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Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth

Frank Chouraqui
University of Leiden
f.chouraqui@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Abstract

In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures

on Husserl’s concept of the earth as Boden or ground. 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 con-
cept of earth as object. In turn, Merleau-Ponty builds this necessity into an essential
feature of being, allowing himself to retrieve ontology itself from its status as external
to being, and to make room for it within the structure of being: ontology is one of the
ways in which experiences (such as that of the earth as Boden) become objectified,
thereby allowing being to achieve its essential movement of hypostatization.

Keywords

Merleau-Ponty – Husserl – Cartesian orders – earth – ontology – hyper-dialectic

…
Are you not mov’d when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm?
SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar, I,3

⸪
This essay attempts to reconstruct the ontology that comes out of Merleau-
Ponty’s encounter with Husserl’s reflections on the concept of the earth in his
now famous text entitled “The Ur-Arche Earth Does Not Move.” Merleau-Ponty’s

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/15691640-12341328

Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth 55

interest in Husserl’s text may be traced back to the time of the Phenomenology
of Perception,1 but it is in the very last months of his life, the months that
yielded texts seminal to the contemporary idea of phenomenological ontol-
ogy, that Merleau-Ponty gave full attention to the text, especially in his lectures
entitled “Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology.” All of this is well known,
and it suggests that the renewed encounter of Merleau-Ponty with Husserl
in 1959–60 should contribute to clarifying the actual tenor of the ontological
innovations of the last months. We hold these innovations to be determined by
Merleau-Ponty’s reworking of the cogito he finds in his own earlier work and
in Husserl’s too. Such reworking consists in Merleau-Ponty’s realization that
the true place of the cogito is as secondary to intentionality, and that being
should be described as pure intentionality, a relation that precedes its terms,
including the cogito. This primacy of intentionality, which places a relation
before its terms, can only lead into ontology, and, in Merleau-Ponty’s language,
to “the limits of phenomenology” (at least in its Husserlian sense, where phe-
nomenology remains attached to a personal consciousness). Thus, there is a
distinct point of departure from Husserl on Merleau-Ponty’s part, which cen-
ters around the concept of the cogito. Merleau-Ponty uses the implicit parallel
drawn by Husserl throughout the “Ur Arche” text between Leib and Erde (both
of which Husserl calls Boden) in order to question the originary character of
the cogito.
Husserl’s text could be summed up as an exploration of the consequences
of drawing an analogy between the relations between Leib and Körper
(which he had discussed earlier)2 and those of Erde and Copernican Earth.
It is well-known that the Leib/Körper distinction informs Merleau-Ponty’s
Phenomenology of Perception and leads it into a discussion of the phenome-
nological cogito. But, it is also the early idea of the phenomenological cogito
which the rest of Merleau-Ponty’s career will be devoted to overcoming.3 Such
an analogy (whereby Leib is to Körper what Erde is to the Copernican earth)
naturally leads to questions regarding the relations of Leib and the Ego, and to
an alternative: should we say that Leib is different from the Ego that precedes it,
and therefore regard the Erde as only a mode of the cogito (Husserl),4 or should

1  See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 85.

2  Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität I, Husserliana XIII (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 57. This specific text is from 1914–1915.
3  See for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’ invisible, (Paris: Gallimard TEL, 1964),
221, 234, 250 and 313.
4  Here I follow John Sallis’s reading of the Husserlian parallel beween Erde and Ego as turn-
ing “toward the transcendental ego, referring everything constitutively to it, even within the

