Stone

The stone is a corpus-motif on which the post-Heideggerian speculative-realism debate converges. In Morin 2022's reading (Ch 5–6), the stone is the contested figure across at least nine thinker-positions (Sartre, MP, Cohen, Nancy, Heidegger, Ingold, Latour, Whitehead, Bennett) — each tests its ontology against what the stone can or cannot be. The stone marks the limit of access (Heideggerian Weltarmut / Nancean concret-de-pierre), the minimal sensing (Nancy's se faire sentir dure), and the limit of phenomenological reach (Carbone's khôra-question: can a stone "fly" in the flesh's horizon?). At HUB weight in the Morin 2022 extraction note; this page is the wiki home.

Key Points

  • Heidegger's stone — weltlos. FCM §47 (and BT H. 55): the stone is weltlos (worldless); it does not touch the earth in the sense of making sense of the ground "as such." Stone, animal, Dasein form a three-step hierarchy of world-relation: weltlos / weltarm / weltbildend. The stone marks the floor of the ontological-difference question — what cannot have a world at all.
  • Nancy's stone — se faire sentir dure. La pensée dérobée / Sense of the World / Corpus: the stone is a body in Nancy's sense — "exteriority, partes extra partes", not contact-of-self-to-self of phenomenological Leib. Its hardness "makes itself feel hard" (se faire sentir dure, FT 322 n. 14) — not "feels hard to me" (correlate), not "is hard in itself" (in-itself), but a happening of hardness at the surface where stone meets other surface. Sense is "right at" (à même) the in-itself, not added to a senseless substrate (SW 61).
  • Nancy contra Heidegger (Morin Ch 6 §2). Heidegger's stone-without-world fails to weigh "the weight of the contact of the stone with the other surface" (SW 61). By binding sense to givenness-to-Dasein, Heidegger restores a covert humanism and loses le concret-de-pierre. Nancy: "Why could the world not also a priori consist in being-among, being-between, and being-against? In remoteness and contact without 'access'?" (SW 60).
  • MP's stone — "I am also stone" (Morin Ch 6 §2, citing SW 61 and VI 110, 148). MP and Nancy converge on "I am also stone": I touch the stone because I am also stone, not because I am living-and-thinking. Nancy nevertheless criticizes MP as "too much of a phenomenologist" for thinking access in terms of commensurability and dialogue. The convergence-with-disagreement: ontological kinship of the mineral, but disagreement over commensurability vs. limit.
  • Carbone's stone-that-flies (Carbone 2015 Ch 1, "Flesh, Stone, and Politics," pp. 15–18). Against Derrida and Henry — and partially against Nancy — Carbone argues the stone "flies" within flesh's horizon. Husserl's 1934 "Umsturz" manuscript on the Earth-as-soil explicitly extends kinship from Leib to "terrestrial bodies" ("a stone flies"); MP (1952–60 course summary) keeps this extension. The Körper's being-stone is not annulled in flesh but reversibly included.
  • Carbone's khôra-stone (Carbone 2015 Ch 5). Gauguin's Polynesian bodies, by taking a detour through stone/wood, restore to skin its opacity (and thereby restore flesh's unity-with-skin), refusing the Christian incarnat = skin-as-veil-of-withdrawing-God. The stone-detour is a deconstruction of the Christian flesh.
  • MP's stone in Nature (course lectures, 1956–60). The stone enters MP's Nature lectures as a test case for the ontology of brute being — alongside crystals, life, animality. Stone is the minimal test case: if there is sense already at the level of mineral configuration, then sense is not the privilege of consciousness.
  • Cautious anthropomorphism (Morin Ch 5 §3, citing Shaviro, Cohen, Bennett). Attributing feeling to stones can be a strategic defamiliarization — neither reckless anthropomorphism (Harman's "sincerity of objects") nor animism/panpsychism. The stone is where this distinction is most acute: a "feeling" stone is either a refusal of dualism or a covert subjectivism, and the difference is in how the human term is dislocated by use.

