PHENOMENOLOGY’S CONSTITUTIVE PARADOX:

MEILLASSOUX ON HUSSERL
AND MERLEAU-PONTY ON SCHELLING
E. Eugene Kleist

Abstract: I provide a phenomenological response to Quentin

Meillassoux’s “realist” criticism of phenomenology and I explore the
resources and limits of phenomenology in its own attempt to grapple with
the paradox Meillassoux believes sinks it: subjectivity has priority over
the physical reality it constitutes despite the anteriority and posteriority
of that physical reality to subjectivity. I first offer a corrective to
Meillassoux’s interpretation of Husserl. Then, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s
lectures on the philosophy of nature, where he addresses the paradox
by interpreting Husserl in the light of Schelling. I argue throughout
that the correct understanding of Husserl’s concept of constitution,
and particularly, passive constitution, defangs this realist criticism
of phenomenology and suggests phenomenology to be capable of a
Naturphilosophie intimating pre-reflective being. The prime instance
of this pre-reflective being is subjectivity’s entanglement with a reality
that encompasses it.

Introduction
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I would like to provide
a phenomenological perspective on the attack upon “correlational”
phenomenology waged by Quentin Meillassoux. Secondly, I aim to explore
the resources and limits of phenomenology in its own attempt to grapple
with the paradox Meillassoux believes sinks it: the subjective constitution
of a reality independent of subjectivity. I will proceed in two stages. The
first stage deals directly with Meillassoux’s criticism of what he calls the
Ptolemaic tendency of Husserlian phenomenology. Meillassoux sees this
tendency in a paradox which he claims renders phenomenology incoherent:
for Husserl, subjectivity has priority over the physical reality it constitutes
despite the causal and temporal antecedence of that physical reality vis-à-
vis subjectivity. I argue that Meillassoux fails to consider Husserl’s explicit
treatment of this paradox, and, more specifically, he fails to understand the
meaning of “constitution” implicit in the paradox. As Husserl sometimes uses
infelicitous formulations that, taken out of context, allow the interpretation
Meillassoux gives them, a more careful investigation of Husserl’s idealistic

© 2019. Idealistic Studies, Volume 48, Issue 1. ISSN 0046-8541. pp. 133–147
DOI: 10.5840/idstudies20194990
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tendencies is needed. So, the second stage of my study turns to the figure of
Schelling on the basis of whose philosophy of nature Merleau-Ponty explicitly
addresses the above-mentioned paradox. I will consider Merleau-Ponty’s
view that Schelling’s account of the complementary tasks of transcendental
philosophy and Naturphilosophie resonates in Husserlian phenomenology
as a tension between constitutive subjectivity and passive genesis. Although
it may seem strange to interpret Husserl “avec Schelling,” it allows us to
appreciate the pre-reflective dynamic entanglement of subjectivity and nature,
and thus to deny the rift between subjectivity and reality that Meillassoux’s
“realism” assumes. In the work of the later Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology
at its limits is capable of a Naturphilosophie affirming the intimation of a
dynamic pre-reflective reality encompassing subjectivity.

Husserl’s Ptolemaicism:
Meillassoux on Phenomenological Correlationism
In order to provide background for what follows, I would like to introduce
the emblematic text which provides the occasion for Husserl to formulate
the paradox of which Meillassoux will make so much. In the “Umsturz”
manuscript from 1934, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological
Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does
Not Move,”1 Husserl seems to have decisively severed phenomenological
analysis from settled scientific opinion. Quentin Meillassoux cites this text as
damning evidence of the Ptolemaic tendency of transcendental philosophy.2
Husserl appeals to the earth as supporting ground [Boden], which has no
place and neither motion nor rest, but rather provides a pre-objective “ark”
which supports us and other beings, and which founds the idealizations
making possible the Copernican constitution of a body [Körper] in motion.
The earth as supporting ground has a kinship with the individual person’s
lived body [Leib] which always remains at exactly the same distance from
itself and which is founding with respect to the perception of space. The
Copernican constitution of moving bodies [Körperen], however, also requires
the pretense of an absolute standpoint uprooted from the stability of the
earth and which transforms the earth into one body [Körper] among others,
idealized as substitutable and understood as being in motion relative to other
mathematizable bodies.3 Husserl further argues that the unity of earth as
supporting ground provides a basis for the unity of history and of all societies
inhabiting this shared ground. The earth as supporting ground is not the
mathematized physical reality of a planetary entity existing independently of
any subject, but rather a subjectively orienting source functioning similarly
to the lived body, but at a different scale. Husserl’s text ends with an explicit
statement of the paradox to which Meillassoux will subsequently draw
attention: transcendental subjectivity has priority over the physical reality