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56 Chouraqui

we reduce the Ego to the Leib, and therefore to the Erde (Merleau-Ponty)? It is
well-known that in the very months of his lectures on Husserl’s concept of the
earth, Merleau-Ponty exhorts himself to “say that I must show that what could
be regarded as ‘psychology’ (Ph. of Perception) is really ontology.”5 By moving
from psychology to ontology, he intends precisely to re-interpret the phenom-
enological cogito independently from the transcendental Ego. This is why his
lecture course chronicles his efforts to explore the extent to which Husserl’s
criticism of the Copernican earth can be taken up in a non-subjectivist per-
spective. This shall be achieved, I argue, through a softening of the distinction
Leib/Körper. This is not to say that they should not be seen as distinct—indeed,
our experience offers us the Leib, but it is constitution that makes it a Körper—
but rather that this movement of constitution must now be seen as a structure
of being itself, and not as a simple psychological fact which could therefore
be explained away by psychology alone. We shall see that Merleau-Ponty
will be led to regard the Earth as a pure principle of generation without origins,
a pure relation of productivity.
This relation of productivity is the essence of being. Therefore, being
becomes known as a movement, and Merleau-Ponty can be shown to take the
question of the movement or rest of the earth to a new level. It is no longer
sufficient to regard the earth as prior to the alternative of motion and rest,
for this fails to explain how this alternative could ever spring forth from a
Boden that precedes it. In short, it would ignore the productivity which makes
up the essence of being by dismissing it as a mere fact of psychology: we rep-
resent the Boden of motion and rest (which, as Boden, is neither in motion
nor at rest) as an object of motion or rest. This, according to Merleau-Ponty,
is the implicit position of Husserl, and it must be overcome by reintroduc-
ing the (pre-)movement whereby this that is neither in motion nor at rest
presents itself as susceptible to motion and rest. For what precedes the level
of the motion/rest alternative is already a movement (or a pre-movement) of
another kind. In this paper, I would like therefore to talk about two kinds
of movement: the movement of the earth, which doesn’t exist, and the move-
ment that the immobility of the earth necessitates, that of being considered as
a pure movement of constitution.
Let me therefore begin by proposing four interconnected theses, two theo-
retical and two historical. Although they might look disconnected from each

domain of origin, thus including even—and most remarkably—the originary earth.” He adds
that in Husserl’s mind “even the earth is submitted to the reference back to transcendental
life.” John Sallis, Double Truth (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 51.
5  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 228.

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Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth 57

other or from the question of the earth, they will help us approach the mean-
ing of the relationships between phenomenological motionlessness (that of
the earth) and the ontological motion of being as constitution:

1) Firstly, the problem of nature for phenomenology is the problem of pre-

history, in the sense of an object that precedes the subject. It challenges
phenomenology to provide a concept of origin that does not precede the
subject, and of a cause that would not precede constitution.
2) Secondly, this question can only be answered if we take the trouble to
show that phenomenology does not begin the world with itself, that is
to say that we must show that it is no accident if it begins “in the middle”
between the universe of objects and the philosophical discourse itself.
This is a “middle” that will require explication.
3) Thirdly, for Merleau-Ponty, this problem, which is found in Husserl, really
finds its root and its paradigmatic example in the ambivalence with
which Descartes (and after him, the modern metaphysics of the subject)
negotiates the relations between the “order of matters” (or “order of
causes”) and the “order of reasons.”
4) Fourthly, it is this problem, posed in these very terms, that the analyses of
the earth offered by Merleau-Ponty in the year 1959 are meant to address.
An analysis of the Husserlian idea of an “earth that does not move” reveals
that the destination of phenomenology is to be the philosophy that recu-
perates itself by finding room for itself within the very structure of being,
and that phenomenology can only carry out this recuperation by becom-
ing an ontology.

