Volant (flywheel-of-inertia)

MP's figure for the flesh that conjoins passivity and activity: a mass-in-rotation whose inertia sustains and relaunches a movement, with passivity in the service of élan. Saint Aubert (E&C II Ch I § 1b) excavates the figure as systematically used by MP from 1951 to 1961 (~20 occurrences) and identifies it as a silent borrowing from Cassirer's Schwungrad in Philosophie der symbolischen Formen III (1929, p. 380). The volant is not the steering wheel (a common translator error) but the flywheel of an engine — passive by its mass, active in its preservation of movement.

Key Points

  • Not the steering wheel. Often mistranslated; volant in French technical usage designates the flywheel of inertia, the cylindrical mass whose rotation regulates and sustains the engine's rhythm. MP exploits this passive-sustains-active paradox.
  • Silent Cassirer borrowing. Cassirer's Schwungrad is used in precisely this sense in Philosophie der symbolischen Formen III (Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis, 1929): language as "das Schwungrad gleichsam, das ihn [den Gedanken] in den Kreis ihrer eigenen unablässigen Bewegung aufnimmt". MP refers to Cassirer as the source in four early occurrences (PM-ms, Inéd, PbParole 116 and 128) but never in published texts.
  • ~20 occurrences 1951-1961. Saint Aubert's philological survey (Ch I fn 2 p. 48): S(HoAdv) 290; PM-ms 212v; Inéd 43/406; PbParole 116/[80]v(4) and 128/[87]v(5); AD 163; PbPassiv 179/127, 131/NP, [162]/NP, 242/190, 246/258; RC55 67; EM1' 145; EM2 209; NTi [272]; NT 257; Huss 83/[115]v; PNPH 348.
  • Triple semantic register: (a) mechanical — the engine's inertia-mass; (b) organic — Weizsäcker's Gestaltkreis, the active- passive coupling of perception and motricity; (c) existential — "charnière moi-autrui" (PbPassiv 179), the hinge between self and other.
  • THE GRAIN IS A VOLANT (Ch II § 3, re-ingest 2026-04-23 finding): MP's appropriation of Sartre's "grain de la peau" (L'Imaginaire p. 255) turns the grain into a volant. EM2 [157]v: "le grain possède la vertu relationnelle d'une résistance (une résistance qui force l'adaptation, et participe ainsi paradoxalement à l'adhésion perceptive), la dynamique d'un élément inertiel (un «volant»), qui entretient et relance le mouvement de la perception". This is the major cross-chapter cross-link between Ch I § 1b (volant as flesh figure) and Ch II § 3 (grain du sensible as anti-Sartre anchor). See texture-imaginaire-du-reel for the broader anti-Sartre polemic within which this grain-volant identification operates.
  • Paired with surrection. The volant is the passive side whose inertia makes surrection possible. Surrection without volant becomes Sartrean fiat magique; volant without surrection becomes pure Sartrean passivité.
  • Limit acknowledged by MP himself. In 1959 (NTi [272]), MP notes: "le volant doit toute son énergie à une source d'énergie distincte de lui, qui l'utilise", and "ceci n'est pas applicable à la production naturelle ni spirituelle". The flywheel figure serves MP for years, but MP acknowledges its eventual insufficiency.

Details

The Cassirer passage

MP's La Prose du Monde draft and Inédit both explicitly cite Cassirer (without textual attribution in later occurrences):

"Le langage est bien pour nous ce 'volant' (Cassirer) qui entraîne l'écrivain là où il ne sait pas qu'il va, par lequel nous apprenons notre pensée" (PM-ms [212]v(a)-213).

"notre pensée, même solitaire, ne cesse d'user du langage, qui la soutient, l'arrache au transitoire, la relance, — qui en est, disait Cassirer, le 'volant'" (Inéd 43/406).

