que, pour une personne, ce qu’elle entend est lié à des significations, tandis qu’il n’en est pas ainsi chez l’autre, mais aussi et surtout en ceci que là où l’une entend une masse sonore amorphe, l’autre perçoit des unités auditives cohérentes et distincts.” Gurwitsch 2002, 226. CAL 34. Cf. again Gurwitsch: “[Les données perceptives] sont regroupées et restructurées, elles acquièrent des ‘­significations’ qu’elles n’avaient pas, s’insèrent à certains emplacements dans la structure nouvelle, etc., de sorte qu’on ne peut dire d’aucune d’entre elles qu’elles survivent, sans variation, à la transformation.” Gurwitsch 2002, 206. CAL 47.

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had already been established on the level of perception and practical action, i.e. that experience in general proceeds by reorganization of a given situation into a novel one that from now on will represent the reference framework for specific perceptual behaviors and for the appearance of particular objects. There is therefore what Piaget calls a décalage or “developmental gap” in the restructuration of perceptual and motor functions in language acquisition. This means that the process of acquisition accomplished at a certain level “must be started over again at a higher level.”39 Linguistic gestures and sounds appear at first like pointing to “non-existent directions; then little by little, some notions begin to find for themselves a potential [virtuel] home in these gestures.” Initially, the child experiences one’s own expressive gestures (in repetition) and the expressions of others therefore as non-thematic significations that are pregnant, i.e. “[h]azy at first, the signification articulates itself and becomes more and more precise.”40 In this way, Merleau-Ponty writes, “language ends up by coming alive for the child.”41 As a result, linguistic sounds are not immediately linked to univocal meanings. Linguistic sounds rather appear in a global situation of meaningful interaction between the child and his or her surroundings. Children experience certain recurrent behaviors around them such as patterned gestures, mimicries, and emissions of sounds in ­interconnection with desirable, unpleasant, joyful objects or events. In this a process of transition takes place from the focus on certain outer expressions endowed with an indeterminate sense to the focus on the sense itself of these gestures: “There is therefore a going beyond of the signifier toward the signified.”42 Language acquisition intervenes in this situation and entails a whole restructuration of the child’s experience. Children who learn to speak experience a transformation of their entire field of appearances. Thus, learning to speak really means “to coexist more and more with the environment.”43

39 40 41 42

43

CAL 47. CAL 47. CAL 28. CAL 29. It would be interesting to compare this way to frame the experience of language with what Heidegger designates as the hermeneutic “as” (als) in Being and Time. The use of the adjective “hermeneutic” here refers to one of the traditional meanings a­ ssociated with the term “hermeneutics,” that is, the meaning proposed by Aristotle in his Peri ­hermeneia. For Aristotle, hermeneia encompasses the totality of signifying speech. Every speech that means something, i.e. that goes beyond itself in order to address something, is hermeneia. Thus, all reality that can be put into meaningful language is “interpreted” reality, or rather, to put it in other words, every signifying speech says something of something, that is, it expresses some thing as something. Cf. Ricœur 1969, 8. CAL 46.

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Although I cannot dwell here on the rich and complex argument ­MerleauPonty lays out in his Sorbonne lectures, it is worth indicating that the study of language acquisition is meant to offer the basic clues for a general theory of conceptual and cognitive experience – i.e. of “spirit” – and it therefore calls for a reinterpretation of this theory in terms of the phenomenological method guiding the analysis of language. It is with the process of the acquisition of language that many of the most relevant moments of the child’s reality gain in determination and achieve a form of identity that will begin to schematize, in a retroactive and integrative movement, his or her whole experience. The logos of speech gathers the manifold determinations of experience into an identical unity that can be recognized and interpreted. The passage from initially vague experiential patterns to the mapping of experience by way of identical poles emerges as fundamental for the development of c­ onceptuality in understanding.44 In other words, the acquisition of linguistic behavior, whether in the child or in the whole context of textual and literary assertions, yields the sorting out of meaningful structures (concepts), which contribute to further determining the living and linguistic orientation in experience.45

44 45

See Lindén 1997, 216: “Die logische Stimme hebt das Identische in der Vielfalt der (Be) stimmungen hervor. So ist die Verwandlung von anfänglich vage erfahrener Ähnlichkeit in Identität ein grundsätzlicher Zug der Begriffsbildung.” Merleau-Ponty’s lecture course on Husserl’s Origing of Geometry from 1959 can be read as a long argument aiming to define the recast understanding of the human being as rational being in contemporary philosophy. These dense notes interweave ideas from Husserl, Fink, and Heidegger about language, thinking, ideality and would demand a detailed commentary, which would burst the confines of the present study and cannot therefore be offered here. Two fundamental themes from Merleau-Ponty’s argument are worth mentioning, however, especially because they bear immense weight for our own argument and for the phenomenological project as a whole: 1) the theme of Z ­ eitigung in connection to language. For Merleau-Ponty, in fact, “the problem of language, of knowing how we understand what the other is saying, is also indiscernible from the problem of Zeitigung (OG 54–56); 2) the theme of intersubjectivity and humanism. The theme of intersubjectivity is already integral part of Merleau-Ponty’s argument about the acquisition of ­language in his course from 1949 on Consciousness and the Acquisition of L­ anguage. In the 1959 course, Merleau-Ponty, with reference to Fink, expands the notion of Einfühlung and that of Ineinander in the direction of a radically transformed conception of transcendental phenomenology and of philosophy in general (OG 57–58, 64–65). As regards the notion of humanism and the idea of an “antihumanistic humanism” mentioned in these notes, see in particular OG 21–25, 41–43. For commentaries on this complex set of issues, a good place to start is the group of essays collected in the French edition of Merleau-­Ponty’s 1959 course under the direction of Renaud Barbaras entitled Notes de cours sur L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl, suivi de Recherches sur la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris, PUF, 1998).

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Speaking of Fundamentals: The Promise of Language

Adequately covering the kinds of issues and details that begin to take shape in these considerations goes beyond the scope of this section, especially as regards the status that should be attributed to conceptual meaning as the specifically linguistic sense making up the ideality of language. In the present context, it will suffice to present only the most compact point about the methodological implication stemming from the phenomenology and psychology of language and the problem of speech. The principal point that emerges from this analysis is that about the unconditional antecedency status of language.46 In the lecture course on Le problème de la parole (1953–1954), Merleau-Ponty clearly spells out this antecedent status in terms of the adherence to an affective situation: “What one needs is 1) affective situation = fact-value, motivating intellectual progress without containing in itself what it motivates, calling, opening upon…restructuration. 2) ‘result’ [is] not simple superstructure but having the capacity to transform the starting point.”47 By couching language in the antecedency of affective life, Merleau-Ponty confirms the structural element that features in Husserl’s philosophy as foundational for everything else, namely the element of operative intentionality and the aspect of meaning in the life of consciousness as agency taking up and correlating to meaning. Consciousness “actualizes” meaning as meaning in the first place, since meaning is always meaning to or meaning for. This implies that any intentional spontaneity and its meaning, especially when cast in the autonomous taking up of the “idea” or “concept,” in order to “make sense,” are to be firmly cast in the frame of a base-level affective situation and thereby in the rich experiential dynamics of perceptual behavior and practical-­motoric action in the world. In accord to this point, Merleau-Ponty interprets the ­categorial behavior that gets fleshed out in language as the formation of a “hollow” (creux).48 But what gets also fleshed out is the enriching and augmenting 46

47 48

There is an intriguing terminological convergence on the point of this “antecedency’ between phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches to language. In particular, I find the terminology of “being-ready” and “standing-ready” as applied to language in Lindén (1997), who speaks of a Bereitsein of the conceptual meaning resulting from linguistic dispositive behaviors. The other reference for such terminology is Fink, who uses the expression Bereitstand to describe the anticipatory grasp or preinterpretation of being expressed by language. About this last reference, see Bruzina 2004, 455. PrPa 104. PrPa 115. Merleau-Ponty describes the move accomplished by the act of the “I think” with respect to the “I can” as a recovery and recasting of the initial situation or initial “structure” (PM 179) of “perceptual evidence” (PM 175). Linguistic expression appears thus as

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of this living operative consciousness into reflective consciousness as itself deeply pathic right into its specific operations. This realization has dramatic consequences for the task of phenomenology, and thus of philosophy, as a task that ultimately concerns the clarification of “the mystery of the world” and “the mystery of reason” while remaining firmly and irrevocably inchoate – “pathically” – in this very linkage!49 In this way, Merleau-Ponty intends to show that “in any case no language ever wholly frees itself from the precariousness of mute forms of expression,” that, therefore, all language is language of a certain time and in a certain situation and that, finally, all philosophy accomplished through language is and remains expression and cannot totalize itself outside of time.50 Far from stamping the whole question of language with the mark of a definitive demise, this result ought to rather shed light on the realization of the absolutely important “philosophical sense of the return to speech.”51 The antecedency of language, which initially seemed to threaten the possibility of rational cognition and universal communication, has been shown to be not just an element of limitation, which would be the case only if we took language to be a dead habitus either enclosing us as if within impenetrable walls or lying ready in subservience to a purely categorial thought, especially if conceived as spontaneous activity of an autonomous reflecting ego-center.52 The analysis of living language and speech shows that the antecedency of language has rather a quite living character in the actual present understanding and thinking of the speaking subjects in their continuous communicative efforts among and across different languages and cultures. The philosophical sense of the return to speech consists precisely in rehabilitating the phenomenon of speech as the

49 50 51 52

a taking up and a continuation of the “tradition” of perception (S 87). In this connection there comes to the fore the whole relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s study of the parallel between painting and linguistic expression. PhP xvi. See also Hua VI, 12. S 98, 102, 103. S 116. In his course on Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, as part of the exposition, Merleau-Ponty turns briefly to the problem of intersubjectivity in Husserl. See CAL 38–44. In so doing, Merleau-Ponty clearly recognizes the enabling role that language plays on various levels of intersubjective experience, included the highest level of reduction and grounding of transcendental knowledge as explicitly pursued by Husserl. It is especially significant to note in this connection that Husserl’s own descriptive-critical analyses motivated a striking qualification in the terminology describing the ultimate instance of transcendental subjectivity as intersubjectity. The Ur-Ich of transcendental phenomenology is only equivocally an “Ego” and ought rather be designated as “wir alle.” See Hua VI, 188. The whole issue of transcendental intersubjectivity is of course too complex to work out here even in briefest outline.

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capacity to produce the “symbol [emblème]” of a “manner to be in the world” or “a certain relation to being,” thereby “accomplishing the promise of recuperation [récupération] of the world,” which is the contribution of every act of l­iterary or philosophical expression and that the appearance of ordinary ­language already foreshadows.53 The historical conditionedness of our thought and therefore the ­recognition of our own finitude is precisely what opens us up to the idea of productivity of thought. If this recognition introduces an irreducible obscurity at the bottom of subjective consciousness, since something beyond the center of its subjective inwardness and self-reflection determines and directs the meaning of its words, this only reveals that the starting point of knowledge cannot be the bedrock of a disincarnated mind. The whole historico-natural dimension of our existence is fully in place and working as a traditional interpretation of the world as soon as we begin to speak. 6

Language and the Lifeworld: General Points from Phenomenology

The foregoing considerations on language, even if in broad outline, aim to show the aspect of actuality of understanding and thinking in the very search for eide characterizing the turn of Western philosophy since Plato. This is the problem at the center of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry.” In the Résumé for the course entitled Husserl aux limites de la phénoménologie (1959–1960), Merleau-Ponty summarizes this problem as ­follows: “Mais s’il y avait une idéalité pure et détachée, comment ­descendrait-elle dans l’espace de conscience de celui qui la découvre, comment naîtrait-elle dans une psyché? Et si au contraire on part, comme il le faut, de sa naissance en nous, comment passer de là à l’être idéal, par-delà toute psyché existante ou possible?”54 There is a facticity of thought that becomes evident in the analysis of language. This facticity does not just set a limit to the grasping of truth and i­deality, but is rather basic to every pursuit into the essence of reality, consciousness, and experience. The Platonic search for eide is literally a “flight into the logoi,” which, as Gadamer put it, is already “in close proximity to the linguistic world-experience as a whole.”55 Language is not nature, but it exhibits the 53 54 55

S 68, 119. Cf. PM 16. RC 163–164. Cf. OG 19, 25: “how can a meaning emerge which is not enclosed in the thoughts of one or several men?”; “how does this former layer acquire the ideality beyond the conscious space of its Erfinder?” Gadamer 1976, 128.

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natural foundation of thought, which we call history, and, as a result, it points to a link to nature by way of the materially determined factors of language. The task is then to lay bare the specific temporal character of the actuality of the actual material factors in play in language with respect to the temporal character of the potentiality of ideality as inherently historical. Only then it would be possible to shed light on the link between the actuality of the material linguistic features as foundational for the timeless validity of ideality.56 This, again, is too big of a topic and cannot be explored further in the context of the present study. For our purposes, I will rather focus on a central implication from the study of language for the characterization of nature that needs to be made explicit from the previous considerations. I shall begin with a brief summary of the progression of analysis from the previous chapter. Formal and Transcendental Logic carries out a dramatic expansion of the notion of the logical judgment. The reflective examination on the intentional aimings in the experience of evidence (as experience determining the sense and scope of logic) has exhibited the “formal universality” of experience as preceding the categorial activities of judging.57 The critical question about the dependency of Husserl’s thought on the thematic determinations of language is a complex matter in light of Husserl’s astonishing claim that the experience of nature is “under” the activity of judgment and yet “in” it.58 The systematic movement of return to experience operated by Formal and Transcendental Logic is carried out under the clear recognition that in the explication of experience, the experiential must appear in relation to the categorial: “The two sets of problems are interwoven in the task of clearing 56

This setting of the whole question is clearly delineated by the way Husserl himself d­ elimits his task in the Origin of Geometry: “Auf das sich hier auch meldende allgemeine Problem des Ursprungs der Sprache in ihrer idealen und durch Äußerung, Dokumentierung begründeten Existenz in der realen Welt gehen wir natürlich nicht ein” (Hua VI, 369). It is highly significant that the text that Fink published in 1939 with the title Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentionalhistorisches Problem (Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Brussels, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 203–225), adds the following remark: “Auf das Problem des Ursprunges der Sprache in ihrer idealen und durch Äusserung und Dokumentierung begründeten Existenz in der realen Welt wollen wir hier nicht eingehen, obschon wir uns bewusst sind, dass eine radikale Aufklärung der Seinsart der ‘idealen Sinngebilde’ hier ihren tiefsten Problemgrund haben muss.” Die Frage nach dem Urpsrung der Geometrie, p. 210. My italics. 57 Hua XVII, 219/212. 58 “Die Natur als Urteilsgestalt, im besonderen als naturwissenschaftliche Erkenntnisgestalt wird natürlich unter sich haben die Natur als Erfahrungsgestalt, als Einheit wirklicher und möglicher Erfahrung, eigener und mit derjenigen der Anderen vergemeinschafteter; aber das Unter-sich ist zugleich ein In-sich.” Hua XVII, 123/118. Cf. Bachelard 1968, 73, 132–133.

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up the lowest level of judging [Urteilsstufe], correlatively the lowest level of categorialia, those that still bear their experiential source immediately within them.”59 The genetic phenomenological analysis of Part II of Formal and Transcendental Logic intends to retrieve and clarify this dimension of experience in terms of an analysis of constitution. Constitutional investigations are investigations that properly give the ontic sense to any object of experience: “such an affair as an object…draws the ontic sense peculiar to it…originally from the mental processes of experience alone…Experience is the primal instituting of the being-for-us of objects.”60 In light of this task, the achievement of Part I can be understood as having shown the full breadth of the idea of the mathesis universalis motivating the endeavors of modern science. The analysis of experience of Part II, however, reveals at the same time that an understanding of nature, limited to the domain of formal logic, must remain necessarily within the boundaries of the ontology of a world constructed mathematically.61 The demand to shift into a domain of experience beyond the properly logical sphere stems from a consequent meditation on formal logic itself, as Husserl has shown.62 The core of this treatment is simple: one principal aspect of judgment – think about the assertions of physical science – is to state truths about the objects, situations, and events of the experiential world, which is the only world of actual being that there is.63 It is at this juncture that Husserl realizes that scientific procedures such as ­idealization, formalization, and mathematization imply a specific model of objectivity that has been uncritically endorsed by modern science and 59 Hua XVII, 230/223 60 Hua XVII, 172–73/164. 61 See on this point, Hua VI, 178: “Die neuzeitliche Philosophie in ihren objektiven ­Wissenschaften ist, darüber dürfen wir nie hinwegsehen, geleitet von einem ­konstruktiven Begriff einer an sich wahren Welt, einer mindestens insichtlich der Natur in mathematischer Form substruierten. Ihr Begriff einer apriorischen Wissenschaft, schließlich einer universalen Mathematik (Logik, Logistik), kann daher nicht die Dignität einer wirklichen Evidenz, d.i. einer aus einer direkten Selbstgebung (erfahrenden Anschauung) geschöpften Wesenseinsicht haben, die sie gern für sich in Anspruch nehmen möchte.” 62 In the Crisis, Husserl then speaks of the priority of the universal apriori of the “pure lifeworld” over against the universal apriori of the objective-logical level. See Hua VI, 144. According to this expansion of the notion of apriori, Bachelard writes: “[T]he grounding of logic leads us directly to the transcendental problem-set in its full breadth, for it is the whole real world which is placed in question when the radical grounding of logic is envisaged. Hence logic cannot be separated from a transcendental theory of cognition which gives it its ground.” Bachelard 1968, 160. 63 “All theoretical truths – logical, mathematical, scientific – finds its ultimate validation and justification in evidences which concern occurrences in the Lebenswelt.” Gurwitsch 2009, 471.

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philosophy but that, on the contrary, requires explication. One of the determining presuppositions underlying modern science is that the spontaneous ­intuition of the world is too specific and subjective.64 There results the ­necessity to suppress this subjective intuition if we are to achieve the distance (one could say “a view from nowhere”) warranting the objectivity of knowledge. For the modern classical physicist, space is added upon space without there ever being an end to this process of objective addition. At the same time, the same scientist presupposes that if only it were possible to observe the totality of space, then the l­atter would appear as a massive reality completely formed and determined, i.e. as pure actuality. The contradiction of this view lies in the fact that it admits the idea of an actual perception of the infinite. This idea turns the infinite into a complete whole without rest, thereby getting rid of the very notion of the infinite. Classical positive science operates a naturalistic objectivation of the world as infinite homogenous universe. At the same time, the widely accepted metaphysical conception of nature as the domain of the purely physical, as the quantitative mass put in motion by certain forces governed by mathematical laws, has led disciplines such as biology and psychology to view their subject matter (life, consciousness) as a domain essentially assimilable to homogenizing processes to be characterized in terms of mechanisms of purely material elements. As a result, what Husserl calls the Copernican doctrine poses a basic problem: the view of the “infinite Copernican horizons” is not actually given within the demonstrative possibilities of “normal experiential confirmation” and “demonstrative showing.”65 ­Husserl makes here an important methodological distinction between the sense of “indication” (Anweisung) and that of “exhibition” or “demonstration” (­Ausweisung).66 He writes, “demonstration, I say, has its subjective departure-point and ultimate anchorage in the Ego who does the demonstrating.” The original situation for any demonstration is the field of perception of an embodied subject whose perceptive activity finds a correlate in the oriented space unfolding around

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Cf. Benoist 2008, 46; Gurwitsch 2009, 462–464; Bachelard 1968, 159–160; Patočka 2016, 6–11, 19–20; Ryckman 2005, 120–121. Husserl 1940, 319–320. “The modern apperception of the world as world of infinite Copernican horizons has not become for us a world-apperception confirmed by virtue of a world view actually ­accomplished. (‘Apperception’ of the world, any apperception whatever, is ­acceptive consciousness with the sense of being, World, inclusive of levels of constitution.) ­Apperceptive transfer has taken place such that it remains but a reference [Anweisung] for a confirmative intuition rather than actually being constructed at the end as demonstration [Ausweisung].” Husserl 1940, 311.

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the subject’s “central body.”67 Our own body with its sense organs plays a role in all perceptual experience, a role which becomes manifest in the correlation between the kinaesthesias and the perceptual presentations of the thing perceived. For the actual givenness of a perceived something to be fully in evidence as there, therefore, a range of contextual factors is indispensable, which amounts to say that the object and the perception of it are inseparably bound to a multi-faceted concrete setting in the world, all of which involve the full range of aspects of bodily being. From here, Formal and Transcendental Logic concludes that every judgment whatsoever ultimately exhibits a reference and a relation to the whole experiential world.68 Raising problems such as those pertaining to the origin of geometry or of the spatiality of Copernican nature, thus, phenomenological critique exhibits “the essential unintelligibility of the world as nature,” thereby leading to a “[r]adical alteration of the concept, a being ([to] on).”69 The unintelligibility of the nature here in question pertains obviously to the idealized nature of physics.70 On the other hand, the investigation of nature as given in direct and immediate experience must provide the account of what makes a being a being in its spatio-temporal individuality and determinateness. Husserl’s recasting of the theory of evidence as a theory of experience giving “something existent”71 comprises not just the general schematic idea of an existing world, but rather the very concrete ontic fullness of the world in its articulated individuation.72 The investigation of this fundamental stratum, which Husserl 67 68

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Husserl 1940, 311. “Das Sichbeziehen der Urteile (nicht Urteilssinne) auf Gegenstände besagt, dass im Urteil selbst diese Gegenstände als Substrate, als die, worüber ausgesagt ist, gemeint sind, und die reduktive Überlegung lehrt, als ein Apriori, dass jedes erdenkliche Urteil letztlich (und je nachdem bestimmt oder unbestimmt) individuelle (in einem weitesten Sinne reale) Gegenstandsbeziehung hat und (was schon weiterführend und zu begründen ist) dass es somit Beziehung hat auf ein reales Universum, auf eine ‘Welt’ oder ein Weltgebiet, ‘für das es gilt.’” Hua XVII, 212/204. See also Hua IV, 24, 56–58, 64–65. VI CM/1, 197. The modal theory of the world finds its fundamental presupposition in the idea of a modalization of “being” as the main effect operated by the epoché, which consists neither in denying being nor in the supposition of non-being, but of making explicit the consideration of being as “holding good” (Geltung). This means that the epoché leads to a reconsideration of being from the perspective of its relation to the subject. Bachelard 1968, 155n8, 162. Cf. Kerckhoven 2003, 34–36. See Hua XVII, § 106. Husserl’s radicalized reflection into the pure or reduced subjectivity in the 1920s makes clear that the transcendental field of phenomenology is to include the full concreteness of the experienced world. On this point, see Bruzina 2004, 94–95; Benoist 2008, 60. If the most radical questions for phenomenology arise when the problem of the “Seinsweise der

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already designates with the term “Lebenswelt” in the conclusive section of Formal and Transcendental Logic, finds in § 51 of the Crisis an explicit recognition in the formulation of the task of an “ontology of the life-world.”73 The fundamental status of this ontology lies in bringing out the relation to the subject as field of evidential demonstration. The important yet often understated point here is that the life-world has not only a purely descriptive interest but also and eminently a methodological import. This import also clarifies the statement that the sense of life-world ontology – Husserl is very explicit about this point –, is radically different than that of any ontology of the tradition.74 This is clear considered that Husserl’s whole attempt in the Crisis could be read as a long critical argument targeting modern objectivism. The principal point is that the life-world as object of ontology – as the ultimate universal apriori, as Husserl would say – only has sense as providing a clue (Leitfaden) into the Korrelativeinstellung of transcendental phenomenology proper. Now this function of life-world ontology puts it in stark contrast with traditional modern ontologies, which are precisely defined by taking some kind or other of objectivity to be unconditionally final. The analysis of the fundamental living intentionality that is in play everywhere in the experienced world, as experienced, provides rather the rudimentary yet indispensable descriptive framework giving concrete albeit initial definiteness to the idea of transcendental experience.75 This idea, therefore, is not only introduced, but sustained and carried out by ontological analyses while these analyses are not simply or purely ontological in a

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transzendentalen Subjektivität” is explicitly raised, then one sees not only the necessity to overcome preliminary concepts and results of transcendental analysis, but one also begins to realize that this very problem can only receive adequate treatment if “transcendental subjectivity” is taken in its utmost “purity” as required by the phenomenological reduction, that is, only if one does not stop at ontology but remains firmly within the transcendental point of view, as coherently required by ultimate methodic questions of self-critique. These questions, together with the tension-rich relationship between ontology and transcendental theory in phenomenology, are paradigmatically displayed in Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation. What the latter offers is a post-preliminary, thus radically self-critical reading of pure subjectivity beyond the world. On this point, see the whole Kerckhoven 2003. Cf. the footnote of the editor in Hua XVII, xxv. “Wir müssen fest im Auge behalten, dass der dieser ‘Ontologie’ eigene Sinn einer apriorischen Wissenschaft zu dem der Tradition in schroffem Kontrast steht.” Hua VI, 177. As Benoist and Gurwitsch before him clearly emphasize, the return to the life-world in Husserl is not at all an integration or complement of realism, which would include two sorts of objects in need of recognition, i.e. the objects of primary qualities and the objects of secondary qualities. See Benoist 2008, 49; Gurwitsch 2009, 476. Yet the primacy of ­secondary qualities in a phenomenological descriptive investigation only brings out a type of being whose pregiven sense remains to be elucidated transcendentally.

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traditional sense. The core of this treatment is that the full, life-wordly reality of the world does not rest on itself but is ontological correlate of transcendental subjectivity. Working out in concrete detail the way these phenomena, those of nature, of fellow humans, of the psyche, are found to be intrinsically related to transcendental subjectivity (as “cogitata” of “ego cogito”) is an immensely complex task, particularly this question of “others” in intersubjective community. Yet only this analysis can ultimately provide an account of the full concreteness of the (life-)world as terminus of the whole constitutive work of transcendental subjectivity: [W]ith the systematic progress of transcendental-phenomenological explication of the apodictic ego, the transcendental sense of the world must also become disclosed to us ultimately in the full concreteness with which it is incessantly the life-world for us all.76 This whole program coincides ultimately with the explication of how ­transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity as displayed by the systematic progress of the Cartesian Meditations and, of course, the specifics of this ­proposal cannot be taken up here.77 The important point of critical concern here is that the world, taken phenomenologically in genetic consideration, clearly does not mean an object as inanimate external-extended nature or a huge totality of objects as the physical totality of causal interactions, but rather it is the world that cannot be taken apart from the living subjects inhabiting it and that for this very reason is life-world, the field of actuality of the actual, that is, of the concrete experiential as sense-modally manifest and as temporally 76 Hua I, 163. 77 The immense scope of a theory of intersubjectivity is clearly recognized by Husserl when he notes that “The scope of such transcendental theory of Einfühlung is, looked closely, a much greater still than it appeared at first.” (Hua I, 235). See on this point, Kerckhoven 2003, 78–79. The three volumes edited by Iso Kern and devoted to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity display the massive extent of the whole task. Only to mention one pivotal aspect of this treatment relevant to the present discussion, the phenomenological amplification into the question of intersubjective experience articulates the idea of a transcendental experience of the “other” by way of the phenomenon of Paarung. In a post-preliminary phenomenological analysis of intersubjectivity, the result is that I find myself no longer unqualifiedly endowed with the splendid autonomy of a transcendental ego-center of reflection but individualized beyond the mere first-degree apperceptive two-fold experiential bottom-level constitution of myself as kinesthetic-aesthesiological subjectivity and objective body. Rather the sense of my intersubjective individualization reaches to my subjectivity in its full concreteness, that is, including my meditating activity as a phenomenologizing “I” who thematizes this very constitution.

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proceeding, and never simply a ready-made object-world. The discovery of this world as fundamentally non-independent from subjectivity is for Husserl the preparatory yet essential step to get hold of the investigative “guiding catalysts” indicating the complex plethora of levels and stages of constitutive augmentation whose concrete totality is what Husserl finally calls “experience” (Erfahrung) as transcendental total-correlation of world- and self-experience. The analysis of this whole experiential field is meant to deliver the concept of the concrete life of transcendental intersubjectivity and therefore the highest possible concept of absolute being. The pattern of argumentation that Husserl offers in Formal and Transcendental Logic and the methodological role of the life-world within the project of transcendental phenomenology enable us to highlight the element that in this complex whole which is the actual living of one’s life in the world must hold a place of pivotal importance along language as a dimension of ­mediation within which the activity of the conceptual achieves effectiveness: this element is history. I will not give an account of the specific issues that the raising of the question of history must involve in the advance of a phenomenological program. Rather in this brief presentation I will spell out the prime point ­pertaining to the laying open of the “inner history” of consciousness as fundamentally a sedimented history. In this connection, the previous considerations are tied especially to the theme of “Einströmen,” a theme that Husserl sketches out in § 59 of the Crisis.78 7

The Problem of Einströmen

This short paragraph brings together a number of issues that Husserl had worked out since the Logical Investigations. Then very early it became clear that the consciousness disclosed by the Fifth Investigation coincided with the natural and mundane psychic life of an empirical human being, that is, with the object of psychology. The radical scope of the phenomenological reflection, however, consists precisely in suspending the implicit and natural apperception of myself as this empirical human person and therefore in laying open a reflection that is no longer dependent on natural-psychological factors.79 While for Husserl there was no doubt that the transcendental “I” is “human being,” this coincidence is placed under the cast of self-apperceptive

78 On the notion of Einströmen in Husserl, see Steinbock 1995, 92; Steinbock 2017, 44. 79 Hua VIII, 78–79, 120ff., 427. See on this point, Bernet/Kern/Marbach 1989, 58–59.

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constitution.80 We read therefore in the Crisis that psychological reflection remains in “transcendental naïveté” as “performance of the so-to-speak readymade world-apperception.”81 As a result, Husserl claims that “only by breaking with naïveté, by way of the method of the transcendental reduction, it is possible to interrogate back into the transcendental historicality [transzendentale Geschichtlichkeit] from which ultimately the performance of sense and ­holding-good [Sinnes- und Geltungsleistung] pertaining to these apperceptions originates [herstammt].”82 This is the familiar overall casting of phenomenological analysis, at least in the context of Husserl’s reworking and deepening of genetic problems in the 1920s. What is now added by the notion of Einströmen is indicative of the general problematic raised by systematic and methodological considerations in phenomenology: “All the novel apperceptions, which are exclusively connected to the phenomenological reduction, together with the novel language (novel even though I inevitably utilize the language of my country [Volkssprache], but this also in consideration of an inevitable transformation of [its] sense) – all this, which previously was completely hidden [Verschlossen] and unsayable [Unsagbare], now flows back into the self-­ objectification, into my psychic life, and is apperceived as its newly disclosed intentional background of constitutive performances.”83 The whole dimension of the transcendental, taken in its fullness as it is disclosed by the transcendental reduction performed by a phenomenologizing subject, becomes itself “localized” (lokalisiert) therefore in consideration of the concurrent perduring of natural and empirical factors in the life of a human being while the psychic life of the natural subject as human results irreversibly “enriched” (bereichert) by the once opened and always expanding transcendental field. Regarding the sphere of naturalness,84 then, its relationship to the “Absolute” of transcendental subjectivity is intrinsic to the whole status of “thereness” of the field of experiential sentience and conceptually articulated cognition, the two defining activities in human being living in the world. Therefore the theme of Einströmen is a decisive fundamental theme in the overall economy of a phenomenological philosophy, especially when one fully realizes that the features of what ultimately amounts to transcendentally constituting action, if any claim in analytic description about the latter is to achieve legitimation warranted by immediate evidence of self-givenness, are inevitably reached, 80 CM VI./1, 183. Cf. Kerckhoven 2003, 30–31. 81 Hua VI, 213. 82 Hua VI, 212–213. 83 Hua VI, 214. 84 Hua XXIV, 371–372.

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d­ isclosed, and articulated according to what has necessarily the form of human awareness and cognition of a human subject. 8

The Modal Ontology of the World

What Husserl calls the problem of Einströmen becomes especially instructive at the point where the very idea of transcendental experience reaches its highest point of determination in the analysis of temporalization as the ­experiential aspect that is supposed to ground every being in full concreteness and evidence. It is also at this level of analysis that the contrast with traditional ontology becomes most dramatically pronounced. The point now is to see that Merleau-Ponty’s overarching thesis in the Phenomenology of Perception is entirely built upon the prime insight that the laying open of the full scope of the phenomenal field “opposes to the direct and total explication a principled difficulty.”85 The reason of this principled difficulty is made explicit right in the “Preface” and at pivotal junctures of the book. This lesson is most clearly spelled out in relation to the question of Eintrömen. In the “Preface,” Merleau-Ponty writes that “[w]e are in the world, since indeed our reflections are carried out in the temporal flux on which we are trying to seize (since they sich einströmen [flow along therein], as Husserl says).”86 At the end of the chapter on temporality, Merleau-Ponty reiterates this same point: “If even our purest reflections in fact retrospectively appear to us as in time, and if our reflections upon the flow are inserted into the flow [fn. What Husserl calls Eintrömen in the unpublished works], this is because the most precise consciousness of which we are capable is always found to be affected by itself or given to itself, and because the word consciousness has no sense outside of this duality.”87 In other words, r­ eflection, specifically as transcendental reflection into ultimate “origins,” discovers itself as always posthumous with respect to the set of structures and operations enabling its very reflective action. This prime lesson is famously presented as the realization of the “impossibility of a complete reduction.”88 Merleau-Ponty forcefully rephrases this point in the “Introduction,” when he writes that “the center of philosophy is no longer an autonomous transcendental subjectivity,

85 PhP 73. 86 PhP ix. 87 PhP 488. 88 PhP ix/xiv.

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which would be everywhere and nowhere, but rather in the ceaseless onsetting of reflection.”89 In sum, the question required by the final transcendental (i.e. temporal) structuring in full concreteness of the whole fundamental domain of being as appearing (“the life-world for us all”), structuring which includes integrally the very openness of “I” or “we” to this appearing, could hardly be framed in the eidetic, apodictic fashion of transcendental-phenomenological explication of a phenomenologizing “I,” assumed the latter is ineluctably preceded and conditioned by this very structuring. The consequence of this realization, however, is that world-horizonality, precisely as the dimension in which the material of intuition, that is, phenomena, are constituted in the first place, is not so easily displaced by a transcendental shift of analysis as much as it remains integrally in place in the whole analysis as what incessantly embraces all being. This includes, as it becomes clear from the citation from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations above, the being of the “I” and of the “we,” taken themselves in full concreteness, i.e. as humankind. The issue of Eintrömen, however, as reinterpreted in the advanced stage of time-analysis, displays most dramatically that the coming-to-be of the horizonality of the world, as temporal ­coming-to-be of the field of phenomenality as such, now affects the transcendental self-­ apperception of the apodictic ego as human, which was rather at first introduced as most radical move aimed at taking distance from being.90 As a result, this same world-horizonality must receive a quite different status within phenomenology that remained underdetermined in the preliminary treatment offered by Ideas I.91 On the one hand, the world is clearly not the absolute as it is rather what results from the operation of the “true ultimate” absolute of temporalization. On the other hand, the difficulty that a phenomenological way of proceeding must encounter to grasp temporality in a self-reflective act of eidetic intuition, as sophisticated and advanced this may be in terms of phenomenological analysis, makes the temporalized living experience of a sentient being in the world the ultimate locus where phenomenological reflection not only begins but also remains engaged in order to perform its task of clarification of what holds good as truly ultimate absolute. I shall now spell out a consequence to be drawn from this whole frame, which is pivotal in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking of nature and thus anticipates 89 90 91

PhP 75. In this move there lies the whole radicality of the phenomenological epoché. This is a point that Husserl himself clearly realizes in the 1920s. See in particular the ­second volume of Erste Philosophie and Formal and Transcendental Logic. Cf. Bruzina 2004, 79, 88 et passim.