1 The Phenomenological Problem of Nature

Let’s begin with the first thesis: the question of the relations between phenom-
enology and nature requires that we decide if and how phenomenology may
provide an account of nature seen as the self-identical object of the natural
sciences.
Indeed, in its orthodox vision inherited from Husserl’s phenomenology,
it seems that the phenomenological reduction—and ultra-subjectivism, its
correlate—only allows for a concept of an objective and self-identical nature as
an object which eludes, precedes and encompasses the subject (the other option
being to regard nature as an intentional object only). Husserl admittedly makes
room for the possibility of replacing a phenomenology of nature (as a thing-
in-itself) with a phenomenology of the natural sciences (which constitute

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58 Chouraqui

nature as a thing-in-itself), and to this extent, it is possible to remove the

demand that phenomenology should satisfy the scientific vision: there is a
phenomenology of biology or of physics and there is no biology or physics
of phenomenology. Indeed, this is the original wager of phenomenology itself:
phenomenology must simultaneously unmask and account for the existence of
objectivist illusions. For a question remains: if the phenomenological explana-
tion of the phenomenon of science must remain possible, it is because sci-
entific experience must be recognized as being at once of the same order as
phenomenological experience and apt to represent objects such as nature,
whose essence transgresses every principle of phenomenology. This means
that a consistent phenomenologist must be able to explain through what mis-
understanding nature came to be conceived as independent from experience.
It is this web of questions that informs the famous discussion that followed
Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of the theses of the Phenomenology of Perception
before the Société Française de Philosophie (the text is known as The Primacy
of Perception), a discussion that, in many respects, posed the question of
the viability of phenomenology itself. It was there that Merleau-Ponty was
led to clarify his position regarding the relations between the objects of the
natural sciences and the objects of phenomenology. In particular, the con-
versation focused on two privileged objects: nature as a whole and the earth.
In spite of differences that Merleau-Ponty will dismiss as superficial (nature
posing the problem of prehistory and the earth that of extra-terrestriality),
the notions of nature and of earth conspire to show to the phenomenologist
that experience, or at least, the experimental sciences, may yield certain non-
phenomenological objects.
Merleau-Ponty, like Husserl, declares that he doesn’t see any opposition
between the concepts of nature or of earth inherited from the sciences and
the phenomenological enterprise, provided we bear in mind that they belong
on the same “continuum”6 determined by experience, and that the science of
experience is indeed phenomenology.
Merleau-Ponty uses the example of the sun of the peasant and that of the
astronomer in order to present their continuity in two ways: firstly, it must be
emphasized that it is the encounter (and the apparent conflict) of the two
visions that constitutes the phenomenological view that encompasses them

6  Paul Césari, Merleau-Ponty’s interlocutor, sums up this continuum as “the continuity

between science and perception.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, trans-
lated by James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 37.

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Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth 59

both: They are made continuous within the phenomenological view.7 Let me
stress that Merleau-Ponty does not place phenomenology on the side of the
peasant and against the astronomer: Already in this early text, he thinks that
the proper object of phenomenology is the continuity between these two
(after all abstract) entities. Secondly, it is science itself which always ends up
moving from its own knowledge of objects to the question of its own essence,
thereby making it intrinsically dependent on the contribution of phenomenol-
ogy (which is the science of science).8
Although in this early conversation emphasis is not placed on the ques-
tion of history, it seems to me, in consideration of later texts, that the key to
Merleau-Ponty’s defense of phenomenology initiated here lies in a certain idea
of the historical relations between phenomenological vision, naive vision (the
peasant), and scientific vision (the astronomer).
Of course, Husserl himself was well aware that phenomenology could not
begin with the world itself and that one needed to let the metaphysics of
science give birth to phenomenology through a long, historical process of self-
critique. Yet, the question that Merleau-Ponty asks himself differs from that of
Husserl insofar as—in his characteristic way—he refuses to reduce this state
of affairs to a mere accident: there is a reason for the fact that phenomenology
can only follow the non-phenomenological, that is to say the constituted. There
is a reason why constitution is irreducible (this is the core of Merleau-Ponty’s
definition of phenomenology in the famous preface to the Phenomenology
of Perception). It is a reason whose elucidation is one of the missions of
phenomenology.
The challenge, in fact, is to succeed in proposing an origin for phenomenol-
ogy that could nonetheless avoid being instituted as an origin for the world:
one must begin thought where the things themselves do not begin.9 The oppo-
sition against certain orthodox Husserlianism is an integral part of Merleau-
Ponty’s project insofar as it is precisely a project that must discover more
than its own point of departure. That is to say, it is a project whose task is to
avoid any charge of subjectivism, psychologism and idealism and which must
therefore avoid beginning with any cogito. For, as Merleau-Ponty remarks, any
philosophy that begins with the cogito shall finish with the cogito, and it will
therefore plainly ignore nature.