Cassirer's original: "Eben hierin erweist sich die Sprache immer wieder als das mächtige und unentbehrliche «Vehikel» des Gedankens — als das Schwungrad gleichsam, das ihn in den Kreis ihrer eigenen unablässigen Bewegung aufnimmt und ihn mit sich fortreißt" (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen III, Bruno Cassirer 1929, p. 380).

French translation by Claude Fronty (Éd. de Minuit 1972): "Et c'est en cela même que le langage ne cesse de se révéler comme le «véhicule» puissant et indispensable de la pensée, ou en quelque sorte comme le volant qui la prend dans la révolution de son propre mouvement perpétuel et l'entraîne avec soi".

Three MP deployments

(a) The flesh as neither cause nor effect. L'homme et l'adversité (1951): "aucune des notions que la philosophie avait élaborées, — cause, effet, moyen, fin, matière, forme, — ne suffit pour penser les relations du corps à la vie totale". The volant is MP's answer: neither cause nor effect, neither premier nor second.

"On ne peut donc plus parler du sexe en tant qu'appareil localisable ou du corps en tant que masse de matière, comme d'une cause dernière. Ni cause, ni simple instrument ou moyen, ils sont le véhicule, le point d'appui, le volant de notre vie." (S(HoAdv) 290)

(b) The hinge between self and other. Le problème de la passivité (1955): "Charnière moi-autrui qui est vie commune, comme charnière moi- mon corps qui n'est pas pour moi seulement poids, malédiction, mais aussi mon volant. Accompagner autrui, l'histoire, et non pas seulement lui donner sens par décision." (PbPassiv 179/127).

MP deploys the volant against Sartre's immanence natale of consciousness: what Sartre refuses in the name of engagement — the passivity that is the principle of strength, the inertie — is exactly what the flesh is and what enables genuine action.

(c) The flywheel in nature and ontology. 1958-1961: Être et Monde, Notes de travail, Huss, PNPH. Here the volant becomes a figure of the charnal Nature, and MP's last course (2 May 1961, a few days before his death) invokes it:

"histoire charnelle, 'matérielle', qui embraye sur les forces naturelles et sur un mouvement toujours 'objectif' qui lui sert de 'volant'. (...) C'est donc Hegel et sa négativité descendue dans la chair du monde." (PNPH 348).

Paired figure: surrection

Saint Aubert (Ch I §§ 1b-2) argues the volant does the passive work and surrection does the active work of the same carnal-ontological structure: volant is the inertia that enables the se relever (surrection), and surrection is the relevant that rises from the volant's mass.

Why it matters philosophically

The volant is MP's most concrete answer to the opposition of passivity and activity that he attributes to Sartre. If the chair were purely passive (Sartrean chair), it could not act; if it were pure action (Sartrean engagement), it would not receive. The flywheel conjoins: its passivity is its active contribution. Saint Aubert treats this as MP's working model for the passivité-activité nexus of the entire late ontology.

Morris's Ur-Volant: Time-Order Generated on the Fly

Morris (2024) extends MP's volant with a new register: the ur-volant. Where the standard volant names the inertial-momentum mechanism by which the past sustains and relaunches present movement (Saint Aubert's "passive sustains active in the engine of life"), the ur-volant names time itself as continually generated on the fly — not just past-as-flywheel that steers the present, but the very order of temporality being generated.

Morris's textual hook is the IP 242/185 volant passage; he writes (article p. 164):

Two further conceptual moves, that are 'Merleau-Bergsonian': taking the past as a reality with a flywheel temporal momentum that continues to steer the present (what Merleau-Ponty in IP calls a volant, 242/185); taking time not as a fixed framework or dimension, but as an order that is continually generated on the fly, an ur-volant.

The ur-volant is thus the condition of possibility of the standard volant: before the past can act as flywheel-of-inertia for the present, time-order must already exist as the framework within which "past" and "present" are distinguishable. Morris's claim is that this time-order is itself generated — by an ur-volant operation that is logically prior to (though not temporally prior to) the standard volant's mechanical-organic-existential operations.

