Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth--Research in Phenomenology

This is a penultimate draft of the article forthcoming in Research in Phenomenology, 2015. For all citations, please refer to the published version

Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth1

Frank Chouraqui

Abstract: In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on

Husserl’s concept of the earth as Boden or ground. Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth

seen as pure Boden as an idealization. He emphasizes the ontological necessity for the earth as Boden

to always hypostasize itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object. In turn, Merleau-Ponty

builds this necessity into an essential feature of being, allowing himself to retrieve ontology itself from

its status as external to being, and to make room for it within the structure of being: ontology is one of

the ways in which experiences (such as that of the earth as Boden) become objectified, thereby

allowing being to achieve its essential movement of hypostatization.

Keywords: Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Cartesian Orders, Earth, Ontology, Hyper-Dialectic.

This essay attempts to reconstruct the ontology that comes out of Merleau-Ponty’s

encounter with Husserl’s reflections on the concept of the earth in his now famous

text entitled “The Ur-Arche Earth does not move.” Merleau-Ponty’s interest in

Husserl’s text may be traced back to the time of the Phenomenology of Perception2,

but it is in the very last months of his life, the months that yielded texts seminal to the

contemporary idea of phenomenological ontology, that Merleau-Ponty gave full

attention to the text, especially in his lectures entitled “Husserl at the Limits of

Phenomenology.” All of this is well known, and it suggests that the renewed

encounter of Merleau-Ponty with Husserl in 1959-60 should contribute to clarifying

1 I wish to thank one anonymous reviewer for Research in Phenomenology for their useful and

generous suggestions.

2 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Translated by Donald Landes, (London

and New York: Routledge, 2011), 73.


the actual tenor of the ontological innovations of the last months. We hold these

innovations to be determined by Merleau-Ponty’s reworking of the cogito he finds in

his own earlier work and in Husserl’s too. Such reworking consists in Merleau-

Ponty’s realization that the true place of the cogito is as secondary to intentionality,

and that being should be described as pure intentionality, a relation that precedes its

terms, including the cogito. This primacy of intentionality, which places a relation

before its terms, can only lead into ontology, and, in Merleau-Ponty’s language, to

“the limits of phenomenology” (at least in its Husserlian sense, where

phenomenology remains attached to a personal consciousness). Thus, there is a

distinct point of departure from Husserl on Merleau-Ponty’s part, which centers

around the concept of the cogito. Merleau-Ponty uses the implicit parallel drawn by

Husserl throughout the “Ur Arche” text between Leib and Erde (both of which

Husserl calls Boden) in order to question the originary character of the cogito.

Husserl’s text could be summed up as an exploration of the consequences of

drawing an analogy between the relations between Leib and Körper (which he

discussed earlier3) and those of Erde and Copernican Earth. It is well-known that the

Leib/Körper distinction informs Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and

leads it into a discussion of the phenomenological cogito. But, it is also the early idea

of the phenomenological cogito which the rest of Merleau-Ponty’s career will be

devoted to overcoming.4 Such an analogy (whereby Leib is to Körper what Erde is to

the Copernican earth) naturally leads to questions regarding the relations of Leib and

3 Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität I,, Husserliana XIII. (The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 57. This specific text is from 1914-1915.

4 See for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible, (Paris: Gallimard TEL, 1964),

221, 234, 250 and 313.


the Ego, and to an alternative: should we say that Leib is different from the Ego that

precedes it, and therefore regard the Erde as only a mode of the cogito (Husserl)5, or

should we reduce the Ego to the Leib, and therefore to the Erde (Merleau-Ponty)? It is

well-known that in the very months of his lectures on Husserl’s concept of the earth,

Merleau-Ponty exhorts himself to “say that I must show that what could be regarded

as ‘psychology’ (Ph. of Perception) is really ontology.”6 By moving from psychology

to ontology, he intends precisely to re-interpret the phenomenological cogito

independently from the transcendental Ego. This is why his lecture course chronicles

his efforts to explore the extent to which Husserl’s criticism of the Copernican earth

can be taken up in a non-subjectivist perspective. This shall be achieved, I argue

through a softening of the distinction Leib/Körper. This is not to say that they should

not be seen as distinct—indeed, our experience offers us the Leib but it is constitution

that makes it a Körper—but rather that this movement of constitution must now be

seen as a structure of being itself, and not as a simple psychological fact which could

therefore be explained away by psychology alone. We shall see that Merleau-Ponty

will be led to regard the Earth as a pure principle of generation without origins, a pure

relation of productivity.