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which it constitutes despite the scientific fact that this physical reality is
chronologically anterior and posterior to the reign of subjectivity.4
Meillassoux defines correlationism as the view that being can be known
only insofar as it is the correlate of thought.5 In order to formulate the paradox
of correlationism, Meillassoux introduces the concept of the “arche-fossil,”
defined as: “materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event;
one that is anterior to terrestrial life.”6 Scientific statements concerning events
prior to the emergence of life and subjectivity can be made on the basis of
radioisotope dating methods, for example. Hence, the challenge: “how is
correlationism liable to interpret these ancestral statements?”7 Adopting a
Galilean-Cartesian ontology in which the essence of material being lies in
its mathematizability, Meillassoux insists that mathematically formulated
statements about nature “designate actual properties of the event in question”
even in the absence of any observer. Insofar as scientific propositions refer to
mind-independent properties, science is non-correlational, and any philosophy
taking science seriously should itself avoid correlationism.
Phenomenology is a philosophy of correlation in some sense, but without,
as we will now argue, making beings or objective properties dependent upon
thought.8 Meillassoux claims “The first decision . . . of all correlationism—
. . . is the thesis of the essential inseparability of the act of thinking from
its content.”9 This applies most notoriously to the mathematical properties
of objects: “Consequently, the mathematical properties of the object cannot
be exempted from the subjectivation that is the precondition for secondary
properties: they too must be conceived as dependent upon the subject’s
relation to the given . . . as an act of subjectivity for the phenomenologist.”10
To say that mathematical properties are “conceived . . . as an act of subjectivity
for the phenomenologist” surely fails to understand Husserl. From the Logical
Investigations onwards, Husserl defends the claim that mathematical objects
have a validity irreducible to the particular acts of subjectivity in which they
are thought. Husserl, of course, maintains that “mathematical properties”
are in one sense mind-independent and in another sense not. Mathematical
objects are repeatable and thus irreducible to particular mental acts. Yet,
minds instantiate these mathematical objects in particular mental acts. From
Ideas on, the genesis of mathematical objectivities is seen to involve acts of
abstraction and idealization and, in the later Husserl, mathematical objectivity
is delineated also in terms of historical sedimentation. None of this, however,
requires taking mathematical properties as subjective acts.
Meillassoux himself mentions two phenomenological objections to
his critique of phenomenological correlationism. The first objection has to
do with the lacunary nature of given appearances, thus applying Husserl’s
analysis of profiles [Abschattungen] to temporally distant (“ancestral”)
objects. Meillassoux responds that this objection fails because “the ancestral
does not designate an absence in the given and for givenness, but rather an

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absence of givenness as such.”11 A second phenomenological objection draws

on the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical: the conditions
for givenness do not exist in the same way that given appearances exist.
Meillassoux responds by insisting that the transcendental perspective requires
incarnation in a localizable body living its life within a time that encompasses
it.12 Time encloses such a transcendental body-subject within times excluding
that subject. Thus, according to Meillassoux, the paradox re-surfaces.
Meillassoux’s rejoinders fail to support his attack on correlational
phenomenology, however. The problem with the first objection to which
Meillassoux responds is that this phenomenological objection diverts
attention from a better phenomenological analysis of the arche-fossil. The
first phenomenological objection applies Husserl’s analysis of Abschattungen
to the arche-fossil in a way that overlooks the fact that scientific analysis of
the arche-fossil treats the arche-fossil as an index or sign which points to
events prior to subjectivity, life, etc. The phenomenologist should have no
problem giving an account of the arche-fossil in terms of its sign function
without appealing to the doctrine of Abschattungen. What a sign indicates
has a specific manner of givenness consisting in its being signified in such
and such a manner (e.g., through radio-carbon dating). Although it is given as
absent, what the sign indicates need not be given as a currently unperceived
but perceivable profile. Furthermore, mathematical properties are involved
in the scientific procedures that make possible the signifying function of
the arche-fossil. Some of the mathematical properties of the arche-fossil
may well formulate perceived morphological features of the fossil, even if
what the signs in question indicate need not be a currently unseen profile
of a perceptual object. In summary, the objection appealing to the doctrine
of Abschattungen overlooks the fact that the indicative function of the
mathematizable morphology of the arche-fossil is perfectly amenable to a
phenomenological account without bringing in currently unperceived profiles
of the object. As such, Meillassoux’s rejoinder addresses an objection that
diverts us from the possibility of a genuine phenomenological account of the
arche-fossil’s indicative function as a sign. Such a phenomenological account
explains how what is given to experience gives us access to an “ancestral”
reality that is prior to our experience.
Meillassoux’s rejoinder to the second objection concerning the
transcendental/empirical distinction not only conflates the lived body [Leib]
and physical body [Körper] in a way that obscures the constitutive role of the
lived body, but provides evidence that his argument against phenomenology
depends upon a misinterpretation of the meaning of constitution and
phenomenological reduction. This in turn obscures Husserl’s own treatment
of the paradox of correlation which involves an appreciation of the complex
interweaving of constitutive levels. Furthermore, once we accept (as
Meillassoux insists we must and as Husserl himself does) that intersubjectivity