7  Ibid.
8  Ibid., 36.
9  As early as the Primacy of Perception, Merleau-Ponty urges that “we could not imagine phi-
losophers being phenomenologists from the beginning.” Ibid., 37.

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60 Chouraqui

2 The Ambiguous Relations between the Cartesian Orders

The proper positing of this problem requires that we learn how to dissociate
the objective order from the subjective order and it reveals the extent to which
Merleau-Ponty never ceased to ponder the paradoxes arising from the ambiva-
lence of the Cartesian relations between the order of matters or causes (which
begins with god) and the order of reasons (which begins with the subject).
Merleau-Ponty focuses on elucidating the ambiguous relations of the two
orders in Descartes at the beginning of his course on Nature of 1957–60. The
question, which he borrows from Descartes scholar Martial Guéroult, is to
establish how the recourse to the rational sentiment found in the fourth, fifth
and sixth meditations can be articulated with the demands for clarity and dis-
tinction formulated in the first three. The question, for Merleau-Ponty, would
be resolved if we succeeded in thinking “according to the first and the second
order all at once”10 but this is made impossible precisely by the positing of the
criterion of clarity and distinction which is not only a product but also a guar-
antee of their separation. In other words, Merleau-Ponty traces the progressive
movement by which Descartes unwarrantedly softens the separation of the
two orders. Descartes defines the two orders in opposition to each other, and
therefore makes them incommensurable. Merleau-Ponty notes how Descartes
surreptitiously appeals to divine mediation in order to support the interaction
of the two orders. But, he argues, even if one granted the divine intervention,
the problem is merely displaced by this appeal, for it is the invisibility of
this incommensurability—and therefore the surreptitious character of their
divine resolution—that makes the whole difference. It is this invisibility that
threatens the criterion of natural light at its core by presenting the inconceiv-
able (the union of the incommensurables) as a judge of the conceivable (the
strict separation of the two orders) and by suggesting a ground that precedes
both of them. This is probably for this reason that Merleau-Ponty decides to
follow Descartes who, in his famous letter to Elizabeth of June 28th, 1643, pro-
posed an alternative solution: mediation lies in the lived body, which is to say
in a “corps trans-spatial.”11 This “trans-spatial body”, whilst remaining a body,
offers itself as a principle of commensurability. It is a body that Merleau-Ponty
describes in the same words he uses to describe the earth, and does so in the
very same weeks.
This discussion of Descartes from the Nature course shows how according
to Merleau-Ponty, the separation of the two orders is always either too strict or

10  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 36.

11  Ibid., 37.

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Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth 61