This relation of productivity is the essence of being. Therefore, being becomes

known as a movement, and Merleau-Ponty can be shown to take the question of the

movement or rest of the earth to a new level. It is no longer sufficient to regard the

5 Here I follow John Sallis’s reading of the Husserlian parallel beween Erde and Ego as turning

“toward the transcendental ego, referring everything constitutively to it, even within the domain of

origin, thus including even—and most remarkably—the originary earth.” He adds that in Husserl’s

mind “even the earth is submitted to the reference back to transcendental life.” John Sallis, Double

Truth (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 51.

6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible, (Paris: Gallimard TEL, 1964), 228.


earth as prior to the alternative of motion and rest, for this fails to explain how this

alternative could ever spring forth from a Boden that precedes it. In short, it would

ignore the productivity which makes up the essence of being by dismissing it as a

mere fact of psychology: we represent the Boden of motion and rest (which, as Boden,

is neither in motion nor at res) as an object of motion or rest. This, according to

Merleau-Ponty, is the implicit position of Husserl, and it must be overcome by

reintroducing the (pre-)movement whereby this that is neither in motion nor at rest

presents itself as susceptible to motion and rest. For what precedes the level of the

motion/rest alternative, is already a movement (or a pre-movement) of another kind.

In this paper, I would like therefore to talk about two kinds of movement: the

movement of the earth, which doesn’t exist, and the movement that the immobility of

the earth necessitates, that of being considered as a pure movement of constitution.

Let me therefore begin by proposing four interconnected theses, two

theoretical and two historical. Although they might look disconnected form each other

or from the question of the earth, they will help us approach the meaning of the

relationships between phenomenological motionlessness (that of the earth) and the

ontological motion of being as constitution:

1) Firstly, the problem of nature for phenomenology is the

problem of pre-history, in the sense of: an object that precedes the subject. It

challenges phenomenology to provide a concept of origin that does not

precede the subject, and of a cause that would not precede constitution.

2) Secondly, this question can only be answered if we take the

trouble to show that phenomenology does not begin the world with itself, that

is to say that we must show that it is no accident if it begins “in the middle”


between the universe of objects and the philosophical discourse itself, this is a

“middle” that will require explication.

3) Thirdly, for Merleau-Ponty, this problem, which is found in

Husserl, really finds its root and its paradigmatic example in the ambivalence

with which Descartes (and after him, the modern metaphysics of the subject)

negotiates the relations between the “order of matters” (or “order of causes”)

and the “order of reasons.”

4) Fourthly, it is this problem, posed in these very terms, that the

analyses of the earth offered by Merleau-Ponty in the year 1959 are meant to

address. An analysis of the Husserlian idea of an “earth that does not move”

reveals that the destination of phenomenology is to be the philosophy that

recuperates itself by finding room for itself within the very structure of being,

and that phenomenology can only carry out this recuperation by becoming an

ontology.

I. The Phenomenological Problem of Nature

Let’s begin with the first thesis: the question of the relations between phenomenology

and nature requires that we decide if and how phenomenology may provide an

account of nature seen as the self-identical object of the natural sciences.

Indeed, in its orthodox vision inherited from Husserl’s phenomenology, it

seems that the phenomenological reduction--and ultra-subjectivism, its correlate—

only allows for a concept of an objective and self-identical nature as an object which

eludes, precedes and encompasses the subject (the other option being to regard nature

as an intentional object only). Husserl admittedly makes room for the possibility to

replace a phenomenology of nature (as a thing-in-itself) with a phenomenology of the


natural sciences (which constitute nature as a thing-in-itself), and to this extent, it is

possible to remove the demand that phenomenology should satisfy the scientific

vision: there is a phenomenology of biology or of physics and there is no biology or

physics of phenomenology. Indeed, this is the original wager of phenomenology

itself: phenomenology must simultaneously unmask and account for the existence of

objectivist illusions. For a question remains: if the phenomenological explanation of

the phenomenon of science must remain possible, it is because scientific experience

must be recognized as being at once of the same order as phenomenological

experience and apt to represent objects such as nature, whose essence transgresses

every principle of phenomenology. This means that a consistent phenomenologist

must be able to explain through what misunderstanding nature came to be conceived

as independent from experience.