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and embodiment feature as conditions of the possibility of appearance, we

are invited to take account of the role of passive genesis in constitution. By
focusing on the embodied localization of transcendental subjectivity in order
to overcome the transcendental/empirical distinction brought to attention by
the phenomenological objection, Meillassoux does not sharpen the paradox of
the arche-fossil so much as he invites us to question whether he understands
the meaning of constitution in Husserl’s phenomenology. Clarifying the
meaning of constitution in its relation to the role of the transcendental or a
priori in Husserl’s thought will show us how Husserl himself addressed the
paradox without falling into subjective idealism.
For Husserl, a priori or transcendental elements are constitutive of
appearance. Unlike the Kantian meaning of “transcendental,” however,
for Husserl these a priori elements are themselves capable of being
phenomenologically exhibited. As capable of being phenomenologically
exhibited, transcendental subjectivity (and transcendental intersubjectivity,
among other a priori factors constitutive of various phenomena) must themselves
be able to come to manifestation through the phenomenological reduction.
But anything capable of coming to manifestation has its own conditions
of its manifestation. Therefore, we are required to admit that for Husserl
transcendental subjectivity and transcendental intersubjectivity (among other
a priori factors) are themselves constituted in addition to being constitutive.
Transcendental intersubjectivity, together with the world, co-constitutes
objectivity, while intersubjectivity and world themselves are constituted by
transcendental subjectivity (the primal ego). Transcendental subjectivity (the
primal ego) in its turn, however, is constituted by various factors, brought to
light particularly through the analysis of time-consciousness.13 Husserl finds
the deepest level of constitution of the ego to be permeated by passivity.
Even if one insists that the primordial flux of time-constituting consciousness
constitutes itself in “longitudinal intentionality” [Längsintentionalität],
this is not equivalent to an active constitution by the ego. Furthermore, the
dependence of longitudinal intentionality [Längsintentionalität] upon the
vertical intentionality [Querintentionalität] directed towards objects in time
means that various levels of constitution interweave.
To deny that transcendental subjectivity is constituted would be to deny
that it can be accessed through the phenomenological reduction, which is
a method of becoming aware in such a way that conditions of possibility
themselves come to appearance. This means that phenomenological reduction
does not lead to a Kantian conception of the a priori as is allegedly arrived
at through transcendental deduction. Husserl famously rejects the Kantian
approach to transcendental subjectivity as involving “mythical structures”
rather than phenomenological exhibition.14 That phenomenological reduction
leads to the transcendental ego means that the transcendental ego itself should
be taken as constituted. The analyses of time-constituting consciousness reveal