The implications:

  • A fourth semantic register of volant beyond Saint Aubert's three (mechanical / organic / existential): temporal-ontological — the volant of time-order generation. The ur-volant operates wherever quantum systems generate their own time-forms locally (see ontogenesis-of-time); wherever wild structures (see wild-structure) redistribute change-dynamics as time-forms. It is the temporal version of the volant that the standard volant presupposes.

  • Connects the volant genealogy to philosophy of physics. The volant concept (silent borrowing from Cassirer's Schwungrad in Philosophie der symbolischen Formen III, 1929) is given a register beyond MP's published texts. Morris's ur-volant is the only attestation in the wiki of a volant-extension into physical-ontological time-generation.

  • Related to but distinct from MP's "barbaric Principle." Schelling's barbarisches Princip — wild being in the present, "ever new" and "always the same" — is the substrate of the ontology; the ur-volant is the operation by which time-order is generated within that substrate. The barbaric Principle is what is; the ur-volant is how time-form arises within what is.

  • Single attestation but coordinated with the volant genealogy. The ur-volant prefix is Morris's coinage; this is its only occurrence in the wiki's corpus. Cross-source attestation would strengthen the concept; for now, Morris's introduction sits alongside Saint Aubert's three-register treatment as a fourth register awaiting confirmation.

This is an addition to (not a correction of) Saint Aubert's volant excavation. Saint Aubert's philological reading of the volant as systematic 1951-1961 figure is intact; Morris's ur-volant extends the figure rather than displacing it.

The eventual acknowledged limit

MP himself signals the figure's insufficiency in 1959 (NTi [272]): "le volant doit toute son énergie à une source d'énergie distincte de lui, qui l'utilise". The mechanical flywheel presupposes an energy source external to it — which makes it inadequate for the auto-productive character of natural and spiritual life. MP suggests the fondations technologiques of philosophy need revisiting. The replacement would come from embryology, the eye's topology, the berceau de la vision — MP's late figures of self-productive organism.

Positions

  • Saint Aubert (novel philological reading): the volant is a structural hub of MP's 1951-1961 thinking, silently borrowed from Cassirer, and paired with surrection as the passive-active axis of carnal ontology.
  • The standard reading (pre-Saint Aubert): volant is a minor figure among many; its importance is not tracked. Saint Aubert's re-reading corrects this.

Connections

  • borrowed from Cassirer's Schwungrad — Philosophie der symbolischen Formen III.
  • paired with surrection — passivity that enables the se relever.
  • grounds the passivité-activité nexus.
  • critiques Sartrean immanence natale and pur fiat.
  • is a case of empietement — the flywheel encroaches on the usual cause/effect, active/passive, form/matter categories.
  • converges with institution — both are non-constituting sources of coherence.
  • develops into the late embryology / aménagement d'un creux / berceau de la vision figures — where MP acknowledges the mechanical volant's limit.
  • extends into the grain of the sensible — the grain is structurally a volant (EM2 [157]v): "la dynamique d'un élément inertiel (un 'volant')".
  • operates within texture-imaginaire-du-reel — the volant-grain identification is MP's anti-Sartre anchor in Ch II.
  • extended by Morris's ur-volant — see Morris 2024 for time-order continually generated on the fly, the temporal-ontological fourth register of the volant. Operates as the condition of possibility of the standard volant. Connects to ontogenesis-of-time and wild-structure.

Open Questions

  • If MP himself acknowledges the volant's limit (NTi 1959), why does he continue using it — including in his last course (PNPH 348, 2 May 1961)? Is this residual use philosophically committed or merely habitual?
  • Why does MP never credit Cassirer in published texts? Saint Aubert does not fully explore the silencing. Is it a matter of Cassirer's philosophical distance from MP's project, or a more specific suppression?
  • Does the volant survive the translation to English? Flywheel preserves the technical sense but loses the pun on vol (flight, theft, flying). MP's playfulness with the volant as that-which-takes-us-with-it (nous entraîne) resonates with vol — a resonance lost in English.

Sources