It is this web of questions that informs the famous discussion that followed

Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of the theses of the Phenomenology of Perception

before the Société Française de Philosophie (the text is known as The Primacy of

Perception); a discussion that, in many respects, posed the question of the viability of

phenomenology itself.

It was there that Merleau-Ponty was led to clarify his position regarding the

relations between the objects of the natural sciences and the objects of

phenomenology. In particular, the conversation focused on two privileged objects:

nature as a whole and the earth. In spite of differences that Merleau-Ponty will

dismiss as superficial (nature posing the problem of prehistory and the earth that of

extra-terrestriality), the notions of nature and of earth conspire to show to the

phenomenologist that experience, or at least, the experimental sciences, may yield

certain non-phenomenological objects.


Merleau-Ponty, like Husserl, declares that he doesn’t see any opposition

between the concepts of nature or of earth inherited from the sciences and the

phenomenological enterprise, provided we bear in mind that they belong on the same

“continuum”7 determined by experience, and that the science of experience is indeed

phenomenology.

Merleau-Ponty uses the example of the sun of the peasant and that of the

astronomer in order to present their continuity in two ways: firstly, it must be

emphasized that it is the encounter (and the apparent conflict) of the two visions that

constitutes the phenomenological view that encompasses them both. They are made

continuous within the phenomenological view.8 Let me stress that Merleau-Ponty

does not place phenomenology on the side of the peasant and against the astronomer.

Already in this early text, he thinks that the proper object of phenomenology is the

continuity between these two (after all abstract) entities. Secondly, it is science itself

which always ends up moving from its own knowledge of objects to the question of

its own essence, thereby making it intrinsically dependent on the contribution of

phenomenology (which is the science of science).9

Although in this early conversation the emphasis was not placed on the

question of history, it seems to me, in consideration of later texts, that the key to

Merleau-Ponty’s defense of phenomenology initiated here lies in a certain idea of the

7 Paul Césari, Merleau-Ponty’s interlocutor, sums up this continuum as “the continuity between science

and perception.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, translated by James. M. Edie,

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 37.

8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, translated by James. M. Edie, (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1964), 37.

9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, translated by James. M. Edie, (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1964), 36.


historical relations between phenomenological vision, naive vision (the peasant), and

scientific vision (the astronomer).

Of course, Husserl himself was well aware that phenomenology could not

begin with the world itself and that one needed to let the metaphysics of science give

birth to phenomenology through a long, historical process of self-critique. Yet, the

question that Merleau-Ponty asks himself differs from that of Husserl insofar as—in

his characteristic way—he refuses to reduce this state of affairs to a mere accident:

there is a reason for the fact that phenomenology can only follow the non-

phenomenological, that is to say the constituted. There is a reason why constitution is

irreducible (this is the core of Merleau-Ponty’s definition of phenomenology in the

famous preface to the Phenomenology of Perception). It is a reason whose elucidation

is one of the missions of phenomenology.

The challenge, in fact, is to succeed in proposing an origin for phenomenology

that could nonetheless avoid being instituted as an origin for the world: one must

begin thought where the things themselves do not begin.10 The opposition against

certain orthodox Husserlianism is an integral part of Merleau-Ponty’s project insofar

as it is precisely a project that must discover more than its own point of departure.

That is to say, it is a project whose task is to avoid any charge of subjectivism,

psychologism and idealism and which must therefore avoid beginning with any

cogito. For, as Merleau-Ponty remarks, any philosophy that begins with the cogito

shall finish with the cogito, and it will therefore plainly ignore nature.

10 As early as the Primacy of Perception, Merleau-Ponty urges that “we could not imagine philosophers

being phenomenologists from the beginning.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception,

translated by James. M. Edie, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 37.


2. The Ambiguous Relations between the Cartesian Orders

The proper positing of this problem requires that we learn how to dissociate the

objective order from the subjective order and it reveals the extent to which Merleau-

Ponty never ceased to ponder the paradoxes arising from the ambivalence of the

Cartesian relations between the order of matters or causes (which begins with god)

and the order of reasons (which begins with the subject).

