Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth

Author(s): Frank Chouraqui (University of Leiden) Year: 2016 Type: Paper (Research in Phenomenology 46, pp. 54-69)

Chouraqui reconstructs Merleau-Ponty's implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Husserl's concept of the earth as Boden (ground). Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth seen as pure Boden as an idealization: the earth as ground necessarily hypostatizes itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object. This necessity is an essential feature of being itself — being is a pure movement of constitution, and ontology is one of the ways in which experiences become objectified. The paper traces this insight through Merleau-Ponty's engagement with the "two Cartesian orders" (reasons vs. causes) and arrives at the concept of hyper-dialectic as the reconciliation of philosophy with itself.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: The earth (Erde) in Husserl's "Ur-Arche Earth Does Not Move" functions as a pure principle of anteriority — a precession — that precedes the cogito itself. Because: The earth as Boden is neither in motion nor at rest but conditions all experience and constitution. The lived earth includes the Copernican earth, not vice versa — the standpoint from which one declares the earth moves is always grounded in the motionless earth. Against: Husserl's own reading, which subordinates the earth to transcendental subjectivity. John Sallis: "even the earth is submitted to the reference back to transcendental life" (Double Truth, 51).

  2. Claim: Merleau-Ponty's reading overcomes the problem of the "two Cartesian orders" (order of reasons, beginning with the subject, vs. order of matters/causes, beginning with God) by finding a ground that precedes their opposition. Because: In Descartes, the separation of the two orders is either too strict (identifying the immediate as the true) or not strict enough (unable to account for the mediacy of the philosophical search). Descartes's letter to Elizabeth (1643) proposes the lived body — a "corps trans-spatial" — as the principle of commensurability, described in the same terms Merleau-Ponty uses for the earth. Against: Both Cartesian dualism and Husserlian subjectivism, which make the cogito first. Also against Guéroult's Aristotelian solution ("what is first for us is second in itself"), which maintains the separation of the orders.

  3. Claim: Phenomenology must become ontology to rescue itself from subjectivism. Because: Any philosophy beginning with the cogito ends with the cogito and ignores nature. The reduction reveals an always-already present that precedes the cogito. Being should be described as "pure intentionality, a relation that precedes its terms, including the cogito." Merleau-Ponty exhorts himself: "what one could regard as 'psychology' (Ph. de la Perception) is really an ontology." Against: Orthodox Husserlian phenomenology, which treats the precedence of constitution as a psychological accident to be repaired by the reduction. Also against Merleau-Ponty's own earlier phenomenological cogito in the Phenomenology of Perception.

  4. Claim: Being is a "pure movement of constitution" — an ontology of pure relations without terms. Because: The earth as principle of precession shows that what precedes the alternative of motion/rest is already a pre-movement of another kind. The Erde→Copernican Earth movement is not a break but a necessary continuity (hypostatization) — an essential feature of being. Against: Heidegger's view that Erde is more authentic than Copernican Earth — in the Spiegel interview, Heidegger treats the photographs of the earth from space as a break in phenomenological embeddedness; Merleau-Ponty insists on the continuity.

  5. Claim: Hyper-dialectic names the overcoming of "bad dialectic" — the theory of the relation between philosophy and non-philosophy. Because: Both pure separation and pure identity of the two orders are "identical moves, and both illusory." Philosophy must accommodate a simultaneous double movement of reduction and constitution — not sequentially (as in Husserl) but as the proper object of phenomenology. Philosophy recuperates itself by finding room for itself within the structure of being. Against: Sartrean dialectic (The Visible and the Invisible, "Interrogation and Dialectic"); Husserlian subjectivism; Cartesian dualism.

Key Findings

  • The earth is not a psychological principle or a metaphysical one but signposts Husserl's "perhaps involuntary" entrance into ontology — one that does not imply an exit from phenomenology but its rescue (§3)
  • The movement from Phenomenology of Perception to the late ontology is described as moving from psychology to ontology — re-interpreting the phenomenological cogito independently from the transcendental ego (Introduction)
  • The "corps trans-spatial" (Descartes's letter to Elizabeth) and the earth are described in the same terms in the same weeks — the body as principle of commensurability parallels the earth as principle of precession (§2)
  • Pregnancy as "a mystery that belongs neither to the order of matters nor to the order of reasons, but to the order of life" — the earth as "mother," as fertility/virtuality (§3)
  • Sedimentation is the geological renaming of the constitutive movement once it has been raised to ontological status (§3)

Methodology

Close reading of Merleau-Ponty's lecture course "Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology" (1959-60), the Nature course (1957-60), the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), The Visible and the Invisible (1964), and Signes (1960). Chouraqui reconstructs an argument that Merleau-Ponty never stated systematically, drawing connections between the Cartesian orders problem and the earth analysis.

