In-itself-for-us

Merleau-Ponty's name (PoP 336) for the paradoxical category the perceived thing belongs to: a thing that is the correlate of my body and that "denies that it is" such a correlate (PP 339). Morin argues this is not a yoking of two pre-given ontological registers (the in-itself + the for-itself) but a single category that undoes the Cartesian-Sartrian ontology on which Meillassoux's ancestrality problem depends. On Morin's reading, PoP's reply to the correlationist accusation is more radical than Meillassoux's diagnosis allows: the inhumanity of the thing comes not from a transcendent outside but from the inhumanity of the body itself — the eyes, hands, and ears as "natural selves" (PP 224) operating with latent knowledge "I do not possess."

Key Points

  • The single-category reading (Morin): "in-itself-for-us" is one ontological category, not two yoked. The category itself dissolves the in-itself / for-itself partition Meillassoux presupposes. Anchored at PP 336: "perception thus poses the problem of a genuine in-itself-for-us."
  • The thing "denies that it is a correlate" (PP 339, re-translated against Landes/Smith — Morin Ch 4 fn 2): Elle le nie does NOT mean "the thing denies or rejects my body" but "the thing denies that it is a correlate of my body." This translation correction matters because it locates the resistance in the thing-side rather than in some adversarial encounter.
  • Inhumanity-of-the-body as the locus of resistance (PP 224, 247, 341): the thickness of the perceived is a function of the body's natural selves, the intentional life of organs that operates with latent knowledge "I do not possess." MP: "if my consciousness constituted the world . . . intentionality would transport us to the heart of the object" (PP 247). The body is "crossed by a movement toward the world itself" (PP 341).
  • Paradox of perception (PP 71–2, 317, 345, 347): perception is situated and perspectival and reaches the thing itself. An "absolute object" given through a "thousand gazes at once" would not show itself. "If I am always and everywhere, then I am never and nowhere" (PP 347). Finitude is "my way of inserting myself into the world" (PP 345).
  • Style as sense of the thing (PP 333–7): the thing's "unique manner of existing" — not behind appearances but right at the thing; not reducible to signification.
  • The limit of the PoP answer (Morin Ch 4 §3): the body-world correlate is posited as the ultimate fact, but its origin sinks into "the darkness of pure contingency" — the last word of PoP (PP 360, 383). This motivates the move to ontology — phenomenology must "bear its shadow" (S 178).

Details

The Cartesian-Sartrian frame (what gets undone)

Per morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being Ch 4 §2 and Ch 5 §1, Meillassoux's ancestrality problem only bites within the cartesian-sartrian-ontology-of-the-object: an ontology in which (a) objects are strictly delimited; (b) their adversity is only a function of a constituting subject's project; (c) anthropomorphism is necessarily projection; (d) the "true" object is reached by stripping anthropological predicates. PoP's in-itself-for-us undoes this frame by:

  1. Refusing to treat the "in-itself" and the "for-itself" as separate ontological registers that need yoking.
  2. Locating the thing's resistance in the thing itself (the thing "denies that it is" a correlate) and in the inhumanity of the perceiving body — a double-sided non-Cartesian structure.
  3. Treating finitude as constitutive (the inhabited perspective makes reality possible) rather than as a deficit.

The result: ancestrality (the Laplace nebula problem, AF 9–10) is intelligible because consciousness "always finds itself already at work in the world" (PP 456), not because consciousness constitutes the nebula. The nebula must be "in relation to which a perceiver can in principle be situated," but this in-relation-to is not constitution.

The "natural selves" anchor

The phrase "natural selves" (PP 224) is MP's name for the pre-personal intentional life of the body's organs — "the life of my eyes, hands, and ears, which are so many natural selves." It is not the body schema (which integrates these selves) and not anonymous existence (a different MP register). The natural selves operate with a latent knowledge that the personal cogito cannot recover or possess. They are the locus of the perceived's thickness.

Crucially: the natural selves are not yet the late MP's "wild being" or "flesh." They are a PoP-stage middle term — and their existence shows that PoP already had resources to answer correlationism, even if (as MP himself came to see) those resources are incompletely worked out and motivate the late ontology.

The Laplace nebula passage

MP's "Nothing will ever lead me to understand what a nebula, which could not be seen by anyone, might be" (PP 338) sounds like a paradigm correlationist statement. Morin reads it differently: the nebula is "not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world" (PP 456) — meaning that for a nebula to make sense at all it must be intelligible in relation to which a perceiver could be situated, not that the nebula is constituted by consciousness. "Consciousness always finds itself already at work in the world."

The limit MP himself recognised

PoP's answer is not the last word. By Ch 4 §3 (morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being pp. 108–11), Morin shows that "Nature" in PoP plays two incompatible roles — (a) horizon of personal experience that cannot be questioned; (b) outside-of-personal-life ground for the body's natural selves. The dialectical body-world correlate is the ultimate fact; its origin sinks into contingency; phenomenology cannot speak of the natural world as the underside of the phenomenal world. This is what motivates MP's move to the late ontology — to "bear its shadow" (S 178) and develop a Nature that contains its own percipii.

Positions

  • morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being reads in-itself-for-us as a single category that dissolves Meillassoux's ancestrality problem at its source. The inhumanity of the thing is the inhumanity of the body's natural selves; the move to ontology is required not to escape correlationism but to think more radically the body's-own shadow.
  • Standard correlationist reading (Meillassoux, AF 9–10, 21–2; Brassier "Postscript") takes MP's PP 333–4 statements at face value and reads MP as a paradigm correlationist who fails to break out of phenomenology — the ancestrality problem stands.
  • Zahavian defensive reply (per Morin Intro §1) admits phenomenology is a form of correlationism but argues this is compatible with scientific realism and is no objection: the SR critique misses what phenomenology is for.
  • Morin's reading is intermediate — neither defensive nor capitulatory: phenomenology already has the answer (the in-itself-for-us as single category), but PoP's articulation is incomplete and motivates the late ontology.

Connections

  • is a single category that undoes cartesian-sartrian-ontology-of-the-object — Morin's central explanatory thesis.
  • requires primacy-of-perception — the paradox of an in-itself-for-us is the load-bearing formula at PP 336 + 339.
  • grounded in the inhumanity of the body via natural selves — PP 224, 247, 341.
  • is the seed of wild-being — the move to ontology happens when MP recognises PoP cannot fully articulate the body's own shadow.
  • contrasts with Husserlian "in-itself" as appearance-mode — for Husserl, "being real" means "being given to consciousness in a certain way"; MP's in-itself-for-us is single-category, not appearance-mode.
  • contrasts with Sartre's in-itself / for-itself partition — Sartre's BN ontology is exactly what MP's category dissolves.
  • answered against by quentin-meillassoux's ancestrality argument (AF 9–10, 14, 21–2).
  • is read by morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being as already containing the resources for the SR reply, but as motivating the late ontology by its incompleteness.

Open Questions

  • Is "in-itself-for-us" a PoP-only category or does it survive into the late ontology under a different name? Morin suggests the answer is "the second" — the Wesen-as-verb of VI 174 inherits the structure — but the genealogy is not explicit.
  • Does MP's "the thing denies that it is a correlate of my body" (PP 339) require the Morin retranslation against Landes / Smith, or does it work either way? The retranslation is interpretively load-bearing and worth a closer Look.
  • Can the "natural selves" reading be sustained against critics who treat them as anonymous bodily life rather than as an answer to correlationism? Toadvine's "Naturalism, Estrangement, and Resistance" (in Kuperus and Oele, eds., Ontologies of Nature) is the closest engagement.

Sources