Merleau-Ponty focuses on elucidating the ambiguous relations of the two

orders in Descartes at the beginning of his course on Nature of 1957-60. The question,

which he borrows from Descartes scholar Martial Guéroult, is to establish how the

recourse to the rational sentiment found in the fourth, fifth and sixth meditations can

be articulated with the demands for clarity and distinction formulated in the first

three. The question, for Merleau-Ponty, would be resolved if we succeeded in

thinking “according to the first and the second order all at once”11 but this is made

impossible precisely by the positing of the criterion of clarity and distinction which is

not only a product but also a guarantee of their separation. In other words, Merleau-

Ponty traces the progressive movement by which Descartes unwarrantedly softens the

separation of the two orders. Descartes defines the two orders in opposition to each

other, and therefore makes them incommensurable. Merleau-Ponty notes how

Descartes surreptitiously appeals to divine mediation in order to support the

interaction of the two orders. But, he argues, even if one granted the divine

intervention, the problem is merely displaced by this appeal, for it is the invisibility of

this incommensurability—and therefore the surreptitious character of their divine

resolution—that makes the whole difference. It is this invisibility that threatens the

criterion of natural light at its core by presenting the inconceivable (the union of the

11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 36.


incommensurables) as a judge to the conceivable (the strict separation of the two

orders) and by suggesting a ground that precedes both of them. This is probably for

this reason that Merleau-Ponty decides to follow Descartes who, in his famous letter

to Elisabeth of June 28th, 1643, proposed an alternative solution: mediation lies in the

lived body, that is to say in a “corps trans-spatial.”12 This “trans-spatial body”, whilst

remaining a body, offers itself as a principle of commensurability. It is a body that

Merleau-Ponty describes in the same words he uses to describe the earth, and does so

in the very same weeks.

This discussion of Descartes from the Nature course shows how according to

Merleau-Ponty, the separation of the two orders is always either too strict or not strict

enough. It is too strict when it runs the risk of identifying the immediate as the true

and the true as the real; but it is not strict enough when it makes itself unable to

account for the mediacy of the philosophical search in other terms than those of a

diffusion and weakening of the natural light through the process of constitution of the

world (that is to say, through the process of the Meditations themselves). In

characteristically Merleau-Pontian fashion, one must therefore conclude that the

conflation of the opposites as well as their absolute separation are in fact identical

moves, and both illusory. In the case of both Descartes and Husserl, the consequence

is the radical and therefore circular subjectivism which makes thought begin and end

in the Cogito. Merleau-Ponty notes that the only solution, that of Guéroult, requires

that we maintain the separation of the two orders, and he invokes Aristotle: “that

which is first for us is second in itself.”13 But, Merleau-Ponty continues, “can one

think this Aristotelian reversal from within Cartesian thought? Hasn’t Descartes

12Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 37.



shown that the for-us is not an appearance, that one will never be able to erase the fact

that the Cogito is first?”14

This takes us to the second lesson of this passage, which consists in Merleau-

Ponty’s turn of mind that focuses on always seeking commensurability on another

plane than that of the incommensurables and in this case, in the appeal to the body as

a principle of commensurability. If it is true that the order of reasons and the order of

matters are in principle incapable of mediation, whilst in practice they always lead

into each other (for example when one passes surreptitiously from the that I am—

because I think—to the what I am—a thinking thing—in the 2nd Meditation), it is

because there exists a ground that precedes their opposition but precedes also their

constitution, a ground for the subjecto-objective that is neither subjective nor

objective.

So, the problem posed by the confusion of the two orders has been identified

as the danger of allowing phenomenology to collapse into subjectivism. Indeed, one

must come to the realization that radical subjectivism is never a discovery but always

a petitio principii: it is always decided in advance, insofar as thinking always begins

in the subject and introspective thought could only ever keep to itself, that is, to the

subject. Merleau-Ponty writes of the ambiguity of the two orders in Descartes:

Such a philosophy is ambiguous: our thought imposes no reality to the things, says Descartes

in the Meditations, yet, I have no other resource for saying that a thing is or isn’t than to rely

on thought… It is the distinctive feature of a philosophy of the understanding that it refuses to

take as its theme in the stylistic sense of “beginning” what it obtains at the term of a



purification process. Everything that precedes this is thrown back into the darkness. Such a

philosophy is naturally worked-over by doubt and by some strabismus.15

Against this psychological reduction or “purification” that Merleau-Ponty sees

in Descartes, but also in Husserl and even in his own earlier attempts at maintaining a

phenomenological cogito in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty

responds to himself in the notes of 1960 cited above: it is a matter of considering that

“what one could regard as ‘psychology’ (Ph. de la Perception) is really an ontology.