Concepts Developed

  • precession — the central concept; the earth as a principle of self-precedence, pure anteriority that conditions all experience and precedes the cogito. "Precession cannot be reduced to precedence: what is primary is not what precedes, but the precession itself."
  • hyper-dialectic — the overcoming of bad dialectic; philosophy recuperates itself by finding room for itself within the structure of being

Concepts Referenced

  • ineinander — cited in the key passage: "they are Ineinander, entangled" (p. 63, quoting Husserl at the Limits, 76)
  • nonphilosophy — the relation between philosophy and non-philosophy is what hyper-dialectic theorizes (§4)
  • lebenswelt — the earth as Boden is connected to the Lebenswelt as pre-theoretical ground
  • flesh-as-element — implicit in the earth-as-element framing and the body as principle of commensurability
  • ontological-difference — implicitly reinterpreted: the Erde/Copernican Earth distinction parallels but revises the Being/beings distinction

Key Passages

"Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth seen as pure Boden as an idealization. He emphasizes the ontological necessity for the earth as Boden to always hypostasize itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object." (Abstract, p. 54)

"The Earth which is first is not the physical earth (by definition it is homogenized); it is the source Being, the Stamm und Klotz being, in pre-restfulness; the mind which is first is not the absolute Ego of Sinngebung. It is the Denkmöglichkeit and they are Ineinander, entangled." (Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 76; cited §3, p. 63)

"it is the 'constitutive genesis' which is first and in relation to which idealities are constituted" (Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits, 75; cited §3, p. 63)

"what one could regard as 'psychology' (Ph. de la Perception) is really an ontology. Show this by bringing out the fact that science can neither be nor be thought of as selbständig." (Merleau-Ponty, VI, 228; cited §3, p. 62)

"Such a philosophy is naturally worked-over by doubt and by some strabismus." (Merleau-Ponty, La Nature, 171; cited §2, p. 62)

"one must begin thought where the things themselves do not begin" (§1, p. 59)

"precession cannot be reduced to precedence: what is primary is not what precedes, but the precession itself" (Mauro Carbone, cited fn. 24, p. 65)

"Phenomenology, as a revelation of the world, rests upon itself, or grounds itself... it shall never know where it is headed" (Merleau-Ponty, PP, xvi; fn. 23, p. 65)

"one should say nothing for fear of saying everything" (§4, p. 68)

What's Not Obvious

  1. Chouraqui's MP describes earth and body in IDENTICAL terms in the SAME WEEKS of 1959–60 (p. 60). The Descartes letter to Elizabeth (28 June 1643) on the corps trans-spatial as principle of commensurability is read in the same lectures (the Nature course) as the Husserl Ur-Arche text. The structural parallel — body and earth as two mediating grounds described in the same vocabulary — is the philological evidence for the deep argumentative parallel between Leib/Körper and Erde/Copernican Earth, and it provides the middle-term linking precession (an earth-concept) to MP's body-philosophy in the same period.

  2. The Heidegger Spiegel-interview footnote is doing more work than its placement suggests (fn. 25, p. 65). Heidegger's reaction to "the photographs of the earth taken from the moon" — being "scared," reading them as "uprooting" — is the diagnostic counter-image for MP's claim that Erde→Copernican Earth is continuity, not break. Heidegger treats the photograph as the rupture; MP treats the photograph as confirming that the lived earth always-already includes its own hypostatization. The most counterintuitive claim of the paper (that the cosmological Earth is not a fall from the lived Erde but part of being's own essential movement) is anchored by what martin-heidegger gets wrong here.

  3. Chouraqui's "purely historical" disagreement with Renaud Barbaras hides a substantive philosophical question (fn. 31, p. 69). Barbaras's Dynamique de la Manifestation (Vrin 2013) holds that the dynamic ontology of pure relations is what MP should have held — but didn't. Chouraqui argues he did hold it. This is presented as a historical disagreement, but the philosophical question — whether an "ontology of pure relations without terms" is even coherent — is left open. Whether the cross-text coherence Chouraqui reconstructs (across the 1959–60 weeks) amounts to a consistent systematic position is precisely what Barbaras denies. This is the main open question for hyper-dialectic and precession.

Critique / Limitations

  • Chouraqui reconstructs an argument Merleau-Ponty never stated systematically — the coherence of the reconstruction depends on drawing connections across texts from different periods (1945-1961). The reader must trust that these connections are warranted, not merely imposed.
  • The paper's disagreement with Renaud Barbaras (Dynamique de la Manifestation) is "purely historical" — Barbaras holds the dynamic ontology of pure relations is what Merleau-Ponty should have held but didn't; Chouraqui argues he did hold it. This is not resolved here.
  • The role of Eugen Fink is noted but not fully developed — the parallel between Fink's "phenomenology of phenomenology" and Merleau-Ponty's self-recuperation of philosophy is suggestive but left as a footnote.
  • The reading of Heidegger is limited to a single comparison (the Spiegel interview); a fuller engagement with Heidegger's own concept of Erde (in "The Origin of the Work of Art") is gestured at but not pursued.

Connections

  • builds on merleau-ponty-2022-possibility-of-philosophy — draws on the same late lecture courses (1959-61) and working notes from The Visible and the Invisible
  • builds on knight-2024-merleau-ponty-essence-of-nature — both read the "Ur-Arche Earth" text as central to Merleau-Ponty's late ontology, but Knight emphasizes the aquatic/elemental dimension while Chouraqui emphasizes precession and the Cartesian orders
  • contrasts with martin-heidegger's reading of earth — Heidegger sees a break between Erde and Copernican Earth; Merleau-Ponty (per Chouraqui) insists on their continuity
  • extends the reading of edmund-husserl's earth text — argues Husserl was taken further than he intended, into ontology