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the deepest level of the ego’s self-constitution, which does not mean that the
ego creates itself, but rather that its passively driven flux makes possible its
own appearance.15 While this may take us to the deepest level of constitution, it
does not thereby take us to the sole condition of possibility of all appearances.
Constitution occurs both passively and actively and involves constitutive
factors other than the ego. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty famously insisted,
phenomenological reduction is always incomplete.16 Both the supposed
phenomenological objection that appeals to the transcendental/empirical
distinction and Meillassoux’s rejoinder that the transcendental elements are
locally embodied obscure the Husserlian sense of constitution, which does not
mean creation, but rather involves the conditions of the coming to appearance
of phenomena. The accurate account of constitution does not eliminate
correlation, but it forces us to acknowledge that Husserlian transcendental
phenomenology is not Kantian transcendental idealism. Furthermore, the role
of passive synthesis in the constitution of the transcendental ego indicates
that, for Husserl, the transcendental ego is not the creator of the world. As
passively constituted, the transcendental ego is not even in control of its own
conditions of manifestation,17 much less its own being.18
If Meillassoux sees the correlational paradox as unaffected by Husserl’s
acknowledgement of transcendental intersubjectivity, or even sharpened by
the embodied situation of subjectivity at the constituting pole, he may be
underestimating the threat to his argument from these passively constitutive
factors. In Crisis §§53–54 Husserl addresses the paradox that human
intersubjectivity is both a subject for the world and an object in the world:
the universal intersubjectivity to which objectivity leads back is itself nothing
other than humanity, “and the latter is undeniably a component part of the
world. How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity,
constitute the whole world . . . ?”19 When Husserl tries to resolve the paradox
by finding transcendental intersubjectivity as a constitutive accomplishment
of the “primal ego,” he means that the ego is the starting point if we want to
“methodically exhibit transcendental intersubjectivity.”20 Husserl remains
adamant that this does not put realism at risk: “In advance there is the world,
ever pregiven and undoubted in ontic certainty and self-verification. . . . [I]t
still has validity for me . . . together with all sciences and arts, together with all
social and personal configurations and institutions, insofar as it is just the world
that is actual for me. There can be no stronger realism than this.”21 Husserl
is also well aware of the material conditions of both the world and the ego.22
According to Meillassoux, the following three situations would
be incomprehensible to correlational philosophy: (1) that “being is not
coextensive with manifestation;” (2) that, accordingly, “manifestation is
not the givenness of a world, but rather an intra-worldly occurrence;” and
(3) “that the fossil-matter is the givenness in the present of a being that is
anterior to givenness.”23 The first two points, that being is not coextensive

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with manifestation and that manifestation is an intra-worldly occurrence

will challenge Husserlian phenomenology only under the assumption of an
inaccurate reading of constitution which construes constitution as creation
while ignoring the role of passive genesis in constitution. Husserl’s own
understanding of constitution is one that, as Merleau-Ponty saw, makes
phenomenological reduction inevitably incomplete precisely because being
is not coextensive with manifestation and because manifestation is never
the “givenness of a world” as if the totality of being could be exhaustively
brought to appearance. We have already shown how a phenomenologist
could offer the following rejoinder to the third point: the arche-fossil is a
sign of what is anterior to givenness. It is a signifying index because it is a
morphological basis for inferences to an ancestral reality that cannot be given,
but rather only indicated, as existing long ago before subjectivity, or even life,
emerged. Thus, the scientist infers the state of affairs antecedent to givenness
through experiments requiring perception and presupposing mathematical
idealization. Once the phenomenological reduction is understood as showing
the conditions for scientific objectivity rather than replacing scientific
objectivity, the phenomenologist can easily explain how science knows a
state of affairs objectively anterior to subjective givenness.
Husserl’s idealist tendencies should nevertheless make us pause in order
to question the tensions to which they give rise in his thought. Along these
lines, Merleau-Ponty offers an account of these tensions in considering
whether phenomenology can overcome the paradox of a transcendental
subject constituting the physical world which envelops and, at times, excludes
it. Towards this aim, Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Schelling avec Husserl
provides an intriguing response to Meillassoux avant la lettre.

Schellingian Naturphilosophie in Phenomenology:

Merleau-Ponty on Schelling and Husserl
If one follows Meillassoux in defining correlation as “the idea according
to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and
being,”24 there may still be a sense in which phenomenology has attempted to
gain access to wild being outside the correlation. In an homage to Husserl en-
titled “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “What resists
phenomenology within us—natural being, the ‘barbarous’ source Schelling
spoke of—cannot remain outside of phenomenology and should have its
place within it.”25 Schelling figures importantly in the later work of Merleau-
Ponty, not only in this homage to Husserl, but also in “The Intertwining, the
Chiasm,”26 and most explicitly in a section on “The Romantic Conception
of Nature” from the lectures “On Nature” which Merleau-Ponty gave in
1956–1957.27 The chapter on “The Romantic Conception of Nature” in which
Schelling receives treatment also includes sections on Bergson and Husserl.
The juxtaposition of Schelling and Husserl proves instructive with regard to

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the capacity and limits of a phenomenological approach to nature. Merleau-