Show this by bringing out the fact that science can neither be nor be thought of as

selbständig.”16 The solution, it seems, is to give up on any thought that would begin

itself at the beginning of the world and to move to a thought whose origin would not

entail the origin of the world (the Aristotelian solution). Such a thought is ontological

insofar as it does not go from the subject to being but begins in being itself and finds

itself permitted in doing so by the discovery that the reduction had sooner reduced the

subject than being as a pure constitutive movement.17 For science (which is not

“selbständig”), is but a moment of this movement.

3. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Precession

What this signifies is that the empirical cogitos that we are can only begin to think by

thinking themselves as secondary. For, as Merleau-Ponty liked to repeat after Kafka,

things present themselves “not by their root but by some point situated around the

15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 171, my emphases.

16 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible, (Paris: Gallimard TEL, 1964), 228

17 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception, (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), xvii.


middle.”18 The requisite ontology must therefore begin by revealing what precedes a

given thinking and is presupposed in it. Merleau-Ponty finds this principle of

anteriority in what he calls the earth.

This point is worth insisting on: it is in the context of a questioning on the

possibility to satisfy the concept of nature from within phenomenology that Merleau-

Ponty sees the question of the ambiguous relations between the two Cartesian orders

emerge, and it is within this questioning that he turns to the earth in his famous

commentary on “The Ur-arche Earth does not move.” There, he identifies the strict

distinction between the two Cartesian orders as the cause of what he calls Husserl’s

“crazy paradox.”19 In order to solve this paradox, we must return to a ground that

allows, supports and justifies the continuity between the two orders, for “it is the

‘constitutive genesis’ which is first and in relation to which idealities are

constituted.”20 In the very last words of his lecture course, he writes as if the entire

analysis was finally finding its equilibrium:

Because he leaves next to one another (correlatively), the realist-causal order and the

idealist-constitutive order, Husserl is obligated to sustain this nearly “crazy

paradox.” One would have to take up the concrete relation of these two orders by

18 The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Edited by Max Brod, 1910-1923, (New York: Penguin, 1972), May

1910, 12. See also Claude Lefort in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, le Visible et l’Invisible (Paris: Gallimard,

TEL), 351.

19 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, edited by Leonard Lawlor and

Bettina Bergo, translated by John O’Neill and Leonard Lawlor, (Evanston: Northwestern University

Press, 2002), p. 76.



Press, 2002), p. 75.


turning both of them not into a physical world relative to the idealistic Sinngebung,

but into two correlative aspects of Being. The Earth which is first is not the physical

earth (by definition it is homogenized); it is the source Being, the Stamm und Klotz

being, in pre-restfulness; the mind which is first is not the absolute Ego of

Sinngebung. It is the Denkmögligkeit and they are Ineinender, entangled.21

To Merleau-Ponty, what this Husserlian text achieves is more than Husserl

himself intended. It is not only a reflection on the relations between experimental

science and phenomenology, one in which the former would appear as a moment of

the latter. This text also illustrates the movement that arrives at the realization that the

reduction can only ever reveal an always-already present that precedes the cogito

itself. For if the earth does not move, it is because the Copernican gesture contains a

sleight of hands that only phenomenology is able to diagnose. This gesture is in fact

close to the Cartesian one insofar as it uses the incompatibility of the lived earth and

of the earth of the astronomer as a pretext supporting the reduction of the lived

experience to scientific experience. 22 This is to say that the radicalism of the

difference between the two senses of the earth becomes exploited to the point that one

becomes rejected to the benefit of the other as if affirming this very difference was

not enough to precisely compromise our right to judge the one in view of the other.



Press, 2002), p. 76.

22 This is a critique reminiscent of Heidegger’s discussion of a struggle between “earth” and “world” in

the Origins of the Work of Artö as well as of Deleuze’s idea of thought as taking place in the

relationship of earth and territory in What is Philosophy where Deleuze makes a rare mention of

Husserl. See Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main

2012, and Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, p 85, NY, Columbia UP, 1996.