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essential points that will be dealt with later in this study. Subsequently, I shall finally come to the further element of history announced at the beginning of this section as an element that is closely related to the element of language treated in the first section of this chapter. If the analysis of temporality is, as Husserl puts it at the end of Formal and Transcendental Logic, the analysis of the all-embracing form of facticity,92 and if the world-horizon is precisely the resulting product of the action of time while also being the very display of any coursing of temporalization at all, then the world-horizon itself carries the status of an all-embracing form of facticity, which is not able to be subsumed under any of the categories one forms and applies for beings encountered within the world.93 This argument should be understood in the context of Husserl’s late considerations about the problematic way in which we can make intelligible how the world as such features in our experience. In the ­manuscript from 1934 on the “Spatiality of Nature,” in which he lays out his thesis about the reversal (Umsturz) of the Copernican doctrine, Husserl writes: “The unity of an ‘intuition of the world’ [Einheit einer “Weltanschauung”] must confirm the world-possibility [Weltmöglichkeit] in all further fashioning of world-apperception – as the possibility and the universum of open possibilities which make up a fundamental composition of the world’s actuality.”94 When commenting on these lines in his 1959 essay on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty paraphrases as follows Husserl’s modal reading of the world-phenomenon: “All possibility is variation of our reality, it is possibility of effective reality (Möglichkeit an Wirklichkeit).”95 The problem is how to understand this actuality if in this phenomenological frame of analysis it can no longer simply be identified with the actuality maintained by the idea of the Copernican infinite universe. Husserl clearly sees that the all-embracing form of the world raises what he calls “the great problem of the structure of a possible intuition of the world.”96 The problem, 92

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“[E]in Bewusstseinsleben ist nicht denkbar denn als solches, das in einer wesensnowendigen Form der Faktizität, in der Form der universalen Zeitlichkeit ursprünglich gegeben ist, in der jedes Bewusstseinserlebnis, im strömenden Wechsel typisch abgewandelter Gegebenheisweisen innerhalb einer lebendigen Gegenwart, seine identische Zeitstelle erhält und dann aus Wesensquellen der Habitualität bleibend behalt.” Hua XVII, 318. See Bruzina 2004, 429. On the essential role of an “orienting thread” (Leitfaden) for ­phenomenological analysis, see Hua VII, 187n1 and Fink’s Vergegenwärtigung und Bild, § 6, in particular pp. 16–18. Cf. Kerckhoven 2003, 96. Husserl 1940, 310. S 227–228. There is a “universality of our world,” Merleau-Ponty writes, not with respect to any wordly content, but rather according to “its ontological structure which envelops every possible and which every possible leads back to.” VI 282. Cf. VI 298. VI CM/1, 207. Das große Problem der Struktur einer Möglichen Welt-Anschauung. For a more systematic treatment of the idea of world-horizon, I refer the reader to the A ­ ppendix XII

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in sum, is precisely that world-horizonality cannot be appropriately analyzed in terms of intentional objectivity.97 This problem has to do with the difficulty of conceiving a synthesis or unity of the manifold of appearances resulting in the representation of an objective world according to the standard philosophically primary distinction of constituting subject and constituted object, taken that the latter is posterior to the total integral unit of living sentient awareness in and with the world.98 If, as Merleau-Ponty had already remarked in the lectures on La Nature, when reading these same lines, “According to Husserl every possible pertaining to the world must be founded on an intuition of the world,”99 then, however, he continues, the world is a “pure given [donnée pure] that cannot be derived, not even by means of r­ eflection, from what is necessary or from what is possible.”100 In a working note of The Visible and the Invisible on this same theme, Merleau-Ponty then states that “this unique possible that is our world is not, in its own fabric, made of actuality.”101 From these texts on the idea of an intuition of the world, one is led to the conclusion that, in the phenomenologically radicalized approach that I have been displaying, the world is a modal “singularity.” This however means that the whole actuality of the world is properly speaking of a pre-objective or pre-categorial order and therefore fundamentally lying before any distinction in being-in-itself and subjective representation.102

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in the first volume of the Sixth Cartesian Mediation with the title “Consciousness of the horizon of the world and its structures. Attempt at a full systematic treatment.” The question is raised explicitly by Merleau-Ponty in a working note from February 1959 (VI 226). Merleau-Ponty refers to Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, Hua I, § 48. See in ­particular Hua I, 135: “Wie kann für mich wirklich Seiendes, und als das nicht nur ­irgendwie Vermeintes, sondern in mir sich einstimmig Bewährendes, anderes sein als sozusagen Schnittpunkt meiner konstitutiven Synthesis?” See Merleau-Ponty’s concise statement in Le visible et l’invisible of the problem ­affecting every philosophy of reflection: “La philosophie réflexive part de ce principe que, si une perception doit pouvoir être mienne, il faut que d’ores et déjà elle soit l’une de mes ‘représentations,’ en d’autres termes, que je sois, comme ‘pensée,’ celui qui effectue la liaison des aspects sous lesquels l’objet se présente, et leur synthèse en objet.” VI 67–68. N 123. See also S 227: “Toute évocation des mondes possibles renvoie à la vision du nôtre (Welt-anschauung).” N 123. VI 282. See also the considerations on this theme of a proto-modal singularity of the world in Merleau-Ponty’s working notes in The Visible and the Invisible: VI 67–74, 147–149, 281–282. At the end of the section entitled Reflection and Interrogation in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty essentially claims that for a philosophy of reflection the question about the singularity of the world makes no sense, that is, for a perspective placing the subject beyond or outside of the world, which is not able to overcome objectivism as

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History in Lifeworld Phenomenology

Merleau-Ponty is the thinker whose philosophical program from the beginning intends to root the essence, which, in philosophy, is traditionally the name for what does not come to pass and perish, into existence. In the Phenomenology of Perception, in the crucial chapter on “Temporality,” he is very explicit in bringing the idea of eternity back to temporal experience: “eternity feeds on time […] Eternity is the time of dreams, and the dream refers back to the day much as it only repeats the move of objectivism on a higher level. See on this point and in connection with Husserl’s philosophy of reflection, Benoist 2008, 62. The question about the proto-modal singularity of the world has sense only if the question of plurality of worlds retains meaning as inseparable from it. Fink makes this connection between the two questions. See Bruzina 2004, 424. Merleau-Ponty speaks in this connection of a “double postulate” of Husserlian phenomenology. In the first lecture course on “Nature,” Merleau-Ponty points out that Husserl’s concern about the idea of Nature is played out within reflexive philosophy in general and transcendental idealism in particular. At the end of his interpretation, Merleau-Ponty confirms the presence of a tension in Husserl’s phenomenology between a philosophy of Nature and the framework of transcendental idealism. See N 102, 112. In his lecture course on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty describes a stronger opposition between the proto-modal ontology of openness sketched by a text such as that about the Copernican doctrine (Umsturz) and the philosophy of constitution to which Husserl consistenly turns. See OG 91. In The Philosopher and His Shadow, we read a more charitable reading of Husserl’s move when Merleau-Ponty says that the loyalty to the “evidences of constitution” must be understood in relation to the dramatic ­expansion of the transcendental field from the field of idealizations to that of the totality of ­experience (see S 223). In Merleau-Ponty’s own words, “[i]f the ‘back-referrals’ of constitutive analysis are not to prevail over against the principle of a philosophy of consciousness, the reason is that the latter has expanded or transformed itself to the extent to be c­ apable of everything, even of that which contests it.” (S 224) Here Merleau-Ponty reads Husserl’s move as the radicalization of the ideal of a “wise world” submitted to the ways of consciousness, a move described as “absurd” (insensé), but that, at the same time, yields the discovery of “those beings beneath our idealizations and our objectifying activities, which nourish the latter in secret and which can hardly be identified with noemas.” (S 227) For Merleau-Ponty, these texts – those encompassing Ideas II up to Umsturz – are not susceptible to a coherent explication, even though he claims that in Umsturz the role of the lifeworld is clearly that of being the source of all idealizations. In this context, “constituting subjectivity” represents also only an eminent case of such idealization (see OG 92). Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl is functional to his intention to redefine the very idea of transcendental philosophy. This intention is clearly present in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking from the beginning. In SC he already calls for a redefinition of transcendental philosophy in order to integrate in it the phenomenon of the real (see above Chapter 1). See SC 241. Finally, Husserl does not conceal this ambiguity but points to the necessity to work it out in terms of a fundamental distinction at the end of the Cartesian Meditations (Hua I, § 64, 180ff.). For other salient statements about this rich tension in Husserl’s thought, see e.g. Hua VII, 187n1 and Hua XV, Text Nr. 38.

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before [veille], from which it borrows all of its structures. So what is this waking time [temps éveillé] where eternity takes root?”103 The vast programmatic studies of our original situation as incarnated beings in the world in the years following the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception focus heavily on the way this living dimension interacts with the eidetic, knowledge, and with what “consciousness” ultimately amounts to. The central point Merleau-Ponty spuns in many ways – for which his studies on language and linguistics play a pivotal role – is one he already clearly made in the Phenomenology of Perception: [W]e must not consider reflection a simple return to a universal ­reason, setting it up in advance in the unreflected; rather, we must consider reflection to be a creative operation that itself participates in the facticity of the unreflected. This is why, of all philosophies, only phenomenology speaks of a transcendental field. This word signifies that reflection never has the entire world and the plurality of monads spread out and objectified before its gaze, that it only ever has a partial view and a limited power. This is also why phenomenology is a phenomenology, that is, the study of the appearance of being to consciousness, rather than taking for granted its possibility in advance.104 The point expresses namely the realization on Merleau-Ponty’s part that while reflection, as transcendental reflection, can only be actual in the empirical person of this reflecting human, with the finite scope that this situation implies, it is imperative for this reflection, if it purports to be a transcendental reductive operation, to operate truly transcendentally, i.e. to not decide in advance the sense of the appearance of being to consciousness in terms of “spirit” or “mind” – especially if taken in traditional terms of abstract autonomous action of an intellectual reflective agent. This realization, which implies critical consideration of the question about who does the reflecting action in the first place, must also affect the standing of eidetic sense that gets articulated in reflection as essentially tied to the actuality of the empirical human as well as to the localized event from which it sets off as reflection.105 It should be noted that it is this realization that enables Merleau-Ponty to recast Husserl’s important 103 PhP 484. 104 PhP 74. 105 PhP ii–ix offers the main points about “essences” that are treated on pp. ix–xiv. See also PhP 76. The essay on “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man” takes up the issue again; and, finally, the new standing of the eidetic is an issue that runs throughout Le Visible et l’invisible. See in particular the opening section, “Réflexion et interrogation,” VI 17–74.

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notion of Stiftung or “institution” – which in the Origin of Geometry is meant to describe the formation of sense, especially of the ideal sense of scientific productions, in the context of the problem of historical constitution of objectivity – into a phenomenology of the historical event. The phenomenological conception of the historical event explicitly thematizes the “double role” (later called a chiasm) in every beginning reflection as a reflection that is both of the transcendental (objective genitive), the latter however remaining precisely beyond categorization in terms of actuality and non-actuality, and of the transcendental (subjective genitive), in relation to which reflection emerges as the constitutive result that must remain inchoate in its conceptual or eidetic reach as derivative with respect to that transcendental structure. Husserl’s theory of institution in a text such as the Origin of Geometry, according to Merleau-Ponty, implies therefore that “the transcendental origin cannot be anything but an empirical origin: there is in the empirical origin an interior, a conceivable ­history to be made explicit, and that is there in the form of a field.”106 The new sense of the eidetic in two registers plays out within an understanding of history whose full scope and meaning in transcendental phenomenology cannot be resolved in this brief consideration, yet the following remarks should suffice to get hold of the main aspect of this larger issue. History, on the one hand, appears as the factor in which sense as eidetic is natively and naturally produced to achieve effective conceptuality in the articulated and expressive forms of language.107 In this register, then, history is the framing setting for the formation of sense, meaning, coherence, and ultimately reason in human experience. This is history properly speaking, as comprising, on the one hand, the series of events in their singularity and contingency, which, at the same time open a field or norm of sense or a tradition characterized by a certain normativity; on the other hand, there is the aspect of sense or normativity in which the instituting event both inserts itself and which the same event also modifies, transforms by re-launching or re-effectuating the elements provided by the acquired, already established, and initially guiding sense or norm into a new norm.108 The notion of historical event, which Merleau-Ponty thinks in light of the idea of “institution,” expresses simultaneously the idea of an originating process and of the originated result of a process.109 The thematization 106 107 108

IP 100. See N 290–292, 302–304, 355–360. On this point and especially regarding Merleau-Ponty’s theory of history, see the clear and insightful exposition by Roberto Terzi, Institution, événement et histoire chez M ­ erleau-Ponty (2017). 109 “Il convient aussi de remarquer l’importance de l’‘effet de champ’ que Merleau-Ponty obtient par la traduction d’‘institution,’ aumoins à deux égards: en permier lieu, ‘­institution’ joint en soi de façon efficace le significations de l’acte (ou de l’événement)

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of this history that is both instituting and instituted eschews the presupposition of a pure constituting consciousness and issue into the conception of a “brute” or “vertical” history (histoire sauvage, verticale).110 On the other hand, in a second register, history transcends and cannot be ultimately framed in any such temporal framework as succession of human generations and cultures.111 The understanding of history raises therefore an analogous issue to that raised by the understanding of the world as horizon of our experience: how can a historical being understand history h ­ istorically?112 The dimension of the manifestation of being is essentially historical, yet there follows that the dimension of the manifesting itself structuring the living connection between the appearances in the world and the intending of such appearances again can hardly be said to be “historical” in the same sense in which this is applied to events and actions in some actual ongoing and properly historical situation. Yet Merleau-Ponty gives a name to the fundamentally historical dimension of experience taken in this second register: la Terre. In the conclusion of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry and focusing on Husserl’s text on the “Reversal” (Umsturz) of Copernican ­doctrine, we see him bringing to bear in ontological terms the investigative material drawn from the first-register concept of history and the analysis of historical ­institution.113 The result of Umsturz can be formulated as the discovery of the primacy of our incarnated coexistence on the earth with respect to any form of i­ dealization.114 According to Merleau-Ponty, the central insight of the analysis of the earth is the determination of physical reality as resting on carnal being (une réalité physique reposant sur du charnel).115 This finding,

110 111 112

113 114 115

d’instituer et du résultat de cet acte (‘institution’ comme ce qui a été institué) - en deuxième lieu, et par là même, le terme ‘institution’ permet de mettre en communication la problématique strictement phénoménologique et les multiples institutions de sens (anthropologiques, culturelles, politiques) qui peuplent les différents champs de notre expérience.” Terzi 2017, 5–6. According to Terzi, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the notion of institution supplies for the lack of thematization of the idea of historical event in contemporary phenomenology, especially in France – in spite of the latter’s focus on the notion of event. Merleau-Ponty rather offers the phenomenological and conceptual framework for understanding the idea of historical event which emerged as paradigmatic notion in the context of contemporary historiography. See Terzi 2017, 4, 11–12. See Terzi 2017, 19–20. Cf. Bruzina 2004, 432f., 517. This is the question that Paul Ricœur asks right at the beginning of his Le conflit des intérpretations: “la compréhension historique met ainsi en jeu tous les paradoxes de l’historicité: comment un être historique peut-il comprendre historiquement l’histoire?” Ricœur 1969, 9. See the conclusive section with the title “Ontological scope of this analysis” in OG 88ff. OG 90. N 111.

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however, raises the q­ uestion about the precise nature of the carnal being thus discovered. The earth becomes in this analysis the name of the fundamental “Being-that-­is-stem” (Être-souche), “ground-stem” or Stammboden116 as starting point of all experience, which, as a result, carries with itself always an “earthly” sense (­irdisch).117 In the Résumé for this course, we then read: The type of being which our experience of the earth and the body reveals to us is no curiosity of external perception but has a philosophical signification. Our implantation envelops a view of space and temporality, a view of natural causation, of our ‘territory.’ It envelops an Urhistorie which binds all existing or possible societies insofar as they all inhabit the same ‘earthly’ space, in the broadest sense…118 What the “earth” names as “ground” of a “proto-history” is therefore equivalent to what Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible calls the “event of the world.”119 If we assist to what can be described as a de-regionalization of the historical event to encompass the dimension of cosmic time, again the main point is however to notice that this move is carried out under the realization that takes this de-regionalization as being both intrinsically inadequate – as being able to be articulated in terms of some actual historical situation in the life of an historically conditioned subject – and yet necessary as representative within first-register analysis of what in principle escapes framing within this analysis. Merleau-Ponty articulates this perspective again with reference to Husserl’s notion of Einströmen in The Visible and the Invisible in a working note from February 1959: “The Einströmen: a particular case of sedimentation, that is, of secondary passivity, that is, of latent intentionality – It is Péguy’s historical inscription.”120 In a later working note from May 20, 1959, Merleau-Ponty then universalizes this claim about the genesis of sense when he writes that “each perception is a ‘thought,’ but the whole is ‘inscribed’ in the world – Every event belongs to the type of historical event that Péguy speaks of, ‘a rhythm of the event of the world.’”121 The task that therefore opens here, in the terms of what 116 117 118 119 120 121

Husserl 1940, 317; OG 87. Husserl 1940, 318, 324. OG 87–88. RC 170. VI 249. The expression “event of the world” occurs also in the essay on Bergson se faisant. See S 236. Claudia Serban has offered an excellent commentary of this expression as it occurs in Merleau-Ponty in connection with Charles Péguy. See Serban 2017. VI 226. VI 249. In his Clio, Charles Péguy (1873–1914) entertains a meditation about history. Through the words of Clio, the muse of history, Péguy speaks of “the law of the ­historical inscription” (Péguy 1932, 33). The historical inscription is this “entrance into the ­matter

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I have been referring to as a second-register analysis, could rightly receive the title of a “metaphysics of history.”122

of time. That which we all do more or less obscurely […].” (ibid. 95). This entrance marks everything that is temporal. Clio calls it the “common misfortune,” the “scandal,” the “­mystery” inherited from the common grandfather Chronos (ibid. 27, 31ff.). The negative and, in general, ambiguous tone of Péguy’s descriptions is due to his strategy that aims at establishing the defining role of the temporal for the idea of eternity while all the same subordinating time and history to the Christian project of salvation. Through cases as diverse as childhood, the work of genius, and the process of de-Christianization of the modern world, Péguy articulates his concept of history and time as inscription. The inscription is therefore described as an event. He speaks of “historical event,” “temporal event,” or “inscribed event” (événement enregistré) (ibid. 32). The notion of event is now further qualified as “organic.” Péguy writes, “Does not appear to be evident that the event is not at all homogeneous, that perhaps it is organic, that there is what in acoustic are called antinodes and nodes, fillings and voids, a rhythm, maybe a regulation, tensions and distentions, periods and epochs, axes of vibration, raising points, points of crisis, dull planes and suddenly points of suspension.” (ibid. 265). Péguy thereby rethinks and recast the organicist conception of history into a philosophy of the historical event. Merleau-­ Ponty’s reference to Péguy draws inspiration from a meditation on the problem of history that pivots around the idea of “dovetailing of the temporal and the eternal,” which he claims being the “center” upon which everything depends. Péguy 1958, 119. Péguy speaks of an “engagement” “one in the other” of the eternal and the temporal, “their being dovetailed one into the other,” ibid. 115. Péguy uses several formulations to express this point such as “mortice,” “center,” “central” or “axial,” “binding,” “link,” “the inlay of the one in the other” (ibid. 120). In Péguy’s meditation on the permanence of the temporal activity itself, on the intemporal nature of the temporal dynamism, in a word, on what he refers to, in various and recurring ways, as “temporal eternity” and “historical inscription,” we find summarized Péguy’s most significant contribution to Merleau-Ponty’s later elaborations. Péguy’s “eternally temporal wound” becomes in Merleau-Ponty’s own words “the most profound, incurable wound.” PM 63. See on this point Colonna 2008, 142–143. In more technical terms, this wound is a way to express the exposure to temporality, the “being-at” of the latent intentionality that Merleau-Ponty repeatedly opposes to the intentionality of “act.” VI 267, 303. Cf. already PhP 485. Finally, Péguy’s idea of the event as historical inscription seems to offer avenues for unexpected and fertile connections with some developments in the theory of time and history in phenomenology. Anyone who has read Husserl’s Origin of Geometry can certainly detect similarities between the idea of Stiftung, Nachstiftung, and Endstiftung with Péguy’s account of the historical event as the opening of a series of events subject to alteration and deterioration and therefore requiring a continuous work of revitalization. Furthermore, Péguy’s theory of the event anticipates more contemporary attempts to rethink the relationship between the eternal and the temporal and, more specifically, it foreruns the paradigmatic role that the thought of the event has assumed in post-Heideggerian phenomenology. On this last point, see Serban 2017. 122 In the course summary of the lecture course on “Institution in Personal and Public ­History” (1954–1955), Merleau–Ponty makes explicit the direction of his project when he writes: “It is the development of phenomenology into a metaphysics of history that we wished to outline here.” RC 65.

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In 1947, not too long after the publication of his seminal work on the P­ henomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote a short text dealing with a topic that may seem at first antithetic to phenomenology. In The ­Metaphysics in Man, Merleau-Ponty describes the contemporary phenomenological ­psychology of perception as “metaphysical” or “transnatural.”123 What he means is that with the notion of structure, organization, and understanding of structures, this science “enable[s] us to rediscover a dimension of being and a kind of knowledge that the human being forgets in the natural mode of ­existence.”124 The role of metaphysics in the program of a phenomenology of perception is explicitly recognized in Merleau-Ponty’s research proposal that he submitted in 1951 for the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France. Here the parallel issues of language and history frame the conception of a total history, a single tissue [un seul tissu] tying together all the enterprises of simultaneous and successive civilizations, all the results of thought and all the facts of economics […] Our inquiries should lead us finally to a reflection on this transcendental man, or this “natural light” common to all, which appears through the movement of history – to a reflection on this Logos which gives us the task of vocalizing a hitherto mute world. Finally, they should lead us to a study of the Logos of the perceived world which we encountered in our earliest studies in the evidence of things. Here we rejoin the classical questions of metaphysics.125 In the following chapters, we shall turn to Merleau-Ponty’s study of the Logos of the perceived world which took the form of a series of studies on “Nature” in the second half of the 1950s and rejoin with him the classical questions of metaphysics as they emerge within these impressive studies. The ­preceding considerations about structure, operative intentionality, the spatial level, ­language, history, and the earth, make available some defining features of ­Merleau-Ponty’s recovery of nature before naturalism. This discussion not only enables us to begin to approach more directly Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of nature in the lectures at the Collège de France, but it also allows us to address more systematically the questions about the relation between transcendental and empirical approaches, the recasting of this relation within the development of phenomenology, and the significance of this recasting for the starting point of phenomenology in the context of these lectures. 123 124 125

SNS 162. SNS 162. PD 47.

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Structural Ontology between Merleau-Ponty and the New Philosophy of Science

1 Introduction In a claim epitomizing the split animating the epistemological c­ onsiderations about the meaning of objectivity in contemporary physics, Sir Arthur ­Eddington drew a distinction between the idea of “the point of view of no one in particular” and that of a point of view from nowhere, i.e. which does not postulate an observer at all.1 By drawing this distinction, Eddington was drawing a clear line between the archetypal attempts in physical epistemology to ground and explain our finite experience of the world and his own epistemological proposal about the scope of the methods of physics. Especially in light of the latest discoveries in physics in the 1910s and 1920s, physical methods are deemed only capable to provide a structural knowledge of physical reality. In Eddington’s account, this meant that the “objective reality” known by physical science is not a mind-independent object, but it rather coincides with the regulative demand of a completely impersonal reality.2 This is a reality detached from particular contents and that, for this reason, exhibits only structural features expressing the (ideal) synthesis of all the spatiotemporal measurements of all possible observers.3 In defending the thesis that the representation of the physical world is a synthetic representation from all conceivable physical measurements, Eddington was tying his epistemology of science to the transcendental idealistic tradition in philosophy, as Thomas Ryckman has shown in his fascinating account of the history of relativity theory. If we turn to the other principal component of the contemporary physical worldview, quantum mechanics, which raises challenges to the deterministic framework of explanation characterizing classical mechanics, then similar and urgent epistemological considerations are raised about the meaning of objectivity in contemporary physics. James Ladyman and Don Ross have shown that quantum mechanics, together with its more cutting-edge developments, 1 Eddington 1921, 31. See Ryckman 2005, 233. 2 Ryckman 2005, 186ff. 3 Ryckman 2005, 195ff. © Alessio Rotundo, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004548947_006

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agrees with relativity theory in rejecting the primacy of self-subsistent individuals as fundamental components of reality and rather motivate a structural or relational conception of reality.4 These remarks can be summarized by highlighting that already Ernst Cassirer, in his historical considerations about the epistemology of science in the new physics, had shed light upon the direction of thought (Denkbewegung) of modern science that he reads as a process replacing the notions of “substance” or “thing” with functional and relational concepts. The concept of object within physical science results thereby deeply transformed.5 One of the principal epistemological hurdles that the new advances in contemporary physics raise has to do with the question of how the new theories relate to experience. The line of interpretation in the philosophy of science outlined above stresses the idea that physics has progressively abandoned the concepts traditionally used to articulate our experience of nature. In spite of this, leading epistemological approaches in the twentieth-century, ranging from logical empiricism to scientific realism, have shown themselves to be recalcitrant to recast their assumptions about a reality made of things, be it “atoms” or fixed “bodies,” “rods,” and “clocks.” If the explicit aim of these epistemological theories has been that of appropriating the novel physical discoveries into a general scientific image of the world, they rather betray an attachment to a conception of experience that is quite traditional in its realist prejudice about the fully determined actuality of the world. As a result, read in light of the abovementioned line of inquiry, ­twentiethcentury epistemology of science has often foregone the most interesting implications of new physical theories. For the same reason, however, it also fell short of its aim to establish a satisfactory connection of the new theory with experience. If physical knowledge, despite the logical-formal character and artificialism of its mathematics, is simply taken to provide information about a mind-independent nature, this implies that physical quantities are posited as distinct properties of natural reality. It does not matter if the physicist, or better, the epistemologist of science, holds that a final framing of reality cannot be reached in this way. What matters for a philosophical evaluation of these arguments is the assumption that if it were possible to arrive at this final framing of reality by way of physical knowledge, then whatever the physical quantity thereby reached would express the true nature of reality. “[The physicist],” Eddington poignantly writes, “has an idea that if he could become a god contemplating the external world, he would see his manufactured physical 4 Ladyman and Ross 2007, 182. 5 Cassirer 1957, 80–81, 108. See Ryckman 2005, 45.

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quantity forming a distinct feature of the picture.”6 This remark is revealing because it points to the proximity of a certain contemporary epistemology of science with the onto-theological epistemology of classical physics. It was Laplace who imagined a universe where all the facts in place at a certain moment would be nomologically sufficient to predict the whole future of the world.7 Yet this conception implicitly presupposes an infinite intelligence capable of knowing all the facts of the world at a given instant. According to Eddington, however, the epistemology of the contemporary physicist shares with that of Laplace’s natural philosophy the idea of an unlimited being capable of dominating the whole of nature. The logical empiricist and realist attempt aiming at severing the ties of our physical conception of reality, which can be observed and measured according to objective physical methods, from any subjective contribution to the way reality itself appears, turns against its own intentions and yields a paradoxical result: the naturalized world of physics, which includes the scientist and the philosopher, corresponds to the picture, and the experience, that only an absolute subject or an infinite intelligence could achieve. Logical empiricist and realist approaches alike, in spite of their ­divergent views on the particulars of their theories, share a common objectivistic ­ontology, which opposes any introduction of “idealistic” concepts into s­ cience. The customary realist assumption that identifies the objectivity of physical knowledge with the postulate of a “view from nowhere,” as we have seen, remains liable to an extreme form of subjectivism. Thus, in order to advance our philosophical understanding of the epistemological implications regarding objectivity, experience, formalism in the new physics, it is reasonable to suggest that the question is not that of avoiding at all costs the introduction of “constitutive” or “synthetic a priori” principles as the sign of a degenerative relapsing into an unacceptable form of idealism. Rather, supported by the fact that more rigorous discourse on the role of transcendental idealism for the constitution of objectivity has emerged within twenty-first-century philosophy of science, the route that I will follow here will be that of critically 6 Eddington 1923, 1. 7 The idea of an infinite intelligence put forth by Laplace can already be found in Kant, so that the Laplacean and the Kantian views express the same idea of causality of nature, in which also all human actions are inserted: “so sind alle Handlungen des Menschen in der Erscheinung aus seinem empirischen Charakter und den mitwirkenden anderen Ursachen nach der Ordnung der Natur bestimmt, und wenn wir alle Erscheinungen seiner Willkür bis auf den Grund erforschen könnten, so würde es keine einzige menschliche Handlung geben, die wir nicht mit Gewißheit vorhersagen und aus ihren vorhegenden Bedingungen als notwendig erkennen könnten.” B577–578. Emphasis mine.

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appreciating the contribution of subjective or phenomenological conditioning factors in play in our conception of objectivity of the physical world. In order to do so, I shall take up the particular approach in p ­ henomenology offered by Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ­investigations appear to be especially interesting in the present context for the following ­reasons. First, in a series of lecture courses on the theme of Nature (1956–57, 1957–58, 1959–1960), Merleau-Ponty works out a phenomenology of nature by paying close attention to recent discoveries in the sciences, from quantum physics to the new advances in embryological biology and ethology. M ­ erleau-Ponty’s close study of how nature was already being studied in empirical science purports to counter naïve presuppositions in the philosophical understanding of nature. However, his analyses are carried out under the guidance of phenomenological principles regarding how to best analyze the relationship of consciousness and the world. These principles, to put it ­schematically, ruled out the idea of a mind-independent reality while also challenging a certain absolutizing modern conception of subjective consciousness.8 Second, Merleau-Ponty’s study of physical nature shows a notable concordance with the conclusions reached by more recent philosophy of science. This chapter takes up this second point more closely by drawing on the structural realist contribution by James Ladyman and Don Ross. Before turning to the main theme of the chapter, however, let me give a compressed synopsis of Merleau-Ponty’s “Nature” course leading up to the study of physical nature. In his first course on “Nature” from 1956–57, Merleau-Ponty claimed with reference to the new physics that took shape in the first half of the twentieth century: “[p]hysics destroys certain prejudices of philosophical and non-­philosophical thought without, for all that, being a philosophy.”9 This first course lays out a programmatical objective: the study of nature must function as an “introduction to the definition of being.”10 The course is divided into two sections. In the first section, Merleau-Ponty presents a reading of the history of Western ontology according to various conceptions of natural production (production naturelle) starting with Descartes. These conceptions share in a certain “diplopia,” that is, as already indicated above, in a certain difficulty in harmonizing and integrating the double 8

9 10

The specifics about the scaffold of basic elements contributing to this line of inquiry into the phenomenon of living consciousness, especially the full notion of operative intentionality on all levels of the emergence of sense in experience, were the matter of Chapters 2 and 3 of this book. This matter is preparatory to the manifest philosophical reinterpretation of those basic elements in the course of the lectures on “Nature” and in the working notes in Le Visible et l’invisible. The detailing of this reinterpretive trajectory is the task of Chapters 4–6 below. N 138. RC 125.

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character of reality, in our experience and knowledge, as both phenomenal and objective. After a brief remark on Aristotelian and Stoic approaches to nature conceived as a “form,” as process of realization of a type, Merleau-Ponty focuses on Descartes as the central figure for subsequent interpretations of nature. Modern interpretations of nature are distinguished according to the way in which they articulate the relationship between nature as naturans and nature as naturata, i.e., respectively, as creative principle and as created product. This split is traced back to Cartesian philosophy. The modern accounts of nature are divided into two groups: 1) Kant and neo-Kantianism; 2) the “romantic” conceptions of nature of Schelling, Bergson, and, significantly included in this group, Husserl.11 The second section of the course continues to detect the presence of Cartesian motives in the interpretation of nature of modern science. It is however with the interpretation of the more recent physics that Merleau-Ponty begins to outline more substantial elements of his conception of nature. In the following, I shall turn to a more detailed assessment of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the contemporary contributions of science to the idea of nature. 2

Ontic Structural Realism

Classical forms of naturalism are usually predicated upon the idea of nature as pure external physicality whose components are seen as being variously worked out by likewise physical forces and their laws. The second section of the course on the scientific concept of nature discloses factors demanding to reconsider realistic and causal assumptions about physical nature. This treatment exhibits some remarkable considerations that find validation and an independent development in more recent literature in the philosophy of science. One contribution by Ladyman and Ross is especially paradigmatic of the kind of recasting in the conception of physical nature as demanded by the advances and findings in newer theories of physics. While the conclusions that Merleau-Ponty draws from his analysis of physical nature point to a type of metaphysics that is in no way to be confused with the metaphysical scientism advocated by Ladyman and Ross, a comparative commentary serves here the purpose to inject cogency into Merleau-Ponty’s ontological proposal in the “Nature” lectures as well as that of integrating and confirming some aspects of this proposal by looking at a recent assessment by leading philosophers of science. In return, the following considerations build the basis for a critical deepening of Ladyman’s and Ross’ realist contribution, especially in connection 11

See Carbone 1998, 164.

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with the transformative recasting of the primary character and sense to be attributed to the “physical-material” within Merleau-Ponty’s own metaphysics of nature. The focus of this section will be the convergence of Ladyman’s and Ross’ structural analysis of the epistemology of physics with some main tenets of Merleau-Ponty’s study of physical nature. The interest of Ladyman’s and Ross’ contribution lies in two main points: first, the anti-reductionism to which they commit philosophy in the light of recent scientific discoveries and debates in physics; second, the naturalism that they expressly understand as a form of scientism. The commonality with Merleau-Ponty’s project is clear. Since The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty has attempted to show the untenability of reductionist theories while defending the idea of a truth of naturalism. In the “Nature” lectures, Merleau-Ponty claims that the philosophy of quantum physics is more realist than classical realism and more subjectivist than transcendental idealism.12 This claim is clarified if read in light of the consideration that the objectivism of realism is only the counterpart of the subjectivism of transcendental philosophy. Contemporary physics is realist because it does not find the truth of its objects in a transcendental dimension subject to a universal “I think.” At the same time the new physics is subjectivist because it is no longer concerned with a mind-­independent object as such. Rather contemporary science “calls into question its own object as well as its relation to the object.”13 There is therefore what we could call a transcendental trait of contemporary science that however coexists with its naturalism. The “hyper-realism” and the “hyper-transcendentalism” of physics is what motivates Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the findings of physical science. Ladyman and Ross develop a metaphysical view that they contrast with a widespread approach common to many contemporary philosophers, even those who explicitly practice a naturalist philosophy. This position draws inspiration from what the authors define as being obsolete features of classical physics or common sense representations of reality.14 These features consist roughly in the idea that the world is made of little things in a relation of efficient causation.15 Ladyman and Ross group the different views that are shaped by these features under the title of “neo-scholastic metaphysics.”16 These authors thus develop their proposal by contrasting it with the two main tenets 12 13 14 15 16

N 134–135. N 120. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 19. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 4–5. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 8ff. It is interesting to note a similar use of the term “­metaphysics” with regard to physics in the work of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll. In the Theory of Meaning (1940), he writes that “today’s physics would be the purest metaphysics after theology.” Uexküll 2010, 159.

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of neo-scholastic metaphysics, that is, 1) the doctrine of causation, and 2) the doctrine of composition.17 Causal relations and compositional relations define reality for classical physics and for the neo-scholastic metaphysics that relies on it. These same features are highlighted by Merleau-Ponty in his account of the assumptions of classical physics. Causalism and an analytic-compositional conception of being are at the basis of classical scientific thought.18 What Merleau-Ponty adds is the connection of both aspects to the “diplopic” character of Cartesian ontology. On the one hand, causalism reflects a conception of the totality of nature as seen from the standpoint of a kosmos theoros19 and it is therefore a “theological claim.”20 On the other hand, the analytic conception of being expresses the Cartesian idea of the decomposition of the complex into the simple.21 This view corresponds to a corpuscular view of reality. Ladyman’s and Ross’ critical account of neo-scholastic metaphysics (i.e. what they take to be a scientifically disconnected metaphysics) is based on their naturalism, which refuses a logical foundation and rather espouses a form of pragmatist (non-positivist) form of verificationism that approves only of those claims that find experimental confirmation in the best theories of science and primarily in the best theories of physics.22 This form of verificationism is presented programmatically as a scientistic stance that eschews any theory of meaning (that of the logical positivists).23 Ladyman’s and Ross’ verificationism thus brings us back to the reach of our observation or, to put it in their terms, to the standpoint in our region of spacetime “or in regions of spacetime to which we or our instruments could in principle go.” “In principle,” it is important to note, does not refer here to a specific (anthropological) limitation of the observers that could be overcome practically. Rather it refers to certain boundaries beyond which we are no longer allowed to make claims on pain of entering the domain of “pointless speculation.”24

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

Ladyman and Ross 2007, 21. N 124. N 141. N 124. N 124. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 29. They also frame this discussion in terms of the distinction between a purely formal or “Platonist” and a verificationist conception of reality. See Ladyman and Ross 2007, 234–235, 288 et passim. Ladyman and Ross describe the theory of meaning as a theory “according to which the meaning of particular terms (other than logical constants) is either given in ­experience directly, or consists in the way in which those terms relate to what is given in experience directly.” Ladyman and Ross 2007, 112. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 29, 235, 237. The poster philosopher for a verificationist stance is identified in Hume, Ladyman and Ross 2007, 64.

