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
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
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
“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
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
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
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.
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 experiential 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.
See Gadamer 1993, 42.
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.
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.
Hua VI, 173.
See Fragment 45 (DK22B45) in Mansfeld 1986, 272. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. W. Kranz, 12th ed. (Dublin and Zurich: Weidman, 1966), p. 161.
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.
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.
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).
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).
On the phenomenological reaction to “naturalism,” cf. Patočka 2016, 3ff.; Bruzina 2010, 91ff.; Ryckman 2005, 120–122.
See Patočka 2016, 6.
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.
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.
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.