Ponty finds in Schellingian nature an account of natural agency anticipating
Husserl’s analysis of the passive genesis of constituted unities. Schelling’s
claim concerning the complementarity of the tasks of transcendental philoso-
phy and the philosophy of nature28 echoes in Husserlian phenomenology as a
tension between constitutive subjectivity and passive genesis.
In the lectures On Nature, Merleau-Ponty draws attention to Schelling’s
conception of primordial nature [erste Natur] which is neither World nor God,
but rather “Being . . . anterior to all reflection on Being . . . pre-Being which,
as soon as we arrive on the scene, is always already there.”29 Schelling admits
a blind agency of nature, neither reducing it to mechanism nor subjecting
nature to a critical teleology driven by the exigency of the primacy of practice
à la Kant. Schelling rather seeks to “live and feel” productive nature, prior to
subjecting nature to reflection.30 Since we are natural ourselves, we are our
access to nature: “it is in my own nature that I find the original state of the
interior of things.”31 Schelling’s claim that nature is subject is not construed
by Merleau-Ponty to mean that material nature is somehow self-conscious:
“[T]here is not the projection of consciousness on everything, but rather a
participation of my own life in everything, and vice-versa.”32 Subjectivity
is entangled within reality as a part of it.33 Anticipating his later account
in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty insists that the bonds
between organized beings and sensible qualities means that sensible qualities
themselves, which can only be approached in perception, are pre-reflectively
active in their turn.34 Nature, for Schelling, is not permeated by consciousness,
but rather is “an arrangement of materials . . . which prepares the sense that
human being gives to it.”35 Nevertheless, the purpose of Nature does not
lie in humanity. Merleau-Ponty sees in Schellingian nature “the beginning
of meaning in the process of ordering itself.”36 Neither human being (as a
humanist conception would have it) nor life (as a vitalist conception would
have it) is the sole origin of sense. Nature, anterior to reflection upon it,
bears a presentiment of sense.37 Nature becomes conscious in us, while we
are the becoming-conscious of things.38 Merleau-Ponty ranks Schelling as
a microcosmic thinker, in contrast with Kant for whom the human being is
not microcosm, but rather antiphysis. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Schelling
draws attention to the fact that subjectivity is itself rooted in a reality that
encompasses it and acts upon it, rather than an anti-nature opposed to nature
as subject to object.
The phenomenological significance of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of
Schelling comes into focus when we place it next to the treatment of Husserl
with which he completes the section dealing with “The Romantic Conception
of Nature.” While it might be surprising to find Husserl classified as a
Romantic, Merleau-Ponty explains that “Husserl takes up certain concerns of
Schelling, hence his place here.”39 According to Merleau-Ponty, Schellingian

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pre-reflective Nature sheds light on what Husserl calls the originary “Ark” of
the Earth in his analysis of the phenomenological foundations of the spatiality
of nature in the 1934 Umsturz text. Nature is not originally the higher order
constituted object of reflection for mathematical physics, but rather could
suggest a pre-reflectively constituting agency. Yet, Husserl’s commitment to
a transcendental ego signals an ambivalence that tempts him into the paradox
of a subjectivity having priority over nature, which nevertheless encompasses
and, at times, excludes that subjectivity.40
Merleau-Ponty looks to the Umsturz text in order to formulate the “double
postulate” creating the tension in Husserl’s paradoxical approach to nature.
In addressing this paradox, Husserl had insisted that one cannot convert the
presupposition of the constituted “homogeneous world” of Cartesian “pure
things” into the transcendental “in order finally to oppose, as valid, the paradoxes
that arise to phenomenology.”41 This anticipates the second phenomenological
objection that Meillassoux mentions: we should avoid conflating the
transcendental (conditions of givenness) with the empirical (appearances).
Husserl indeed seems to bluntly enforce this distinction when he insists that “The
ego lives and precedes all actual and possible beings, and anything existent.”42
Much rides on what is meant by “lives and precedes” in this statement, and this,
in turn, cannot be grasped without understanding what Husserl is referring to
as the beings which the ego precedes. The correlate of the living and precedent
ego is appearance. In many other analyses, Husserl concerns himself with the
passive genesis of the ego itself. The question as to whether the conscious ego
“lives and precedes” the conditions of its own appearance remains vexed by
problems concerning the reflexivity of consciousness.43
Passive genetic analysis suggests a way for phenomenology to grasp its
shadow. Merleau-Ponty thus takes note of the other postulate in Husserl’s
treatment of the paradox: “[Husserl] responds to this by positing the end of
non-receptivity.”44 In the Umsturz essay where Husserl insists that the ego
lives and precedes all beings, he is focused on the homogeneous objectified
world as constituted. This constitution of the Cartesian “pure things” is not
the achievement of a wholly active constitutive transcendental subject, but
involves the passive genesis ingredient to the constitution of mathematized
nature and transcendental subjectivity itself. For Merleau-Ponty, this points
towards the agency of pre-reflective nature which lends its own sense to
a passively constituted subjectivity (rather than receiving its sense from a
constituting subject). With respect to ourselves and our relation to nature,
nature takes the initiative.45 Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl and Schelling
sees embodied subjectivity as dynamically enmeshed within an environment
with which it interacts. The realist’s dream of cognitive access to a nature
which would remain uncontaminated by subjectivity seems misguided in
light of the fact that subjectivity is itself absorbed in nature.