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At the same time, this restriction need not entail that all our claims are l­imited to what we actually observe. Ladyman and Ross believe that this is ­certainly not the case with scientific theories. They give two main reasons for this claim, one epistemic-theoretical, the other pragmatic-methodological. First, scientific theories do not just describe what is observable and actual, but they give us rather information about what is possible and often also counterfactual. In this sense, scientific theories describe the modal structure of reality, i.e. relationships among phenomena “that pertain to necessity, possibility, potentiality, and probability.”25 Second, but closely linked to the first point, scientists are not interested in what just happens actually in front of their eyes. They are much more interested in the framework of conditions structuring what actually happens. Therefore their methods are designed so as to maneuver these conditions and study the range of possible outcomes.26 The empirical adequacy sought after by the sciences does not reduce to the ostensive character of the actual.27 Ladyman’s and Ross’ “ontic structural realism” is equivalent to a metaphysics of modality.28 3

Syntactic and Semantic Views

In their treatment, Ladyman and Ross take pains to make clear that their structural realist view is not embedded “in the syntactic view of theories that adopts first-order quantificational logic as the appropriate form for the representation of physical theories.”29 The syntactic view is a view based on the ontology of objects that consists in assuming the identification of being with quantification.30 To the syntactic view of theories as axiomatic systems or collections of propositions, they oppose a semantic approach to scientific

25 26 27

28 29 30

Ladyman and Ross 2007, 111, 154. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 110. “Empirical adequacy is not achieved by a list of all the actual phenomena,” Ladyman and Ross 2007, 110. This claim should remind us of what Husserl’s said in the opening of the Crisis, “Bloße Tatsachenwissenschaften machen bloße Tatsachenmenschen,” See H ­ usserliana VI, 4. The first volume of the Logical Investigations is entirely devoted to demonstrating the right standing of ideality in knowledge over against its empirical reduction to facts. Karl Popper’s critique of verificationism also holds that simple ­empirical factuality is not a necessary criterion for the truth of a theory insofar as p ­ rinciples must be admitted in our theories that are not empirically verifiable. See Chiurazzi 2017, 178. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 107–111. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 128. See Chiurazzi 2017, 94, 171–173.

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theories as “families of models.”31 Put in these terms, the semantic approach strongly highlights the idea of similarity instead of relying on the logical relation between s­ entences. The latter syntactic approach presupposes a standard correspondence theory of truth that consists in interpreting the relationship between more or less well defined theoretical terms and the world in terms of an adaequatio.32 This ­theory of truth depends on the kind of verificationism defended by logical positivists and logical empiricists and that was associated with a special theory of perceptual belief based on uninterpreted sensedata and theories about linguistic entities.33 To sum up, “The syntactic view demands quantification over a domain of individuals, whether theoretical and observable objects in a physicalist version, or sense-data in a phenomenalist version.”34 The semantic approach, on the other hand, differentiates the domain of truth by introducing a dimension that is not identical with the order of individuals, even if individual terms may or even turn out to have to appear in the formulation of the theories. The semantic approach expresses therefore the idea of a continuity in the scientific investigation that is not based on quantification over individuals, which can only be discreet and discontinuous, but rather on what ­Wittgenstein would call “family resemblances” as what pertains to individuals but that is of a different order than the individuals themselves.35 When s­ cientists talk about the world, what is really describing reality are not the single terms or concepts, but a certain structure that becomes delineated and maintains itself in the change of the particular terms and concepts. “The semantic view encourages us to think about the relation between theories and the world in terms of mathematical and formal structures.”36 The ­structure therefore works as an invariant across different representations. As Ladyman and Ross point out, the fundamental idea here is that in mathematics the invariant is what comes to define objectivity.37 A mathematical object, for

31 32 33 34 35

36 37

Ladyman and Ross 2007, 116. See Ladyman and Ross 2007, 111–115. See Ladyman and Ross 2007, 28, 33, 63, 132. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 118. Cf. for a similar line of argument Chiurazzi 2017, 28, 110, 129, 131 et passim. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus and his conception of proposition as “image of a state of affairs” is paradigmatic among correspondence theories of truth and in stark opposition to the later conception of truth based on the notion of “family resemblance.” Ladyman and Ross 2007, 118. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 145–146.

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instance an equilateral triangle, can be understood as a set of transformations that leave the object invariant.38 4

Invariance between Physics and Phenomenology

The similarity with Husserl’s method of eidetic variation seems almost too obvious for those familiar with the phenomenological tradition. Interestingly enough, Ladyman and Ross point to the fact that Hermann Weyl, to whose work in relativity theory they refer as examplary for the application of the mathematical idea of invariant to physical systems, was indeed deeply influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology and the latter’s understanding of objectivity in terms of invariance.39 The key aspect of invariance however is that it turns the attention from the idea of a domain of individual objects as actually self-subsisting entities to the discernment of an operative dimension other than that of objects. In mathematics this is the dimension of the operative rules of transformation that define, for example, a geometrical figure. This operative aspect should also clarify, in retrospective regard, the core meaning of Husserl’s proceeding in terms of eidetic variation. This is a proceeding that from the beginning abandoned the exclusive view of reality as partitioned into things and turned its focus rather to its relational character. It is this relational and operative aspect that should be emphasized in the Husserlian idea of the search for the invariant in the variations of appearances. Ladyman and Ross on their part are interested in stressing the ontological importance of the mathematical notion of invariance for modern physics and especially for the representation of phenomena by quantum theory. They refer to Ernst Cassirer for whom “the possibility of talking of ‘objects’ in a context is the possibility of individuating invariants.”40 Essentially the view they purport to defend is that of a scientifically motivated metaphysics. Yet contemporary physics does not speak of “things” but it identifies entities through their relations. Quoting Cassirer again, “The individual electron no longer has any substantiality in the sense that it per se est et per se concipitur; it ‘exists’ only in its relation 38

39 40

Examples of transformations for a geometrical figure are rotations and reflections, as in the case of placing an imaginary mirror in the middle of the figure so as to find its half reproduced along the line of reflection and thereby the whole invariant figure again. Mathematical group theory is the discipline that studies systematically these symmetries and invariants. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 145n29. The authors refer for this claim to Ryckman’s account of the history of relativity theory. Cf. also Bachelard 1968, 174–175. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 147.

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to the field, as ‘singular location’ in it.”41 Ladyman and Ross argue against a “­standard” notion of structure that they understand as set-theoretic or logical and that roughly consists in the idea that relations or structures are only possible as supervening upon related individual objects and their properties.42 They argue that this notion is undermined by our best physical theories and that therefore it should be rejected in favor of an ontology that is rather informed by physics’ latest findings. This ontology should no longer be an ontology of objects but of structures or of relations to be taken as ontologically basic.43 In their own words, Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) is the view that the world has an objective modal structure that is ontologically fundamental, in the sense of not supervening on the intrinsic properties of a set of individuals. According to OSR, even the identity and individuality of objects depends on the relational structure of the world. Hence, a first approximation to our metaphysics is: “There are no things. Structure is all there is.”44 Physical quantities describe the modal structures of reality as relationships of necessity, possibility, potentiality, and probability. What is really entailed in the meaning of scientific theories is thus the reference to “stable modal relations among the phenomena.”45 If contemporary and cutting-edge ­physics admittedly may have little to say in terms informing strong positive metaphysical or ontological commitments, however, it has more to say negatively by way of denying the idea of a world “as spatio-temporal manifold with classical

41 42

43 44 45

Ladyman and Ross 2007, 140. Cassirer, like Weyl, seems to have thus been concerned with the project of replacing an individual-based ontology with one informed by 20th century physics. See Ladyman and Ross 2007, 132. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 148, 151, 153–154, 174–175, 186, 229 et passim. Ladyman and Ross point out that the difficulty for the contemporary analytic philosopher to accept the consequences of their structural claims lies in the fact that the latter has been mostly schooled “in modern logic and set theory, which retains the classical framework of individual objects represented by variables subject to predication or membership respectively.” Ladyman and Ross 2007, 155. The aim of these authors could thereby be summarized as inverting the metaphysical relation between background (individuals) and foreground (relations) against which modern science arose and at the same time as finding a ­justification that would motivate the scientific focus on “individuals” and “forces” over the course of the centuries. See Ladyman and Ross 2007, 246. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 130. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 130. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 106.

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particles interacting locally.”46 Ladyman and Ross note however that to philosophers such as Quine, the state of science in the 1950s and 1960s still seemed to motivate forms of ontological reductionism and atomism consisting in the “Democritean faith” about the idea of an ultimate quantification over physical or elemental particles.47 Yet in the 1950s Merleau-Ponty turned to the philosophical meaning of quantum mechanics precisely because since the beginning of the twentieth century science has seemed to stop dealing with objects in the classical sense.48 In the light of the degree of abstractness reached by physical theories, Merleau-Ponty however asks the pertinent question about the possibility to speak sensibly about the findings of physicists from a non-technical stance. His idea is that it is possible to do so by tackling the ways in which science tries to understand the nature that its mathematical and formal structures capture in order to “make sense” of it.49 This is a striking claim if we compare it with Ladyman’s and Ross’ overall project to articulate a naturalistic metaphysics that takes into account the latest discoveries in physics. Their whole project could be interpreted as being the attempt to “make sense” of a new kind of formalism emerging in modern physics. It is therefore on this level that we should look for clues that may inform our concept of nature. 5

Physics Deformalized

For Ladyman and Ross, as we have seen, the formalism of contemporary physics consists in the mathematical and formal description of modal structures of reality. It may sound contradictory to claim therefore, as I would like to do, that the formalism of contemporary physics, with its increasingly abstract character, would carry out a deformalization of our image of the physical world.50 This claim, however, is justified if we consider with Ladyman and Ross that the “abstract” findings of physics impose a renewed awareness regarding the “great mistake” of transposing the object-oriented categories that we use to formulate our theories into the content described by the theories.51 This mistake is avoided if instead of relying on a mode of theory based on the model of formal logic as mode of theorizing upon a domain of individuals we shift our 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ladyman and Ross 2007, 174. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 234, 207. N 122. N 125. For the claim about the abstract character of science cf. Chiurazzi 2017, 102, and Ladyman and Ross 2007, 160. Cf. Ladyman and Ross 2007, 252.

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focus to a mode of theory that holds that formalization ultimately hinges upon “physical possibilities for measurement.”52 This aspect is clearly recognized by Merleau-Ponty, who states that “classical thought wants only to take into account positive determinations, to compose them into a unique reality. Now wave mechanics states the impossibility of composing them into a preformed and completely accessible reality.”53 It is interesting that Merleau-Ponty refers to the problems raised by Zeno’s paradoxes as analogous to the problems raised by quantum mechanics. The dichotomous way of proceeding of Zeno’s arguments shows the impossibility to account for motion or space by way of a composition of parts. Every step of division that locates a part forces us to turn to the middle term of two extremes, now considered itself as an extreme requiring a further middle term and so on indefinitely. In their negative result, however, Zeno’s arguments have a positive import in that they force us to consider motion or space differently than in terms of composition. In other words, Zeno’s paradoxes challenge the Parmenidean monolithic idea of a being which is and cannot not be and force us to conceive a being that admits of non-being.54 The same could be said of quantum mechanics. The introduction of probabilistic indeterminism and the idea of entangled states into physics call into question the idea that reality is ultimately made up of self-subsisting entities defined by their identity with themselves.55 The logic of quantum mechanics is not just a logic of A (being) and ⁓A (non-being) but a logic that also admits of the passage from ⁓A to A.56 But this is equivalent to say that besides claims about what is and what is not, we must admit formulations such as those about a being that can also not be or about a non-being that is not nothing. The result we need to draw, 52 53 54 55

56

Ladyman and Ross 2007, 236. N 128. “Mais le paradoxe de Zénon était aussi l’occasion de raffiner nos conceptions de l’Etre.” N 145. “No entity without identity” is Quine’s motto in “Existence and Quantification” (1969). See Chiurazzi 2017, 144. Probability, Merleau-Ponty remarks, “enters the texture of the real, and statistics gains acceptance with respect to an individual reality that is generic.” N 127. Ladyman and Ross significantly stress the same point when they say that “Arguably, what is really novel about the conceptual structure of QM [quantum mechanics] is that it seems to make use of probabilities irreducibly and not (merely) epistemically.” Ladyman and Ross 2007, 187. “D’où la création d’une logique non plus à deux mais à trois valeurs. A la lettre, il y a ­création et annihilation des corpuscules dans l’acte d’observation. Mais aux états de non-existence et d’existence s’ajoute ‘l’état zéro exprimant la possibilité du passage à l’existence.’” N 128. In this passage Merleau-Ponty quotes Paulette Destouches-Février’s La Structure de théories physiques (1951).

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Merleau-Ponty writes, is that “existing things are not individual realities, but generic realities.”57 6

Observation and Objectivation

The logic operating in the field of quantum mechanics imposes therefore the conception of different criteria of truth than those framing classical logic. The crucial aspect introduced by this new logic is the relation to the subject, which is closely connected with the eminent role that the measuring apparatus assumes in quantum physics. “The reason of this effort towards a new logic is due to the new relation between the thing observed and measure.”58 This new relation needs to be clarified. In the system “object-measuring apparatus-­ observer,” the observer is not just a contingent element that could in principle be reduced with better knowledge of the observer’s limitations or with the production of more sophisticated measuring tools.59 The act of the one doing the measuring does not make manifest an individual object, but rather produces an objectivity by way of the integrated system: “system observed-measuring apparatus-observer.” Merleau-Ponty refers to Edmond Bauer and Fritz London who speak in this connection of a “maximum of the ‘object.’”60 Until now Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the novel epistemological and ­ontological aspects introduced by discoveries in quantum mechanics finds full confirmation in what has been established by the work of Ladyman and Ross. There is a further aspect that Merleau-Ponty introduces in his argument in connection with Bauer and London to which I now turn. Bauer and ­London illustrate the relation of the observer to the system observed in quantum mechanics by exhibiting a sort of transcendental relation at work in the process of observation. Consider the function ψ (x, y, z), where x is the object proper, y is the measuring apparatus, and z is the observer. As we just saw, this function represents the notion of object in quantum mechanics. The observer z, however, can always operate a reflective turn toward oneself and thereby separate himself or herself from the function ψ (x, y, z). This separation, as Bauer and London note, would have to result into a new objectivity. “The act of observation is an act of objectivation.”61 Bauer’s and London’s argument is similar in 57 58 59 60 61

N 128. N 129. Cf. N 128–129. N 129–130. N 133.

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form to that given by J. W. R. Dedekind in order to demonstrate the existence of a real (non-mathematical) infinite.62 This proof is based on the idea of biunivocal correspondence between a set s and one of its own parts s’ defined as image of s. An example of such relationship is that between natural numbers and even numbers. Bauer and London create precisely such “mirroring” relation by highlighting the possibility for z to separate himself or herself from the function ψ (x, y, z) through reflection. In this way the new resulting function is z [ψ (x’, y’, z’)], in which there can be found a biunivocal correspondence between a set z and one of its elements z’. Merleau-Ponty, however, adds an important qualification to Bauer’s and London’s exemplification of what is admittedly a transcendental relation. The role of self-awareness set in play in the process of observation does not turn the objectivity resulting from the act of observing and measuring into an objectivity for a pure subject. The thinking that is here in play remains a thought annexed to an apparatus.63 This means that the “coefficient of facticity” introduced by the new physics, if it leads us away from the idea of a pure determinism, also does not lead us to the idea of a pure indeterminism. The failure of a purely deterministic worldview in the light of the findings of the new physics, Merleau-Ponty remarks, makes determinism improbable.64 On the basis of the same findings and of their coefficient of facticity, however, indeterminism is not established as the only necessary outcome of observation, so that reality would dissolve into another form of objectivism under the cloak of subjectivism: an objectivism of images or ­representations instead of the objectivism of a nature in itself. By establishing the relationship to the subject as factor defining objectivity, quantum mechanics opposes scientific realism, but also nominalistic idealism and idealism in the Kantian sense. It speaks of reality, but of a reality that shows itself modally in relation to my point of observation. Quantum mechanics therefore raises the problem of reflection and of the subject of reflection. At the same time quantum mechanics also raises the problem of perception and of the object of perception. Merleau-Ponty feels compelled to say that “the problem posed by physics approaches the problem of perception.” Both the new physics and the studies of perception (­especially those carried out by the psychology of the form) reveal a structural conception of being and truth.65 This structuralist conception represents for ­Merleau-Ponty the point of contact between the contemporary theories 62 63 64 65

Chiurazzi illustrates this demonstration in his (2017), 114–115. N 131. N 132. N 135–136.

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of physics and the philosophy of perception insofar as both outline a non-­ objectivistic view of being and beings. To put it in a nutshell, both raise the problem of how to think together the transcendental and the ontic. In contemporary physics the prioritization of the concept of “order” over that of “measure” represents the point of contact with transcendentalism.66 In the psychology of perception, Albert Michotte’s experiments, for instance, aim at revealing a dimension of the perception of causality that is more complex than the experience of “objects” and their “collisions.” Michotte’s experiments reveal a transcendental or “global” order that is required by the focused perception on singular objects. This psychology of perception, like the newer physical theories, appear to ­Merleau-Ponty as making available a world of experience ­preceding the world covered up by the idealizations of classical science, that is, the world at a stage preceding the explication of nature, perception, objectivity, and ideality itself, by objectivistic thought.67 He forcefully makes this point when he writes: “We must therefore distinguish perception as an isolating attitude, like the art p ­ rofessor teaches, which makes me give to each thing a figural grandeur, and perception as a natural attitude, in which such an operation is impossible. In the natural field, I am going to find ambiguous beings, which are neither waves nor particles.”68 At the same time, however, this transcendental aspect, both in the new physics and in the experiments of the psychology of perception, remains ­problematic. The conditioning (transcendental) factor of general experience establishing a field for particular experiences to take place remains in both cases linked to an experiential instance as ontic. If contemporary physics is not a survey of individual and self-identical “things” but rather deals with “­relations” or “structures,” the apparatus used to measure and observe these structures remains a part of the world thus construed, and it must also be included within the structural picture of the physical world. The perceiving activity is “global,” it opens a dimension where there can be something to be perceived. Yet, the perceiving activity does not simply hold the world in front of itself, but it is itself “in” the world. As a psychophysical being, the perceiving subject is a part of the global dimension that it opens up.69

66 67 68 69

See on this point Massimo Ferrari in Il neocriticismo (1977). This reference is in Chiurazzi 2017, 159n39. N 137. N 137. This situation instantiates the whole problematic of transcendental psychologism. See on this point Husserl’s Formal and Trascendental Logic (Hua XVII), § 62.

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149

The Passage of Nature

Merleau-Ponty’s reading of some salient contemporary findings in physics has shown that the natural world can no longer be primarily determined as a domain of individual beings or as omnitudo realitatis. The objects of ­physics, in spite of their increased formalism, resemble all of a sudden the objects of perception as Gestalt-psychology determines them: i.e. as “configurations” or “structures.” The definiteness that atomistic psychology attributes to the data of sensation and that is supposed to be responsible for the perception of definite objects is an abstraction from the field of natural perception, which delivers rather “ambiguous beings.”70 Physics rediscovers this ambiguity in the objects it studies, which is the ambiguity affecting precisely the dimensions defining the physical world: space and time. This ambiguity consists in the impossibility of determining univocally the spatial and temporal features of physical objects. In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty could already write that “[i]t sometimes happens that physics, in its increasing fidelity to the concrete spectacle of the world, is led to borrow its images, not from the poorly integrated wholes which furnished classical science with its models and in which one could attribute absolute properties to separable individuals, but from the dynamic unities, fields of force and strong structures which the world of perception also offers.”71 The ambiguity of the objects of perception shares with the ambiguity of the objects of physics the aspect of a dynamis, to use an old term, so that both contemporary physics and the study of perception shed new light upon the ancient idea of nature as the domain of becoming. Thus, already the investigation of the physical world exhibits elements of natural production and generativity that are made manifest in living nature. Quantum physics introduces us into the idea of a space for something to truly happen and, as a result, to put it in Whitehead’s words, the new physics reintroduces us to the idea of a passage of nature.72 70 71 72

N 137. N 156. Merleau-Ponty’s first “Nature-”course concludes with a commentary on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of nature. Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the work of Whitehead is motivated by the relationism put forth by the latter as recasting the classical notions of time, space, and causality in the context of contemporary physics. Merleau-Ponty could already take notice of some of Whitehead’s basic ideas thanks to the study of Jean Wahl’s works as evidenced by the bibliography of The Structure of Behavior. If Merleau-Ponty is aware of Whitehead’s philosophy since his early work, it seems however that it is only in the mid-1950s that he carried out a direct study of his texts at the occasion of his “Nature” lectures. See on these points, Robert 2011, 12–13, 25; Vanzago 2017, 45 and n3.

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8 Natural Dynamis between Physics and Perception The new physics outlines a notion of interconnectivity of nature towards which Merleau-Ponty is highly receptive, as the lecture courses show. For Merleau-Ponty, “[p]hysics destroys certain prejudices of philosophical and

Merleau-Ponty merits Whitehead for having outlined a perspective that deformalizes nature from the classical Laplacean view of nature as totality of facts in place at a certain instant that would be nomologically sufficient in order to predict the whole future of the world. See N 123–124. The Laplacean view can stand if the facts of nature are framed by the Newtonian concepts of spatial points, temporal instants, and bits of matter. According to Whitehead, these are the three basic concepts of the classical picture of the physical world. See on this point Vanzago 2017, 60, who refers to Whitehead’s paper On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World (1905). These concepts and the Laplacian view allow us to think of each physical entity as occupying an unequivocal position in space and time. This is the idea of “simple” or “simple location” (emplacement unique). See N 154. It is this idea, according to Merleau-Ponty, which Whitehead calls into question. The idea of a punctual spatio-temporal existence is an abstraction. This abstraction, however, is taken to be the actual nature that we experience. Whitehead calls this move the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Whitehead discusses this fallacy in Science and the Modern World (1925) and in Process and Reality (1929), but the thought is already anticipated in ­Concept of Nature (1920). See Robert 2011, 100–107 and Vanzago 2017, 61n46. The fallacy consists in positing the spatial points and temporal instants, which are abstractions, as real instead of considering them as the placeholders for our descriptions of nature. The fallacy emerges clearly if we look at the main consequence pertaining to the idea of simple location of physical events. This is the reduction of time to a punctual instant, to a “flash-point” at which, Whitehead writes, nature would be fully real even if no nature existed at any other instant. See N 154. This conception implies a static interpretation of nature, which must do away with the productive and generative aspect that Whitehead claims to be so evident in the physical world. Cf. on this point Whitehead’s reference to Newton’s scholium in Robert 2011, 101–102. This static view must therefore do away with generation and with nature itself. In the light of the aporetic consequences of this fallacy, Whitehead intends to recover an understanding of motion and change in our concept of nature. This means overcoming the serial conception of nature in terms of a completely given actuality at each instant, which in Whitehead comes down to a critique of the idea of simple location. For Merleau-Ponty this critique implies a deformalization of the notion of substance, which in Whitehead corresponds to a dynamization of substance. Thus, on the one hand, the dynamization of nature implies a certain “ontological confusion” and Whitehead speaks in this regard of a nature with “ragged edges.” On the other hand, however, this indeterminacy is precisely what makes it possible for us to conceive the connectivity among natural events. The passage of nature, as Whitehead calls it, is that which connects (ce qui relie). See N 153–155, 159, 162–163. For more detailed accounts of the confrontation of Merleau-Ponty with Whitehead’s thought, I refer the reader to Robert 2011, Hamrick/Van der Veken 2011, and Vanzago 2017, in particular 57–68.

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non-philosophical thought without, for all that, being a philosophy.”73 The experiences of physics point to a world anterior to the world of theory, which he calls the perceived world. Thus, we return to the idea of a perceptual consciousness from The Structure of Behavior and to the breadth of its reach, which the Phenomenology of Perception investigated. In the Nature lectures, the experiences of physics, as well as those of biology and psychology, ­motivate more resolutely the claim that “Being cannot be defined outside of perceived being.”74 As I showed in Chapter 3, this way of approaching the pure living experience preceding the idealizations of science and culture is coupled with the realization that the natural attitude is not an attitude, that therefore the problem of the intuition of the world of pure experience cannot be solved by a purely transcendental analysis that would put the natural attitude out of play, and, as a result, that the problem of the world cannot be detached from the problem of being. This is the basic line of argument that allows Merleau-Ponty to establish the essential link between “Being” and what he calls the “perceived world.” Merleau-Ponty, however, says also that this does not mean that everything should be reduced to perception.75 The proximity that Merleau-Ponty recognizes between the new findings of physics and the problems of perception is not intended to reduce the investigations of physical nature to a regional problem of perception. If the embodied subjectivity is the pivot around which the ontological shift for a renewed understanding of nature is carried out, this subjectivity, as embodied, is already a field, and it is already in the world.76 The lived body is not the new name for a condition which lets something else be (i.e. as constituting instance); the lived body emerges rather as a way to access the constitutive factors of experience which let the lived body and e­ verything else be. The way Merleau-Ponty advances his analysis is proof of this. The notion of a field of presence and the role of movement as constitutive of perception have a clear methodological scope for the delineation of the temporal and spatial dimensions of the world.77 The field of presence, 73 74 75 76

77

N 138. N 247. This is said in the context of animal behavior. Cf. N 144 for a parallel claim in the context of physics. N 138. In the Phenomenology of Perception, the lived body is said to be the “vehicle of the ­being-in-the-world.” PhP 97, 161, 264. Cf. also the following statement: “C’est en communiquant avec le monde que nous communiquons indubitablement avec nous-mêmes. Nous tenons le temps tout entier et nous sommes présent à nous-mêmes parce que nous ­sommes présent au monde.” PhP 485. Cf. Serban 2017, 144; Colonna 2008, 144.

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centered around a living body, is explicitly said to renew the conception of time.78 The notion of body schema is the basis for the elaboration of a topological space, which, Merleau-Ponty writes, would have to be taken as the model of being.79 ­Merleau-Ponty writes that “the installation in a space by the corporeal schema, and the founding of a time in the embryology of behavior – all this turns around the problem of an existence that is not a thought of existing.”80 In this connection, the later working notes repeatedly speak of a Weltlichkeit of the Geist, i.e. of a worldy rooting of the mind, which is reminiscent of the picture of a “mind [esprit] which comes into the world” in the conclusion of Merleau-Ponty’s early work as now powerfully reframed and refined through the filter of the kind of phenomenology of nature that the “Nature” lectures aimed to lay down at the core of a new ontology as adequately fundamental.81 The dynamic essence of nature rehabilitates the central role of movement for the determination of the natural world. In the constitution of the animate and inanimate world and at different levels of complexity, we seem to find the same dynamic of totalization, completion, and integration or, in the words of Gestalt psychologist Gaetano Kanisza, “of ‘filling in the gaps’ – that is, of making present that which is absent,”82 which characterizes the appearance of movement. Let us therefore, in the conclusion of this chapter, turn to the phenomenon of movement. In order to do so, I will refer to the study of movement that Merleau-Ponty carries out in his first course at the Collège de France on the topic of “The Sensible World and the World of Expression” from 1953. The following section will achieve two objectives: first, it will make more explicit the way in which Merleau-Ponty inquires into the various aspects of natural dynamism – materiality, permanence, causality, 78 79

IP 35. VI 264. Cf. the following claims from L’Œil et l’esprit, “Elle [la vision] seule nous apprend que des êtres différents, ‘extérieurs,’ étrangers l’un à l’autre, sont pourtant ­absolument ensemble, la ‘simultanéité.’” (OE 84); “il [le ‘quale visuel’] est la concrétion d’une ­universelle visibilité, d’un unique Espace qui sépare et qui réunit, qui soutient toute c­ohésion (et même celle du passé et de l’avenir, puisqu’elle ne serait pas s’ils n’étaient ­parties au même Espace). Chaque quelque chose visuel, tout individu qu’il est, fonctionne aussi comme dimension, parce qu’il se donne comme résultat d’une déhiscence de l’Être.” (OE 84–85). 80 VI 246. 81 See VI 226, 228, 233 et passim; SC 225. 82 “Two Ways of Going beyond the Information Given” in Organization in Vision: Essays on Gestalt Perception (New York: Praeger, 1979), 6, quoted in Smith 1988, 31.

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organic production etc. ­Second, the remarks on movement will also build the transition to the next chapter dealing with animal nature, where we find the perception of a ­movement manifestly involving productiveness and generativity. 9

The Praxis of Nature, or What the Things Do

If Merleau-Ponty is interested in the ontological elements that the new physics and the study of perception can contribute to our understanding of reality, then, however, we see now that this contribution operates in the context of a renaturalization of the question of being by means of the reference to the sensible dimensions of the world.83 The lecture course on “The Sensible World” is divided into three parts dealing with 1) the phenomenon of lived-space, 2) the perception of movement, and 3) the notion of the body schema. In all this, we are told that the study of lived-space functions as a propaedeutic in order to arrive at an intuition of movement.84 The theory of the body schema discovers the constitution of an oriented space that is primarily traversed by actional vectors determined by what the lived-body has to do. This leads Merleau-Ponty to understand the schema in terms of the ground of a praxis. Now the study of the perception of movement discovers that such praxis is inextricably tied to a certain “behavior” or “life” of things within the world, that is, tied to what things themselves do or to what I designate here as a certain praxis of nature. A decisive clarification of the implications stemming from the new findings in physics – but, as we will see shortly, also from biology – comes for Merleau-Ponty from the tradition of the psychology of perception. Especially in relation to the phenomenon of movement, the reference to the studies of the authors belonging to this tradition establishes for Merleau-Ponty the demonstrative grounding for the philosophical claims regarding the notion of “overlapping” (empiètement, enjambement), as notion defining the totality of phenomenal reality. The lecture course on the “Sensible World” approaches the phenomenon of movement in a systematic way by looking at cases of what Gestalt psychologists call “modal” and “amodal” perception of movement. In the case of modal perception, as exemplified in Wertheimer’s 83 84

On this line of interpretation, see also Colonna 2014, 354–355. MSME 89.

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work on the stroboscopic effect, we observe that the dynamic of “filling in” characteristic of movement has a counterpart in the stimuli.85 Amodal perception, such as Albert Michotte’s tunnel effect, is equally perception involving the presence of something absent, but without any correspondent in the sensible givens. A basic example of amodal completion process is that according to which the backside of an object is present to us without us actually seeing it. Another example, which carries essential significance for the constitution of the whole phenomenal world, is the amodal perception of the background of a perceived object. The figure-ground structure of experience is a case of amodal perception.86 In light of the pivotal role that amodal perception plays in Merleau-­Ponty’s philosophy and because of his recurrent reference, in the last working notes, to the work of Michotte, I shall briefly turn my focus to Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of Michotte’s examination of the perception of mechanic causality in his lecture course on the sensible world. Michotte’s experimental findings concerning the perception of mechanic movement prove especially insightful because of their implications for ­developing an adequate understanding of the dynamic of spatio-temporal phenomena and, correlatively, for advancing our understanding of the structuration of the sensible world in general. The apparent simplicity of Michotte’s experimental setting should not deceive the reader about the profound questions that he is trying to address: is there a perception of causality? How does causality appear? How can we experience the permanence and identity of objects while also perceiving changes in their properties? These are the c­ entral questions leading the investigations of Hume or Descartes into our experience of the natural world. Merleau-Ponty, however, finds in experimental ­psychology a new starting point to tackle the ontological implications that questions of permanence and change have for our understanding of natural reality. The reference to the authors of the psychology of perception is so 85

86

Kanisza 1979, 6. Paracchini 2008, 215n17. The effect of stroboscopic movement can be s­ imply caused by the successive activation and deactivation of two sources of light in a dark environment. The two lights are placed in close vicinity to each other and activated at different speeds. Depending on the speed at which the lights are turned on and off, the observer can see a stroboscopic movement, that is, the impression that a shining object moves from a point A (turning on of one source of light) to point B (turning on of the other source of light placed nearby). The stroboscopic effect appears when the interval between the deactivation of the first source of light and the activation of the second one is approximately between 10 and 250 ms. Kanisza 1979, 6.

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pervasive in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking that, in The Visible and the Invisible, he claims that “the modern theory of perception is a phenomenology (Michotte) that unveils brute being, the ‘vertical’ world.”87 I now turn to Michotte’s experiments on perceived movement as representative of the modern theory of perception. The experimental studies conducted by Michotte have established that the “launching effect” we experience when two objects enter in contact with each other does not extend over the course of the whole movement of the two objects but is delimited by a “radius of action” or different “transitive periods” assigning causal action to one object over the other. In other words, Michotte showed that in the configuration of objects A and B there is a moment when object A, at a certain distance from object B, and moving at a certain speed, enters its “radius of action,” that is, that period when the observer has the impression that object A will cause the movement of object B. When A enters the “transitive phase” of causal action it becomes the impacting (choquant) object. From now on, object A is phenomenally related to object B as the impacted (choqué) object, which takes up the role of an object moving in a movement that is not its own (what Michotte calls “phenomenal split” or “scission”).88 With this simple experiment, and by varying the direction, speed, or duration of contact between the objects involved, Michotte was able to establish that the reach of causal activity (the “radius of action”) depends on the speed of the movement and on the temporal distance of the objects from their impacting phase.89 These experiments, together with those on phenomenal permanence,90 demonstrate that a perception of causality is in fact possible (against Hume), but also, and more importantly, they point to a renewed and more precise determination of the sense of permanence and change defining the sensible world.

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VI 254. For an illustration and detailed description of Michotte’s experience on the launching effect, see Paracchini 2008, 216–221. See on this point, Paracchini 2008, 220–221. Paracchini refers to further research by Michotte’s collaborator Mariano Yéla who established that a certain temporal duration relative to the moment of impact is responsible for the determination of the impression of causal action between two objects. The beginning of the “transitive phase” of A (A as impacting) and the end of the “transitive phase” of B (B as impacted) in fact was shown to depend on a temporal constant that is independent of the speed of the objects. For a reference to Michotte’s studies of permanence, see Colonna 2014, 167–169.