But, the failing of the scientific view is indeed to believe that the object of the concept

of lived earth (which is at rest), and of scientific earth (which is in motion) is the

same, and that the latter may replace the first in the same way as a new scientific

discovery dispenses with a former one within the progressive order of science. But,

Merleau-Ponty notes, what permits one to say that the earth moves is not a thesis that

would overcome and replace the former, but indeed the reverse, for the movement of

the earth is nothing but a form of the relation of the earth to itself, that is to say that

the point of view from which one declares that the earth moves is always a point of

view grounded in the motionless earth. It is the earth that doesn’t move that includes

the earth that moves and not the reverse. One can see therefore, through this limit-

case of the earth that watches itself move from the depths of its a-mobility, that what

Husserl calls the earth is nothing other than a pure principle of anteriority that

conditions every experience and every constitution, and that precedes the cogito just

like the rest. This absolute precession only signifies one thing, relying as it is on the

refusal to turn the earth into an object: the earth is neither a psychological principle

nor a metaphysical one. On the contrary, it signposts Husserl’s (perhaps

involuntary23) entrance into ontology, an entrance that does not imply any exit from

23 This is a point diifcult to verify. Much depends here on how much one places Fink’s idea of a

“phenomenology of phenomneology” expressed in several writings of 1932-34 and especially his

Sİxth Cartesian Meditaiton, in the dependence of Husserl or as a departure from the letter of his text.

One argument in favor of placing both Merleau-Ponty and Fink under the umbrella of Husserl’s late

philosophy would be through an appeal to the—admittedly cryptic—dicsussions in the Crisis of

European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Part III B, section 71). See also Eugen Fink:

“L’Analyse intentionnelle et le probleme de la pensee speculative.” In Problemes actuels de la

phenomenologie, 54-87. Brussels: Desclee de Brower, 1952; “The Phenomenological Philosophy of

Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism.” In The Phenomenology of Husserl, 73-147. Chicago:


phenomenology but on the contrary, the consequence of its rescue.24 If it is to resist

the objection made to it by the natural sciences, phenomenology must become in its

entirety a theory of a pure principle of precession. 25 Until now, our primordial

embeddedness into a world that is always-already being constituted resembled a

psychological accident waiting to be repaired by the reduction. 26 In the neo-

Quadrangle Books, 1970; Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method.

Translated by Ronald Bruzina. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; “What Does the

Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish?” Translated by Arthur Grugan. Research in

Phenomenology 2, (1972): 5-27.

24 In his characterization of phenomenology in the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception,

Merleau-Ponty makes this point exactly in regard, not to the earth, but to philosophy itself:

“Phenomenology, as a disclosure of the world, rests on itself, or rather provides its own

foundation.14 All cognitions are sustained by a ‘ground’ of postulates and finally by our

communication with the world as primary embodiment of rationality. Philosophy, as radical refl ection,

dispenses in principle with this resource. As, however, it too is in history, it too exploits the world and

constituted reason. It must therefore put to itself the question which it puts to all branches of

knowledge, and so duplicate itself infi nitely, being, as Husserl says, a dialogue or infi nite meditation,

and, in so far as it remains faithful to its intention, never knowing where it is going” (PP, xxiv).

25 One should note that it is a matter of a precession that cannot be reduced to precedence: what is

primary is not what precedes, but the precession itself. Mauro Carbone has recently shown very

convincingly the importance of the theme of precession in Merleau-Ponty. See in particular, La Chair

des images: Merleau-Ponty entre peinture et cinéma, (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 116-129.

26 I take this to be corroborated by John Sallis who asks in Double Truth: “Where does Husserl’s text

leave the earth?” He answers: “Husserl’s text leaves the earth as something constituted. Indeed the very

opening of the text onto the analysis of the earth is a description—though still at an undifferentiated

level—of the synthesis by which the earth comes to be represented.” This leads Sallis to declare:

“Where does the text leave the earth? It leaves the earth, in the second place, suspended from

transcendental life, from constituting subjectivity” John Sallis, Double Truth, (Albany, SUNY Press,

1995), 52. In short: Husserl’s analysis of the earth takes him further than his subjectivism allows, and


Husserlianism of Merleau-Ponty, this so-called accident becomes the major of the

phenomenological enterprise in general, and it upsets everything. It therefore finally

appears that Merleau-Ponty’s interest for this text of Husserl’s lies precisely in its

exhibiting the passage from a Husserl who wishes to begin at the beginning to a

Husserl who begins in the middle thanks to a problematization of the given that

becomes now only characterized by the precedence of constitution.