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Merleau-Ponty locates in Husserl’s conception of phenomenological

reduction a tension that threatens to leave him vulnerable to the constitutive
paradox we have been discussing. On the one hand, “The phenomenological
reduction is going to . . . reduce Nature to the state of a noema. Nature seems
enveloped by philosophical consciousness.”46 On the other hand, however,
a correct understanding of the reduction requires that we see that “The role
of phenomenology is not so much to break the bond that unites us with the
world as to reveal it to us and to explicate it.”47 This second possibility refers
to phenomenological reduction as a method of becoming aware of the dynamic
entanglements of embodied subjectivity.48 We might even stretch this thought
to consider it as presaging not just a phenomenological Naturphilosophie,
but a naturalistic phenomenology. In clarifying reduction as revelatory of
our participation in reality, Merleau-Ponty has already sketched the theme
of correlation in a way that prevents the bite of speculative realist criticism.
Correlation takes the form of entanglement. Our embodied entanglement with
an encompassing and active pre-reflective nature is itself a reality to which
phenomenological reduction gives us access. If we want to learn about parts
of reality other than this pre-reflective entanglement, we will need to consult
the relevant sciences which take those parts of reality as their topics. As for
the possibility of those sciences themselves, however sophisticated their
cognitive practices, they ultimately depend for their concrete experimental
methods and for their mathematical models upon this entanglement.49
Merleau-Ponty had long observed another tension in Husserl’s conception
of reduction: that between a “positivistic” reduction which discovers pre-
reflective subjectivity and an “artistic” reduction that reconstructs an idealized
constituting subjectivity.50 In the 1959–1960 course entitled, “Husserl at
the Limits of Phenomenology,”51 he invokes this tension while once again
emphasizing constitutive genesis in addressing the paradox at the end of
Husserl’s Umsturz: “All of this, this philosophical dimension of the Umwelt
(or of the Lebenswelt),—of the world and of the mind before their correlative
idealizations,—is really different from an idealism: it is the ‘constitutive
genesis’ which is first and in relation to which idealities are constituted.”52
Merleau-Ponty suggests that Husserl did not fully acknowledge these
idealizations: “Doesn’t his [Husserls’s] own analysis really obligate him to
consider constituting subjectivity as an eminent case of idealization? What do
the analyses demonstrating the simultaneity of the earth and Körperlichkeit
mean, if then all of this is posterior to the constituting Ego?”53 Here the
problems arising from the idealizing reconstruction of the ego yield the
tension between constituting subjectivity and passive genesis. Attempting
to circumnavigate the problem created by idealizing both ego and earth,
Merleau-Ponty adds: “The Earth which is first is not the physical earth (by
definition, it is homogenized); it is the source Being . . . ; the mind which is first
is not the absolute Ego of Sinngebung . . . they are Ineinander, entangled.”54

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In this way, phenomenology is capable of at least indirectly intimat-