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The experimental findings concerning the “launching effect” present us with a case in which it is a certain organization sported by the things themselves that structures our perception of an event in terms of the imminence of something about to happen, that is, in terms of a futural event, in a way that is independent of protentional dynamics.91 Merleau-Ponty comments on this point: “Already in the launching effect something analogous happens: the movement of the impacting body appears as a ‘preparation’ of the impact. Element of imminence. The movement of the impacting body is not ‘for itself,’ nor that of the impacted body […] Thus, retroaction of the end of the process upon the beginning (‘preparation’) entanglement of the beginning upon what follows. Entanglement of the change of place upon the figural aspects and reciprocally: movement, i.e. becoming of a figure.”92 In other words, the experimental results regarding the “radius of action” provide demonstrative evidence for the claim that a certain materially sensible configuration of the things themselves – the “preparation” of an “imminence,” “retroaction,” the reciprocal “encroachment” of these moments – has impositional character for bringing about a sense of the future and therefore a sense of the general “encroachment” of time structuring our experience. What this means is that the intentional non-discrete dynamic of a retentional “just-now” in relation to a protentional about-to-be “right now,” precisely in its way to take on temporal sense in any intending of an actual something, cannot be simply the subjective structuring of sensation data, but rather the very way in which “nature” is first made manifest in the full richness and materiality of actual human perception.93 To put it in Paracchini’s words, it is “sensible reality itself that 91 92

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See Paracchini 2008, 223. “Déjà dans l’effet lanchement quelque chose d’analogue: le movement du corps ­choquant apparaît comme ‘préparation’ du choc. Élément d’imminence. Le movement du ­choquant n’est pas ‘pour son compte,’ ni celui du choqué […] Donc retroaction de la fin du ­processus sur le début. (‘préparation’) empiétement du début sur la suite. Empiétement du ­changement de lieu sur les caractères figuraux et réciproquement: movement devenir d’une figure.” MSME 106. In connection with the idea of a praxis of nature, cf. Michotte’s conclusive statements about the phenomenal givenness of physical causality: “La perception, d’une manière générale, est coordonnée à l’action, elle la prépare et la déclenche. Ce n’est pas, en effet, en spectateurs inertes que nous contemplons le monde qui nous entoure ; ce monde nous porte à agir, nous agissons sur lui et nous utilisons, pour agir, les objets qu’il contient. Peu importe, à ce point de vue, de connaître les formes, les couleurs et même les positions et les mouvements des choses aussi longtemps qu’on ignore ce qu’elles font, ou ce qu’elles sont capables de faire. C’est à partir du moment où nous savons comment les choses ­agissent sur notre corps, comment notre corps agit sur elles et comment elles

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imposes ‘in advance’ its own givens in the course of the events.”94 The full sense of the future, i.e. of productivity and genuine generation, is inseparable from the configuration of the sensible givens themselves, something that Merleau-Ponty sometimes expresses by saying that they are “pregnant.” This means that the organization of the perceptual field in the coursing of experience is fully ­integrated with the workings of the sensible givens themselves. The full scope of this integration is shown by the fact that it contributes to the coming about of a genuine experience of time. The identity of a certain appearance over time is not the result of a subjective ensouling.95 The unreflected that enters reflection is already animated by a structure of its own, by an organization that is “endogenous.”96 I shall conclude this chapter with a brief coda. In this chapter, we started to look closer at Merleau-Ponty’s ontological proposal stemming from his lectures on nature. The first section especially focused on Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the findings in contemporary physics. This reading issues into the preliminary formulation of a philosophy of structure. This philosophy shows important convergences with the discussions and claims in a recent contribution by the leading philosophers of science James Ladyman and Don Ross. These p ­ hilosophers have advanced a position known as “ontic structural realism.” This position maintains the primacy of relations over that of substances or individuals. The discussion of this position is helpful to introduce us to the recast conception of nature that Merleau-Ponty sees emerging from the new physics. The new physics has philosophical implications for our understanding of reality, objectivity, and perception. The main implication is the rehabilitation of the notion of movement in nature. In the final section, I show Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of movement in his first lecture course at the Collège de France as laying the philosophical presuppositions for an account of nature

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agissent les unes sur les autres, que le monde phénoménal cesse d’être une collection ­d’échantillons, pour devenir un tout cohérent, plein de signification.” Michotte 1941, 328. Paracchini 2008, 224. Renaud Barbaras has clearly seen and thematized this all-important integration of the sensible material with perception in Le désir et la distance: “Nous proposons ­d’appeler Sensible l’ordre phénoménal ainsi constitué. Il est en effet temps de renoncer à la distinction entre la sensation et la perception. Cette distinction […] recouvre l’opposition entre la présence proprement dite et l’objet qui, présent en personne, n’est cependant pas donné tel qu’il est en lui-même […] entre la sensation, qui délivre la seule présence, c’està-dire l’existence, et la perception, qui délivre l’objet dont c’est l’existence et, à ce titre, exige l’intervention de l’esprit sous une forme ou une autre.” Barbaras 1999, 101–102. MSME, 97, 102, 107.

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as firmly rooted in living dynamics. Before turning to the problems raised by the worldly rooting of the mind, which will occupy us in the last chapter, in the next chapter I begin to address the problem of a rooting of the mind by addressing the phenomenon of animal nature. This is also Merleau-Ponty’s focus in his second lecture course on nature.

Chapter 5

Nature and Logos 1

Introduction: Animal Nature

In the last chapter we saw that the philosophical meaning of the new p ­ hysics consists in “putting in doubt the idea that every object has an individual ­existence.”1 The objectivistic prejudice of the world draws from the dynamic of the perceived world and the autarchy that the one identical object already exercises within our experience. In this context, Husserl’s phenomenology of perception emerges as an especially effective critique of objectivism because of two main points: first, it explicitly counteracts the uncritical acceptance of the absolute existence of objects and of an external world by breaking down the sameness of any object into manifold appearances or adumbrations; second, the horizonal structure of perception gives us the clue for the way in which the presence of the object giving itself originally is to be understood in connection with the continuous work of synthesis and anticipation of perceiving action. What this perceptual structure implies, however, is that the evidence it brings out (the in-itself of the object) coincides with the potential aspect inherent in perception itself, i.e. its structure of sedimentation. Sedimentation, in this context, means that perception is always oriented towards the object in a way as to make it in principle accessible to consciousness as it is in itself, even if this must remain a limit-idea which can never be simply realized in one single atomic experience.2 1 N 128. 2 “The Idea of a total datum is, then, no longer an ‘initial’ but rather a ‘final’ Idea; such an Idea is the limit of a history of the spirit.” Ricœur 1967, 105. The Husserlian notion of “sedimentation” represents a structural moment of experience as crucial for the coming to present evidence of any definite experiential unit. Any concrete contact with a being – that is, the formation of the sense of any experiential being in coherence and permanence as “it itself” – only takes place in the continuous temporal structuration of experience. See in particular Hua XVII, Appendix II, § 2.c. on “The time-form of intentional genesis and the constitution of that form. Retentional modification. Sedimentation in the incospicuous substratum (unconsciousness).” Cf. also Hua I, 99: “To be this lowest basis is the continual function of immanent temporality, the flowing life that constitutes itself in and for itself. Its constitutional clarification is undertaken by the theory of original time-consciousness, wherein temporal data are constituted.” Evidence, as presence of the thing itself, is already modified “retentionally” as both no-longer unqualifiedly belonging to the present of the object while forming the stable and coherent unit pattern into an identifiable being: “As now present, this © Alessio Rotundo, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004548947_007

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The first thing to notice is that if in this way Husserl describes the becoming sensible or manifestable of nature in its materiality, then however nature here is nature not in the sense dominating modern scientific research as “matter under laws.” The second important point is that the way nature gets conceptualized in a phenomenology of perception takes the living operation of the human body as intrinsic to the primordial appearance of nature as material. At the same time, this fundamental role of living human bodiliness introduces an aspect of spiritualization right at the bottom of material nature that antecedes, as condition of any appearance, its being taken up (act-intentionally) in a specific kind of mental experience. This consideration not only changes the sense of the materiality of “sensible qualities” – which is clearly far removed from the dogmatism of physicalist “sense data” – but it must also change the sense of speaking of “spirit.” In a phenomenology of perception, spirit is thus not ipso facto taken in the terms of the dogmatism of self-consciousness of transcendental idealism. What the genetically transformed sense that the terms nature and spirit take up in this context suggests is that their sense becomes amenable therefore only if the whole living human world – the concrete Lebensumwelt – and not just some external bodily nature is taken as phenomenon. Our originally experienceable human subjectivity – i.e. our human self-apperception – is that of a fundamentally non-dogmatic and non-presuppositional living

modified consciousness functions, in accordance with the same law, as the primitive mode relative to a new modification (a modification of the modification); and so on, continuously. / In itself, every such modification obviously refers us back, either immediately or mediately, to its absolute primitive mode – to a consciousness that, to be sure, becomes modified forthwith but is not itself a modification. This undergoing of continuous retentional modification is the essential initial part of the constitution of an identical object, one that, in the broadest sense, persists.” Hua XVII, 318. This continuous differential flowing of the presence of the object as coherent patterned form, however, at some point, simply ceases being relevant to our attention, it is in a way forgotten, and yet is not to become ineffective; rather it becomes sedimented in a horizon that can become concretely operative (“awakened”) in future events: “Continuous retentional modification proceeds up to an essentially necessary limit. That is to say: with this intentional modification there goes hand in hand a gradation of prominence; and precisely this has its limit, at which the formerly prominent subsides into the universal substratum – the so-called ‘unconscious,’ which, far from being a phenomenological nothing, is itself a limit-mode of consciousness. The whole intentional genesis relates back to this substratum of sedimented prominences, which, as a horizon, accompanies every living present and shows its own continuously changing sense when “awakened [in der ‘Weckung’].” Hua XVII, 318–319. Translation slightly modified. In sum, the notion of sedimentation expresses the central phenomenological idea that there is a trace of the subject in any experience of a being- or truth-in-itself while also recasting the classical idea of a subjective consciousness and the modern conceptions based on the distinction between subject and object.

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nature that can hardly be reduced to “elements,” “reflexes,” or “physical laws” among elementary unities such as organelles, genes or molecules. In a late text, Husserl remarks that even outside of phenomenological considerations, biological science, by way of its morphological-descriptive observations, cannot be limited to considerations about causal connections. Husserl’s considerations on biology fit in the broader intellectual controversy about the methodology suitable to clarify the specificity of life processes. The mechanistic view held by the theory of developmental mechanics intended to explain living organisms analytically.3 Causal hypotheses were to be verified by way of experimentation, that is, artificial intervention and manipulation of the organic material. Biology was seen as a mechanistic system where every living process could be traced back to a connection of cause-and-effect. This view is in principle analogous to the more contemporary one that aims at explaining the phenomenon of life by processes of digitalization and following informatic models. Mechanistic and digital paradigms of life have in common the tendency to turn the analogical and comparative nature of every account of the living into an identity (esse est computari).4 The methodological controversies in the history of biology, however, show the difficulty to turn biology into a pure artefact (bloßes Kunstwerk). The descriptive observation of living processes as essential part of the biological methods of investigation exhibits a proximity to the source of all evidence, that is, the human life-world as starting point and constant standpoint of access to living reality. For Husserl, this methodological situation warrants biology an eminent role as entryway to true philosophical cognizing.5 The aim of this chapter is to advance and deepen this insight by looking at Merleau-Ponty’s study of animality in the second course on nature.6 ­Reinterpreting in light of his philosophical project some key contributions of recent biology to the clarification of the development and behavior in animal organisms, Merleau-Ponty takes up the concept of structure from earlier works as central for the definition of the phenomenon of living being. This concept plays an especially important role in the biology of Jakob von Uexküll. Uexküll’s conception of structure can be situated in the context of the debate around the causal problem in biology.7 The nature of the subject-matter of biology required 3 See Cassirer 1950, 178ff. 4 Rafael Capurro speaks in this sense of the “digital ontology” of contemporary data-age. See the reference to Capurro’s formula esse est computari in Cera 2020, 202n29. 5 Hua VI, 483. 6 “Animality, the Human Body, Transition to Culture” (1957–58). 7 Cassirer 1950, 178ff.

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an inversion in the methodological setting of priorities about the very starting point and constant focus of biological investigation. Against the approach that started with the dynamic processes of physiology in order to establish phylogenetical connections among animal species, Uexküll concentrated on the anatomical form defining each organism, which determines the specific environment in which the animal lives.8 The investigation into the environment of the animal stopped therefore to be ipso facto a causal investigation, which, furthermore, had to modify for Uexküll the very idea of a “purpose” (Zweck) in biology. Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Uexküll becomes therefore explicit if we consider that the treatment of animal nature in the “Nature” lectures reads the experiences of material and living nature as producing a deformalizing effect with respect to the actualism characterizing both mechanistic and finalistic concepts of nature. At the same time, it is the dissolution of the stark ­contrast between causalism and finalism that launches in biology the attempt to determine anew the actuality of organic being. The result is the elaboration of the notion of an invisible element in natural being. This elaboration consolidates the conception of an “intentionality within being,” which is Merleau-Ponty’s definition of operative intentionality in The Visible and the Invisible.9 The combination of findings from physical and biological theories in the first two courses on nature introduces us to the philosophical proposal that Merleau-Ponty begins to articulate in the third course on nature and in the contemporaneous draft of The Visible and the Invisible. The treatment of animal nature will therefore complete the preparatory work required to approach adequately the role of the problem of nature in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. In this context, another point deserves to be briefly mentioned. MerleauPonty’s study of animality in the lectures on “Nature” emerges as a study that opposes the way in which the relations between the human and the animal have been articulated by the philosophical anthropology of the tradition. Following a strategy that pays careful attention to the actual findings in the sciences, Merleau-Ponty develops his analysis by surveying a variety of concrete examples from biological and ethological studies. This analysis broadens the scope of the phenomenological investigation by taking into account the intentionality of animals, as it emerges in Uexküll’s theory of animal experience or Adolf Portmann’s studies on animal mimicry and sexual display. The ontological question of animality is crucial, especially because it deepens fundamental aspects of the relation between human experience and reality. 8 See Cassirer 1950, 199–201. 9 VI 297–298.

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This reading has therefore important consequences for understanding the emergence and place of the human being in nature. The tendency to posit humanity as the appearance of an interiority in the midst of or over against an exteriority is critiqued and recast. Merleau-Ponty quotes Teilhard de ­Chardin, who writes that “the human being came in without a sound.”10 This reference offers in summary way the sense of the conception of humanity that ­Merleau-Ponty develops in these lectures. This conception intends to rethink the idea of a rupture introduced by consciousness in being. The reference to biology and behavioral research shows the continuity in the passage from animal to human behavior. Yet this proximity of animal and human, which today no longer really appears as a scandal, raises even more emphatically the problem of the Sonderstellung of the human nature in the natural cosmos.11 In light of various overlapping levels of analysis, Merleau-Ponty elaborates a “binocular philosophy”12 that thinks the appearance of the human being with consciousness otherwise than as a function of the objective body or as a form of absolute spirit “parading” in front of itself.13 This new understanding of human consciousness, however, can only be achieved by a philosophy that blurs (brouiller) the separation between phenomenal and objective being.14

10 11

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L’homme est entré sans bruit. N 334, 339. “Gerade in seiner Natürlichkeit scheint er [der Mensch] etwas Außerordentliches, und die augenscheinliche Tatsache, daß kein Lebewesen sonst seine eigene Umwelt so zur Kulturwelt umarbeitet wie der Mensch, der damit ‘Herr der Schöpfung’ wurde, hat eine neue unbiblische Offenbarungskraft in sich.” Gadamer 1972, xix. Cf. the more recent ­contribution by Joachim Fischer: “Nell’uomo, la storia naturale è una distanziazione dall’ambiente e dalla corporeità naturali, ma una distanziazione nella natura, che nella natura va vissuta.” Fischer 2020, 25. N 180. In this sense, the answer to the question about the anthropological difference that ­Merleau-Ponty articulates differs from that offered by classical positions in philosophical anthropology, such as that, now paradigmatic, of Max Scheler. Merleau-Ponty critiques the (Hegelian) idea of consciousness as “redoubling” (redoublement, N 180 or reduplication, N 333) of being, whereby “consciousness witnesses its own manifestation in the exterior, this kind of ‘parade’ with return to itself.” (N 337) The same claim is made earlier in the course on nature where Merleau-Ponty wants to renounce to the idea of the human being as “parade of the asbolute in front of itself.” (N 180) and to the idea of a “pure exterior” doubled (doublé) by a “pure interior” (N 304). Merleau-Ponty speaks of “doubling” of reality also in N 206, 208. For consciousness as function of the objective body, see VI 253. N 349. According to Merleau-Ponty’s own programmatic statement from 1952, the task to recast the antinomies of modern philosophy between subject and object, matter and spirit, consciousness and reality defines his own first two main publications.

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Chapter 5

Biology and Ontology

Let me state right at the outset the kind of implications raised by the study of animal life and of life in general. The living being, as being characterized by birth, death, and development raises ontological concerns that have repercussions for the modern understanding of the relations of nature, human being, and God.15 The polarism of Cartesianism takes its point of departure from self-consciousness, which, as cogito, is principle of the objectivity of the whole universe as constructed according to physical and mathematical laws. The end-point of Cartesianism, however, by way of the idea of the infinite, is God as principle of all that exists.16 The objectivity of the universe of modern natural science is established both on the basis of the evidence that some being has of itself (self-consciousness) and on the evidence that objects display to this same being (consciousness of objects).17 This double focus on evidence of Cartesian thought, however, while aiming at establishing a new objective knowledge of nature as well as the method to justify and achieve this knowledge, presupposes the otherworldly presence of God as creator. The Judeo-Christian heritage is thereby recast into an “abstract philosophy that describes being [être] as emerging from nothing [néant].”18 The concepts of nature and of the human are therefore conceived in light of the idea of God, which modern philosophy inherits from medieval thought as identical with the idea of “Being.”19 One of the consequences of medieval anthropo-theology is that if God is Being, then the world is, taken in itself, nothing. Descartes’ philosophy is for this reason “unstable” because 15 16 17 18

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Colonna refers to Jean Wahl, who highlights the two moments of the “pre-reflexive” and of “becoming” as the two themes characterizing the contemporary process of renewal of metaphysics. See Colonna 2014, 51. Cf. Ricœur 1967, 83–84; Löwith 1967, 24ff. Cf. the section entitled “Le corps et l’analyse cartésienne” in Phenomenology of Perception. N 180. By the words of the devil, Valéry’s poem Ébauche d’un serpent points to this postulate very clearly, as well as to its consequences, i.e. the unintelligibility of the process of creation itself. The devil wants us to believe that in the idea of God himself there is implied the idea of the “temptation of the Nothing.” See Beaufret 1984, 22. These lines of Valéry’s poem capture nicely the modern understanding of the relations between nature, human being, and God. In a provocative way of speaking, if measured according to the idea of Valéry’s poem, modern philosophy would appear here as a “devilish” philosophy. N 178. For Aquinas, as for Bonaventure, however, philosophy is ultimately to become theology. See Cassirer 1950, 13. Modern philosophy, while inheriting from the Middle Ages its theological foundations, also revived the primacy of human knowledge and the ideal of universal science from antiquity. Cartesianism, according to Ricœur, is accordingly a philosophy with two sources.

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it is “undermined by the reference to a nothing that it never stops negating, but that it also does not stop thinking, as if there was a being of the nothing [un être du néant].”20 This ontological and theological feature is found again in the epistemological and transcendental concerns of modern thought, displayed eminently in the conception of a self-consciousness to which the world is fully inherent.21 The world appears in criticist and transcendental philosophy as Idea and therefore as the correlative reference of the reflection of a human mind. As a result, God becomes then also an Idea into which reflection, starting from this world as it is, puts all that which ought to be.22 Husserl’s conception of transcendental philosophy as philosophia prima is therefore atheistic in the sense as it posits the being of my transcendental ego as first absolute, that is, as capable of grounding by itself the whole task of philosophy with respect to the ideas of world and God.23 In any case, God in transcendental philosophy remains a God pro nobis.24 At the same time, the a-cosmism of modern philosophy, culminating in a-theistic transcendental world-analysis, once self-critically radicalized, rediscover the human being as rooted in the world and in a natural history that is not so easily subordinated to any pre-­ conceived form of causality or finality.25 There follows an immediate consequence for our understanding of the relations of nature, human being, and God, of the relations between nature and spirit or, more formally, of the object and the subject: “Naturalism, humanism, theism: these three terms have lost

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N 172. In connection to Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, Ricœur writes that “the epoché is not a placing between parentheses, as Ideas I has it, for there is nothing in the parentheses […] The kinship is evident between the Cartesian doubt and this suspending of the ‘belief in being’ which we apply to the world. Contrary to Descartes’s Sixth Meditation, however, no world will be found again. The epoché does not consist in stretching an ontological bond in order to be more assured of the in-itself.” Ricœur 1967, 88. “Dieu apparaît alors, non pas comme le créateur de ce monde […] mais plutôt comme idée au sens kantien et restrictif du mot, terme de référence d’une réflexion humaine, qui, considérant ce monde tel qu’il est, précipite dans cette idée ce qu’elle voudrait qui fût.” SNS 168. Ricœur speaks of an omission of God in Husserl. See Ricœur 1967, 84. Karl Löwith writes in this connection: “Bei Husserl ist von Gott kein Gedanke und die Innerlichkeit des Selbst ist auf eine ‘Egologie’ reduziert als dem Grund und Boden wissenschaftlicher Begründung unserer Welterfahrung und -erkenntnis.” Löwith 1967, 45. SNS 168. See also Löwith 1967, 86: “Gott, sagt Kant geradezu, ist ‘mein eigener Gedanke,’ eine Idee, die sich auf uns selbst bezieht – luterisch gesagt: ein deus pro nobis – die wir ‘selbstschöpferisch’ solche maximalen Gedanken wie Gott und Welt entwerfen.” Löwith 1967, 79.

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all clear signification in our culture, all these conceptions keep transitioning into one another.”26 3

Organic Totality

Merleau-Ponty’s approach to biology in the lectures on animality aims at extracting and determining the original being that is in play in the dynamic interaction between the animal and the environment. In so doing, MerleauPonty investigates biological findings following the interpretative analysis of psychology in earlier works. The new research tendencies in biology borne out of the controversy around vitalism had the effect of radicalizing the instability of classical biological concepts and the theoretical positions based on them. These tendencies exhibit an original mode of being of the living that Merleau-Ponty identifies with the term “structure” or Gestalt as dynamic of “dialectical” relationships.27 Merleau-Ponty finds the clues to determine more precisely this kind of structural and dialectical being in the studies carried out by G. E. Coghill and A. Gesell about embryological development.28 These studies, like that about the development of the motor functions of the axolotl salamander by Coghill in 1929, challenge the theory of the living as machine.29 The new developmental biology stresses the potential and temporal features of the organism in interaction with its environment beyond its actual functioning.30 In other words, the organism carries with itself a productivity and a generativity that is captured by the notion of behavior as thrusting movement that engenders the anatomical development that, in turn, enables further behavioral activities.31 The anatomical determinations are therefore inseparable from and rather fully integrated with the animal motoric behavior. As in the case of physical 26 27 28 29 30 31

N 181. A paradigmatic case in modern culture of this continuous transitioning could be found in the work of Felix Ravaisson. Merleau-Ponty highlights the two aspects of the Gestalt and of “dialectic” relationship as the two moments defining modern biology at the beginning of his lecture on animality. See N 187–188. N 188–200. N 201. N 193. See also N 191: “Le développement embryiologique réalise progressivement des ­parties individuelles (anatomiquement et fonctionnellement), en même temps que la conduite d’ensemble envahit la péripherie du corps.” For some exemplary expositions of this process with regard to Coghill’s study, see Mazis 2000, 235, and Morris 2018, 212–216.

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objects, the difficulty in adequately articulating this situation lies in a form of fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead): the functional-physiological explanation works for us who have already observed what certain anatomical features will do once developed, yet the same explanation is alone insufficient if we limit the focus on what the animal is actually doing right now as it develops these anatomical features.32 Coghill’s study, therefore, sheds light upon a totality – that of the adapted organism –, which does not appear in the actual anatomical parts taken at a single moment in time, but which is anticipated, as it were in outline, in the total behavior of the animal at a certain point of its embryological development. Thus, a fundamental reference to the future is here in play. The living organism exhibits “the imminence of what is going to follow in that which has already begun.”33 We recognize in this claim a reading similar to that offered in the studies on movement in the 1953 lecture series on the sensible world. As a matter of fact, Merleau-Ponty himself draws this connection at the end of his analyses of Coghill and Gesell on animal development. The reference to the perception of movement in the “Nature” lectures returns to Michotte’s analysis already mentioned in the lectures on “Sensible World.” Both the observable appearances of developmental change and objectual movement exhibit the imminence of a future.34 The dynamic of morphology exhibits structural moments such as anticipation, orientation, spiral development, intertwining, asymmetry, fluctuation of equilibrium and disequilibrium, and tendency towards an optimal

32 33 34

“If we read in the first movement the act of swimming, we fall in the retrospective illusion that makes us project what is yet to come into the past, or to double the sensible world with an intellectual world without first understanding.” (N 203) N 205. Merleau-Ponty speaks with reference to Coghill’s study of a “référence à l’avenir” of the embryo in N 193. Morris describes developmental change as “tension interior to the organism’s ‘level’ as configuring a developmental field.” (Morris 2018, 212). Mazis similarly points out that the auto-regulating transformations enveloping the animal and its environment are “processes moving by fluctuations through moments of equilibrium and disequilibrium […] there are levels of organization of the environment and organism […] an unfolding field in which there is this folding back of one into the other.” (Mazis 2000, 235). Both ­Morris and Mazis point out the same result of these sections. For Morris, organismic totality and perceived movement “are not to be understood as translation along an already determinate trajectory.” (Morris 2018, 212). Mazis writes similarly that both the organism and the phenomena of the percetual field “get us to see [that] there is no need for an underlying ground for either animality or world, if we can envision a more global relation among multiple factors, in which there is not a juxtaposition of being and non-being, but rather the presence of a given lack that gives rise to emergences that provide an evolving, self-regulating sense of structure or form (N 206–210).” (Mazis 2000, 236).

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state.35 The same general structural moments pertain now also to the dynamic of perceived movement. I already highlighted Merleau-Ponty’s description of Michotte’s analysis of the launching effect: we observe preparation, imminence, retroaction or feedback, intertwining, and the presence of a radius of action. In the nature lectures, Merleau-Ponty can lucidly state that: [m]ovement perceived in its nascent state is always a movement that goes somewhere […] is a movement that goes from its point of arrival to its point of departure. This is not only an already made trajectory, not even a trajectory that will be, but a trajectory that is going to follow. It is the grasp of the imminence of what is going to follow in what has already begun. Imminence is the character of the structure of perceived movement. The totality grasped is not beyond space and time; it is perceived as the enjambing of what crosses space and time.36 We thus discover that the living organism, analogously to perceived movement, exhibits a totality that is neither a “totality by summation” (i.e. as purely actual), nor a “transcendent” totality (i.e. as purely ideal), since it is tied to ­specific spatio-temporal and material conditions.37 Rather, in the context of the new biology, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “a totality [that] is no longer describable in physiological terms; it appears as emergent.”38 The problem of life thus raises the question of how to understand the coming about of totality as its defining feature.39 For Gesell the status of the living form or totality is the “fundamental enigma of science.”40 Merleau-Ponty echoes Gesell’s concern when he claims that the question of how to understand such a totality “is the philosophical question that raise Coghill’s experiments. This question is at the center of this course on nature and perhaps at the center of all philosophy.”41 In this chapter, I will approach the solution that Merleau-Ponty formulates in his second course on nature. It is in this context that the study of Uexküll’s 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

These are the seven principles of “dynamic morphology” given by Gesell and reproduced by Merleau-Ponty in N 198–199. N 205. N 204. N 194. “La forme ou la totalité, voilà donc le caractère du vivant.” N 200. N 200. “Comment dès lors, comprendre cette relation de la totalité aux parties, quel statut faut-il donner à la totalité? Telle est la question philosophique que posent les experiences de Coghill, question qui est au centre de ce cours sur l’idée de Nature et peut-être de toute philosophie.” N 194.

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approach to biology becomes relevant for two main reasons. First, ­Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt avoids either a reductive materialism of random and mechanical interactions or any sort of vitalism, in which determinate goals are embedded within nature. This aspect aligns with Merleau-Ponty’s strategy in the lectures on animality and it also brings Uexküll’s theory close to the conceptions pivoting around the notion of Gestalt, which is characterized by eschewing the classical dichotomy of materialism versus vitalism.42 Second, Uexküll situates his project explicitly in reference to transcendental philosophy, which he however expands in two directions that clearly introduce the notion of behavior in modern biology and that are of equally crucial ­significance for Merleau-Ponty’s own project: i.e. sensorial experience and intersubjective life (interanimality).43 4

The Ontology of the Umwelt: Uexküll’s Notion of Umwelt

In Theoretical Biology (1920), Uexküll observed that the idea of considering a machine to be like a living being would encounter general dissent whereas the idea of comparing living beings to machines has certainly many supporters.44 The critical target of Uexküll is the machine theory about living organisms. This theory puts forth a form of mechanism that posits a ready-made s­ tructure involving the local co-functioning of certain isolated elements right at the germinal state of the living being.45 The mechanistic theory of the organism rejects therefore any form of vitalism. Merleau-Ponty however sees a form of 42 43

44 45

See N 187. It should be noted that not only Merleau-Ponty, but other influential philosophers of the twentieth century have repeatedly been inspired by Uexküll’s approach to biology. Buchanan (2008) offers a good account of this history by focusing in particular on the influence exerted by Uexküll on the work of Heidegger, Cassirer, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze and Guattari. Carbone points out that Merleau-Ponty’s new ontological proposal is presented “in an especially enlightening way” through the analysis of Uexküll’s theories (2004). Hamrick/van der Veken (2011) consider Uexküll to exert an important influence on Merleau-Ponty’s views of life and nature. Other authors have stressed the relevance of Uexküll for deepening the idea of the intentional act in phenomenology by his theory of animal experience (Lindén 2011) or for achieving an understanding of the notion of “form-of-life” (Agamben 2014). Uexküll 1973, 145. This is in fact the definition of the “dogma” of evolution theorists given by Uexküll, “Immer wieder versuchten die Evolutionisten, das Dogma von einem im Keime von Anfang an vorhandenen unsichtbaren Gefüge festzuhalten, indem sie Erbschaftspartikelchen voraussetzten, die in irgendeiner Weise miteinander räumlich verbunden sein sollten.” Uexküll 1973, 218–219. This dogma is still very much present in our times. Richard Dawkins defines the individual organism of a mammal in terms of a “survival machine”

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bad faith operating in the modern interest for machines. In fact, he notes, this interest hides a fascination for the resemblance that machines have with living beings. The interest in mechanical bodies owes much to the fascination for the appearance of living reality that machines exhibit. Merleau-Ponty remarks that in the seventeenth century there was a parallel interest for ­automatons and for the study of perspectivism. In both cases, however, the interest was spurred by the appearance of a living dynamism that both automatons and ­perspective representation caused in the observer.46 Moreover, if Kant still says in his anthropology that animals are like things (Sachen) that can be actioned and handled at one’s own discretion (mit denen man nach Belieben schalten und walten kann), Malebranche’s claim is revelatory when he says that he would have not hit a stone in the same way as he hit his dog, the reason being that the stone did not suffer.47 The reference to Uexküll’s observation is therefore interesting because Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of cybernetics (the science of machines) counters the reductive tendencies of machine theorists and the early modern idea that mechanistic physiology and psychology are sufficient for a description of living nature. The advent of cybernetics, in fact, seems to prompt a change in the early modern paradigm regarding the machine as an anthropological model. The features of information and communication, as well as the self-regulatory, responsive, and feedback driven behavior we observe in advanced machines exhibit dynamics that resembles those in play in living organisms and may therefore provide helpful models for thematizing the processes of feedback and integration of information in living organisms. The idea that machines may be like living beings and the most sophisticated of them may even possess a “consciousness” has attracted the attention of many at least since the second half of the twentieth century and is fully present in contemporary scientific debates about a posthuman technological future.48 Leaving these more recent and often problematic debates aside,49 what is important for us to notice is that for Merleau-Ponty the recent

46 47 48 49

in The Selfish Gene (1989) and Rodney Brooks believes that our body is a machine in Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (2002). N 219. N 219. For the outline of a comparative cybernetic anthropology, cf. Fischer 2020, 33–36. For a recent evaluation of both traditional and contemporary posthuman theories, see the volume Trasformazioni del concetto di umanità, C. Di Martino, R. Redaelli, M. Russo (a cura di), (Roma: Inschibboleth Edizioni, 2020). For an instance of the conception that ­living bodies can be thought as machines as basic for the conception that thinks machines as living bodies, see Rodney Brooks’ approach to robotics in Gallagher and Zahavi 2008. 133–134.

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machine theory can contribute to our understanding of life and consciousness the more it tends to become a theory of living organisms and of language.50 Merleau-Ponty’s work around these topics in the 1950s brings out therefore the fundamental tension between the tendency to reduce living phenomena to commensurable units, such as those observed in the processes of i­ nformation, and the relational and dynamic character of living processes. This tension remains important for the resolution of debates around the adequate explication of living phenomena and around the nature of scientific objectivity. The most damaging consequence of the machine theory of living beings is that, by making animals into pure spatial objects, it implies a suppression of the subject – although this suppression is tied in modern thought with the displacement and interpretation of the subject as a kosmos theoros separated from the universe of pure things.51 The consequence stemming from the machine theory of the organism is however fatal for biology. This theory eliminates the idea of non-human perception and it interprets the world perceived by humans as a fictitious domain of secondary qualities. As a result, the machine theory reduces the whole biological enterprise to a physico-­chemical investigation.52 On the other hand, the fact that informatic technologies seem 50 51

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“La cybernétique tend à devenir une théorie du vivant et du langage.” N 212. The philosopher of biology Daniel J. Nicholson argues for a theoretical use of the machine concept of the organism. See Morris 2018, 69, 133, 142. N 141, 181. See also VI 32. According to the materialistic version of the Cartesian conception of animal-machine, the animal as machine is the result of a process of assemblage that is purely due to chance. This conception joins however the idea of an integral mathematization of reality, which presupposes in turn the idea of the possibility of gaining a perfect insight into the workings of nature as a whole. This is also a Cartesian idea, which is based on the assumption of an “Archimedean point” as absolute perspective outside of nature. Ultimately these assumptions are linked to the modern conception regarding the possibility of interfering and controlling the events of nature, which is only possible if there is rigorous knowledge of the causes of natural phenomena. This conception can be considered as a particularly paroxysmal version of the teleological view, whereby the formative character of our relationship with the world takes on a specific utilitarian spin. The theory of the animal-machine does not reject the teleological view but represents a rather refined improvement on this view by raising a specific human behavior towards reality to ontological eminence for the definition of the whole of reality. For Uexküll the putative elimination of the “content signs” (Inhaltszeichen) of perception has the only purpose to bring the whole of reality to a common denominator which alone allows the “calculating manipulability” (rechnerische Durcharbeitung) of reality. See Uexküll 1973, 126–127. In relation to Descartes, who maintains the idea of the animal and of the human body as machines, E. A. Burtt similarly remarks that Descartes’ criterion to establish an element of certainty in our experience is oriented towards “mathematical handling,” in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York: Anchor Books 1954), 117.

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to reproduce processes that were initially believed to be prerogative of human life and consciousness may lead to identify the mediative activity of human thinking with computational operations and storing of data. In light of this identity, however, we discover that the machine theory is source of a new heteronomy that undermines both biology and anthropology as autonomous scientific projects.53 The living being, Merleau-Ponty remarks, is never simply identical to a distribution of facts that could be formalized by fixing combinatorial possibilities that are valid once and for all.54 Uexküll’s Theoretical Biology wants to be a response to this theory by rehabilitating the autonomy of the living organism. Uexküll presents his project of rehabilitation of the autonomous status of biology as explicitly a Kantian enterprise. He summarizes this enterprise in the claim that “all reality is subjective appearance [Alle Wirklichkeit ist subjective Erscheinung].”55 This Kantian approach, however, undergoes an important expansion in Uexküll’s theory. Uexküll himself informs us about the two respects in which Kant’s Copernican revolution needs to be integrated. He writes that “The task of biology consists in expanding in two directions the results of Kant’s investigations: (1) by considering the part played by our body, and especially by our sense-organs and central nervous system, and (2) by studying the relations of other subjects (the animals) to objects.”56 Yet this expansion is not without consequences for the Kantian transcendental project that aims at determining the conditioning factors of human experience and the knowledge of reality. The two aspects in which the Kantian project needs to be further developed, according to Uexküll, must in fact recast our understanding of the subjectivity involved in experience. The sensing aspect of the subject’s own body targets precisely that aspect that in the tradition of Western philosophy has often been associated with the animal dimension of human existence.57 Correlatively, the notion of reality as subjective appearance is recast in light of considerations about our experience of animals and of their way to experience objects. It is in this context of expansion of Kant’s ­investigations that Uexküll’s idea of Umwelt is developed. The theory of animal experience that this notion is meant to capture reveals an ontological dimension that, even if explicitly located within the framework of the Kantian approach, has the effect of recasting the implicit anthropological ­presuppositions under which Kant’s project is 53 54 55 56 57

Uexküll 1973, 7. Cf. also Buchanan 2008, 14–16. N 217. Uexküll 1973, 9. Uexküll 1973, 9–10. Buchanan 2008, 3.