In order to convince ourselves that this truly represents an entrance of

phenomenology into ontology, one that is not fortuitous but indeed necessary, it may

suffice to observe the language used by Merleau-Ponty. The last time he had

compared the two Cartesian orders, the context was already that of the question of the

genesis in nature, and the exit of the alternative was already achieved through an

appeal to the virtual. In his course on child psychology, Merleau-Ponty described

pregnancy as “a mystery that belongs neither to the order of matters nor to the order

of reasons, but to the order of life.”27 As is well-known, virtuality, that is to say

seems to reveal the pre-existence in principle, of the movement by which Erde becomes Copernican

earth. It is worth noting how Heidegger himself seems to insist on regarding Erde as more authentic

than Copernican earth, when in his famous Spiegel interview he regards the impression given by seeing

images of the earth from space as an event that breaks the phenomenological embeddedness of man.

He declares: “I don’t know if you are scared; I was certainly scared when I recently saw the

photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of

human beings is already taking place.” It is clear, I think, that Heidegger’s reaction relies on the idea

there must be a break and not a continuity from Erde to Copernican earth, and idea that is precisely

foreign to Merleau-Ponty. See Martin Heidegger, “‘Only a god Can Save Us,’ The Spiegel interview,”

(1966), Translated by William J. Richardson in Heidegger, The Man and the Thinker, edited by

Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981), 45-69, quotation from p. 57.

27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952,

translated by Talia Welsh, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 78.


fertility, would later become the very name of that earth that doesn’t move. For

example in Merleau-Ponty’s Lecture notes on the Origin Of Geometry where the earth

as principle of precedence is compared to a “mother,” in the very same weeks as he

elsewhere calls upon himself to one day carry out a “psychoanalysis of nature,” as

“the flesh, the mother.”28 In the context of the lecture course on child psychology of

49-50, the allusion was mysterious. However, Merleau-Ponty clarifies the idea in “the

Philosopher and his Shadow” strictly contemporaneous to both the notes on the earth

and the nature course. There he writes that “the most natural life of man aims at a

certain ontological milieu that is none other than that of the in-itself and which

therefore cannot be derived from it in the constitutive order.”29 That is to say that the

strictest given can only send one back to a ground that precedes and constitutes the in-

itself, thus triggering a double reflection: the entrance into the matter, if it is to really

take place “in the middle,” points to the earth as a principle of precedence that as such

can only point to the horizon of the in-itself insofar as it finds its meaning only as a

motivation for the movement of constitution. If it is true that phenomenology can only

ever begin in the middle, it is therefore necessary for it to accommodate within itself a

double movement of reduction and constitution, for these two processes do not take

place sequentially, as they do in the Husserlian orthodoxy. On the contrary, the proper

object of phenomenology is no longer the blosse Sagen, but the very movement by

which constitution always leads into reduction and vice versa, a movement that is

none other than the earth itself as a principle of self-precedence. It is in this way that

phenomenology succeeds in recuperating the world while recuperating itself, and

therefore succeeds in conjugating the order of causes and the order of reasons without

28 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible, (Paris: Gallimard TEL, 1964), 315.

29 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 166.


conflating them. The reconciliation of the ground (Boden) with the object is the same

as the reconciliation of the earth with the terrestrial, a reconciliation that can only be

found within the movement of constitution that, after having been brought to the

ontological status, shall become renamed by Merleau-Ponty with appeal to another

geological formulation: “sedimentation.”

4. Conclusion: Merleau-Ponty’s Hyper-Dialectics

As a result, we can say that the moral of the problem of the two orders is precisely

that any philosophy will fail as long as it remains unable to recuperate itself.

Interestingly, this is the conclusion Fink arrives at through different channels, when

he invokes a phenomenology of phenomenology in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation.