ing pre-reflective being. The special role of nature in the indirect ontology
of pre-reflective being finds a suggestive clarification in Merleau-Ponty’s
fragmentary manuscript, La Nature ou le monde du silence, which is contem-
poraneous with the course on nature. In the introduction to this manuscript,
Merleau-Ponty writes of nature as “an index of that which in things resists
free subjectivity” [index de ce qui dans les choses résiste à l’opération de
la subjectivité libre].55 As an index of wild being, nature shares the general
features of the arche-fossil in the phenomenological account of it we pre-
sented above, when we considered it as a sign indicating an ancestral reality
prior to subjectivity. Here Merleau-Ponty goes on to consider nature further
“as a concrete access to the ontological problem” [comme accès concret au
probleme ontologique].56 Seen in light of this sketch, pre-reflective being
could itself be taken as an ancestral source, which would be indirectly, but
concretely, accessible by means of a phenomenological philosophy of nature.
Schelling frames the matter in a way that invites comparison with
Merleau-Ponty: “So long as I am identical with nature, I understand what
a living nature is. . . . As soon, however as I separate myself, and with me,
everything ideal, from Nature, nothing remains to me but a dead object.”57
The divergence between the phenomenology of the later Husserl or
Merleau-Ponty, on the one hand, and Meillassoux’s anti-phenomenological
realist speculations, on the other hand, does not really turn on the realist
pronouncement that nature is beyond any correlation. The divergence has to
do, rather, with the phenomenological starting point which Merleau-Ponty
acquires from Husserl and Schelling: nature as a source within me gives me
access to the interiority (that is, the independence) of nature outside me.

Wynnewood, Pennsylvania

Notes
1. Edmund Husserl, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin
of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move” in Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina
Bergo (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 117–31. Hereinafter cited
as Umsturz. See note 3, below.
2. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (New York: Continuum, 2008), 137: “This
is a highly significant text because it clearly exhibits the Ptolemaic reduction of science’s
Copernicanism which is inherent in every correlationist approach.” Cf. Ray Brassier, Nihil
Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 223.
3. There are two (not mutually exclusive) ways this Husserlian analysis could be
interpreted. On the one hand, Meillassoux and Brassier, anticipated by Merleau-Ponty, read
it in terms of Husserl’s continuing commitment to transcendental idealism. On the other

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hand, some commentators argue that Husserl demonstrates the phenomenological basis of
Einsteinian general relativity theory according to which Copernican heliocentrism involves
questionable assumptions. See Pierre Kerszberg, “The Phenomenological Analysis of the
Earth’s Motion” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48(2) (December 1987):
177–208. Supporting Kerszberg’s interpretation is Husserl’s own description of his
manuscript, “Overthrow of the Copernican Wordview” [Umsturz der Kopernikanischen
Weltanschauung]. Since the interpretation in terms of relativity theory does not deny
Husserl’s commitment to idealism, I would like to sideline the issue of relativity in order
to focus on the question raised by the paradox of correlational idealism.
4. Husserl, “Foundational Investigations,” 131: “It is possible that entropy will put
an end to all life on earth, or that celestial bodies will crash into the earth, etc. . . . What
sense could the collapsing masses in space, in one space constructed a priori as absolutely
homogeneous, have, if the constituting life were eliminated? . . . The ego lives and precedes
all actual and possible beings, and anything existent, whether in a real or irreal sense.”
5. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5: “By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to
which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never
to either term considered apart from the other.”
6. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 10.
7. Ibid.
8. Correlation in phenomenology does not amount to metaphysical idealism. For
relevant discussions, see Dan Zahavi, Husserlian Phenomenology (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2003), 71–72; and Richard Cobb-Stevens, “Aristotelian Themes
in Husserl’s Logical Investigations,” One Hundred Years of Phenomenology, ed. D. Zahavi
and F. Stjernfelt (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 82.
9. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 36.
10. Ibid., 5. My emphasis.
11. Ibid., 21.
12. Ibid., 23: “But if the transcendental subject is localized among the finite objects
of its world in this way, this means that it remains indissociable from its incarnation in a
body; in other words, it is indissociable from a determinate object in the world.”
13. See Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis, trans.
Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers [now Springer], 2001),
esp. §§26–28 and Appendix 11 to §26 (Hua XI 386).
14. Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §30.
15. Francisco Varela and Natalie Depraz, “At the Source of Time: Valence and the
Constitutional Dynamics of Affect,” in Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches
to Intersubjectivity, ed. Shaun Gallagher, Stephen Watson, Philippe Brun, and Philippe
Romanski (Rouen: Publications de l’université de Rouen, 2004).
16. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London:
Routledge, 2012), lxxvii: “The most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility
of a complete reduction.”