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carried out. In other words, Kant’s Critic of Pure Reason is here integrated with the project of a Theoretical Biology, which must deepen the transcendental presupposition that experience can only be human experience.58 In Uexküll’s work, the notion of Umwelt has the effect of specifying the transcendental idea of conditioning subjective factors in the context of a theory of animal experience. For Uexküll there is a problem with the epistemological objectivism of biology, which takes the environment of the animal to be in principle the same as that of humans and therefore to be made of the same objects. But this one “objective” world is ultimately the world experienced and known by human beings and cannot be uncritically identified tout court with the world experienced by every other animal. The task of biology is therefore that of extracting, so to speak, the reality of the animal starting with the empirical study of specific animal modes of relating to their environment. Uexküll’s strategy is to focus on the anatomy, actions, and behaviors of the animals that can be perceived by an observer and from there to draw conclusions about the organization of the animal and its reality.59 In other words, the focus on the outer structure and expressions of the animal or on its behavior gives us insight into the animal Umwelt. The study of embryological development and morphological organization exhibits the animal organism as a general form of integrated behavior with the innumerable variations of a dynamically structured surrounding world. The animal is “bound to a certain dwelling-world.”60 While this integrated b­ ehavior has the appearance of “something inexplicable,”61 it is crucial for the task of biology to recognize the arrangement and order in living processes, which Uexküll called “conformity with plan” (Planmäßigkeit).62 The idea of a “conformity with plan” captures “the marvelous fact […] that in the outside world certain features are available in limited number for which the animal, if it wants to flourish, must develop certain counter-features in its bodily structure that 58 59 60 61 62

See on this point and for a parallel line of interpretation, Lindén 2011, 96–97. “Die Biologie hat sich nur mit den für den Beobachter wahrnehmbaren Äußerungen der Tiere zu befassen und aus ihnen auf die Organisation zu schliessen.” Uexküll 1973, 215. Uexküll 2010, 139. Uexküll 1973, 134. Uexküll 1973, 292ff. This term is pivotal in Uexküll’s philosophical biology. By “philosophical biology” I mean a conception of life that is grounded in empirical givens but that also lays open on this basis the fundamental features defining both life and the study of life. The idea of a philosophical biology is made explicit by Uexküll himself when he writes that “[b]iology wants only to point to factors that are present in the subject beyond sensorily given phenomenality and which should serve to clarify the interrelations of the world of the senses.” Uexküll 2010, 159.

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must fit together with the features of the outer world like joints [Fugen] and pivots [Zapfen].”63 The adequate understanding of living nature depends on clarifying this fact. The main difficulty on the way to achieve this clarification, however, remains the artificialism of the classical concepts which have been traditionally applied to the explanation of living phenomena. Uexküll contrasts his idea of “conformity with plan” with the mechanistic theories of stimulus-response as well as the vitalistic theory of animal behavior as governed by an entelechy or end-goal exerting attraction upon the activity of the animal. In spite of its opposition to the modern machine theory of living beings, traditional teleology conceives the process of formation as the agency of outer forces upon a certain material. Against this view, Uexküll writes, “No effect can come from the Umwelt, that is, from the inorganic medium, which would prompt the germ cell to take a determinate direction during its formation process. We cannot assume a direct exchange of influence between the germ cell and the Umwelt as it is presupposed by the theory of goal-pursuing.”64 By claiming that the developing organism is not in a direct exchange with the Umwelt, Uexküll’s point is that organism and Umwelt rather grow together. Uexküll writes, “The plans that rule living beings are rather active and operative.”65 The way in which the organism produces and comes to have a cohesive relation to its environments, as if with joints and pivots, is essentially active.66 63

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Uexküll 1973, 320. Compare also what Uexküll writes few lines down: “We have to put up with this fact: on the one hand, the features of the outer world, which do not exert any orienting influence and, on the other hand, the living germ cell, which does not have any organs that would be able to communicate the knowledge of these features. But ­certainly we observe how the germ cell with full resolution produces certain counter-­ features that are integrated into a group of certain features of the outside world. We can leave this problem aside as unsolvable…” Ibid. 321. “Von der Umwelt, namentlich dem anorganischen Medium, kann aber gar keine Wirkung ausgehen, die den Keim veranlassen würde, einen bestimmten Weg während seiner Ausbildung einzuschlagen. Eine direkte Wechselwirkung, wie sie die Lehre von der ­Zielstrebigkeit voraussetzt, kann zwischen Keim und Umwelt nicht angenommen werden.” Uexküll 1973, 318–319. Uexküll 1973, 301. Morris (2018) sketches a brief critique of teleosemantics, a position that aims at establishing positive phenomena matching current functions of the organism. Teleosemantics could thus be considered an inverted version of Baer’s theory of Zielstrebigkeit. Teleosemantics posits the condition that the organism needs to satisfy not as a target remotely guiding its development, but as a retroactive factor determining the process of natural selection (the living organism lives because it develops a certain appropriate function that matches a certain natural factor). Morris however stresses a point that Uexküll makes very clear everywhere in his work, namely that the organism is itself “a selective and orienting agency over and above criteria of survival.” See Morris 2018, 253n18, 71–72. What

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Uexküll conceives this activity, as well as the natural orientation and production involved in it, not as a fact of the animal nor as a fact of the Umwelt, but as the activity binding both the animal and the Umwelt, so that “the one could not exist without the other.”67 This means that the organism is essentially relational. As long as it exists, the organism is never a completely self-­ contained entity nor can it ever achieve identity with some atomic actuality. Animal embryogenesis, morphology, and behavior rather exhibit what Uexküll described as “functional cycle” (Funktionskreis). Reduced to basic formal terms, the functional cycle describes “the connection of subject to object.”68 Uexküll uses the image of a pincer movement in which two moments link the animal to its surrounding world: with one arm of the pincer, the animal is related to the environment by “perception marks”; with the other arm, the animal comports itself towards these perceptual features in the way specific to its kind by way of “effect marks.”69 As a result, the Umwelt encompasses the articulation of objective factors (stimulus-like factors) and of subjective factors (states of organism) in one single physiological-perceptual total process. Uexküll’s descriptive scheme makes possible to identify a number of functional elements that in the life of an animal work as unifying factors, i.e. the factors which make up the Umwelt of the animal (e.g. prey, food, mate, etc.). Uexküll’s speaks of “primal images” or “archetypes” (Urbild).70 In Theoretical Biology, Uexküll distinguishes then living organisms from machines by saying that the former are characterized by a “centrifugal” while the latter by a “centripetal” mode of existence. He writes that morphology shows us that the triggering of living processes “cannot stem from an agent factor located spatially outside the material because the construction of the living being is accomplished centrifugally and not centripetally as in the case of things.”71 As a result, the relation of the living organism with its environment is insufficiently understood in terms of a fixed concatenation of mutually external and objective events. The relation to an Umwelt is rather the relation to certain carriers of meaning, such as the odor function in the tick, but also such as the categorial function in the human. These carriers of meaning define the specific modes of belongingness of the animal to reality and the animal responsive

67 68 69 70 71

Morris adds, by looking at Merleau-Ponty, is the negative aspect that is implied by the living agency in order to be an agency and that has to do ultimately with the temporality affecting the living. “Eines wird ohne das andere nicht bestehen können.” Uexküll 1973, 96. Uexküll 2010, 49. Uexküll 2010, 49. See Uexküll 2010, 159, 167. Uexküll 1973, 232. See also Uexküll 2010, 156.

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behavior towards them gives us access to the inner organization of its living processes. There results a diversified system of Umwelten which can appear to us to be organized according to the more or less unified appearance of the animal under consideration. Thus, for instance, the jellyfish exhibits generally a non-unified responsive behavior while the ameba shows too much responsivity and integration with its environment. Higher animals, on the other hand, show a much clearer integration of perceptual and actional functions with respect to their environment.72 Moreover, at the level of higher animals, instincts and outer appearance outline a complex reference system that more clearly than the mechanical behavior of some lower animals exhibits the orientation of animal life towards meaning formation, symbolic exchange, and interpretation.73 In any case, the formation of animal anatomy and the perceptual-actional functions of each animal show a perfect adaptation of the animal inner organization and activity with its Umwelt. This conclusion, however, must have the effect of changing the sense of speaking of criteria of adaptation and survival in biology. Thus, by starting with the study of the animal’s behavior, the Kantian ­starting point regarding knowledge can finally be recast in a context that accounts for the multifarious manifestations of life. These considerations shed light upon the actual scope of Uexküll’s expansion of the Kantian approach with respect to the subject of experience. Consider the conclusion that ­Uexküll draws from the biological analysis carried out in the first three chapters of his Theoretical Biology. The morphological study of the animal (such as the study of the spatial distribution of sense organs), exhibits a regularity that we recognize in our own incarnated human form. The interesting claim in this conclusion is not that the analogous regularity in the morphology and behavior of another living being works as a premise for us to draw conclusions about its status as a subject. Rather the salient point is that the regularities of behavior in the animal are an indication of the fact that the appearance of our surrounding world cannot be limited to conditioning factors relative to our human subjectivity alone. In the following I reproduce the whole important passage:

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N 221–227. For a clear summative account of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Uexküll’s study of lower and higher animals, cf. Mazis 2000, 237–238. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty notes the following: “L’Umwelt est de moins en moins orienté vers un but et, de plus en plus, interprétation de symboles.” (N 231). From this observation, then, Merleau-Ponty will consider the physiology of the animal in its external circuit, e.g. the phenomena of mimicry, display, and instinct. See N 240–259.

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When we recognize the regularity that we come upon in the forms of our own attention (and that is the determining factor for the world of appearance of our own subject) not only in the formation of our own body but also in the formation of the body of alien subjects, about whose forms of attention we do not know anything, then this is an indication that the form-giving activity [Formgebung] of the perceptual cues is not only conditioned by our subject, but rather it is an intersubjective activity. Thereby we are here on the way to intuit the workings of a nature pointing to a unity which is above even our own apperception, in which we usually discern the last instance of unity.74 If a world of non-human perception is integrated in the unity of our own perceived world, then there arises the question about the kind of ­relations that are in play in this inter-animal world. The reference to Uexküll allows ­Merleau-Ponty to begin to articulate and generalize the ontological aspects emerging from the study of embryological and morphological development in the animal organism. In particular, Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt does two things. First, it makes explicit the role and stratification of expressive meaning right into the animal world. Second, it enables an expansion of the integrated circuit of organism and environment into the new ontological proposal ­Merleau-Ponty is after. According to this proposal, humans are no longer placed on a separate level of being than the rest of nature, but, by way of their lived body, integrally part of the circuit defining living nature. The following considerations about ­Uexküll’s theory will thus introduce us to Merleau-­Ponty’s idea of an ontological mutation taking place in post-­Cartesian philosophy, a mutation that the concept of nature helps bringing to light.75 5

Behavior, Consciousness, and World

In light of his research into the notion of Umwelt, Uexküll comes to the conclusion that “there are as many worlds as there are subjects.”76 Instead of leading 74

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Uexküll 1973, 107. The question about a form of unity of experience that is above our human apperception should not be confused with the question about whether an alien form of apperception, such as that of animals, can become manifest in our world of appearance in the shape of an objective factor of nature. The latter question, Uexküll writes, was addressed by Hans Driesch and answered positively. See Uexküll 1973, 155. N 265. “Demgegenüber behauptet der Biologe, dass es ebensoviel Welten gibt als Subjekte ­vorhanden sind.” Uexküll 1973, 95.

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us right into a paradoxical form of absolute relativism, however, this claim, along with the notion of Umwelt that buttresses it, introduces us to the most interesting and profound aspect of Uexküll’s ideas, i.e. the relational character of the world of appearance and of living processes in nature. At the beginning of his interpretation of Uexküll’s work in biology, Merleau-Ponty articulates the implications of Uexküll’s idea of biology as “doctrine of organization” (die Lehre von der Organisation). The notions of organization, structure, form, and behavior transform classical conceptions of consciousness and of the world. On a methodological level, this doctrine rejects the conception of consciousness according to a theory of representation. The empirical ­ study of animal behavior makes available the elements for the definition of ­consciousness. Especially in light of his early work on behavior, it is significant to highlight that Merleau-Ponty designates Uexküll in the “Nature” lectures as anticipating the notion of behavior.77 On a level of content, a further implication is that consciousness emerges as one possibility of animal organization. The Umwelt, Merleau-Ponty echoes in the lecture, is a “surrounding of behavior” (entourage du comportement). That is, Umwelt is “the aspect of the world in itself that the animal addresses, that exists for the behavior of an animal, but not necessarily for its consciousness.”78 Animal behavior therefore precedes the representations of consciousness and the latter emerges rather as a form established as a result of a particular behavior: “This behavioral activity oriented toward an Umwelt begins well before the invention of consciousness […] Consciousness must appear as an institution, as a type of behavior.”79 As a result, the philosophy of consciousness must ultimately appear inadequate to elucidate the possibility of a “structural ontology” or an “ontology of relations” in living nature.80 It is again only through a study of behavior that the possibility of

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N 220. Adolf Portmann points out that Uexküll is not the founder of V ­ erhaltensforschung. Portmann however adds that Uexküll’s research exerted an important influence on those authors in Germany who in the 1930s developed this direction of work. Behavioral research is the result of the convergence of manifold sources. Uexküll’s own work emerges from this research environment and contributes significantly to it. See Portmann’s “Introduction” to Uexküll 1956, 11–13. In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty quotes Uexküll indirectly through an article by F. Buytendijk, “Les Différences essentielles des fonctions psychique chez l’homme et les animaux,” Cahiers de philosophie de la nature 4 (1930), 131. Merleau-Ponty’s quote occurs in SC 172, where he takes up the descriptive idea of the m ­ elody: “the unfurling of an Umwelt is a melody, a melody that is singing itself.” See Buchanan 2008, 122–130, 133 and Carbone 2004, 64n8. N 220. N 220. N 299. See also Buchanan 2008, 36.

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this ontology is outlined while also eschewing various objections of relativism, solipsism, intellectualism, and idealism. Finally, there is an ontological implication that emerges from the relational aspect of the idea of a “conformity to plan.” If, on the one hand, Uexküll claims that the belief in the existence of one and only one world is an illusion,81 on the other hand, he highlights the fact that, “like the spider’s threads,” each s­ ubject spins out “its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence.”82 At the end of his Theoretical Biology, Uexküll draws the conclusion of his theory of the Umwelt, one that was already implied in his adherence to the Kantian idea of the subjective character of all experience. If there are as many Umwelten as there are subjects, then there is no longer a distinction to be made between the “world” (Welt) and the Umwelt. The world in the objective sense can only be “a rarefied cast of the Umwelt.”83 The identification of the world with the animal’s Umwelt has the effect of doing away with the distinction between the notion of a world in itself as distinct from the Umwelt for each animal subject. Yet there is a further conclusion that imposes itself at this point and that is crucial for the kind of answer that Merleau-Ponty is after in his studies of nature: by giving up the notion of the objective world altogether, each subject also can no longer be simply thought as a part of the (objective) world.84 This result is important because it liberates the study of living nature from the part-whole dichotomy. Only then, to put it with Uexküll, the task of “forming the universe out of the Umwelten” can begin anew.85 It is precisely Uexküll’s idea of the intertwining (enveloppement) of Umwelten that Merleau-Ponty indicates as being the more interesting aspect of Uexküll’s theory. The rejection of the idea of an all-encompassing objective world and the identity of the world of the animal with its Umwelt make ­possible a glimpse into the coordinated network of relations among the various Umwelten. This network must remain hidden so long as the idea of one objective world is maintained. 81 82

83 84 85

Uexküll 2010, 54. Uexküll 2010, 53. Cf. also N 230–231. It would be interesting to follow the history of the analogy of the spider web, which is also to be found in the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon compares the act of the spirit returning upon itself to the work of the spider weaving its web. The result of this work is delicate and fine but useless, according to Bacon. Uexküll’s image of the spider web thus could be read also against this background as rehabilitating the fundamental Cartesian idea of a return to the subject and thus to the new contribution of the philosophies of reflection. Uexküll 1973, 338. Buchanan also stresses this all-important point in Buchanan 2008, 128. Uexküll 1973, 339.

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The Bivalent Ontology of the Umwelt

The novelty of Uexküll’s descriptions is that they do not appeal to the idea of a positive principle as separate from the actual structure of living o­ rganisms.86 The organism is a totality or a form, but this totality appears to be neither transcendent nor simply immanent with respect to the single anatomical events or facts composing the organism.87 The anatomical structure of the living being cannot be thought apart from its total behavioral dynamic. The inseparability of these two elements in living nature makes the idea of totality ambiguous: “totality is everywhere and nowhere.”88 As a result, the reinvestigation and redefinition of the features defining living beings and living nature in the “Nature” lectures provides the demonstrative material for outlining ­Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of natural being. The descriptions of living development and structure in biology in terms of behavior yield a bivalent ontology. In a phrasing that preliminarily summarizes the overall thrust of his reading of nature, Merleau-Ponty writes: “It is necessary to put in the organism a principle that is negative or absence.”89 We also read that “[s]eizing life in things means to seize in the things as such a lack [un manque].”90 But this lack “is not lack of this or that.”91 In sum, correlative to the animal organism being not simply a punctual existence manifest in pure actuality, so the living reference to the Umwelt is the reference to something “inactual.”92 These formulations point to the ontological import that Merleau-Ponty draws from his reading of biological findings in the “Nature” lectures. Merleau-Ponty writes: 86 87 88 89

90 91 92

N 188, 200, 203. N 201, 204, 206. N 240. In the working notes to the third lecture course on nature, we read that life is “ambiguity of the parts and of the whole.” N 302. N 207. In the first course on “Nature,” Merleau-Ponty had already anticipated this point by simply stating that “in biology abscence has a meaning,” N 96. The idea of “presence of an absence” is already found in the lectures on passivity (1954–55). Cf. also Buchanan 2008, 138; Morris 2018, 13–14, 18. This idea, however, which is also pivotal in that it defines the nature of temporality, needs to be read in light of the influence exerted by the psychology of the form on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The idea of the presence of an abscence is in fact eminently contained in the figure-ground structure of experience and in the types of amodal perception. N 209. N 207. Cf. N 239: “L’organisme ne se définit pas par son existence ponctuelle; ce qui existe au-delà, c’est un thème, un style…” With regard to the idea of Umwelt, Konrad Lorenz’s treatment of animal instinct is especially enlightening. Instinct is read as a factor ­indicating a ­symbolizing behavior rather than a form of mechanical response to a triggering object that is present in actuality. Cf. N 251, 252, 255.

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Living being is not a form; it is formed directly without the theme having to become an image [beforehand]. Morphogenesis is neither a work of a copyist nor a force that goes [on its own]. The ideal is a guide ­indissociable from the activity. The reality of the organisms supposes a non-­Parmenidean Being, a form that eschews the dilemma of being and nonbeing.93 The living organism taken in its totality is a “theme,” “variable thematism,”94 – but again this does not tie to an idea of representation in the consciousness of the animal, or to a causal sequence of events in sheerly actual materiality, or to an “entelechy” directing the physicochemical events in the animal. The phenomenology of living nature thus applies coherently the injunction of the epoché: “This abandonment of causality and finality is an overcoming of the Homo faber and encompassing Being, grasped from within, and not surveyed, fabricated.”95 What gets usually framed in terms of assemblages of natural sequences and processes in mechanism or as the infusion of the same assemblages with an external and pre-established end in finalism has to be understood rather in terms of an “operative non-being,” that is, of a being of the type of the form.96 Organisms are “events framed by a structure that would not be realized in another order, but that has relations with these events.”97 At the beginning of the third “Nature” lecture series, Merleau-Ponty thus ­summarizes this result: “The organism is not a sum of instantaneous and punctual microscopic events; it is an enveloping phenomenon, with the macroscopic style of an ensemble in movement. In between the microscopic facts,

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94 95 96

97

N 239. Translation modified. Cf. a passage from previous lectures where Merleau-Ponty expresses a similar idea: “The idea as field does not contain what will be developed in it, and yet, the idea gets a teleology underway.” IP 98. The passage is quoted in Morris 2018, 19, 25. N 233, 239. N 332. On the theory of “homo faber,” cf. the chapter “Wesen des Geistes: Freiheit, ­­Weltund Selbstbewußtsein, Aktualität. Tier und Mensch” in Max Scheler’s Die Stellung des Menschen in Kosmos. Both mechanism and finalism are inadequate to account for living processes. See ­Hamrick/ van der Veken 2011, 153. Merleau-Ponty, in contrast to the idea of a positive ­Parmenidean being, defines the living organism as “interrogative being”: “Ce n’est pas un être positif mais un être interrogatif qui définit la vie”; “La rupture d’équilibre apparaît comme un non-être opérant, qui empêche l’organisme de rester dans la phase antérieure.” N 207 for both passages. N 239.

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global reality is delineated like a watermark [en filigrane].”98 In a formulation that shows the profound interpretive coherence of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of living nature, he defines life as “a power to invent the visible [une puissance d’inventer du visible].”99 Animal life coincides with the opening of an autonomous field of action, that is, a field whose structural unity as both spatially and temporally open is not adequately grasped on the model of the physical structures of the physical world, or, to be more specific, organic structures coincide with the laying out of an environment as system of intentional references organized by the anatomical structure and the sensory-locomotory behavior of the animal.100 The possibility to construe adequately the living being, that is, to give ontological consistency to the descriptive material from biological findings, hinges closely therefore on rethinking the paradigm of Parmenidean being. The implications of this ontological paradigm, and of its dichotomy between being and non-being, find echoes in modern conceptions of nature, such as Cartesianism, which conceives nature as deriving its existence from a positive principle, from a Being (un Etre). This principle is ultimately exhibited as a particular being (un Etant) from which must derive the properties of all beings that exist, nature included, as placed on the side of that which is not nothing.101 While Descartes’ considerations about the usage of life and about our natural powers of volition and passion offer the implicit sketch of a bivalent ontology, the elaboration of the ontological dimensions of Nature and Spirit, or of Body, Soul, and God in the context of the Cartesian project remains framed by the dichotomy between being and nothing, which ultimately coincides with a monism of being according to which being is plenitude equally spread in all its parts.102 98

99 100 101 102

N 268. In consistency with this finding, Merleau-Ponty writes, “there is only a manifold and this totality that emerges is not a totality in potentiality but the instauration of a certain dimension.” N 208. Merleau-Ponty even says that the living operates only with physico-chemical elements and that an organism is, in a certain sense, nothing but ­physicochemistry. See N 232 and N 267. See the reference to “physicochemistry” or to what Merleau-Ponty calls the order of causality or of the events in the second “Nature” course, N 232, 235, 238, 239, 243. N 248. For the description of the living organism as a spatio-temporal open structure, see N 206, 227, 230, 232, 233, 305. N 266, 282. For Merleau-Ponty’s notes about the antinomic nature of Cartesian ontology, see N 266. For the monism of Cartesian ontology, cf. the following passages: “Dieu n’est distinct d’elle [de la nature] qu’en étant plus pleinement encore Nature, étant inconditionnel alors qu’elle n’est qu’intrinsèque.” N 266. “La grande difficulté vient toujours de la ­hantise

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183

The Sphere of Life as Sphere of Intercorporeity

The treatment of living nature which closely follows the analyses and results of biological studies has for Merleau-Ponty, consistently with previous studies, an eminently critical thrust: “across the movement of science, to open unto the placing in question of the Being-object of Nature, unto the Nature that ‘we are,’ unto the Nature in us – and thereby to begin a revision of the ontology of the object, a fortiori, since the nature-as-leaf [le feuillet nature] detaches from the object and rejoins our total being.”103 The ontological reassessment of scientific and biological descriptions of the organism as “watermark,” “openness,” “negativity,” and especially as “visible” and “invisible” in relation to living ontogenesis, structure, and behavior, rejoins the aspect and value of appearance to and meaning for the animal as sensing and conscious intentional being. The same analysis advances in integrative direction to include the kind of field of appearances that lays open the properly human world in both living experience, thematic knowing, and reflective thinking, what traditionally is referred to as “reason” or “spirit.” The analysis of humanity, a topic that the third course on “Nature” explicitly takes up, becomes for Merleau-Ponty the exemplum crucis of the whole study, namely the topic that must exhibit and confirm the conception of “a being of the order of the Logos,” that is, a modal non-Parmenidean being, as spanning the totality of nature and as opposing the conception of being as “pure thing.”104 The descriptions of the living being as a “watermark,” “in filigree,” and as “visible” and “invisible” assume therefore a wide scope for framing relations of meaning from the microscopic level of sensing relations going on in the organ of sense to the macroscopic level of relations between animal species with one another and on a historical scale which includes the emergence of human consciousness, conceptuality, and the categorial attitude.105 In the statement summarizing the results of this program, Merleau-Ponty writes: “Ontology that defines being from within and not from without: at every level Being is infrastructure, framework, hinges, and not de l’espace – comme partes extra partes – comme plein. Cela veut dire: un être tout ­extériuere à soi. L’idéalisme, la spiritualisation de l’étendue ne changent pas le probléme: l’extérieur pur est doublé d’une intériorité pure qui lui est parallèle et ne la rencontre pas. […] Remettre en cause l’étendue-objet comme plenitude égale en toutes ses parties.” N 304. 103 N 275. Translation modified. 104 N 209. Cf. also the following summative definition of the being made manifest by ­living nature: “Cet être pré-emipirique architectonique, pré-objectif, pivots, charnières, ­structures des organismes et des espèces” (N 269). 105 N 268–269, 276, 282.

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offered in perspective and calling for the construction of what is behind these appearances.”106 It is at this juncture that Merleau-Ponty takes up again Uexküll’s expansion of Kantian transcendental philosophy outside of the limits of scientific knowledge in a direction “pointing to a unity which is above even our own apperception.”107 In the first “sketch” for the third “Nature” course, Uexküll’s theory of animal experience sets the starting point for recasting the phenomenological theory of meaning and the relationship between semantics, sense, and sign as centered around the traditional role of the “universal” or “essence.”108 The appearance of reality specifically as concept, which includes the categorization of realities in visibilia and invisibilia, as properly human form of intentionality, is thereby not absolute in the sense of separating this conceptual sense from the natural relationship with and integration in an Umwelt with other living beings. This form of separation traditionally took the form of an ontological distinction between humanity and the rest of living nature with consequent attribution of an exceptional position to the human being in nature.109 Against the Cartesian epistemological anthropology that separates the epistemic subject from the natural experience of life, which testifies rather of a disturbing union of the body and the soul, but also in contradistinction to Aristotelian essentialism that takes the human as an animality with reason as its characteristic feature, Merleau-Ponty proceeds to articulate the human logos as something that is not juxtaposed or added to the animal and nature.110 By deepening 106 107 108

N 282. Translation slightly modified. Uexküll 1973, 107. Cf. above in this Chapter 5, p. 177. N 270ff. The animal body as defined by a reference to the Umwelt at the beginning of the first sketch is connected to the human “body schema” and its symbolyzing structure as other than the traditional semantic symbolic activity: “Symbolisme: un terme pris pour réprésentatif d’un autre, Auffassung als → on se réfère alors à l’esprit porteur du als, à l’intentionnalité, au sens – mais alors: le symbolisme est survolé, il n’y a plus de corps.” N 273. 109 This ontological anthropocentrism is a line of thought that begins in the Western tradition eminently with Plato’s anthropological theory of the soul and the conception of the separation (chorismos) between the sensible and the ideal and continues with modern rationalist anthropologies, in particular with the conception of subjectivity as ­consciousness and later with the conception of objectivity as a result of the systematic epistemological disqualification of the subjective factors that do not fit the scientific paradigms about what counts and what does not count as objective in the context of the scientific intersubjective community. Cf. Lindén 2011, 83–88, 97–98. 110 Right at the beginning of his undertaking, Descartes clearly qualifies his methodology as specifically meant to establish an epistemology when he writes: “In the meantime, I know that no danger or error will result from my plan, and that I cannot possibly go too far in my distrutful attitude. This is because the task now in hand does not involve action but merely the acquisition of knowledge.” Descartes’ epistemological anthropology aims

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the idea of behavior, the concept of Umwelt responds to the methodological requirement of neutrality and thereby fulfils a propaedeutic function with respect to the possibility of recasting the ontological anthropology of the tradition: “The animal body defined by the Umwelt, i.e., as aspects of the world cut up and organized by movements. Neutral between the interior and the exterior of the body. Intertwining movement-perception. Neutral between [the] centrifugal and [the] centripetal.”111 The epistemological obstacle represented by classical attributions of an exclusive ontological character to the human being as sole possible center of intentional life, is challenged by the study of the Umwelt as mode of interanimal intentionality. By relocating the subject in the animal, Uexküll’s theory thus provides at the same time an understanding of the animal conditions of experience and knowledge in the subject.112 The question about the anthropological difference, therefore, is articulated according to a comparative schema that reveals a middle term enabling the comparison and that connects animality, subjectivity, and humanity. The final determination of this middle term may remain ambiguous, but that this term is found in corporeity is evident in the fact that the modern conception of the human as pure consciousness tended to isolate, and exclude, corporeity as the specific animal aspect in us. The study of the dimension of embodied human perception and cognition, whose sensory-motor coordination constitutes the affective-cognitive human world, as well as the emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness, exhibits the relevant differences with the animal, such

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clearly and distinctly at establishing man there where he no longer has any relation with life. See N 339. The domain of action and of the experience of life, on the other hand, teaches the union of the soul and the body. Merleau-Ponty rejects the idea of reason, spirit, or of self-consciousness as added or imposed from the top-down onto the natural and living body. In the introductory remarks about Coghill’s and Gesell’s studies in behavioral biology, Merleau-Ponty says that “l’esprit est non ce qui descend dans le corps afin de l’organiser, mais ce qui en émerge.” (N 188). In the same connection now with reference to Gesell, he writes, “Le comportement ‘ne descend pas’ dans l’organisme ‘comme une ­visitation d’en haut. Il émerge plutôt des bas niveaux.’ Le supérieur est autre chose que l’inférieur, mais ne vient pas d’une source extérieure à l’organisme lui-même.” (N 200). In relation to humanity, the topic of the third course on nature, we hear that what is human is not to be understood as “imposition d’un pour soi à un corps en soi.” (N 270). Cf. N 270–271, 276–277, 284–285, et passim. This way of proceeding “from below” is characteristic of Merleau-Ponty’s studies of human behavior and consciousness both in The Structure of Behavior and in the lectures on “Nature.” Cf. Bimbenet 2004, 45. N 283. Translation slightly modified. Merleau-Ponty speaks of an “animality in the subject” (une animalité dans le sujet) in N 219. He summarizes the program of the third course on “Nature” as follows: “situating the subject within the totality in Nature” (N 276). For the fundamental role of animality in human life, see Lindén 2011, 86ff.

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as the emergence of language, both in speech and writing, and of the cultural world. Our human experience is particularly defined by sociality, moral obligations and rituals, linguistic and other forms of symbolic expression.113 These specifically human modes of experience give actuality to our human world and to the objects that are of special significance for the latter, including the dimension of ideality.114 These phenomena appear as especially relevant for the sphere of human experience. By the study of the human body, however, we do not just understand our humanity and our distinctive modes of experience. Rather we also maintain the connection with the basis of an interanimal understanding insofar as animals, at least some of them, exhibit behaviors that we seem to understand and that at any rate attract our attention and remain relevant for our human life.115 The patterns of interanimal reference and significance are many and varied. This means that what ultimately counts as reality cannot be identified with the specific human field of appearances but also that there is no unified mode of experience of the living according to the biologistic paradigm of evolutionist and ethologist anthropology. In spite of its more explicit intentions, the latter remains an anthropomorphic paradigm that does not fully recognize the sense of living animality as incarnated in a plurality of intentional manifestations.116 113

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Cf. on the question of the difference between human beings and animals with special focus on the aspect of dying, cf. the enlightening essay by Roberto Redaelli with the title “Heidegger e la fine dell’umano tra analitica esistenziale e sapere scientifico.” Redaelli 2020. In his unfinished text Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne, Friedrich Nietzsche offers a genetic description of language and of the emergence of conceptual and abstract thought. He stresses the importance of that “game of dice” and its conventional rules, which ultimately identify what is designated as “truth,” for the emancipative human capacity of reason. Cf. Vattimo 1985, 23–25. “Pourtant, parce qu’il y a quelques animaux dont le comportement nous fascine et nous trouble, car ils nous évoquent une expérience partiellement compréhensible, nous nous sentons obligés de les comparer à nous–mêmes.” Lindén 2011, 84. On evolutionist anthropology, cf. Fischer 2020, 19–23; Scheler 2016, 31. For a recent approach based on biologistic continuism, see Singer 1975. To be sure, the evolutionary theory of modern molecular biology, which takes animals as objective entities subordinated to a set of rigorous natural laws, differs from the approach of the ethologists, who rather draw their findings from observation of animal behavior in their natural or semi-natural habitat. Both approaches, however, establish a form of continuism between the animal and the human that tends to efface all differences. This biologistic continuism, it should be noted, is clearly anthropomorphic as it takes the whole of living nature in terms of a very specific form of the concept of nature as determined by various scientific methodologies in order to make ontological claims about both animals and humans. On the anthropomorphism of evolutionistic and ethologist continuism, see Lindén 2011, 98–99. Bimbenet has recently stressed that any anti-specist attempt to equalize humans

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In this interanimal context, the idea of the intentional act, as foundational for phenomenology, gets rather generalized to describe the animal capacity of living orientation and response in relation to essential, that is, invariable aspects within a particular field of experience. The perceptual and motoric behavior of the animal does not only imply that experience is variable and changing but also that an intentional content remains the same, thereby organizing the orientation of animal life.117 For the animal it is vital to determine or extract, so to speak, a certain essence from the very changing situations that it experiences.118 In certain animals, this vital understanding of a given situation can also become a more or less integrated capacity to vary and adapt one’s behavior around a similar or identical object in different situations. In these cases of animal behavior, the intentional manifestation of the living is more accessible and intelligible, that is, less transcendent to our human field of experience as we share in this capacity to actualize a reference to the virtual. In the case of humanity as our natural situation, it is understandable that the intentionality guiding human life, experience, and knowledge would give shape to a particularly human world.119 If we look at comparable modes of animal behavior, human intentionality seems to display an unlimited sense for the virtual aspects of experience, sense that the philosophy of the subject has always tended to identify with the constituting activity of a pure or absolute consciousness. However, this is not the only possibility. The consideration of human native corporeity rather demonstrates the nature-intrinsic features of sense manifestness as conditions for the articulation of conceptual meaning, such as linguistic expression and processes of structuration, habitualization, discontinuity, and destructuration, i.e. history.120 In the first three sketches introducing the third course on “Nature,” this analysis of corporeity gets accomplished by way of the ascending strategy already tested in the Structure of Behavior – which however has nothing to do with the doctrines of the Neo-Platonic tradition and rather has the effect of integrating anthropological insights in the framework of a phenomenology of living

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and animals only testifies of the highly human and thus anthropomorphic nature of this operation. See Bimbenet 2020, 336–337. See Lindén 2011, 88–89, 105–106. Cf. also Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the “amovable” forms in animal life from the Structure of Behavior. For an illustration of this treatment, see Bimbenet 2004, 67–68. “La réaction acquise se rapporte à l’essence de la situation et […] elle admet une série de variations autour d’un theme fundamental.” SC 111. Jocelyn Benoist clearly recognizes the “anthropomorphic accent of Merleau–Ponty’s later ontology.” See Benoist 2019, 113. On preliminary considerations about language, cf. N 290–292, 302–304, 355–340.