not strict enough. It is too strict when it runs the risk of identifying the imme-
diate as the true and the true as the real; but it is not strict enough when it
makes itself unable to account for the mediacy of the philosophical search
in other terms than those of a diffusion and weakening of the natural light
through the process of constitution of the world (that is to say, through the
process of the Meditations themselves). In characteristically Merleau-Pontian
fashion, one must therefore conclude that the conflation of the opposites as
well as their absolute separation are in fact identical moves, and both illu-
sory. In the case of both Descartes and Husserl, the consequence is the radical
and therefore circular subjectivism which makes thought begin and end in
the Cogito. Merleau-Ponty notes that the only solution, that of Guéroult,
requires that we maintain the separation of the two orders, and he invokes
Aristotle: “that which is first for us is second in itself.”12 But, Merleau-Ponty
continues, “can one think this Aristotelian reversal from within Cartesian
thought? Hasn’t Descartes shown that the for-us is not an appearance, that one
will never be able to erase the fact that the Cogito is first?”13
This takes us to the second lesson of this passage, which consists in
Merleau-Ponty’s turn of mind that focuses on always seeking commensura-
bility on another plane than that of the incommensurables and in this case,
in the appeal to the body as a principle of commensurability. If it is true that
the order of reasons and the order of matters are in principle incapable of
mediation, whilst in practice they always lead into each other (for example
when one passes surreptitiously from the that I am—because I think—to
the what I am—a thinking thing—in the 2nd Meditation), it is because there
exists a ground that precedes their opposition but precedes also their con-
stitution, a ground for the subjecto-objective that is neither subjective nor
objective.
So, the problem posed by the confusion of the two orders has been identi-
fied as the danger of allowing phenomenology to collapse into subjectivism.
Indeed, one must come to the realization that radical subjectivism is never a
discovery but always a petitio principii: it is always decided in advance, insofar
as thinking always begins in the subject and introspective thought could only
ever keep to itself, that is, to the subject. Merleau-Ponty writes of the ambiguity
of the two orders in Descartes:

Such a philosophy is ambiguous: our thought imposes no reality to the

things, says Descartes in the Meditations, yet, I have no other resource for

12  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 175.

13  Ibid.

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62 Chouraqui

saying that a thing is or isn’t than to rely on thought . . . It is the distinctive

feature of a philosophy of the understanding that it refuses to take as its
theme [in the stylistic sense of “beginning”] what it obtains at the term of
a purification process. Everything that precedes this is thrown back into
the darkness. Such a philosophy is naturally worked-over by doubt and
by some strabismus.14

Against this psychological reduction or “purification” that Merleau-Ponty

sees in Descartes, but also in Husserl and even in his own earlier attempts at
maintaining a phenomenological cogito in the Phenomenology of Perception,
Merleau-Ponty responds to himself in the notes of 1960 cited above: it is a
matter of considering that “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.”15 The solution, it seems, is
to give up on any thought that would begin itself at the beginning of the world
and to move to a thought whose origin would not entail the origin of the
world (the Aristotelian solution). Such a thought is ontological insofar as it
does not go from the subject to being but begins in being itself and finds itself
permitted in doing so by the discovery that the reduction had sooner reduced
the subject than being as a pure constitutive movement.16 For science (which
is not “selbständig”) is but a moment of this movement.

3 Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Precession

What this signifies is that the empirical cogitos that we are can only begin
to think by thinking themselves as secondary. For, as Merleau-Ponty liked to
repeat after Kafka, things present themselves “not by their root but by some
point situated around the middle.”17 The requisite ontology must therefore
begin by revealing what precedes a given thinking and is presupposed in it.
Merleau-Ponty finds this principle of anteriority in what he calls the earth.
This point is worth insisting on: it is in the context of a questioning on the
possibility to satisfy the concept of nature from within phenomenology that
Merleau-Ponty sees the question of the ambiguous relations between the two

14  Ibid., 171, my emphases.

15  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 228.
16  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), vii.
17  The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Edited by Max Brod, 1910–1923, (New York: Penguin, 1972), May
1910, 12. See also Claude Lefort in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 351.

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Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth 63

Cartesian orders emerge, and it is within this questioning that he turns to the
earth in his famous commentary on “The Ur-arche Earth Does Not Move.”
There, he identifies the strict distinction between the two Cartesian orders
as the cause of what he calls Husserl’s “crazy paradox.”18 In order to solve this
paradox, we must return to a ground that allows, supports and justifies the
continuity between the two orders, for “it is the ‘constitutive genesis’ which
is first and in relation to which idealities are constituted.”19 In the very last
words of his lecture course, he writes as if the entire analysis was finally finding
its equilibrium:

Because he leaves next to one another (correlatively), the realist-causal

order and the idealist-constitutive order, Husserl is obligated to sustain
this nearly “crazy paradox.” One would have to take up the concrete rela-
tion of these two orders by turning both of them not into a physical world
relative to the idealistic Sinngebung, but into two correlative aspects of
Being. 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.20

To Merleau-Ponty, what this Husserlian text achieves is more than Husserl

himself intended. It is not only a reflection on the relations between experi-
mental science and phenomenology, one in which the former would appear as
a moment of the latter. This text also illustrates the movement that arrives at
the realization that the reduction can only ever reveal an always-already pres-
ent that precedes the cogito itself. For if the earth does not move, it is because
the Copernican gesture contains a sleight of hand that only phenomenology
is able to diagnose. This gesture is in fact close to the Cartesian one insofar as
it uses the incompatibility of the lived earth and of the earth of the astrono-
mer as a pretext supporting the reduction of the lived experience to scientific
experience.21 This is to say that the radicalism of the difference between the two

18  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, edited by Leonard

Lawlor and Bettina Bergo, translated by John O’Neill and Leonard Lawlor, (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2002), 76.
19  Ibid., 75.
20  Ibid., 76.
21  This is a critique reminiscent of Heidegger’s discussion of a struggle between “earth” and
“world” in the Origin of the Work of Art as well as of Deleuze’s idea of thought as tak-
ing place in the relationship of earth and territory in What is Philosophy, where Deleuze

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64 Chouraqui

senses of the earth becomes exploited to the point that one becomes rejected
to the benefit of the other as if affirming this very difference was not enough to
precisely compromise our right to judge the one in view of the other. But, the
failing of the scientific view is indeed to believe that the object of the concept
of lived earth (which is at rest), and of scientific earth (which is in motion) is
the same, and that the latter may replace the first in the same way as a new
scientific discovery dispenses with a former one within the progressive order
of science. But, Merleau-Ponty notes, what permits one to say that the earth
moves is not a thesis that would overcome and replace the former, but indeed
the reverse, for the movement of the earth is nothing but a form of the rela-
tion of the earth to itself, that is to say that the point of view from which one
declares that the earth moves is always a point of view grounded in the motion-
less earth. It is the earth that doesn’t move that includes the earth that moves
and not the reverse. One can see therefore, through this limit-case of the earth
that watches itself move from the depths of its a-mobility, that what Husserl
calls the earth is nothing other than a pure principle of anteriority that condi-
tions every experience and every constitution, and that precedes the cogito just
like the rest. This absolute precession only signifies one thing, relying as it does
on the refusal to turn the earth into an object: the earth is neither a psycho-
logical principle nor a metaphysical one. On the contrary, it signposts Husserl’s
(perhaps involuntary)22 entrance into ontology, an entrance that does not
imply any exit from phenomenology but on the contrary, the consequence of

makes a rare mention of Husserl. See Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,
in Holzwege GA 5 (Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 2012) 21–37; and Gilles Deleuze,
What is Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (NY: Columbia University Press, 1996), 85.
22  This is a point that is difficult to verify. Much depends, here, on how much one considers
Fink’s idea of a “phenomenology of phenomenology,” expressed in several writings from
1932–34, and especially his Sixth Cartesian Meditation, to be dependent on Husserl or a
departure from the letter of his text. One argument in favor of placing both Merleau-Ponty
and Fink beneath the umbrella of Husserl’s late philosophy would be via an appeal to the
(admittedly cryptic) discussions in the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology (Part III B, section 71). See also Eugen Fink: “L’analyse intentionnelle et le
problème de la pensée spéculative.” In Problèmes actuels de la phénoménologie, (Brussels:
Desclée de Brouwer, 1952), 54–87; “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl
and Contemporary Criticism,” in The Phenomenology of Husserl (Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, 1970), 73–147; Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of
Method, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); “What Does
the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish?” Translated by Arthur
Grugan. Research in Phenomenology 2, (1972): 5–27.