Details

The nine-thinker scan (Morin Ch 5–6)

Thinker Stone-figure Position
Sartre "Digested indigestible" — psychoanalysis of things Cartesian ontology of object; adversity is freely chosen
MP (1948) "Look at the stone, it is alive. Look at life, it is stone." (MT 441) Cautious anthropomorphism; dislocates both terms
Heidegger Weltlos — does not touch earth as such (FCM §47, BT H. 55) Hierarchy of world-relation; stone is floor
Nancy Se faire sentir dure — hardness happens at the surface Sense à même the in-itself; partes extra partes
Cohen "Trans-ontological affinity" / "geophilia" (SEI 14–25) Kinship-with-ontological-distance; close to MP-flesh
Ingold "World of materials" — hiker's encounter with stone Materials vs. materiality; phenomenology of making
Latour The Gothenburg-stone scene; Whitehead's "risk taken by rocks" Conatus as engagement; hiatus
Whitehead "Risk taken by rocks in order to keep on existing" Concept of Nature 167
Bennett Vibrant Matter — thing-power Vital materialism; closer to animism

The stone is the test: each ontology shows its stripes when asked what the stone is and how we touch it.

Three sub-questions converging on the stone

  1. Does the stone "feel"? (the panpsychism / animism / cautious-anthropomorphism question). Bennett and Abram say yes-in-a-flat-sense; Heidegger says no (weltlos); Nancy says hardness happens at the surface (se faire sentir dure) — neither feels-for-someone nor feels-in-itself.
  2. Does the stone "fly"? (the Husserlian Umsturz / Carbonean question). Carbone says yes — kinship of Körper extends from Leib to terrestrial bodies; Derrida/Henry retreat to self-affection as criterion.
  3. Is the stone weltarm or weltlos? (the Heideggerian-hierarchy question). Heidegger answers weltlos; Nancy refuses the hierarchy entirely — no access is itself a mode of being-with, not a deficiency.

Why "stone" not "rock" or "mineral"

Morin uses "stone" deliberately because the philosophical-figural register (Nancy's concret-de-pierre, MP's polemic against Sartre on rock-faces, Heidegger's Stein of FCM) all converge on a handle-sized, graspable mineral object — not on geological mass or chemical composition. The stone is the thing-scale mineral, the one a hand can hold, a hiker can pick up (Ingold), a sculptor can carve (Gauguin via Carbone). At larger scales (the rock-face, the mountain) the figural register shifts toward sublimity; at smaller scales (the pebble, the grain) it shifts toward the powdery indistinct. The stone is the middle scale of mineral encounter.

Connections

  • contrasts with freedom-of-the-stone — the dedicated Nancy-page; this page is the broader cross-source motif, that page is the Nancean-specific freedom thesis.
  • contrasted with anthropologisme — anthropologisme tracks MP's polemic against negative humanism; the stone's "feeling" attests cautious anthropomorphism, which is non-overlapping and load-bearing in a different direction.
  • shares mechanism with flesh-as-element — Morin's reading of "I am also stone" suggests a mineral / lithic register of flesh, complementing the three-mode flesh structure (body / world / element).
  • is a case of the limit-of-phenomenology problem (Nancy vs. MP) — sense à même the in-itself vs. sense via Leib-correlation.
  • connected to seinsverlassenheit-abandonment-of-being — Nancy's stone-without-why presupposes the abandonment-as-expenditure redirection of Heideggerian Seinsverlassenheit.

Open Questions

  • Is "I am also stone" a literal ontological claim or a figural defamiliarization? Morin's reading via cautious anthropomorphism keeps the figure live; a flat-ontology reading collapses it.
  • Does Carbone's stone-that-flies require the Umsturz manuscript to do real work, or is the textual attestation gestural? Husserl's "a stone flies" is a single passage; whether MP genuinely incorporated it or whether Carbone reads MP back through it is a load-bearing philological question.
  • What happens to the stone-figure in the post-Anthropocene / deep-time register (Cohen's SEI 85, 289–90)? Cohen's critique of Meillassoux ("cutting deep time off from the present") suggests the stone is also a temporal figure (geological time as ontologically operative), not only a spatial-mineral one. The wiki currently treats stone as spatial; the temporal dimension is open.

Sources

  • morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being — Ch 5–6, esp. Ch 6 §1–4 (the freedom of the stone, concret-de-pierre, se faire sentir dure, the nine-thinker scan); HUB-weight in the extraction note.
  • carbone-2015-flesh-of-images — Ch 1 "Flesh, Stone, and Politics" pp. 15–18 (the stone "flies" within flesh's horizon, against Derrida/Henry); Ch 2 (Gauguin's stone/wood detour deconstructing Christian incarnat); Ch 5 (flesh as khôra).
  • merleau-ponty-2003-nature — Nature course (1956–60): stone as test case for brute being / sense at the mineral level; minimal sensing.