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nature. In particular, Merleau-Ponty rereads the concept of body schema in the context of Uexküll’s theory of interanimal intentionality. He takes up again the character of sensory-motor bodiliness as defining human intentional acts according to a body schema that is both “libidinal” (desiring) and “symbolic.” The “open totality” characterizing the human body in coherence with the openness of living ontogenesis, morphology, and intentional behavior, is further manifested and realized in the “libidinal” openness of the living body.121 The structurally spatial and dynamically temporal orientation of the living organism corresponds to the appearance of a world or milieu the indeterminate openness of which is intrinsic to the very actualization of animal life.122 The body schema is said to provide “the tracing that intervenes in the reading of the world,” which gets articulated in the determination of stable aspects of the world as appearing through the active movements of the body.123 The appearance of a living milieu, however, is also appearance of a milieu for appearance as such to appear. The invariants of experience, such as the presence of an obstacle or of another animal as prey or mate, are not objects that the animal constitutes in some cognitive thematic-making process. If there is any thematic positing on this level of practical-intentional experience, then this is a positing natively tied to a living awareness of one’s display to other animals in one’s surrounding in the very act of perceiving and moving to and from them. The value of presentation on this level of experience is therefore that of the presentation of an invariant content together with the active display and exposure of the animal to the object of intentional aiming. If animal nature is ontologically deficient, this deficiency is constitutive of the desiring nature of the living organism as such: “Things as what are missing from my body in order to close its circuit.”124 The phenomena of animal sexuality, mimicry, and camouflage, are the impressive manifestations of the Umwelt as field of mutual presentation and appearance that does not simply function in terms of ­physical causality and of material predetermination of behavior.125 These 121

122 123 124 125

N 279–280. For more detailed and critical considerations about the proximity between Aristotelian philosophical psychology and phenomenological philosophy around the role of desire or orexis as basic condition for the appearance of the world, see Lindén 2011–2012. “Contre l’idée de la préformation (emboîtement des germes) simple dépliement, pour l’idée d’une épigenèse: intervention en surplus de quelque chose qui n’est pas donné dans l’actuel (le déterminé) d’un inactuel.” N 294. N 279. N 281. “Si, pour l’endocrinologue, ‘la crête du coq n’est pas autre chose que le manometer des hormones,’ comme si le coq était fait pour être vu par un endocrinologue, c’est que ce

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phenomena are rather evidence that something is more or less mattering to the animal that is not ipso facto identical with what matters to us as observers interested in explaining animal behavior according to specific paradigms of knowledge. As a result, the perceptual and motor structures of the body schema involve already a libidinal structure: “[T]he body as corporal schema, the esthesiological body, the flesh, have already given us the Einfühlung of the body with perceived being and with other bodies. That is, the body as the power of Einfühlung is already desire, libido, projection-introjection, identification. The esthesiological structure of the human body is then a libidinal structure, the perception [is] a mode of desire, a relation of being and not of knowledge.”126 The bodily openness to what is manifest as actual and what is non-actual as correlate to perceptual and motor behavior is already a mode of “orectic” (desiring, striving) behavior.127 Animal sexuality, for example, is not simply subordinated to a field of material stimuli triggered by a predetermined survival and procreation impulse according to the utilitaristic psychology of evolutionism.128 Sexuality rather implies a form of intentionality by which the animal perceives and posits the presence of another animal by making itself perceptible for another through the coherent and stable pattern of its form and behavior: “There are as many relations among animals of one species as there are internal relations among every part of the body of each animal. The fact that there is a relation between the exterior aspect of the animal and its capacity for vision seems to prove it: the animal sees according to whether it is dernier fait de l’animal un objet de science et qu’il ne le considère pas selon la verité qui lui est propre.” N 245. 126 [L]a structure esthésiologique du corps humain est donc une structure libidinale, la ­perception un mode de désir, un rapport d’être et non de connaissance.” N 272. For a good account of the role of psychoanalytic concepts in Merleau-Ponty’s work, see in particular Étienne Bimbenet’s excellent tracing of the presence of psychoanalytic sources at the important junctures of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. See in particular Bimbenet 2004, 296–302. On the reinterpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis in The Structure of Bahavior, see Bimbenet 2004, 93–99; on the recasting of the universal role of sexuality in psychoanalysis in the Phenomenology of Perception, see Bimbenet 2004, 116–126. 127 Cf. Lindén on this point: “Il serait possible de dire que l’intentionnalité animale possède la structure oréctique d’idéntifier le désiré et le fixer dans l’acte de désir, créant ainsi un repère relativement stable qui rend possible la perception non seulement du désiré mais du monde autour à travers le désiré – et à travers toutes ses déclinaisons plus ou moins fantasmagoriques.” Lindén 2011, 89. 128 “Il ne faut pas voir dans cette manifestation de la sexualité le simple ornement d’un fait essential, qui serait le rapprochement des cellules males et des cellules femelles, car on ne comprendrait pas alors la richesse de ces manifestations. La sexualité, si elle ne visait que l’utile, pourrait se manifester par des voies plus économiques […] Si la vie consistait à former des bandes cohérentes d’animaux, il suffirait de déclencheurs simples.” N 245.

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visible.”129 On the one hand, since the animal desire is affected by the desired object, this intentionality of display involves a form of causality.130 On the other hand, since the act of desiring identifies the desired object in sensing as relatively coherent and stable structure whose manifestation actualizes the sense of something that is of relevance for the life of the animal, this causality has “existential value.”131 The aspect of desire becomes therefore paradigmatic for illustrating the theme of existence as neutral in relation to the modern dualistic distinction between a mental interior and a physical exterior. The subject of desire is not a consciousness but a body: “a body which of itself desires something other than itself or its similars, as physiochemistry becomes other than itself in life, and [a body] which, however, desires it according to its own logic, by its own arrangement, by its own weight, a perceived thing that perceives itself, and thereby inserts the world between it and itself – a mass of pleasures and of pains that are not closed in on themselves, but is used by us to please and to suffer from the world and from others (pleasure and reality) – there is not a frontal overcoming here, but a lateral one, by detour.”132 The act of desire falls between the desired object, which already includes the expectation of the conjunction of oneself with what is desired, and the living animal that desires, perceives, and moves in direction of the desired object. As such, the desiring animal, ­­including the 129 130

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N 247. The recasting of the sense of this causality involved in desire is insightfully illustrated by Lindén. He show that the distinction between causality and intentionality as characteristic of classical phenomenological approaches loses much of its relevance if the Aristotelian notion of “cause” is taken into consideration and contrasted to the modern conception of causality. See Lindén 2011–2012, 348 et passim. N 246. In the last pages of the second lecture course on nature, Merleau-Ponty draws an analogy that is worth being noticed, especially in light of his late project of a psychoanalysis of nature. The Umwelt is defined as “a theme that haunts consciousness” and the ­orientation of animal behavior is compared to the orientation of our oneiric consciousness. Cf. N 233. Oneiric consciousness orients itself “towards certain poles that are never seen as such, but that are nonetheless cause of all the elements of the dream.” Cf. N 233, 251, 252, 255. The notion of oneiric consciousness stresses the sense of virtuality allowing for variations in the life of the animal against the idea of a rigid concatenation of mechanistic actions. N 273. This description is the living act of desiring is matched by the description of the perceiving body: “my body as interposed between that which is in front of me and that which is behind me, my body standing in front of standing things, in circuit with the world – Einfühlung with the world, with the things, with the animals, with the other bodies (as having a perceptive ‘side’ too) understandable by this theory of the flesh.” N 271. In the lectures on L’institution La passivité, Merleau-Ponty offers a more extensive account of this intermediate position of the desiring subject.

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human animal, exhibits an intentionality that is open to be affected by what is important, with all the dangers and variability that this involves. At the same time, the act of desiring actively pursues the objects that manifest relevance according to a coherent orientation of one’s form and behavior. This l­ibidinal and intercorporeal intentionality is thus not a­ ssociated with a criterion of consciousness but rather with a natural belongingness to a living nature, or as Merleau-Ponty also puts it, with a “natural rooting in the for-another.”133 The renewed consideration of animal behavior and of the behavior of the human body teaches us therefore “not only the union of our soul with our body, but [also] the lateral union of humanity and of animality.”134 Humanity is “another corporeity” or, one could also say, another animality.135 In sum, the third set of “Nature” lectures aims at seizing the logos of the zoon logon echon at a point that precedes the ideal of the animal rationale.136 The notion of logos rather undergoes now a dramatic generalization and relativization beyond all projective self-interpretation of the theorizing subject: “Animality and human being are given only together, within a whole of Being that would have been visible ahead of time in the first animal had there been someone to read it. Now this visible and invisible Being, the sensible, our Ineinander in the sensible, with the animals, are permanent attestations, even though visible being is not the whole of Being, because it [Being] already has its other invisible side.”137 Yet, as this passage makes clear, the same analysis that rehabilitates the animality in the human points at the same time to the originality of the human phenomenon as openness to the Ineinander of animal and human in the comprehensive grasp of the “visible”/“invisible” being.

133 On this particular point, Merleau-Ponty refers to the work of Adolf Portmann on ­Tiergestalt. See N 272, 281. 134 N 339. 135 N 269. Cf. already in The Structure of Behavior: “Si la vie est l’apparition d’un ‘intérieur’ dans l’‘extérieur,’ la conscience n’est d’abord que la projection dans le monde d’un ­nouveau ‘milieu,’ irréductible aux précédents, il est vrai, et l’humanité qu’une nouvelle espèce animale.” SC 175. 136 In the third “Nature” lectures, Merleau-Ponty writes: “It is not the eye that sees, but it is not the soul either. It is rather the body as “open totality” (totalité ouverte, N 280) or as “body of the spirit” (corps de l’esprit, N 284). As regards this latter expression, see also N 288, RC 177 and VI 287. In N 188 Merleau-Ponty uses also the variant expression corps du comportement and in N 284 the expression corps d’une vie. These formulations capture the fact that the soul is not something added from outside to the body, the latter being therefore identified with the animal side of the human. 137 N 338.

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8 Towards a Philosophy in Double Dimensionality: Merleau-Ponty’s Esthesiology The analysis of living nature therefore moves and builds in clear adherence to phenomenological basic principles, which, at the same time, get further demonstrated and validated in the course of the interpretive reading of the particular findings. The same analysis however also begins to recast the preliminary sense of these principles, especially with regard to the intentional constitution of the field of experience. Merleau-Ponty’s study of animality and his phenomenological reading of biological findings are now brought to bear on phenomenology’s core idea of the intentional act as grounded in the ontological dimension of living nature. On these reinterpreted phenomenological grounds, reality is not ipso facto the result of a subjective constitution culminating in the eidetic system of insights set up by the phenomenologist as disinterested spectator of a world any judgment about the existence of which he or she has temporarily suspended. Merleau-Ponty takes up and transforms the motive behind this very activity (the eidetic variation) as anchored in experience and therefore, consistently with Husserl’s own procedure, as predisposed to self-critical advances. The dimension of co-existence that emerges from the crossing and interlacing of Umwelten identifies an interanimal (or intercorporeal) reality that cannot be defined with reference to any of the particular animal modes to exist in each specific Umwelt.138 Therefore the definition of existence that emerges from this dimension of co-existence is not univocal. Through the confrontation with animal life we find a path towards the elaboration of a fundamental form of intentionality that is neither restricted to our human teleological sense (culture) nor, in even narrower terms, to a very specific human teleological sense (the cultural world of epistemic objectivity). Even if taken under the effect of the phenomenological epoché, which suspends the aspect of existence of reality, this reality is retained in the analysis as modalized and modalizable intentional content in the coursing of a lived experience. If however there is an interanimal form of intentionality and thus manifold forms of intentional relationship to an intentional content, as described in terms of the “visible”/“invisible,” then intentionality appears less as a criterion of a pure consciousness and rather what could be described with Merleau-Ponty as a “lateral-universal of co-perception of the world.”139 Corresponding to this living universal intentionality, however, one must also posit a fundamental dimension of existence encompassing all forms of experience of 138 139

Merleau-Ponty speaks of “interanimality” in N 227, 247. Universel-latéral de co-perception du monde. N 281.

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the world while necessarily exceeding the specifically conditioned features by which experience opens unto reality, including the many and varied expressions of human intentionality.140 The deep coherence of this conclusion is most clearly seen in the formulation meant to summarize the results of the whole analysis of living nature: the first three “sketches” in the preparatory notes for the third “Nature” course formulate the theory of animal experience, starting from Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt, in terms of an esthesiology or a theory of flesh.141 The “flesh” is here the name for the living incarnated body as a union of soul and body, which thereby contrasts the modern designation of it as sheer physical materiality and of thought, reason, the soul, or consciousness, as somehow adjoined to or ­ensouling it: “theory of the flesh, of the body as Empfindbarkeit and of the things as implicated in it. This has nothing to do with a consciousness that would descend into a body-object.”142 Rather, Merleau-Ponty writes: “the flesh is the Urpräsentierbarkeit of the Nichturpräsentierten as such, the visibility of the invisible, esthesiology.”143 The dimension designated by the “flesh” is therefore that of living nature as it has been described with reference to biological studies and as anteceding the determination of nature in terms of sheer physical matter or, more generally, in the epistemic terms of a nature-object 140 Lindén has argued in favor of the role of a universal animal community shaping our empirical reality and has stressed the distinction between a “universal of the soul” (­l’universel de l’âme) and the “universal of the mind” (l’universel de l’esprit). Lindén claims that “the empirical worlds of animals are not like stuff that we can shape according to our own will, but rather that which gives an ontological entourage to our will to determine the world in virtue of its empirical and universal validity. The totality of experiences of all living beings makes manifest an ontological dimension that holds good for everyone, but that has this universal validity under the sign of a constitutive indeterminacy.” Lindén 2011, 89–90. As a result, in his argument for a “living universal” (animé universel) or a “universal that holds good” (valable universel), Lindén concludes that “belongingness means precisely that the dimension to which one belongs exceeds the character by which one belongs [to it].” Lindén 2011, 94. Renaud Barbaras, commenting on Merleau-Ponty’s double critique of naturalism and essentialism in The Visible and the Invisible, writes in the same vein, “That which is addressed [visé] by the question exceeds absolutely that which the answer discovers as the object of what is addressed.” Barbaras 1989, 29. 141 Unlike the first two courses on “Nature,” which are composed by the notes taken by several auditors, the third and final set of notes making up the lecture course on nature is Merleau-Ponty’s own hand. This third gourp of notes is divided into eight “sketches” (Ébauches). These sketches are composed as repeated variations on central themes of the course. The first three sketches begin with the same reference to the theory of Umwelt. 142 N 271. “Esthésiologie: l’union de l’âme et du corps prise au sérieux.” (N 287). “Ne pas penser l’esthésiologie comme descente d’une pensée dans un corps.” (N 284). 143 N 271.

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according to our specific access to natural reality. Thus, while knowledge may very well remain for us a determining factor in experiencing natural reality, the “flesh” names the newly radically enlarged sense of “experience” that emerges from the study of animality as “sensibility” (Empfindbarkeit), i.e. openness to the appearance of a world or to phenomenality as such.144 As such, the “flesh” is a dimension of general affectivity in the full connotation expressed in ­phenomenology by the term Erlebnis as indicating a base-dimension of lived experience in living intentional awareness. There are two main effects of this theory of the flesh. First, if sensibility is the basic dimension for the appearance of the world and phenomenality as concerning living being, then one needs to realize that natural reality as such, including other living beings, can only appear in the context of our human perceptual constitution. Natural reality can only be thought in terms of “perceived Nature” to which there corresponds the correlate claim that “the human body can only be understood as the perceiving body.”145 The “flesh” designates therefore the displaying of the world as sensible, including itself as living sensing and perceiving (as living human body) in the openness of a concrete milieu. But the “flesh” designates something else too, namely the coming about of the natural “sensibility” within which there can be perceiving of this perceived in the first place. The “flesh” is both the living/lived reality that we perceive by way of our body and the very constitutive agency opening up and therefore conditioning the specific human capability to perceptually determine reality. ­Merleau-Ponty describes this “coming about” or “opening up” of the human living body as “flesh” in terms of a “hollowing out” (creux) of and within nature.146 As a result, natural reality as such, that is, as dimension ­conditioning the ­coming about and dynamics of experience, remains thereby in a state of in principle invisibility. The manuscript on The Visible and the Invisible, the parallel piece to the last set of “Nature” lectures, will make the dimension of invisibility its thematic focus, but this invisibility gets couched in the “Nature” lectures in biological terms: “Emergence of the flesh from life like [emergence] of life in the physiochemistry.”147 Thus, what the biological context makes 144

145 146 147

This is of course a theme that is anticipated in Merleau-Ponty’s earlier analyses of the l­ iving body, specifically those in the Phenomenology of Perception as focusing respectively on “The Body Proper” (First Part) and on “The Perceived World” (Second Part). “[M]y organism,” Merleau-Ponty writes, is “prepersonal adherence to the general form of the world, as anonymous and general existence.” PhP 99; “The body is our general means to have a world.” PhP 171. N 278. N 271, 272, 281, 282, 286, 302. N 280.

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clear is also that this invisibility is not absolute invisibility as natural reality is precisely manifest in the very experience of the world that it opens up. The reality that is here discerned can only be discerned through what can be actually seen and only as the barely detectable, i.e., as maintaining its feature of ­invisibility: “In between the microscopic facts, global reality is delineated like a watermark, never graspable for objectivizing-particular thinking, never eliminable or reducible to the microscopic.”148 With reference to the analysis of interanimal experience, the point here is that the universal dimension of the “flesh” gets expressed in many and varied ways which are more or less accessible to our experience – whether in ontogenesis or anatomic development or in the behavioral integration of the animal with its milieu or, finally, in the ­relationship of the animal with other animals or with humans. This global dimension itself, however, while it is named “flesh,” would have at most to be said to be “not nothing” as an in principle indeterminacy that eschews any particular innerworldy determination.149 The second effect has to do with the role of the concept in precisely making the “flesh” available in comprehensive understanding as the goal of philosophical efforts. If the result of the analysis of interanimal experience is to exhibit the human being as Ineinander of humanity and animality whereby the human appears as “fold” or “folio leaf” of living nature, then also the very capacity to determine conceptually the condition of “sensibility” as enabling the appearance of a dimension for manifestation or phenomenality cannot be that of pure conceptuality as dimension often assumed not to require any bodily or natural attachments.150 There follows that the “idea” or the “concept,” while seeking to obtain philosophical comprehensiveness, remains natively of this natural reality as source of all sense and intelligibility, that is, in the perceptual 148 149

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N 268. On the expression “not nothing,” see N 266, 267, 275, 283. Merleau-Ponty also ­designates this invisible as an “inner framework” (membrure) that is not absolute invisibility and transcendence, but also never to be taken in terms of any visible thing. N 152, 159, 269, 282, 287. The human being, as carnal subject (N 280), as “hollowed out” as flesh, is open to itself and nature by way of the very capability of “sensing” that the flesh itself is: “Il faudra dégager mieux cette idée de l’Être, c’est-à-dire de ce qui fait que ces Êtres, la Nature, l’homme sont, et sont ‘l’un dans l’autre,’ qu’ils sont ensemble du côté de ce qui n’est pas rien, p ­ réciser en particulier le rapport du positif et du négatif en eux, du visible et du non-visible. Et c­ onfronter cet Être intérieurement tissé de négation avec l’Être des ­ontologies classiques.” N 275. On the term “Ineinander,” see N 269–270, 277–278, 283, 286, 293, 338–339. On humanity as “fold” or “folio leaf,” see N 269. The word “fold” (pli) is applied to life in N 208 and to language in N 282. Cf. Lindén 2011, 86: “L’humain serait donc une sorte de face intérieur de la nature.”

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coherence and variability of its appearance. The result is that what is supposed to name the most fundamental dimension of experiential constitution is effective only as inchoatively rooted in the living sensibility to be named and that Merleau-Ponty does name the “flesh.” Thus, it is only starting with what comes to be manifested perceptually in and through the sensible flesh that conceptual meaning can articulate the ultimate (invisible) foundations or conditioning sources of every experience and appearance of the world. This is evident in reference to the condition for conceptual articulation as possible only through the concrete nature-integral symbolic system of language and its expressivity: “Here the title, Nature and Logos, receives its full sense. There is a Logos of the natural world, [of the] aesthetic [world], on which the Logos of language rests.”151 If the study of animality discerns a dimension of operative sense in nature, so that Merleau-Ponty defines “animality” as “the Logos of the sensible world: an incarnated sense,” language takes up the intentional content of this lived sense into the dimension of ideality by way of its expressive and symbolic power which, however, cannot be deployed without the preavailability of and belongingness to a sedimented history and culture as “second nature” or, as Merleau-Ponty writes, as a “second body.”152 This double dimension of the analysis, which comes to the fore with a t­ heory of the flesh or esthesiology, becomes then the true philosophical problem that the “Nature” lectures launch and that the text on The Visible and the Invisible begins to explicitly thematize. 151 152

N 274. N 273. On “incarnated sense,” see N 219. On language as “taking up” the sense opened up by perception, see N 282.

Chapter 6

The Institution of Nature 1 Introduction: Phenomenological Ontology and the Institution of Nature The lectures on “Nature” held between 1956 and 1960 make clear that the theme of nature stands out by two main attributes: first, Merleau-Ponty writes, the concept of nature is the privileged expression of ontology, and its evolution works as a propaedeutic towards ontology; second, the experience of nature outlines another and new ontology.1 The study of nature advances concretely a theory of the continuity of the real that is met with in experience against the theories of spatio-temporal atomism. The main assumption of the latter is that about an objective reality as a sum of things that are ontologically separated. This assumption makes it impossible to account for the fundamental continuous processes defining our experience, such as organic life, history, consciousness, and time. In the previous chapters, I showed how Merleau-Ponty develops his account of the Gestalt character of living action and cognition from his first two works on behavior and perception in a series of investigations into the concept of nature. If we turn to the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, it can be observed how Merleau-Ponty introduces the new project explicitly as an ontological interrogation while also tracing the lineage of his ontological project back to the analyses in the Phenomenology of Perception.2 As a matter of fact, the whole analysis “must be entirely carried out within the perspective of ontology.”3

1 N 265–266. 2 VI 219, 230, 237. In highlighting this lineage I am disagreeing with the view of mainstream scholarship about Merleau-Ponty’s turn to ontological investigations from his previous phenomenological focus and the often exaggerated incompatibility of ontological and phenomenological analyses and wordings in Merleau-Ponty’s corpus. Notable exceptions to mainstream views on this point from both recent and older scholarship are Taminiaux 1977 and Benoist 2019. In a working note of The Visible and the Invisible from February 1959, ­Merleau-Ponty famously states in reference to the Phenomenology of Perception that “what one might consider to be ‘psychology’ (Phenomenology of Perception) is in fact ontology.” (VI 230). The question, then, as Merleau-Ponty realizes in another note from the same month, remains that of bringing the results of the Phenomenology of Perception to “ontological explicitation.” (VI 237). 3 VI 222. © Alessio Rotundo, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004548947_008

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The lectures on “Nature” show that the aspect of genesis is firmly integrated within this ontological perspective, as Merleau-Ponty clearly emphasizes when he takes up and recasts the Cartesian theme of the “institution of nature.” The idea of an institution of nature occurs in Descartes’ Sixth Meditation and is meant to account for and justify, in light of the results of the previous meditations, the possibility for our mind or soul to apperceive bodily states and movements as its own. The problem discussed by Descartes in the last meditation is therefore the problem of the substantial union of the soul and the body. This discussion is carried out in connection with the assessment about the existence of material things. The meditation rehabilitates the existence of material things by justifying the veracity of the natural inclination to believe in the existence of external objects. Descartes thereby reintegrates this natural inclination, which plays a crucial part in our life, with our faculty of natural light, which, in Descartes’ strategy, is guaranteed by the existence of God. This expedient of the proof of God, as Husserl calls it, must provide the reason why we can, and ultimately should, trust the impression of corporeal affections.4 Yet, this rehabilitation of the existence of material things yields a particular conception of the relationship between the soul and the body. This relationship cannot be thought as such, Descartes contends elsewhere.5 But even if we cannot grasp the union of body and soul through our natural light, this union is certainly lived, that is, we experience it in our natural inclination to believe in the existence of material things, including our own body. Yet, the proofs for the existence of God function as premises to establish the truth of this inclination. According to this conception, an “institution of nature,” Descartes writes, “compels the soul to function according to the apparatus of the body and also the body to furnish ready-made thoughts to the soul.”6 4 [D]ie Nothilfe des Gottesbeweises (Hua VI, 422). This “expedient” is therefore essential for ­Descartes’ project because God is not a “deceiver” and can thereby function as axiomatic premise for establishing the existence of the world and the possibility of its methodical knowledge by extinguishing all doubt. The phenomenological recasting of the idea of an “institution of nature” rather works against this tendency towards “security” by laying open our natural experience in the natural world in its full instability but also and for this very reason as essentially question-triggering. 5 Descartes’ letter to Princess Elizabeth from June 28, 1643. 6 This is the relevant passage from Descartes’ Meditations: “[W]hen I feel a pain in my foot, physics teaches me that this sensation took place by means of nerves distributed throughout the foot, like stretched cords extending from the foot all the way to the brain. When these nerves are pulled in the foot, they also pull on the inner parts of the brain to which they extend, and produce a certain motion in them. This motion has been constituted by nature [qui institutus est a natura] so as to affect the mind with a sensation of pain, as if it occurred in the foot.” AT VII, 87. Cf. also Descartes’ Dioptrique: “Ce sont les mouvements par lesquels

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Merleau-Ponty takes up the theme of the institution of nature in the third and last set of lectures in order to designate the theory of esthesiology, especially in contrast with Malebranche’s occasionalist explication of perception. The idea of a natural institution of the living human body, which gets articulated through its perceiving, desiring, and linguistic functions, presents a conception of experience as deployment of one same constitutive capacity for sensing, as flesh. For Descartes, this capacity belongs to a domain of affectivity (sentiment) that testifies of the union of our soul with the body and that, for this reason, in the context of Cartesian philosophy, is thereby identified with the actualization of a confused mode of thought. For Cartesian epistemology, esthesiology is ultimately about the extended reality of physical bodies, among which the living body is the substance in relation to which thoughts such as those of pain, hunger, or thirst (jugements naturels) take place. But since the explication of the union of body and soul rests ultimately on the existence of an ens originarium, this union must also rest on “the absolute opacity of an institution that reconnects by the efficacity of decision two orders each of which would suffice to itself.”7 There is an “inneist” tendency in this Cartesian epistemology issuing in the occasionalist idea of an “intelligible extension” accessible only to God. The institution of nature becomes here a divine science, which, as such, has devastating effect for the project of legitimation of the empirical sciences of nature. The dynamic activity of integration of the living organism with the intentional contents making up its milieu, in the terms described above as sensibility of the flesh, must rather be thought as truly instituted, as the actual onsetting of a living and perceiving process rather than being the result of the continuous efficacity of a divine understanding.8 Merleau-Ponty intends thereby to articulate the institution of nature on the level of the natural union of body and soul, which he understands as an order that gives “at one stroke what a divine science would make us understand.”9 This is also why esthesiology or the theory of flesh is said to take seriously the union of the soul and the body.10 In Merleau-Ponty, this claim follows from an astute rereading of Descartes’ thesis that the union of body and soul cannot be grasped by pure understanding.11

[la peinture des choses] est composée, qui, agissant immédiatement contre notre âme, d’autant qu’elle est unie à notre corps, sont institués de la nature pour lui faire avoir de tels sentiments.” AT VI, 130. 7 VI 286. 8 N 272, 280, 282, 284. 9 VI 222. 10 N 287. 11 Cf. OE 55.

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The phenomenon of the living being is namely not adequately articulated if one starts with the usual mutual separation of substances, such as the body or the soul, matter or spirit. The phenomenon of life in fact remains integrative of both categories in the invisible temporal deploying of visibility as sensible vectoriality of a meaningful milieu of life for a concretely sensing living being; this holds also for the particular kind of living that is human experiencing in nature. If one therefore turns to the conceptual determination of this integrative experiencing, then accordingly the “body” and “soul,” or “matter” and “spirit” need also to be taken together for bringing this living functional dynamic to proper articulation. But there is another fundamental realization stemming from all this. The flesh, as institution of nature, is in fact the primordial and still actual ongoing opening to one’s natural reality in one’s own sensing flesh as integratively open to a natural dimension of manifestness as sensible and to itself as coming to be in that dimension. As a result, the conceptual articulation of the coming about of phenomenality as such achieves proper intelligibility only if it accords with the status of flesh as fundamental originating factor of experience. Yet this is only achieved, that is, the dimension designated as “flesh” becomes both ­accessible and determinable primordially only in and through the intentional experiencing and understanding of a particular living conscious human being. But this gives again to phenomenality a status of methodological primacy even at the very bottommost level of constituting action as represented in terms of the genesis and development of conscious living nature. While this mode of articulation remains inadequate in principle for the explication of constitutive processes as ultimately transcendental, the designation of the latter as “flesh” makes clear that one is no longer dealing with some separate entitative ­substance such as Nature or Reason or Spirit.12 As a result, the possibility of adequately articulating the dimension of ­origins of experience as other than that of an ens originarium, depends ultimately on the adequate articulation of the interrelation of being and nothing.13 The ontological outline in the drafted portion of The Visible and the Invisible emphasizes this point. Merleau-Ponty critically evaluates reflection, negation, and intuition according to their positivistic and negativistic tendencies: “Like the negativism of the doubt, the positivism of the essences says secretly the contrary of what it says openly.” If the negativism of Descartes’ doubt harbors 12 Cf. VI 193–194. 13 Merleau-Ponty’s long fine-grained critique of Sartre’s philosophy boils down to Sartre’s failure, in spite of his intentions, to think a “nothing sunk in being.” VI 118, 122. Cf. also Bimbenet 2004, 211–213.

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the positivism of a res cogitans, the positivism of the essences harbors the ­negativism of a pure consciousness.14 In Merleau-Ponty’s strategy, Sartre’s philosophy is paradigmatic expression of this ventriloquial thought as “that which always affirms or denies in the hypothesis what it denies or affirms in the thesis, that which as high-altitude thinking belies the inherence of being in nothingness and of nothingness in being.”15 The experience of nature, as seen in Chapter 4 and 5, works as a corrective of this Sartrian way of thinking and points to a dimension where being and nothing pass into one another.16 By the same token, however, Merleau-Ponty suggests, the way to understand their interrelation presupposes repeated and extensive analysis against any “high-­ altitude thinking,” i.e. against a point of view from nowhere or the point of view of a kosmos theoros, which historically has assumed either a positivistic form (substantialism) or a negativistic form (transcendental idealism). What we learn from this, however, is that this work of constant qualification and deepening is essential for the transformative turn from the intrawordly biological, esthesiological, or linguistic framework to the ultimate questions of ­origination and constitution of world-experience as concretely carried out in accordance to the very findings of that intrawordly frame. 2

Nature as Empirical and Transcendental Genesis

We have seen that when Nature is investigated in light of an effort of radical reflection, of “hyper-reflection,” that is, in light of the problem of beginnings or genesis, then we face methodological issues raised by the double dimensionality at work at every step of post-preliminary phenomenological analysis: Genesis, that is, the passage from nothing to something, as mode of radical unveiling of Being, proof of totality, and not as empirical anecdote, or as an explication by the interior. Genesis or emergence [surgissement], 14 15 16

VI 160. Cf. VI 183–184. VI 104. Merleau-Ponty speaks of “passer” of being and nothing into one another in VI 96 and of “totalité confuse” in VI 91. In this argument, the same point about the interrelation of being and nothing comes to expression in a variety of different formulations such as “épaisseur,” “profondeur,” “pluralité des plans,” “arrière-mondes” (VI 97). These expressions are typical of Merleau-Ponty’s positive attempt to capture the dimension of negativity that he is after and that can be summarized with the idea of an “interworld” (intermonde), expression that appears several times over the course of The Visible and the Invisible (VI 73, 90, 116) and most importantly there where the concept of “flesh of the world” is introduced (VI 116).

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which poses the problem left in suspense by a transcendental attitude referring to the ideal order. What is “genetically” first is not necessarily transcendentally first or, for an internal and totalizing consideration, may be only the most visible of a block of invisible Being; but it is then that the description of genesis was superficial, overburdened by corpuscular and empiricist postulates. Genesis truly understood must show a relation to the whole, that is, to conform to transcendental genesis and even to its successive form demanded by this.17 The question of genesis is laid out here in terms of the reiteration of a philosophical program Merleau-Ponty has been articulating explicitly since the Phenomenology of Perception but that was already outlined and anticipated by the early study on behavior. In accordance with the coming about of the ­intentional structure of living nature, as displayed by empirical studies in biology, the unity of anatomic structure with behavioral dynamics defines the organic totality of the living as interiority that is inseparable from exteriority.18 The point that emerged from this is deeply coherent with the phenomenological application of the epoché as setting aside implicit assumptions about physical or mental reality. The ontogenesis and behavior of the living organism outline a totality that is temporally in the making and therefore remains insufficiently accounted for by theories based on the prejudice of objective being as presence outside of time.19 This biological account of organic life becomes eminently phenomenological in the way it describes life as opening up a phenomenal field that is integral to organic development and behavior. The introduction of the element of appearance and manifestness into the account of living being, both as production of a milieu and as visibility of the animal in that milieu, recasts our understanding of biological reality not only in the sense of what is originated, instituted, or generated but also, in conjunction 17 18

19

N 292–293. “From the moment behavior is considered ‘in its unity’ and in its human meaning [sens], one is no longer dealing with a material reality nor, moreover, with a mental reality [une réalité psychique], but with a meaningful whole [un ensemble significatif] or a structure which properly belongs neither to the external world nor to internal life.” SC 182. “Thus for us, for example, it must be that the Nature in us have some relation to Nature outside of us – even that Nature outside of us be revealed to us by the Nature that we are.” N 267. Cf. e.g. Bergson 1932, 40: “L’essence des explications mécaniques est en effet de considérer l’avenir et le passé comme calculables en fonction du présent, et de prétendre ainsi que tout est donné. Dans cette hypothèse, passé, présent et avenir seraient visibles d’un seul coup pour une intelligence surhumaine, capable d’effectuer le calcul.”

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with this, in the sense of the ongoing unfolding of the sensitive-intentional relationship of the animal with a sense-material, that is, perceptual field of phenomena. It is at this juncture and only after recognition of these two integrated senses of the biological that one can begin to pursue the organic living genesis as ­conforming to transcendental genesis and as taking up the problem that the transcendental attitude left in suspense. The order of the transcendental, i.e. of the conditioning factors of experience, does not primarily refer to the order of the ideal, especially when this is taken in terms of the conceptual fixation of contrasting metaphysical orders of being. The order of the transcendental is rather that of a constitutive genesis encompassing every order of being and which thereby cannot be ultimately identified with any “being” or “process” actually anteceding the constituted products as an entity resting “in itself” and from which all other beings would derive.20 Transcendental genesis is the constitutive foundation for the ongoing coming to be of a coherent and intelligible world of experience, which is determinable primarily in the ­context of my own human sensitive-bodily life that Merleau-Ponty designates with the name of the “flesh.” It is at this bottommost level of articulation of experiential manifestation and sense with its complexities and intricacies – that of our bodily Empfindbarkeit21 – that one must find and follow the agreement of experiential living genesis with transcendental genesis. What results from this consideration is that the agreement plays out first of all in terms of the “nexus” that each of us is both as primordial “invisible ­having-come-to-awareness [prise de conscience]” and as what is “made present in the visible.”22 In what follows, however, Merleau-Ponty immediately specifies that “[t]he invisible, spirit/mind [l’esprit], is not a second positivity; it is the inside [l’envers], or the other side of the visible.”23 If the fundamental thrust of natural science is to carry out investigations that draw the validity of their results and judgments by recourse to the evidence of a certain experiential state of affairs, then the description of this ongoing event in process that is human nature in the natural world assumes eo ipso “transcendental” meaning. The description and probing of this phenomenon – the flesh as the visible/ invisible or more generally sensible/sensing being – accounts for the temporalizing of concrete experiential sense as the very possibility for the experiential foundations of the methodical observation and experimental examination in 20 21 22 23

Cf. N 266–267. N 271. N 267, 271. N 274.