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17. Husserl, Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis, Appendix 11 (to §26
of the Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis).
18. Husserl, Ideas III, trans. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1980), Supplement I, §4 (Hua, V 117): “More generally we can say” the material
world is, within the total Objective world that we call Nature, a closed world of its own
needing no help from other realities. On the other hand, the existence of mental realities,
of a real mental world, is bound to the existence of a nature in the first sense, namely that
of material nature.”
19. Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
§53.
20. Ibid., §54b.
21. Ibid., §55.
22. See note 18 above.
23. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 14.
24. Ibid., 5.
25. “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans.
Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 178.
26. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969).
27. Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, compiled and
with notes by Dominique Seglard, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 2003).
28. Friedrich Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans.
Keith R. Peterson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 194: “If it is the
task of transcendental philosophy to subordinate the real to the ideal, it is on the other
hand the task of the philosophy of nature to explain the ideal by the real.”
29. Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 38.
30. Ibid., 39. Merleau-Ponty adds: “What Schelling means is that we rediscover
Nature in our perceptual experience prior to reflection. Our perception is probably no
longer altogether a natural exercise, having been perverted by reflection. It no longer gives
us the the things, but rather an envelope, similar to a cocoon left behind by the butterfly
when it emerges from its chrysalis. In order to retrieve the meaning of external nature,
we have to make an effort to retrieve our own nature in the state of indivision where we
exercise our perception.”
31. Ibid., 40.
32. Ibid.
33. For a more recent conception of cognition in terms of dynamic coupling, see
Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). In its wider meaning, Husserl’s term Paarung could be interpreted
as presaging the concept of dynamic coupling.

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34. Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 41: “Schelling rails against ‘hyperphysics’. He wants to

attain the ‘non-known’, the Ungewusst, not a science of Nature, but a phenomenology of
pre-reflexive Being.” Cf. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 133–36.
35. Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 42.
36. Ibid., 43.
37. For a recent study of the pre-reflective activity of sensible qualities as environmental
affordances that engage embodied subjectivity, see Erik Rietveld, “Affordances and
Unreflective Freedom,” in The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity, ed. Rasmus
Thybo Jensen and Dermot Moran (Cham: Springer, 2013), 21–42.
38. Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 43: “We are the parents of a Nature of which we are also
the children.”
39. Ibid., 70.
40. For Merleau-Ponty’s earlier view on this paradox, which is closer to Husserl’s
ambivalence, see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 456.
41. Husserl, “Foundational Investigations,” 131.
42. Ibid.
43. See Self, No Self: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian
Traditions, ed. Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011).
44. Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 77–78: “If this reference to living beings can disappear
. . . are we not obliged to say that only ‘pure things’ remain? And he responds to this by
positing the end of non-receptivity; nothing can lessen the evidence to which all reference
relates; we cannot think this reference. The apparent paradox (of a physical thing resting
on the carnal) exists only in certain conceptions of subjectivity and the transcendental.
It is true for Kant, but not for Husserl. We cannot deduce from pure things our relations
with our body, with perceived beings, and with other perceiving beings. We have to admit
then that the world is not an appearance in relation to the appearances of pure things, but
on the contrary that it is founding in relation to these pure things.”
45. Ibid., 78: “Husserl rehabilitated the idea of Nature by this idea of jointure to a
common truth that subjects would continue but of which they would not be the initiators.”
Yet, Merleau-Ponty admits: “Such a philosophy of Nature was hard to integrate into the
framework of a transcendental idealism” (ibid., 79).
46. Ibid., 71.
47. Ibid. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvii: “Reflection does
not withdraw from the world toward the unity of consciousness as the foundation of the
world; rather, it steps back in order to see transcendences spring forth and it loosens the
intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear.”
48. On Becoming Aware, ed. Natalie Depraz, Francisco J. Varela, Pierre Vermersch
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2003).
49. Merleau-Ponty’s focus here on a philosophy of nature rather than a philosophy
of being could be read in light of his influence on naturalistic developments in
phenomenological cognitive science, e.g., embodied enactive cognition.

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50. See Jacques Taminiaux, “Experience, Expression, and Form in Merleau-Ponty’s

Itinerary,” in Dialectic and Difference, ed. James Decker and Robert Crease (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1985), 133–54.
51. Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 5–89. See esp. pp. 9–10,
67–76.
52. Ibid., 75.
53. Ibid., 76. Merleau-Ponty adds: “Perhaps Husserl would evade the objection and
the complaint of paradox if he had not enclosed his own discovery in the dimension of
the ‘consciousness’ of the absolute Ego.”
54. Ibid. For another critical statement and response to the problem of correlation,
see Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 46–49.
55. Maurice Merleau-Ponty—sous la direction d’Emmanuel De Saint Aubert avec un
texte inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty: La Nature ou le monde du silence, ed. Emmanuel
De Saint Aubert (Paris: Hermann, 2008), 53 (my translation).
56. Ibid.
57. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. E. Harris and P. Heath
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 36.

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