The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature

CHAPTER TEN Finding the Body’s Place in Nature

CHAPTER TEN Finding the Body’s Place in Nature Merleau-Ponty on Schelling’s “Phenomenology of Pre-Reflective Being” Angelica Nuzzo Abstract In this essay, I place Merleau-Ponty’s course notes on Nature (1956–1960) between his two major works (The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible) with regard to the central issue of the place of the human body in philosophical thinking and to the problem of its philosophical thematization (transcendental method vs. phenomenology). I show that MerleauPonty ’s discussion of Schelling’s conception of Nature in the first lecture course represents a central step in his reflection on that crucial topic. I claim, first, that what Merleau-Ponty has in mind in this discussion is the status and the role of the human body in experience and philosophy. The body is that which, like Schelling’s Nature, is “always already there” as an “excess of Being over the consciousness of Being.” Second, I show that Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Schelling, precisely because of its orientation to the issue of embodiment, while aiming at separating him from Kant, insists on aligning him with the positions of the Critique of Judgment. Both chronologically and thematically, Merleau-Ponty’s course notes on Nature stand between his two major works, The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. The lecture notes on Nature 211 212 Angelica Nuzzo bear witness to Merleau-Ponty’s long-standing reflection on the crucial philosophical problems posed by the human body. This is the central topic guiding Merleau-Ponty in his three courses on Nature delivered at the Collège de France from 1956 to 1960. In this essay, I am interested in posing a methodological question to which, I believe, Merleau-Ponty’s lectures offer new and precious insights. What is the methodological perspective that a philosophical investigation on the human body should take after Kant (and after phenomenology)? At stake is the fundamental alternative separating transcendental philosophy from phenomenology. Which of these two methods allows for the most adequate thematization of the human body? That is, which is the perspective capable of disclosing what the human body truly is? And, in the first place, can this question be asked of the human body? In our post-Cartesian and post-Kantian (and indeed postphenomenological ) epoch, we can get to the reality and presence of the human body only by investigating what the human body does, that is, by giving an account of the role and place that the body occupies in the cognitive process as well as in its interaction with the natural living world (i.e., in its interaction with Nature within and without ourselves). To follow Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of the problem of the human body in the lecture notes on Nature sheds light on the methodological problem of separating phenomenology and transcendental philosophy. For the question of Nature emerges, for Merleau-Ponty, precisely from a reflection on this connection. Henceforth, I concentrate on the notes for the first course. Herein the issue seems to play only a secondary role, but is instead, as I will show, the very center of his reflection. The lecture notes of the first course frame that methodological alternative historically, presenting it as a choice between Kant and Schelling, or, alternatively, as the way in which Schelling can be said to overcome the flaws of Kant’s transcendentalism but also to inherit its fundamental conquests. On Merleau-Ponty’s account, Schelling’s confrontation with Kant opens the path to phenomenology. But this genealogy also leaves a fundamental mark on phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty sees Schelling as healing the dualisms implied by the Kantian notions of Nature, of the a priori, and of space as form of our intuition. He explicitly endorses Schelling’s position in dealing with Nature from the standpoint of the intuitive understanding, from the “abyss” of human reason, directly viewing Schelling’s problem as “our problem.” On Merleau-Ponty’s account, in his Naturphilosophie Schelling is after a “phenomenology of pre-reflective being” (N2, 41). Nature (and existence) comes first, before all experience and 213 Finding the Body’s Place in Nature meaning. With regard to this claim, I will discuss the shift from Kant’s transcendentalism to Schelling’s phenomenology. In what sense can Schelling’s view of Nature as pre-reflective being be said to overcome the Kantian a priori? What does Schelling’s “phenomenology...