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science. Thus, the agreement of empirical and transcendental genesis plays out right at the heart of human living corporeality as one actual integrative whole that emerges as clearly in contrast to the usual dichotomy of the “mundane” and the “transcendental” in more classical presentations of phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty programmatically defined this structurally integrative phenomenon as the “transcendental human being” (homme transcendantal) in the proposal for his candidacy at the Collège de France in 1951. In the “Nature” lectures, Merleau-Ponty approached this phenomenon via “nature” as natura according to the Latin root of this term, i.e. nascor (birthing, coming into being). Birth as the biological event in which is couched the very coming to be of our human being is the event of an emergence of the dynamic sensing awareness which concretely opens unto being in the living determinacy of some concrete living entity. When the coming into being and operation of the human being in nature in terms of living “flesh” is found and described in terms of this ­living dynamic of origination, then the “Nature” in question here is fundamentally no longer simply determinable as some antecedent entity or process in time causing the emergence of another entity or process, in particular when this is understood in terms of sheerly physical or biochemical events couched within a mechanism of natural selection. The “Nature” that is in question here is rather only adequately thinkable in relation to the very experiential ongoing event that it brings about, that is, the “flesh,” which Merleau-Ponty explicitly expresses when he writes that “there is no other means for thinking nature than by nature perceived.”24 The idea of the “flesh” in other words teaches us the conjunction of “matter” and “sense” or “nature” and “spirit” as found at the very heart and origin of human experience in the world.25 ­Merleau-Ponty had programmatically pursued this conjunction not only on the level of biological and perceptual processes, but also in the direction of the establishment of language, the institutions of culture, such as painting and literature, and pushing his meditation into the logic of history and the idea of reason.26 In 24 25

26

N 278. Bimbenet presents this idea as the thesis that the “flesh” is both “destituent” (destituante) and “restitutive” (restituante) with regard to the humanity of the human being: “La chair est donc destituante, s’il est vrai qu’à travers elle l’homme radicalise le décentrement à soi constitutif de toute vie; mais elle est restituante aussi bien, et cette fois-ci sans restriction, car à travers elle s’ouvre l’horizon d’une rationalité véritable.” Bimbenet 2004, 273. Cf. also Bruzina 2001, 69. On the problem of reason as at the center of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, cf. Bimbenet 2004, 292–296. Cf. also my “Ratio Negativa: Normative Reason and History in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,” in Etica e Politica / Ethics and Politics (2021) XXIII/2, EUT Edizioni ­Università di Trieste, Trieste, 2021, pp. 345–368.

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light of the strict coherence of this program, the “transcendental” therefore cannot possibly be identified with any “natural” absolute, whether in the form of a naturalistic physicalism or a naturalistic psychologism, nor with an “ideal” absolute modeled upon the mental work of human reflective thematization as so often displayed by modern philosophies of consciousness. The “transcendental” is rather only adequately found in and as the total event of the human being in the world of “nature” and “history” but only if these terms are taken according to the fundamental refashioning demanded by the phenomenological ­description of genesis and the deeply integrative bivalent ontology it ­displays on every level of analysis. If we pay attention to the systematic character of this conceptual ­apparatus, then Merleau-Ponty’s thesis receives comprehensive interpretive force: “not that everything is nature, but because everything is natural or becomes natural to us. There are no differences of substance between physical nature, life, and spirit.” The “natural” here does no longer designate the purely “­material” in the sense of physical or chemical stuff and its equally material forces. The “natural” rather designates the comprehensive domain of what is concretely accessible to us, or, as Merleau-Ponty writes few lines after the passage just quoted, the domain of “the nature of which ‘we are’” and “the nature in us.”27 But this is precisely the comprehensive domain of “sense” as defined by the central phenomenon of the sensitivity of the flesh as integrative structural conception of human nature by and in which one has any insight into transcendental genesis. 3

Towards Totality: Perceptual Faith and the Flesh

Merleau-Ponty multiplies in his texts the ways and sense in which the agreement or coincidence of the transcendental and the empirical plays out at every level of human experience, from organic life to the domains of culture and history. The Visible and the Invisible makes this essential principle the very focus of analysis as given comprehensive representation by the notions of “perceptual faith” and the “flesh.” Merleau-Ponty’s recasting of Husserlian concepts in this text demonstrates the overall direction of this systematization of the question of the primordial genesis of sense in experience. This radicalized recasting lays out the kind of conceptual transformations that this principle not only

27

N 275.

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allows but also demands in order to bring the integrative structural agreement of transcendental and empirical genesis to full assertion. The ontological outline, which goes under the title “Philosophical Interrogation,” turns against Pyrrhonian arguments and shows that the issue of establishing a starting point for philosophy is not a problem of reality (the skeptical problem whether there is a world or whether our experience of it is true or false). The question is not if the world exists, but how it exists.28 The study of nature, which was to follow, intended thus to begin and advance our insight into the sense of being of the world (le sens de l’être du monde) after the prejudices of skepticism and logicism have been finally detected and weakened in their extreme and self-destructive demands to reason.29 As we have seen, the main implication drawn from the study of nature is the one concerning the question about being and nothing.30 This is the question defining modern thought, which can be summarized by the Leibnizian search for a principle of sufficient reason when he asks, “why is there something rather than nothing?” In a certain modern declination of this question that was inaugurated by Descartes’ doubt, the question presupposes a definition of being as framed by a double negation: that which is is that which cannot not be. But this implicit understanding of being has far-reaching consequences for our definition of experience, reality, and knowledge. Descartes’ doubt is the prime paradigm for the search of a being understood as double negation. The methodic doubt follows precisely this understanding in discerning what is from what is not. In this light, the methodic doubt no longer shows a purely presuppositionless stance. The doubt rather presupposes a specific definition of being as that which resists the hypothesis of inexistence. In other

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Barbaras 1989, 28. “Il faut donc passer de la question an sit à la question quid sit, de la question du fait à celle du sens: non pas se demander si le monde est, mais comment est ce monde qui est.” VI 21. Merleau-Ponty points out that the Pyrrhonian argument presupposes the idea of a Being in-itself while calling it into question in its critique of our experience of reality. Skeptical arguments have an ontological prejudice, that is, they must maintain this idea of a Being in-itself in order to raise their doubts about experience and knowledge. In this, as Husserl alludes in Formal and Transcendental Logic, skeptical relativism shares the same assumption of logical absolutism, i.e., the assumption of a being and a truth “in itself.” In his discussion of hyperdialectic Merleau-Ponty clarifies that this “dialectic without synthesis that we are talking about is not however skepticism, the vulgar relativism, or the domain of the ineffable.” (VI 129). This view is confirmed by an unpublished note where Merleau-Ponty suggests that the opposition of being and nothing resumes all the oppositions of metaphysics. I.B.N., VI, f. 54 (in Colonna 2014, 250).

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words, what is positive for it is what is identical to a negation of a negation.31 The work of discerning and extracting being and truth has therefore already decided the fate of a whole series of experiences that are in one stroke placed on the side of what is not, i.e. the illusory sensations and the phantasms of ­imagination. The progressive stride of the Cartesian doubt does not change anything to the hypothesis of inexistence. Finally, as I indicated in the previous chapter, the search for a certitude that resists all doubt – at the cost of casting out of e­ xperience most of what precisely counts for us as experience – is kindred with the tendency to identify the reality that we encounter in experience with the reality upon which we can operate.32 The experiences of physical and living nature surveyed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 have raised the demand to conceive of a form of negativity in being. The idea of a negative-in-being, however, runs directly against the idea of a positivity of being that is at once identical with a double negation. The immediate implication of this non-Cartesian perspective is that the potentially disturbing experiences of deluded sensation, dreaming, hallucinating, can no longer be simply cast out of being and placed on the side of nothing. A further consequence is therefore that the separation between reality and appearance needs to be reconsidered. Therefore, the dimension of a negativity in being opens us to a level of experience where the antinomy of being and nothing works as a true antinomy, that is, as Kant teaches, as a relationship between two terms whose reconciliation can only be found on a level that is other than that on which they appear to be antinomic. The significance and novelty of Merleau-Ponty’s thought is decided precisely on the meaning of this “other” order.33 The opening of The Visible and the Invisible designates this other order as perceptual faith. In the context of perception understood in the narrow sense (the perception of my sense organs), this faith consists in our natural 31 See VI 62, 75. On this point, cf. also Bergson’s critique of the metaphysics that defines “Being” only over against the possibility of “Nothingsness” in the fourth chapter of L’évolution créatrice. Renaud Barbaras points out the common trajectory of Bergson’s critique, based on the notion of intuition, and Merleau-Ponty’s recast version of the phenomenological reduction as recovery of the basic phenomenon of perception. See Barbaras 1999, 65-75. 32 With reference to Einstein’s disqualification of the “psychological” experience of s­ imultaneity regarding intersubjective perceptions, Merleau-Ponty writes that this p ­ osition presupposes “that what is is not that upon which we have an openness, but only that upon which we can operate.” (VI 35). The philosophies of reflection equally reduce “in advance our contact with Being to the discursive operations with which we defend ourselves against illusion.” (VI 62). What is significant is that someone like Einstein would openly admit the contrast of the “wildly speculative” character of his science due to this understanding that equates Being with the operations of science. The philosophies of reflection, we may add, tend to cover up this same contrast emerging in their theories rather than openly acknowledging it. 33 VI 49 f.

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“certitude” to be experiencing the same things, that is, things that maintain a permanence in the flux of experience.34 This is the constitutive problem of perception. The “certitude” of perception is not based on any deliberate effort of justification.35 The question is the basic one to understand how a thing can remain identical for us while we perceive changes in its properties.36 In more general terms, this antinomy of perception lies in the fact that perceptual beings appear as preceding the act of perception while not being conceivable outside of this act: “Being is anterior to perception, and this primordial Being is conceivable only in relation to perception.”37 The conceptual difficulty is that appearance tends to annul being entirely and that being tends to reabsorb appearance entirely. The study of nature was meant to provide the essential concepts for the recasting and articulation of the peculiar relation between reality and appearance that emerges already in the simplest perception. The findings of biology show that there is no absolute distinction between the real and the phenomenal. If this is true for perceptual experience in the narrow sense whereby “[t]he stirring [bougé] of the ‘appearance’ does not disrupt the evidence of the thing,” the study of nature makes clear that this holds also for scientific experience whose most recent findings contest the cleavage between the “subjective” and the “objective” and “make the contact between the observer and the observed enter into the definition of the ‘real.’”38 This insight however is reached only if one makes explicit the implications of the new experiences of nature that Merleau-Ponty discusses and that take perceived being as “the center of indetermination that introduces the possible into full 34

It is “the permanence of the perceived and of perception” (VI 60) that motivates the “very naive postulate” of Cartesian “spirituality,” Merleau-Ponty remarks in VI 59. The expression “perceptual faith” appears in the Phenomenology of Perception in connection with the experience of depth as “nothing but a moment of the perceptual faith in one sole thing.” (PhP 303). 35 The introductory lines of The Visible and the Invisible specify that “faith” is understood here “not in the sense of decision but in that of what is before all position” (VI 17). 36 The experience of a piece of iron that turns red or of a dilating balloon illustrate i­ ntuitively what Merleau-Ponty calls the “antinomies of perceptual faith.” See VI 50. Albert Michotte addressed this question in his studies on phenomenal permanence: “A propos de la permanence phénoménale. Faits et théories” (1950) in Causalité, permanence et réalité phénoménales (1962). Cf. Colonna 2014, 168–169. 37 N 83. 38 Cf. VI 22, 33. In the “Nature” lectures, Merleau-Ponty thus claims that “the real cannot perhaps be obtained if not by pushing [en pressant] appearance, [the real] is perhaps the appearance.” N 248. This thesis only fixates a line of argument that Merleau-Ponty had developed since the Phenomenology of Perception: “The ‘real’ is this milieu in which every moment is not only inseparable from others but in a certain sense synonymous with the others, in which the ‘aspects’ signify each other in absolute equivalence; it is ­unsurpassable plenitude.” PhP 373.

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(plein) Being.”39 These implications from previous studies are now brought to bear their full ontological significance in The Visible and the Invisible in the typical fashion by which Merleau-Ponty draws from pathological conditions such as hallucination or illusion as indicative experiences providing dramatic disclosure and confirmation of the basic proto-temporal modalizing of experience and its horizonality.40 1. The theme of modalization of experience is a typical Husserlian one, and one that is fundamental for phenomenology in several respects. The concept of modality is implicitly present on the most basic level of phenomenological analysis, i.e. that of the a priori intentional cogito-cogitatum correlation, which is the correlation between performances of the experiencing ego and the contents of experience.41 More precisely, the modal character of experience emerges when this formal intentional scheme is integrated with fundamental phenomenological concepts such as meaning and interest. Every experience orients itself towards an object as this object endowed with such and such qualitative features. This as-structure attaching to the object of experience is correlative to an interested behavior on the part of the subject. This conceptual frame works against the idea of reality as “flat” plane and of experience as biunivocal correspondence between subjects and objects.42 As we have seen, it is one of MerleauPonty’s most characteristic points that experience is rather essentially structured in terms of meaningful points of reference with respect to which a certain coherent experiential “sense” is established and unfolds.43 The Cartesian starting point of phenomenology in the Cartesian Meditations, which takes up the radicality of Descartes’ questioning while 39 40

41 42 43

N 84. This claim and the one preceding it are made in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of “The Romantic Conception of Nature.” Each of the four drafted chapters of The Visible and the Invisible stresses this aspect of modality at work in experience: cf. VI 65 (Réflexion et interrogation), 121 (Interrogation et dialectique), 170 (Interrogation et intuition), with explicit reference to Husserl. Cf. also VI 173, 184 (L’entrelacs – le chiasme). Husserl designates the idea of a universal a priori correlation between consciousness and being as his most fundamental discovery in Hua VI 169n. The expression “flat being” is found in The Visible and the Invisible in various different wordings. See in particular VI 97, 135, 152, 165, 169, 179, 182, 290, 296, 306, 313. In the course on L’institution, Merleau-Ponty interprets the notion of “institution” with reference to the establishing of dimensions in Cartesian sense: “Donc institution [signifie] établissement dans une expérience (ou dans un appareil construit) de dimensions (au sens général, cartésien: système de référence) par rapport auxquelles toutes une série d’autres expériences auront sens et formeront une suite, une histoire.” IP 38. While the line of argument in The Visible and the Invisible develops in explicit contrast with Cartesianism, Merleau-Ponty never tires to draw inspiration from the nuances and complexity of Descartes’ philosophy.

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explicitly rejecting nearly all of the content of Cartesian philosophy, retains and deepens in its way of proceeding an essentially Cartesian manner of interpreting the modal character of experience. Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations aim at a radical grounding of a universal science of pre-scientific experience, that is, of phenomenology as radical philosophy of the fundaments of experience.44 The Cartesian question about certainty in connection with some existing entity in the world or the world itself as a whole is no longer of concern in this ­phenomenological framework since for Husserl the aspect of existence is bracketed in the epoché. The Cartesian idea of evidence however remains central for ­phenomenology in that it is by and on this idea that Husserl intends to ground the ontological intelligibility of the pre-given world of experience, including the positive knowledge of empirical and formal sciences.45 In the context of the universal science of experience, the critique of apodictic evidence that we outlined in Chapter 2 opens up the truly “apodictic” dimension of subjective experience as temporalizing/temporalized field with respect to which any intention and judgment must ultimately find its validation. In this, the scientific attitude of verification and the question of adequacy, as back-reference of a judgment to the more or less satisfying presence in person of a state of affairs, represents the ideal mode establishing the true and ultimate sense that any being ought to assume for us.46 The straightforward orientation towards the fulfillment of interest in the non-scientific attitude is raised to awareness about its adequacy in this scientific doing, whereby confirmed or verified evidence substitutes the straightforward, more natural experience of evidence.47 The radicalization of the critique of experience into the genetic structure of temporalization of experiential horizons however complicates the aspect of adequacy and intuitive evidence/givenness “in 44

At a crucial moment of the presentation of his project, that is, in the context of the extensive revisions of the Cartesian Meditations in collaboration with Eugen Fink, Husserl writes that the move of the reduction as move into philosophical questioning as such has only sense “if philosophy, as one ought obviously to preface, aims at universal autonomous world-knowledge, which therefore does not operate by any unnoticed tradition, but that rather performs universal critique and universal questioning and searches for ways to establish a new, ultimately grounded tradition.” CM VI/2, 136n10. 45 Cf. CM VI/2, 150n80. 46 Luft points out that the attitude of science sets the “absolute” standard of optimality in experience towards which every other (natural) striving for optimality must appear as “relative.” Luft 2002, 44. 47 Cf. Bachelard 1968, 69–70.

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person” as guiding the whole analysis, especially as this analysis claims to proceed under the guidance of universal autonomous cognition as presuppositionless. The complication lies in the fact that the phenomenon of temporality demands that the aspect of self-givenness in person in immediate experience, as Husserl defines it in the Cartesian Meditations, be qualified. In particular, the problem lies in the fact that the world of experience as temporalized cannot be simply given in the thematic fulfillment of a particular meaning-intention. In fact, the totality of the world given in experience is at most a supposed givenness. For Husserl however this givenness must count as genuine evidence, albeit always only given in the particular relative evidences that are actually temporalized in my experiential flow as ultimate and truly apodictic ego. In this case, the modality of experience refers to the fundamental horizonal structure allowing for a potentiality of references. The meaning-interest schema of experience is embedded in a referential framework that allows for degrees of differentiation, articulation, and restructuration. Everything in our experience is found at the intersection of intentional implications. Suzanne Bachelard writes: “the ­systematic explication of the horizon reintroduces a sort of absolute – the absolute of the ever-more in place of the dogmatic absolute of the in-itself.”48 By the notion of horizon, it is therefore possible to reintegrate in experience those experiences that do not respond to our current interest. The Husserlian notion of horizon becomes therefore central for the project of a rehabilitation of the ontological capacity of experience since it sheds light on the nature of our relationship with the world. The aspect of p ­ ossibility that the notion of horizon places at the heart of every experience should be rightly understood. This is especially important as the notion of horizon and the aspect of possibility that it integrates in our experience of reality is at the center of Husserl’s critical reworking of the Cartesian Meditations.49 As we have seen, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reading of biology this aspect of possibility is concretely displayed in the bodily-sensing and bodily-pathic experience of a living human being. The universal sensitivity of my “flesh,” as opening up my actual experience of the world, makes however unmistakenly clear that a thematic shift has taken place with respect to the usual starting point of phenomenological reflection from the apodictic evidence of one’s existence as ego of experience. The latter must still issue in an ontological Bachelard 1968, 214. Cf. Kerckhoven 2003, 212ff.

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anthropology that defines human experiential reality as articulation of potential determinations, whereby the experiential access to the totality of my reality is taken eo ipso as access to the totality of the world as inherently horizonal and determinable as such starting from this primordial opening to myself and the world. For Husserl, this determinability of the horizon proceeds according to “inner” and “outer” dimensions of horizontal givenness, that is, according to the always possible progressive explication of an object, its inner aspects, and its surroundings.50 “Horizonality” organizes therefore for ­Husserl essentially around a set of types or “typicality” of ­experience. The problem of the horizonal nature of experience is for him essentially the problem of the formation of a universal form or invariant given in the actualization of typical experiential potentialities. For Husserl, finally, this prepredicative, non-­reflective dimension identifies the infinite invariant of the world as correlate of a non-reflective lifewordly consciousness, which can and must be ­presentified or co-presentified in the reflection of the autonomous phenomenologizing subject. The notion of “flesh,” in contrast, brings to explicit self-­critical ­thematic focus the non-identity between the world that is accessible to us in experience (the p ­ henomenal world) and the reality to which we ourselves belong as entities “in the world.” The indeterminacy of the “horizon” appears in this case considerably deepened with respect to the idea of a virtuality as possible determination of a phenomenal field. The horizon designates rather fundamentally the indeterminate existence of the world as dimension in which every intentional-correlative explication of experiencing subject and experienced world takes place and which must thereby in principle transcend any inter-experiential determination. The specific determinations of the field of experience as determinations of a certain essence are actualizations that do not coincide with the actuality of existence as opening this specific domain of givenness. In this development one can clearly see the new sense of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy as “ontology.” In the context of The Visible and the Invisible, we ought therefore to pay careful attention to the fact that the concept of perceptual faith is meant to address a twofold question. First, the problem for Merleau-Ponty is to establish an alternative starting point of the analysis of experience with respect to the Cartesian way of proceeding from the an sit question or the question of existence and reality, which issues into a definition of the real as that which resists a deliberate doubt, i.e. as that which an intellectual operation or active act of 50

Cf. Kerckhoven 2003, 220; Bimbenet 2004, 238–239.

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discrimination could establish as what cannot not exist.51 Second, and parallel to this, the problem for Merleau-Ponty is that of adequately framing the meaning and scope of the quid sit question or the question of essence. The phenomenological modalization of human experience as interpreted in light of the inherently genetic phenomenon of the “flesh” displays an ontological function that displaces the traditional framing of what is taken as usually contrasting metaphysical categories and regions of being. This usual framing is still apparent in Husserl’s phenomenological and methodological treatment of the different constitutive status of the structure of what is to count as purely “transcendental” with respect to the “mundane” – while having to admit a perfect coinciding of the transcendentally pure with the inner psychological, and thus natural or mundane correlational schema of intentional human self-apperception as providing the basic frame for the understanding of constitution.52 The “flesh” can be said in this sense, that is, in accordance to the very principle of the phenomenological reduction, to “de-humanize” the action of transcendental constitution as it is itself clearly result or outcome of genetic constitution. Living human being as “flesh” emerges within and from nature and it is therefore in turning to this “productive” nature that works as anteceding to and within human flesh that one ought to ultimately look for and define what would amount to the true and ultimate transcendental. In this very same measure, however, one ought to carefully notice that this turn to transcendental constitution, as the ultimate instance of experiential genesis, is only actually performed, that is, it can achieve positive conceptual determination, only within the dynamically living frame by which any entity becomes experienceable to a human being in the concreteness of an individual personal life and in a tradition. According to this line of argument, human being and the perceptual experience of his/her flesh coincides with “the inaugural opening of the world”53 in a twofold sense. First, in the sense of being an opening out into the natural and situational all-encompassing dimensional factor for that which comes to 51

52 53

Both in PhP 394 and in VI 62–63, Merleau-Ponty carries out a critique of “criteriological thought,” that is to say, the thought that operates a deliberate critique of the confused ideas of sensible experience or of the prejudices of inherited knowledge. The paradigm of this criteriological thought is Descartes. According to Fink, Descartes subjected all objects of experience to the methodic doubt but missed to extend his doubt to the very dimension in which these object are found. Fink therefore suggests that Descartes “emptied” the world but conserved the world as empty and indeterminate field of those things that are most certain. Fink 1959, 194. On the transcendental-mundane parallel, see in particular the lectures on “Phenomenological Psychology” (Hua IX) and the preface to the English edition of Ideas I from 1931. VI 49.

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stand in this factor – regardless now of the vast and deep complexity in which this dimensional factor for appearance is concretely framed. The workings of reflection of a human subject, even when doing philosophy, must accordingly remain definitely grounded in the whole ongoing sensitive-­dynamic system of unreflected experiencing as inherently horizonal, on pain precisely of falling outside of the conditioning factors of experience, action, and reflection.54 Reflection upon this base-level experiencing in which every cognition and therefore all science grounds, as the very task that phenomenology sets for itself, must therefore conform to the complexity of the living/lived o­ perative relatedness of the human subject with the world conceived as horizonality. “Flesh” is now the name for this universal sensitive openness for beings as such, that is, as bottommost-level phenomenon in whose functioning one comes to experience the very structuring dimensional factors for the experienceability of any entity or event, thus also for the objects investigated by the sciences. As a result, phenomenological knowing appears to be essentially non-­categorizable on the basis of scientific knowing. The latter operates naively on the level of a thematic activity that does not extend to the universal dimension of experiential accessibility preceding the domain for scientific inquiry and the exercise of its investigative procedures.55 The theory of the “flesh” is the explicitation of a base-level intentionality that is not primarily thematic, objectifying, abstracting, but the fundamental kind of sensing and being intrinsic within any consciousness to give it its concrete, coherent, and manifest content. In performing this explicitation phenomenology expands the “partial and abstract contact” that scientific cognition establishes with being and enters the true domain of philosophy, that is, the domain of the “total contact of someone who, living in the world and in Being, means to see his life fully, particularly his life of knowledge, and who, an inhabitant of the world, tries to think himself in the world, to think the world in himself, to unravel their jumbled essences, and to form finally the signification ‘Being.’”56 In connection with this argument linking the particular with the universal, one of the last working notes from December 1960 thematizes explicitly 54

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“Le fonctionnement réflexif […] ne maintient pendant ce temps la permanence du perçu et celle de la perception sous le regard de l’esprit que parce que mon inspection mentale et mes attitudes d’esprit prolongent le ‘je peux’ de mon exploration sensorielle et corporelle.” (VI 60); “Je n’ai pu […] prendre le chemin de la réflexion, que parce que d’abord j’étais hors de moi, dans le monde, auprè de autres, et c’est à chaque moment que cette expérience vient nourrir ma réflexion.” (VI 74). For a paradigmatic way to express this point, see e.g. IP 35: “Je peux apprendre à mieux connaître [l]’entourage par la science, mais ce sera toujours remaniement du monde perçu, emploi de ses structures.” VI 146.

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the idea of an ontological capacity of experience: this is the “capacity to take a being as representative of Being.” This capacity exhibits a general characteristic of every being to become an “emblem of Being.” More profoundly, however, this capacity exhibits “the openness to Being in an Entity, which, henceforth, takes place through this Entity.”57 The ontological import of the studies of perception, of the sensible and natural world, of expression and language emerge now clearly.58 Merleau-Ponty’s program in the 1950s was to proceed to an explicit ontological interpretation of his studies on the psychology of perception. He began his first lecture course from 1953 by stating that for him there is no difference between ontology and phenomenology.59 In this first course, movement is said to be “revealing of being.”60 Commenting on Husserl’s appendix on biology from the Crisis, he writes: “From there, revision of the relationships philosophy-non transcendental thought. Psychology is philosophy. Biology is philosophy. Philosophy is already in [a] recognition of lateral participation of life and of psychism with me.”61 In an unpublished note, Merleau-Ponty even proposes to speak of a philosophy of nature instead of a philosophy of being: “we say philosophy of Nature and not philosophy of being because it is a question of accounting for our experience of being, – and in particular for scientific experience.”62 In profound coherence with this program, in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty writes, “we have with our body, our senses, our look, our power to understand speech and to speak, measurants [mesurants] for Being, dimensions to which we can refer it, but not a relation of adequation or of immanence.”63 Secondly, if this is so, however, then this first sense of “flesh” as base-level experiential dimension that includes both human experiencing and the world as it is richly featured in this experiencing would be one-sided if taken by itself. As such, the sense of the “flesh” is to be an “element” or “the concrete emblem of a general manner of being” in the very integrative unity of nature and spirit or of visible and invisible as deeply transformative of these terms when taken as substances.64 But as an “emblem” this entity that is the “flesh” is not simply in a relationship of adequation or immanence with Being. This is why Merleau-Ponty can claim that “[w]hat we are calling flesh, this 57 VI 323. 58 See VI 138 for perception. See VI 267 for the sensible and natural world. See VI 139, 166–168 for language. 59 MSME 46. 60 MSME 100, 181. 61 NC 85. 62 I.B.N., VI, f. 106 (in Colonna 2014, 136). 63 VI 140. 64 VI 193–194.

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interiorly worked-over mass, has no name in any philosophy,” including therefore ­Merleau-Ponty’s own philosophy.65 The implications of this point make us aware of another sense of “flesh” that is fully in play in Merleau-Ponty’s naming of what has no name. This sense is most noticeable in the whole way in which Merleau-Ponty recasts the conception of essence in philosophy, with particular regard to Husserl’s conception of the eidetic variation in The Visible and the Invisible. In the opening chapter on “Reflection and Interrogation,” Merleau-Ponty makes the point that eidetic ­variation stabilizes our experience allowing us to reach an insight into its dynamics.66 The critical reading of the Wesensschau in the chapter on “Interrogation and Intuition” is meant to show however that the scientific access to objectivity exhibits a fundamental proximity to Husserl’s eidetic variation rather than to any hypostatized view about induction or essentialism.67 As a matter of fact, The Visible and the Invisible begins with a preamble that deals with science.68 Merleau-Ponty makes here a familiar point, namely that the scientific knowledge of our reality remains anchored in the perceived world and it is made possible by it. At the same time, science clearly raises the quid sit question in its methodic investigations. The essences that it establishes (the essence of nature, life, history, language) are maintained “under the jurisdiction of the facts.”69 As a result, the essence emerges not as the positive object of an intuition but as the invariant of a variation.70 In this case, the essence is not taken as separate from the fact, since it is the work of variation on the facts that yields the objectivity of the essence. Scientific thought thereby already applies a form of eidetic variation in the determination of its objects and exhibits that facticity and ideality are undivided in its proceedings and findings.71 The philosophical implication of scientific methodology is therefore a renewed understanding of essence as the in-variant of a deliberate work of exchange, comparison, reciprocal clarification and correction among facts. This “­variation” extracts, as it were, the stable hinges of experience, its universal contours.72 The work of variation is work of exchange, comparison, correction that yields what is not incompatible with the unfolding of experience. ­Merleau-Ponty writes: “There is therefore for me something inessential, and 65 VI 193. Cf. VI 183. Cf. also Bruzina 2001, 67–68. 66 VI 17–74. 67 See VI 155–156. 68 VI 31–48. 69 VI 146. 70 See Barbaras 1989, 29. 71 Cf. VI 156 where Merleau-Ponty speaks in particular of psychology, ethnology, and ­sociology. 72 VI 70.

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there is a zone, a hollow, where what is not inessential, not impossible, assembles.”73 In his working notes, Merleau-Ponty thus writes: “The eidetic variation, therefore, does not make me pass to an order of separated essences, to a logical possible, the invariant that it gives me is a structural invariant, a Being in intrastructure which in the last analysis has its Erfüllung only in the Weltthesis of this world.”74 The signification “Being,” which the eidetic variation ultimately reveals, is this “Being in intrastructure.” This is the factor concretely working as connective of all experience. The most fundamental meaning of essence lies therefore in bringing to expression this connective factor. But this meaning can be made explicit and therefore fulfill the philosophical task only in the ­constant return to the “thesis of the world” as the true invariant grounding all variations of experience. By means of Husserl’s vocabulary, ­Merleau-Ponty states that the world is the place where all m ­ eaning-intention finds its fulfillment. This means, however, that no intention can in principle fall outside the world. The pre-givenness of the world as starting point of philosophy is therefore here truly operative. The world is the constant thesis of my life.75 As a result, in this “thesis,” we recuperate not only every reflective attempt to turn towards certain regions of the world or towards the world itself, but also every feigned behavior (imagination) or failed e­ xperience of integration (illusions, hallucinations, etc.).76 There is no appearance that imposes itself as pure being and no appearance can turn out to be a pure nothingness. Rather there is “a field of appearances, each of which, taken separately, will perhaps subsequently break up or be crossed out (this is the part of nothingness), but of which I only know that it will be replaced by another which will be the truth of the first, because there is a world, because there is something.”77 At every moment, experience testifies to this fundamental evidence: “there is being, there is a world, there is something; in the strong sense in which the Greek speaks of τò λέγειν, there is cohesion, there is meaning.”78 The activity of i­ deation, in the last analysis, finds its condition in a base-level form of intentionality that is itself only fillable in the ongoing, i.e. ultimately temporal, coming about of the phenomenon of the world.79 73 VI 150. 74 VI 282. 75 PhP xii. 76 VI 192. 77 VI 121. The same point, with explicit reference to Husserl, is made at the end of the section on “Interrogation and Intuition” (VI 170). See also VI 173, 184. 78 VI 121. 79 “Toute idéation, parce que c’est une idéation, se fait dans un espace d’existence, sous la garantie de ma durée qui doit revenir en elle-même pour y retrouver la même idée que je pensais il y a un instant et passer dans les autres pour la rejoindre aussi en eux.” (VI 150).

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If philosophy is “the recapture of the brute or wild being,”80 and if no ­ hilosophy has a name for the bottommost level of experiential genesis as p properly transcendental, which in the context of the system of phenomenology is ultimately responsible for every other domain of investigation for it to receive final intelligibility and definition, then the naming and conceptualization of this bottommost level as “wild being” or “nature” or “flesh” gives us still only concrete emblems of “Being” that as such are not themselves the “absolute” of origination. This conclusion clarifies the overall trajectory of the introductory chapters of The Visible and the Invisible and of the fundamental paradox they outline at the core of all philosophy. This trajectory points to an ontology that takes the farthest stance with respect to those forms of artificialism and positivism that fabricate the world or “Being” with innerwordly and ontic “substances.” The ultimate problem of totality lies in the fact that “Being” is the totality that can never be resolved in terms of any of the innerworldy totalities as sum, organic life, etc. as precisely whole originative dimension of the latter. But if any innerwordly coming about or genesis is only ultimately intelligible in light of the very bottommost originative dimension of experience, and if this originative dimension is stamped with final indetermination, then it may be that also any empirical process of genesis as originative of our human living being must remain in principle never fully definable once and for all, no matter which sophisticated and insightful findings scientific research has contributed and does contribute about it. This topical result is featured throughout the “Nature” lectures regarding the very theme of genesis. The theme finds paradigmatic expression in Merleau-Ponty’s claim that in our study of nature we can only really see the physico-chemical facts or the separate living events but we are unable to see the appearance of life or the emergence of consciousness itself.81 80 81

“La philosophie comme reconquête de l’être brut ou sauvage,” VI 139. “[…] we had only a bit of a protoplasmatic jelly, and we then have an embryo, by transformation which, always too early or too late, we were never witness to in our investment in a biological field.” (N 268). “Where does the human with consciousness truly appear? We do not see him any more than we see the moment when consciousness appears in ontogenesis.” (N 334). See the reference to “physicochemistry” or to what Merleau-Ponty calls the order of causality or of the events in the second course on nature, N 232, 235, 238, 239, 243. The task of a rehabilitation of the sensible for Merleau-Ponty cannot be separated from the study of empirical facts. His whole work is one impressive attestation of this claim. For Merleau-Ponty, in any case, “it is starting from the visible that we can understand the invisible. [It is] starting from the sensible that we can understand Being, its latency, and its manifesting itself.” (N 335). The sensible world is not the same as the factual world of science, but the factual world of science works for Merleau-Ponty as an essential starting point to arrive at a rehabilitation of the sensible.

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But if it is our placement in the world that makes the very possibility and efforts of knowledge of our actual origins irrevocably incomplete, this final situatedness is also what sets in motion and breaks open a genuine philosophical interrogation about genesis as truly transcendental, which – and this is the paradox – is only achieved if the ontological capacity of experience gets full recognition. This clarifies the selection of approaches analyzed in the opening sections of The Visible and the Invisible. The approaches that Merleau-Ponty systematically takes up are those that start with the reality as it is experienced without first setting this reality against the backdrop of a thematic act of doubting. These approaches are the philosophy of reflection, dialectic philosophy, and the philosophies of intuition. Merleau-Ponty characterizes the guiding concepts of these approaches, i.e. reflection, negation, and intuition, as ­pointing to an inchoate experience that integrates simultaneously ­oppositional features such as subject and object, being and nothing, essence and existence into the operative structural unity of our human being.82 4

Tying It All Together: Nature as Leaf of Being

It is from the perspective of this radical paradoxicality that one can finally come to see and appreciate the deep coherence of what Merleau-Ponty is sketching out and detailing as an ontology of nature and of its implications for the human being in the natural world.83 For the purpose of offering a conclusive – yet by no means final! – characterization of Merleau-Ponty’s radically integrative ontology, let me begin with a schematic reading of the notion of nature from The Visible and the Invisible, after which Merleau-Ponty’s powerful representation of the ontology of nature will be given. In the working note with the title “Nature” from November 1960, Merleau-Ponty considers the meaning of nature in the sense of what is primordial.84 He states that the most primordial (Urtümlich, Ursprünglich) is not “of old” (d’autrefois), as if belonging to a 82 83

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VI 172. Merleau-Ponty speaks at different points of an ontology of “nature,” of the “visible,” of “wild” being. The designation “ontology of nature” appears in N 265. He also speaks of an “ontology of the visible” in the chapter on “L’entrelacs – Le chiasme” (VI 185). The relevant references to the “ontology of wild being” are in VI 11, 219, and 222. One ought to compare the treatment of the question of “primordiality” with the ­treatment of the theme of origination in Merleau-Ponty’s Seventh Sketch in the “Nature” lectures which concludes with the following statement: “C’est pour donner cette profondeur au corps humain, cette archéologie, ce passé natal, cette référence phylogénétique, c’est pour le restituer dans un tissu d’être pré-objectif, enveloppant, d’où il émerge et que nous

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bygone time. In fact, what is older than everything is here claimed to be “of the first day” (au premier jour).85 The working note continues: “It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world (and not in the past) an ‘ever new’ and ‘always the same.’”86 In the summary of the first course on nature, again in reference to Lucien Herr’s statement that “Nature is of the first day,” Merleau-Ponty defines nature as the “implication of the immemorial in the present, the appeal from the past to the most recent present.”87 What clearly emerges from these key statements is that time has a central role in the explanation of nature. This is evident in the idea of an ongoing coursing and becoming as the very nature of natura as inherently temporal. In Merleau-Ponty’s own rethinking of ontology, therefore, not only one has to take into account the implications of the analysis of temporality as final-stage level for the conceptualization of what the “transcendental” amounts to, but one also needs to realize that in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological project, nature and time share a common conceptual framework and represent an equivalent methodological and philosophical principle.88 The full reach of the description of the primordiality of nature becomes evident if one realizes the ontological recasting of transcendental experience that a radical conception of the “primordial” involves. In an earlier working note from April 1960 entitled “‘Indestructible’ past, and intentional analytic – and ontology,” which connects thematically with the question of the primordiality of nature, the problem is to clarify the sense in which the inactuality of the past is still present in the actuality of the present and is therefore simultaneous with it. In his analysis, Merleau-Ponty considers

85 86 87 88

rappelle à chaque instant son identité comme sentant et sensible, que nous avons donné une si grande place à la théorie de l’évolution.” N 334. VI 320. See also VI 264. Merleau-Ponty quotes Lucien Herr’s phrasing – la nature est au premier jour –, which the latter uses in connection with Hegel. VI 320. RC 94–95. Cf. Colonna 2002, 227 “Time and Nature pass into one another, they exchange their p ­ hilosophical function within a unique conceptual operator, namely that of a ­development [croissance], of a letting be [faire advenir], of an event, of the differential deployment of Being.” This link between time and nature powerfully emerges in the following passage from a late working note: “the visible that we see, of which we speak, is the same visible of which Plato and Aristotle spoke, the same visible that they saw, the same numerically: behind each landscape of my sight, even if it is not l’Hymettus, l’Ilisos or the plane trees of Delphi, because it is a landscape, not a flock of ephemerous sensations nor of judgments, of stray and vagrant spiritual acts, but a segment of the durable flesh of the world, are hidden the landscapes of all the human beings that have been, of all those who will be, of all those who would have been or could be, undivided between them and me like the object that I hold between my right hand and my left hand.” NC 374–375. My translation and emphasis.