Indeed, if it is true that the alternative between the pure separation and the pure

identity of the two orders must be overcome, it is because the two terms of the

alternative are different only from each other’s point of view. Remaining at the level

of this mutual opposition however would only drag us into what Merleau-Ponty often

calls “false dialectic” (for example in his critique of the Sartrean dialectic in the

chapter of the Visible and the Invisible entitled “Interrogation and dialectic”) or a

“strabismus.” According to Merleau-Ponty, these two terms of the alternative,

assuming they ever really oppose each other at any given point, can be reunited at one

crucial point anyway: neither the one nor the other possesses the resources to

incorporate the order of discovery (that is to say, of philosophy) into the order of the

discovered. Indeed, the entire project of the last lecture course on philosophy and non-

philosophy (that is to say, on the relations between philosophy and the world), is

contained in this problem. For the ambiguous relations of the two orders only reveals

a constant and paradoxical position that one finds both in Husserl and in Descartes,


and that regards philosophy as transparency. For opposing thought and world can only

ever amount to affirming their mutual independence, and therefore the non-

participation of the one into the other. Conversely, positing their identity only leads to

saying that either the world or thought does not exist, that is to say, it is saying

nothing. For the cogito, in its strict sense of an absolute precedence, signifies nothing

if we see clearly that it contains no thesis about either itself or the world. It is in fact

only in affirmation that the cogito both precedes the world and determines itself

against it, and it is only in this affirmation that it accesses its full signification. But

this of course, is nothing but the intellectualistic strabismus (and the initial passage of

one order into the other, the aforementioned illicit passage from the that I am to the

what I am in the second Meditation), a strabismus that brings us back to the earth by

teaching us that meaning can only arise as a reference to a principle of precedence. A

principle of which one should say nothing for fear of saying everything.

Therefore, if it is indeed the transparency of philosophy as θεωρία that leads

to the problem of the confusion of the orders, and the helplessness of traditional

philosophy before this problem becomes obvious: philosophy, in its obsession with

the world, simply forgot to make room for itself within it and only gave itself the role

of a mere accident. This accident cannot help but echo the two Husserlian accidents

mentioned earlier and diagnosed by Merleau-Ponty: that of the accidental precedence

of the constitution and the accidental impossibility to complete the reduction. As

Merleau-Ponty declares both in his discussion of Husserl’s Erde and of Descartes, one


should overcome the double fantasy of the “absolute observer” 30 and of

“philosophical immanence.”31

From a Merleau-Pontian point of view on the contrary, the confrontation of

phenomenology to the question of nature should not lead to the dismissal of

phenomenology. On the contrary, it offers it a chance to achieve its own maturity, a

maturity in which it ceases to see itself as the last moment of some philosophical

history, but instead takes possession of a new status, that of a philosophy that

succeeded in recuperating philosophy itself by acquiring a new ground on the basis of

which the observation of the world and the reflexive observation of thought become

reconciled. The name of this new philosophy, which overcomes the bad dialectic

inherited from Descartes through Husserl and Sartre is “hyper-dialectic,” the theory of

the relation between “philosophy and non-philosophy.” Let us recall the remark of the

young Merleau-Ponty in the discussion about the primacy of perception. In 1947

already, it seemed to him that “one cannot imagine philosophy being phenomenology

from the beginning” for that would require that we begin thinking with thought and it

would amount to ignoring history, which is only the infinite reconciliation without

conflation of matters with reasons.

We can therefore trace how Merleau-Ponty’s concern for the relations

between Husserlian Erde and Copernican Earth inform the evolution of his thought



Press, 2002), p. 9.



Press, 2002), p. 14.


towards an ontology of pure relations.32 His reading of Husserl’s fragment known as

“the Ur-Arche earth does not move” reveals that unlike Husserl, his interest is focused

on the continuity between the two senses of earth, leading him to revise the traditional

view of philosophy as θεωρία. Philosophy is indeed a pertinent part of its own object,

and only an ontology that can account for the necessary movement whereby Erde

becomes Earth can be satisfactory.

32 This reading suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s cosmological reflections lead him into an ontology of

pure relations and therefore a dynamic ontology. It is therefore in full agreement with the argument of

Renaud Barbaras’s Dynamique de la Manifestation. My point of disagreement with Barbaras is purely

historical: this is a view he believes Merleau-Ponty should have held, but didn’t. See Renaud Barbaras,

Dynamique de la Manifestation, Vrin, Paris, 2013. On Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of relations without

terms, see also my Ambiguity and the Absolute, Fordham, NY, 2014, especially pp. 217 ff.

Documents

Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth--Research in Phenomenology