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the viability of Husserl’s intentional analysis for adequately treating this problem. The question namely is whether the way of proceeding in terms of an intentional analytic is able to seize upon the sense of the simultaneity of the past and of the present. Merleau-Ponty’s remarks are divided in two parts. 1. On the one hand, the method of intentional analysis continues to maintain the idea of an absolute point of view: “a place of absolute contemplation from which the intentional explicitation is made, and which could embrace present, past, and even openness toward the future – It is the order of the ‘consciousness’ of significations, and in this order there is no past-present ‘simultaneity,’ there is the evidence of their divergence.”89 What becomes clear to Merleau-Ponty, thus, is that a thinking of nature, of the physis, cannot be achieved in this way. He insists on the necessity to take again operative intentionality as starting point of the analysis: “It is necessary to take up again and develop the fungierende or latent intentionality which is the intentionality within being [intentionnalité intérieure à l’être].” He continues by claiming that the project of developing operative intentionality as intentionality within being “is not compatible with ‘phenomenology,’ that is, with an ontology that obliges whatever is not nothing to present itself to the consciousness across Abschattungen and as deriving from an originating donation which is an act, i.e. one Erlebnis among others.”90 In a note from the same period, intentional analysis is said to ultimately yield a phenomenological positivism.91 These statements are best contrasted with Merleau-Ponty’s description in the working note on “Nature.” As a matter of fact the latter concludes with a statement about the new point of view required by the analysis of the “primordial”: “The sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the other.” What we see here is Merleau-Ponty’s lucid turn to the question of the primordial constitution 89 90 91

VI 297. VI 297–298. Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “positivist endeavor” in relation to the method of ­intentional analytic in VI 285. This working note is from January 1960. In October 1959 Merleau-Ponty intervened in the discussion on “Langage et inconscient” at the Sixth Bonneval ­Symposium on the topic of the unconscious. On this occasion, as reported by Pontalis, Merleau-Ponty stresses already that an understanding of the unconscious cannot be reached by way of an intentional analytic “that would positively distinguish and describe a series of ­operations or acts of consciousness.” It should be noted that in the working note Merleau-Ponty carefully places the title “phenomenology” within quotation marks, which indicates the rejection of a certain fixed and preliminary form of phenomenology, yet not of phenomenology tout court, as the reference to operative intentionality makes unmistakably clear.

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of phenomenality as probed precisely in terms of “Nature” as “sensible” and in the vivid ontological naturality and materiality of the sensitive corporeal “flesh.”92 But there is more to this when we also see Merleau-Ponty openly explicating this base-level ­originative dimension in the explicit register of metaphysical projections. M ­ erleau-Ponty thus names the simultaneity of past and present (and of the future), which he sees being exhibited in the order of the sensible and of nature, with designations such as “existential eternity,” “the indestructible,” “the barbaric Principle.”93 These are the titles that are now entrusted with the recasting of the idea of “primordiality,” of the ens originarium or of a first cause in philosophy. To enable and explore this ontological recasting, however, ­especially in the context of a phenomenological philosophy, one needs to ­displace the entry-level stage of intentional analysis as centered around the “transcendental” as “I” or “consciousness” with its still clinging human c­ omponents as featured in the “immanentist” psychological schematic that is supposed to begin and frame the phenomenological field of inquiry.94 On the other hand, these sketchy remarks shed light on the further reading Merleau-Ponty extracts from Husserl’s time-analyses in connection with the theme of “primordiality.” He writes:

Cf. the description of the kind of radical-level ontological integrality that the notion of sensible “flesh” is entrusted with exploring in the following selection of working notes: VI 226 (“the aesthesiological Ineinander”), 258–259 (“Gestalt”), 269 (“the world of aisthesis”), 276 (“original living nature”), 301–302 (“corporeity”), 302–303 (“the felt at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality”), 312–313 (“flesh […] which is the sensible in the twofold sense of that which one senses and that which senses.”) VI 321. It would be too complex and it would bursts the confines of the present work to clearly trace the detailed references to these expressions. In way of a summary orientation, the “barbaric Principle” stems from Schelling’s philosophy. See Hamrick/ Van der Veken 2011, 127. As Fabrice Colonna has shown, the idea of eternity emerges in ­Merleau-Ponty’s last writings through various formulations and a variety of refences. The notion of “existential eternity,” Colonna points out, is clearly conceived in light of Péguy’s notion of “temporal eternity,” although one can also trace this title to the “Romantic” conceptions of nature, thus again to Schelling and the idea of a “time without age,” but also to Bergson (see in particular the distinction between “eternity of life” and “eternity of death”) and Husserl (see in particular the idea of an “immortality” of temporal duration and the idea of the temporal nunc stans). For these references, see Colonna 2008, 139ff., 143, 150, 152. Cf. also Serban 2017, 139–140. The reference to the “indestructible” past is finally to be traced back to Freud’s psychoanalysis. See Carbone 2004, 12. In this connection, cf. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “worldliness” (Weltlichkeit) of the “spirit” or of the “mind” in VI 71–72, 226, 269, 285 et passim.

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[T]he Ablaufsphänomen that Husserl describes and thematizes […] contains the “simultaneity,” the passage, the nunc stans, the Proustian corporeity as guardian of the past, the immersion in a Being in transcendence not reduced to the “perspectives” of the “consciousness” – it contains an intentional reference which is not only from the past to the factual, empirical present, but also and inversely from the factual present to a dimensional present or Welt or Being, where the past is “simultaneous” with the present in the narrow sense. This reciprocal intentional reference marks the limit of the intentional analytic: the point where it becomes a philosophy of transcendence.95 There where the method of intentional analysis interrogates the most fundamental layer of the constitution of sense, i.e. the proto-life of a dimensional present, as “World” or “Being,” we discover a dimension that is not unqualifiedly given in the experiential context of the constitutive synthesis of an “I.”96 This dimension and its “simultaneity” with everything that is experienceable, that is, of any event or entity in their actual and manifest appearance, is therefore said to be “meta-intentional.”97 This statement receives a decisive clarification if we turn to an essay by Eugen Fink from 1959, to which Merleau-Ponty refers at this juncture.98 In this essay, Fink highlights three main motives that appear to be especially prominent in Husserl’s manuscripts. These motifs are, first, the interpretation of time, second, the treatment of the intuition of essence (Wesensschau), and, third, the analysis of intersubjectivity. In light of these guiding themes of Husserl’s late philosophy, Fink exhibits the presence of speculative elements in Husserl’s thought. These elements, however, are not just implicitly at work in Husserl’s lengthy analyses, they are also what Husserl lucidly obtains by following the rigor of his own analytical work: Time grounds in a time-formative [zeit-schöpferisch] present, which is not in time; the division of all beings (essentia – existentia) grounds in a primordial unity [Ur-Einheit], which is neither “factical” nor “possible,” 95 96 97 98

VI 297. Colonna sees in this passage the influence of Bergson on Merleau-Ponty’s r­ eading of Husserl. See Colonna 2002, 216. Merleau-Ponty refers to Bergson in relation to his ­conception of time in the working note with the title “Nature” (VI 320). With special reference to the theme of temporality, Colonna points out Klaus Held’s argument in his Lebendige Gegenwart (1966), who highlights the difficulties for ­ ­phenomenological experience to seize upon the anonimity of the ultimate living present. VI 297. E. Fink, “Die Spätphilosophie Husserls in der Freiburger Zeit,“ in Nähe und Distanz (ND 205–227).

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neither one nor manifold, neither exemplary nor a species; the plurality of subjects grounds in a depth of life before any self-adherent individuation [selbsthafte Individuation]. Husserl repeatedly circles around these three conceptual motifs […] Husserl wants to think back into the formless ground from which the configurations emerge, he wants to seize the apeiron, the unlimited – yet, not in a mystical sinking into the night, in which – according to Hegel’s mocking word – “all cows are black”; he wants to seize upon it as the primordial source [Ur-Sprung], as the fissure [Riss] that breaks open the living ground, as the negativity in the most primitive Being, that is, he wants to grasp time in its emergence from the intemporal-eternal, the fabric of the world [Weltgefüge] in its being fabricated [Fügung], and the selves, the subjects, in the selfing [Selbstung] of absolute Being.99 If one considers Merleau-Ponty’s profound reinterpretation 1) of time as metaintentional dimension; 2) of the eidetic in relation to the world as fundamentally supra-eidetic; 3) of the role of sensation, desire, and appearance in the context of interanimality as pointing to a “unity which is above even our own apperception” (Uexküll); then this passage shows a striking programmatic accord in the way both Merleau-Ponty and Fink understand the onsetting and advancing of phenomenological philosophy. According to Fink, especially in connection with the three themes of time, the essence, and the alter ego, Husserl formulates theses that open unto meta-intentional and metaphysical dimensions at the very core of the method of intentional analysis.100 What we see when we turn to Merleau-Ponty is that notions such as simultaneity, but also depth, and ultimately the “chiasm,” name the basic determinacies of “Being,” but only if they are taken as marshalling the ontological reinterpretation of the idea of nature in the clear direction of structural integration of usual metaphysical distinctions. These notions in other words are set in motion by and give concrete expression to the radical insight into the meaning of the “transcendental” as title for the fundamental conditioning and originative factor of our experience and that Merleau-Ponty sums up in the idea that “every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is 99 100

ND 224. ND 222–223. Sebastian Luft writes in connection to the movement of self-overcoming in Husserl’s phenomenology: “Husserl hätte wohl selbst nicht zugegeben, dass er jemals die Grenzen phänomenologischer Methode willentlich überschritten hätte, aber seine eigenen Denkanstrengungen, die ihn zuletzt in die Nähe spekulativer Philosophie führen, belehren nicht zuletzt ihn selbst eines Besseren.” Luft 2002, 17.

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held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of.”101 One has therefore to notice that the sense of nature as the name of the “primordial” in our experience is traditionally coupled with the idea of generative “productivity.” The primordiality of nature is the primordiality of a dimension that is not “in the past” as opposed to our “present.” In this case, the sense of nature as productive power would not encompass or overtake us and we would thus fall back upon the usual heteronomy and separation of ontological orders. The past of nature is “of the first day,” it is fully operative in our actual present but not as an adumbrated phase of consciousness. The primordiality of nature is therefore Urstiftung or “primordial institution,” which, according to the conceptuality of institution, encompasses in its reach the present, the past, and the future taken as lived-experiences of consciousness.102 This sense of the productivity of nature thus finds coherent confirmation in the idea of an ontological adherence to the “flesh” as the name of “the fabric [tissu] of one sole Being,” the “brute or savage being,” which Merleau-Ponty already mentioned in his 1951 programmatic proposal as the pre-objective “single tissue” of our experience.103 It is thus that in the “Nature” lectures we read: “The deepening of Nature must clarify to us the other Beings and their engagement in Being, this time directly. It is no longer a matter of ordering of our reasons, but of seeing how all of this holds together – a philosophy of perspective and a philosophy of vertical Being.”104 The way one can follow how it all holds together is to be approached in the terms of primordially living nature and this, in Merleau-Ponty’s final explications, precisely as “flesh” and thus in terms of the whole integrative force that this notion is meant to exert in contrast to the traditional frame of the nature-spirit/mind dichotomy. The experience of the living sensitivity of the flesh is the cohesive phenomenon from which one can trace the true explicative account of how “Being” unfolds, that is, Merleau-Ponty crucially adds, the “explication of what being-natural or being naturally means.”105 The formulations about the “fabric of one sole Being” or the “single tissue” of the “flesh” as tying it all together by implying in it everything is therefore clearly 101 102 103 104 105

VI 319. The same idea is made explicit also in VI 177–178, 183, 247, 327. VI 275. VI 148, N 267, PD 47. N 267. “Ce que nous cherchons, au contraire, c’est une vraie explicitation de l’Etre, i.e. non pas l’exhibition d’un Etre, même infini, en qui s’opère – d’une manière qui nous est par principe incompréhensible – l’articulation des êtres l’un sur l’autre, mais le dévoilement de l’Etre comme ce qu’ils modélisent ou découpent, ce qui fait qu’il sont ensemble du côté de ce qui n’est pas rien.” N 266–267; “Donc […] explicitation de ce que veut dire être-naturel ou être naturellement.” N 267. My emphasis.

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contrasted with the idea of some “one being” as final “metaphysical place of coherence” or “one separate and explanatory Being.”106 Rather, the comprehensive formula for nature as “leaf of being” Merleau-Ponty uses for giving overarching intelligibility to the new ontology he is working towards exhibits the profound accord with the polysemic and structurally integrative sense of flesh as both primordial and productive, as that which holds together, in one sole being, “the visible and the interior armature which it manifests and which it conceals.”107 In the context of the third course on nature from 1959–1960, the definition of “Being” as a “watermark,” “in filigree”108 offers therefore a guiding statement of this ontology when it is taken in conjunction with the powerful imagery of nature as “leaf of being.”109 This is what I want to briefly elaborate in way of conclusion. The definition of nature as “leaf” of being is introduced as part of a ­tripartite series of problems that include the human being and God. In this way, ­Merleau-Ponty connects his ontological formulation to the historical ­surveys of the previous courses on nature. There he concluded that naturalism, humanism, and theism are conceptions that in modern culture keep transitioning into one another. After the study of animality, Merleau-Ponty can offer the reason for this blurring of metaphysical distinctions. The reason is that in fact these distinctions presuppose a continuity that needs to be uncovered. This is the dimension of a pre-being (Vor-Sein) that is the nexus or vinculum between nature, the human, and God, and that represents the unifying theme of philosophy.110 It helps to note that Merleau-Ponty also uses the term “fold” (pli) in connection with the “leaf” of nature.111 What this entails in the context of the phenomenon of nature is a frame in which the relations between physicochemistry, plant and animal life, and human spirit are presented in terms of foldings of the same “leaf” material. Thus, this aspect relative to the folding clarifies in an important way the characterization of nature as a part revealing the whole, “as leaf or layer of total Being.”112 The term Merleau-Ponty uses here is feuillet. Nature is a “leaf” that folds and unfolds, thus without being cut, just

106 107 108 109 110 111 112

N 266–267. VI 195. N 268–269. La Nature comme feuillet de l’Etre. In different wordings, this formulation is found in N 265, 266, 269, 275, 283. N 265. N 269. The word “pli” is applied to life in N 208. N 265. In N 266, nature is said to be “part of this complex, what reveals the whole.”

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like the production of booklets by way of folding from full paper sheets.113 In this technique, what is called the folio leaf does never get cut but only folded. Contrary to the monist and pluralist interpretations of being as one or as many, Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor intends to capture the continuity of the real beyond the one without falling into the absolute disintegration of a manifold. As we have seen, this conception is based on the overcoming of the idea of a monolithic Parmenidean being. If read in this light, the theory of flesh that systematizes these results cannot be read as a monism.114 The comprehensive metaphor of nature as “leaf of being” is further enriched by the way in which nature as “leaf” of “total Being” is not itself the whole of being while making being “appear” or by revealing being as if in a “watermark.” The watermark is something that is there and that is not visible although it can become somewhat visible. A piece of paper carrying a watermark presents features that are not reducible to its visible constituents. This image integrates and completes neatly that of the folio leaf of nature. Merleau-Ponty is suggesting not only that the ongoing productivity of nature, whether as emergence of life, of the flesh, or of consciousness, must ultimately remain imperceptible as for its final determination and clarification without thereby being simply nothing, but more fundamentally that the whole of being, the single total sheet of being, as it were, is as such in principle not givable and thus irrevocably invisible. Yet if one cannot give ultimately a name to this fundamental originative source, the living material phenomena of genesis – life and death, birth and development, behavior and experience – are the text from which one can evince and reimagine a conception of being as generative. This however only if nature is rediscovered in its original sense as going back to the Greek verb φυω- and the Latin nascor, as Merleau-Ponty wrote in the very first lines of his first course on “Nature.” Nature is that from which something else is generated, and therefore it is a true principle of continuity or unfolding, that is, it is never ab-solute as some distinct and determinable entitative unit, whether as “matter” or “spirit.” In the study of the phenomenon of natural genesis, as Merleau-Ponty already clearly saw at the beginning of his phenomenology of the human being in nature, one ultimately reawakens the classical questions of metaphysics.115

113 114 115

See Robert Vallier’s comment in his translation of the “Nature” lectures in Merleau-Ponty 2003, 305n7. This is Barbaras’ critique in Barbaras (2008). See Hamrick/van der Veken 2011, 181–190, for an analysis of this critique and a possible Merleau-Pontian response. PD 47.

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But also, the rehabilitation and concern with metaphysical themes in ­ erleau-Ponty’s thought, which Fabrice Colonna has brilliantly exposed, M remains incomplete if we do not take into account that the emergence of metaphysical and even speculative motives originated within Husserlian ­phenomenology itself, as one can evince from the role and contribution of Eugen Fink in the context of Husserl’s own effort to achieve a comprehensive formulation of his own phenomenology. In Merleau-Ponty’s project of a philosophy of nature, operative intentionality is the plurivalent placeholder of this development from within phenomenology. The experimental character of the psychology of perception, the reflective approach of Husserl’s phenomenology, and the reopening of metaphysical questions thus, in Merleau-­Ponty’s hands, are less mutually exclusive than some passages in Colonna’s work would suggest. In his essay on Husserl’s late philosophy, Fink argues that the difference between intentional analysis and speculation is not a mere methodological one: “In the meditating thinking of the fissuring differences [reißende Unterschiede] that Being [Sein] and being [Seiendes] undergo, the thinker experiences also their primordial unity.”116 This thinking meditation decides also the fate of Merleau-Ponty’s own philosophy.117 116 117

ND 156. The proximity of Fink and Merleau-Ponty is attested in Merleau-Ponty’s own words. In a letter to Fink, he writes that “today as in the past, I am very close to your preoccupations and your meditation, even if the approach and the mode of expression are different.” The excerpt of Merleau-Ponty’s letter is quoted in Bruzina 2002.

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Uexküll, Jakob von. 2010. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning. Minneapolis/London, University of Minnesota Press. Vanzago, Luca. 2017. The Voice of No One. Merleau-Ponty on Nature and Time. Milano, Mimesis International. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2000, Das leibliche Selbst. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Leibes. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Worms, Fréderique. 1998. “Entre intuition et réflexion. Le sens de la critique dans la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty,” in Merleau-Ponty. Notes de cours sur ­L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl suivi de Recherches sur la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty. Paris, Puf. Zahavi, Dan, 1994. “Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Body,” in Études Phénoménologiques 10 (19). Zahavi, Dan. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. (Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi), London and New York, Routledge.

Index Anthropology 76, 128n109, 139, 162, 170, 172, 184–187, 212 anthropological difference 163n13 Apodicticity 47–49, 58–63, 78, 119, 123, 210–211 apodictic evidence 43, 45, 55n50 Aquinas, Thomas 5–6, 164n19 Aristotle 1, 4–6, 88, 109n42, 220n88 Behavior see Structure of Behavior, The Bergson, Henri 12, 23n24, 137, 202n19, 207n31, 222n93, 223n95+6 account of the understanding of speech 107 Biology 10–11, 21, 33, 35, 38, 40, 116, 136, 151, 153, 161–186, 192–196, 201–204, 208, 211, 215, 218n81 history of 161 and philosophical cognizing 161, 215 Cartesian “realism” 47–50 Cassirer, Ernst 14n7, 134, 142, 143n41, 161–162, 164n19, 169n43 Causality existential value of 190 perception of 148, 154–157 as physiochemistry 218n81 problem in biology 161–162 Derrida, Jacques 101n16 Descartes 78–79, 82, 97, 137, 154, 164–165, 171n52, 182, 184n110, 198–201, 206, 209–210, 213n51 Husserl’s criticism of 54, 58, 62, 71 see Cartesian “realism” Desire (libidinal, orexis) 41, 109, 188–191, 199, 224 Earth 129–132 Einströmen 120–122 Formal and Transcendental Logic 3, 33n76, 36, 44, 47–67, 74–77, 95–96, 104n20,

114–120, 123n91, 124, 148n69, 206n29 Fink, Eugen 28, 43, 44n14, 49n28, 56n54, 57n59, 58n65, 59–64, 66–67, 70, 78, 92n182, 95, 102n16, 110n45, 111n46, 114n56, 118n72, 124n93, 126n102, 210n44, 213n51, 223–224, 228 Flesh 36–37, 193–200, 203–205, 211–219 in the (leibhaft) 41n4 of the world 201n16, 220 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 17n13, 18, 105n23, 106n28, 113, 163n11 Genesis 38, 57, 198, 200, 219, 227 embryogenesis 175 morphogenesis 181 of ousia 77 ontogenesis 183, 188, 195, 218n81 intentional 159n2 sense- 11, 51, 130, 213 primordial 205 temporalizing 52–53 transcendental 218–219 see Nature as empirical and transcendental genesis Gurwitsch, Aron 107–108, 115n63, 116n64, 118n75 Hartmann, Nicolai 5–7 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 16–18, 25n39, 220n85 Heidegger, Martin 1n2, 10n25, 11n26, 23n24, 43, 69n97, 109n42, 110n45, 169n43, 186n113 Helmholtz, Hermann von 12–16, 19 History 3, 79, 114, 120, 187, 197, 205, 216 in two registers 128–129 logic of 204 natural 165 of philosophy 4, 48, 78 of Western ontology 136 philosophy of 103n18 sedimented 57, 98, 120, 196 theory of 128n108

237

Index Husserl, Edmund 9–11, 23n24, 32–36, 42–59, 63–67, 74–79, 94–96 argument in Formal and Transcendental Logic (summary) 114–117, 206n29 biology 160–161 Crisis-text 70n102 critique of modern science 115–117 critique of Subjektphilosophie 89, 96 critique of experience see Formal and Transcendental Logic earth 130 Einströmen 120–122 eidetic 42, 46, 123 epoché 117n69, 123n90, 165n21, 181, 192, 202, 210 God 165n23, 198 Heraclitus 4 horizon 55, 211–212 intentionality in preliminary phenomenology 43, 45–46 in genetic analysis see Formal and Transcendental Logic see Intentionality intersubjectivity 103n18, 119n77, 223 in Merleau-Ponty’s Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language 112n52 in Merleau-Ponty’s Husserl aux limites de la phénoménologie 110n45 transcendental problematic of 56n54, 112n52, 119–120 intuition 43–45, 116n66, 210, 216 of essence 46, 123, 223 of the world 124–125, 151 language 100n13, 101–104 life-world 118–120 modalization of experience 209–211 modal ontology 122–125 natural attitude 64 nunc stans 222n93 perception 41, 43–45, 84 reduction 55n53, 118n72, 210n44 Romantic conception of nature 137 universal apriori correlate 30, 209n41 three conceptual motifs in 223–224 typicality 212 Horizon 44n14, 53, 55n48, 59–62, 125, 214

as primordial level 95 as sedimented 160n2 infinite Copernican 116 intentionality of 39, 43n11, 55, 58 of past and future (retentional and protentional) 69, 71 world- 123–125, 129 Idea of being in phenomenology 59–62 Husserl marginal note on 62n75 Intentionality 2–3, 30, 39, 42–43, 184, 187, 189, 190n130, 192, 214, 217 as temporalizing 67–74 human 187, 193 in Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic 54–58 in Husserl’s genetic phenomenology  51–54, 63 in Husserl’s preliminary phenomenology 43–46, 50–51 in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception 67–76, 79–80, 94–95 in Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible 221 interanimal 185–188, 192, 195 intercorporeal see interanimal latent see operative of animals 162 of display 190 operative 3, 34–36, 46, 54–74, 75, 80–81, 94–95, 100, 111, 118, 130, 131n121, 132, 142, 162, 196, 214, 217, 219, 221, 228 Interanimality 169, 192n138, 224 Institution 27, 128–129, 131n121, 209n43 consciousness as an 178 of culture 204 primordial 57–58, 115 see institution of nature Kant, Immanuel 11n26, 14, 17–18, 74–75, 78–79, 135n7 intuition as faculty of relations 90 in Merleau-Ponty’s critique of spatial intuition 91–93 Ladyman, J. and Ross, D. 133–146, 157

238 Language 3, 98–114, 120–121, 124, 127–128, 132 pre-availability of 104–107 identity of linguistic meaning 107–110 Levinas, Emmanuel 77n119, 84 Lifeworld (Lebenswelt) 36, 66, 77, 93, 95, 115n63, 118–120, 123, 126n102, 161 pure 115n62 Logical positivism 8, 99, 139, 141 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice body schema 36, 152 in La Nature 184n108, 188–189 in Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression 153 in Phenomenology of Perception  80–88 cogito in Phenomenology of Perception 67n92, 97 tacit 98 flesh, theory of (esthesiology) 193–196 in La Nature 189, 190n132, 195n150, 225–226 in Visible and the Invisible, The  220–222, 225–226 history in L’institution La passivité 209n43 in Metaphysics in Man, The 132 in Phenomenology of Perception 10n25, 67n92 and Kant 11, 22, 30, 39–40, 78n121, 79–80, 90–94, 96, 137, 147, 165n22, 184 language in Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language 99n11, 107–109 in Phenomenology of Perception 86, 98n9, 100n14, 102 in La Nature 171, 186, 187n120, 195n150, 196, 204 in Le problème de la parole 99n11, 103n18, 111 in Les sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie 101n16 in Husserl aux limites de la phénoménologie 110n45 in Visible and the Invisible, The 98, 215n58, 216 nature see Nature operative intentionality see Intentionality phenomenology of nature 1–4, 10–11,

Index 32-33, 36, 40, 125n102, 152, 220, 228 prejudice of the world 64–67, 70 and Saussure 102n18 spatial level in Phenomenology of Perception 76, 86–90 and Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt 193 and Whitehead 149n72 Metaphysics anti- 99n11 history of 7 metaphysical scientism 137 of history 36, 131 of modality 140 of nature 31, 138 naturalistic 144 neo-scholastic 138–139 oppositions of 206n30 questions of 227 renewal of 164n15 scientifically motivated 142–143 of substance 77 Metaphysics in Man, The 102n18, 132 Michotte, Albert 148, 154–157, 167–168 Movement perception of, in Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression 153–157 Natural attitude 28, 33–34, 66, 148, 151 anything but naturalistic in MerleauPonty 65n83 general thesis of the 64 Nature 1ff., 6–7, 7–11, 114, 132, 204–205, 216, 218 and consciousness 38–40 see Structure of Behavior, The aesthetic and technological approaches to 12–19 animal 36, 153, 159, 162, 188 as aesthetic apriori 96 as flesh 218, 222, 226 as leaf 183, 195, 226–227 as leaf of being 226–227 as empirical and transcendental genesis 201–206 causality of 13–14, 16, 24–25, 68, 85, 119, 135n7, 137, 139, 149n72, 152, 156n93, 161, 181–182, 188, 218 concept of 1, 19, 36, 41, 137, 144, 150n72, 177, 186n116, 197

Index Nature (Cont.) experience of 9, 68, 114, 134, 197, 201 first (primordial) 1, 3, 6, 9, 10–11, 30, 85, 156, 160, 200, 219–223, 225 human 203 institution of 198–201, 225 lawfulness of 14, 170 living 23, 85, 149, 162, 170, 174, 177–193, 200, 202, 207, 222n92 mastery of 15–16, 18 mind-independent 134 objective 39–40, 92, 116, 119, 135, 147, 171n51 ontology of 219 passage of 149, 150n72 phenomenal 3, 37 philosophy of see phenomenology of physical 136–138, 151, 207 praxis of 153, 156n93 productive 213, 225, 227 second 196 transcendental 3, 37 Ontic structural realism 137–140, 143, 157 Ontology 6, 85–86, 152, 157, 197–198, 200, 212, 219 as apriori science 118n74 bivalent 180–182, 205 and phenomenology in MerleauPonty 215 modal 122–125 of the Umwelt 169–177 of nature 219–220 of wild being 218–219 ontological anthropology 184–185, 211–212 ontological diplopia 41, 139 ontological experience 211, 215, 219 language as 104–110 ontological outline in The Visible and the Invisible 200–201, 206 lifeworld as ontological correlate 119 phenomenological 197, 200, 201–205, 212–219 relationship with transcendental 35, 118n72 structural (in physics) 143 (in biology) 178 Origin 57, 62, 72–74, 82, 115, 121, 127, 200, 201–204, 218, 222, 224, 227 absolute 218 both originating and originated 128

239 empirical 128 ens originarium 199–200, 222 epistemico-critical vs psychological 35n83 in La Nature 219n84 investigation into, as provisional 56n54, 122, 219 of the concept 39, 41, 97 original experience of space 89, 92n180 original self-apperception 160 original situation of demonstration 116 original time-consciousness 159n2 transcendental see Genesis Passive synthesis 69 analyses of 52–54 Patočka, Ian 8n, 116n64 Péguy, Charles 130n121 Perception perceptual consciousness 28–31, 75, 80, 151 perceptual faith 56, 75n113, 205, 207–209 see also Desire; Flesh; Lifeworld; Movement; Operative intentionality; Passive synthesis; Phenomenology of Perception; Structure of Behavior, The Phenomenology 32–37, 96n2, 127, 228 gestaltic 33 double aspect 42 genetic turn in 50–54 Husserl’s definition of 35n83 and metaphysics 132 modern theory of perception is a 155 new definition of apriori in 96 of intersubjectivity 119n77 of language 103n18, 111 of living nature 181, 187, 192, 194 of perception 160 of phenomenology 73–74 of the historical event 128 and ontology 215, 221 post-Heideggerian 131n121 static and genetic 51n35, 69 see also Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology of nature; Phenomenology of Perception; Phenomenological ontology; Transcendental phenomenology; Transcendental philosophy

240 Phenomenology of Perception 10n5, 23n24, 36, 42, 46–47, 49n31, 64n81, 67, 70, 72, 75, 76n117, 79–80, 93–98, 99n11, 102n18, 122, 126–127, 151, 151n76, 164n17, 189n126, 194n144, 197n2, 202, 208n34, 208n38 Plato 1, 113, 220n88 Aristotle’s criticism of 5n11 Reduction, phenomenological in Husserl 45, 49n27, 55–56, 58, 60, 62, 121 in Merleau-Ponty 28–29, 34, 35n81, 73, 112n52, 122, 127, 213 of the Idea of being 61 Relativity theory history of 133, 142n39 Ricœur, Paul 129n112, 159n2, 164n16, 164–165n Scheler, Max 17n14, 163n13, 186n116 Schilder, Paul 83–84 Speech see Language Spirit 1–2, 6–7, 16–18, 30, 37–38, 40, 81, 84–86, 95, 110, 127, 152, 157n95, 160, 163, 165, 179n82, 182–186, 200, 203–205, 208n34, 215, 220n88, 225–227 body of the 191n136 history of the 159n2 of praxis 84 worldliness of 152, 222n94 Structure of Behavior, The 19–32, 40, 66, 75, 102n18, 138, 149, 151, 178n77, 185n110, 187, 191n135 Temporality 18, 34n81, 50, 67–74, 75n113, 86n152, 91, 93, 95, 96, 106, 122–125, 130, 139, 149, 151–152, 156–157, 159n2, 168, 175n66, 180n89, 197, 204, 211, 220–224 and Bernau-manuscripts 51–54 and eternity 126, 130n121 and language 112 and ideality 114 and nature 220 and prejudice of objective being 202 see Intentionality as temporalizing Transcendental 2–3, 11, 33–34, 67, 72, 77, 205, 220, 224

Index aesthetics 92, 96 analytic 92 apperception 39–40, 79, 91, 123 as flesh 200 attitude 28–29, 66, 202–203 concept of being 61 constitution 66, 121, 213 dialectic 93, 96 field 117n72, 121, 126n102, 127 idealism 9, 17–18, 21, 28, 126n102, 133, 135, 138, 160, 201 intersubjectivity 120 Kantian transcendental project in Uexküll 172–173 logic 10, 52, 59n67, 63, 74, 115n62 man 132, 204 mundane dichotomy, parallel 204, 213 and ontic 148 phenomenology 19, 37, 50, 60n71, 62, 110n45, 112n52, 118–120, 123, 128 philosophy 3, 17, 22, 30, 40–47, 50n33, 60n71, 64n80, 66, 76–80, 94n188, 110n45, 126n102, 138, 165, 169, 184 pre-transcendental stage of phenomenology 51 problematic in The Structure of Behavior 22–23, 30–31, 38–39 psychologism 148n69 reduction 121, 127 subjectivity 4, 14, 32, 39, 46, 48–49, 61, 73, 112m52, 118n72, 119–122, 222 see also Nature as empirical and transcendental genesis; Origin; Formal and Transcendental Logic Uexküll, Jakob von 138n16, 161–162, 168–180, 184–185, 224 refashioning of Kantian enterprise  172–176, 179 World antepredicative unity of the 75, 94–95 apperception of the 116–117 as sensible 194 constitution of the, in Ideen I 50n33 co-perception of the 192 event of the 130 flesh of the 201n16, 220

Index World (Cont.) in Kant 92–93, 97n5 modal ontology of the 122–125 presupposition of the 33–34, 217 relational structure of the (in physics) 143

241 (in biology) 178–179 scientific image of the 134 totality of the 211–212 transcendental sense of the, in Cartesian Meditations 119 see Merleau-Ponty, prejudice of the

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studies in contempor a ry phenomenology — 24

Alessio Rotundo obtained his doctorate in philosophy from Duquesne University, Pittsburgh in 2020. He studied philosophy at the University of Turin in Italy, the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the University of Kentucky under the Baden-Württemberg Stipendium, and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris supported by the Bourse Chateaubriand. He has served as Adjunct Professor at Xavier University of Louisiana and Loyola University New Orleans. His research interests and publications focus on topics in twentiethcentury Continental philosophy and the history of modern and contemporary philosophy, especially in the fields of phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics.

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First Nature Alessio Rotundo

This book explores a radically integrative phenomenology of nature through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By revisiting novel empirical findings in the sciences and advances in scientific methods and concepts, Merleau-Ponty leads us to rediscover a first nature right at the heart of the subject. Alessio Rotundo traces and documents the presence of a double meaning of nature affecting Merleau-Ponty’s analyses across foundational aspects of human experience: sense perception, organic development and behavior, cognition, language, and history. Physical, biological, and psychological processes in nature are not merely scientific data; they provide the evidence for another, more primordial sense of nature.

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studies in contempor a ry phenomenology — 24

First Nature The Problem of Nature in the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty

Alessio Rotundo