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its rescue.23 If it is to resist the objection made to it by the natural sciences,

phenomenology must become in its entirety a theory of a pure principle of
precession.24 Until now, our primordial embeddedness into a world that is
always-already being constituted resembled a psychological accident waiting
to be repaired by the reduction.25 In the neo-Husserlianism of Merleau-Ponty,

23  In his characterization of phenomenology in the preface to the Phenomenology of

Perception, Merleau-Ponty makes this exact point in regard, not to the earth, but to
philosophy itself: “Phenomenology, as a revelation of the world, rests upon itself, or
grounds itself. All knowledge rests upon a ‘ground’ of postulates and ultimately on our
communication with the world considered as the primary establishment of our ratio-
nality. Philosophy as a radical reflection deprives itself a priori of this resource. Since
philosophy too, is in history, it too makes use of the world and of constituted reason. It
will therefore need to confront itself with the interrogation with which it confronts all
knowledge. Philosophy will therefore double itself out indefinitely. It will be, as Husserl
says, a dialogue or an infinite meditation and insofar as it remains faithful to its own origi-
nal intention, it shall never know where it is headed” (Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de
la perception, xvi). 
24  One should note that it is a matter of a precession that cannot be reduced to precedence:
what is primary is not what precedes, but the precession itself. Mauro Carbone has
recently shown very convincingly the importance of the theme of precession in Merleau-
Ponty. See in particular, Mauro Carbone, La Chair des images: Merleau-Ponty entre pein-
ture et cinéma, (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 116–129.
25  I take this to be corroborated by John Sallis who asks in Double Truth: “Where does
Husserl’s text leave the earth?” He answers: “Husserl’s text leaves the earth as some-
thing constituted. Indeed the very opening of the text onto the analysis of the earth is
a description—though still at an undifferentiated level—of the synthesis by which
the earth comes to be represented.” This leads Sallis to declare: “Where does the text
leave the earth? It leaves the earth, in the second place, suspended from transcenden-
tal life, from constituting subjectivity.” John Sallis, Double Truth (Albany, SUNY Press,
1995), 52. In short: Husserl’s analysis of the earth takes him further than his subjectiv-
ism allows, and seems to reveal the pre-existence in principle of the movement by which
Erde becomes Copernican earth. It is worth noting how Heidegger himself seems to insist
on regarding Erde as more authentic than Copernican earth, when in his famous Spiegel
interview he regards the impression given by seeing images of the earth from space as
an event that breaks the phenomenological embeddedness of man. He declares: “I don’t
know if you are scared; I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the
earth taken from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human
beings is already taking place.” It is clear, I think, that Heidegger’s reaction relies on
the idea there must be a break and not a continuity from Erde to Copernican earth,
an idea that is precisely foreign to Merleau-Ponty. See Martin Heidegger, “ ‘Only a God
Can Save Us,’ The Spiegel interview,” (1966), Translated by William J. Richardson in
Heidegger, The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent Publishing,
1981), 45–69, 57.

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66 Chouraqui

this so-called accident becomes the major part of the phenomenological

enterprise in general, and it upsets everything. It therefore finally appears that
Merleau-Ponty’s interest for this text of Husserl’s lies precisely in its exhib-
iting the passage from a Husserl who wishes to begin at the beginning to a
Husserl who begins in the middle thanks to a problematization of the given
that becomes now only characterized by the precedence of constitution.
In order to convince ourselves that this truly represents an entrance of phe-
nomenology into ontology, one that is not fortuitous but indeed necessary, it
may suffice to observe the language used by Merleau-Ponty. The last time he
had compared the two Cartesian orders, the context was already that of the
question of the genesis in nature, and the exit of the alternative was already
achieved through an appeal to the virtual. In his course on child psychology,
Merleau-Ponty described pregnancy as “a mystery that belongs neither to the
order of matters nor to the order of reasons, but to the order of life.”26 As is
well-known, virtuality, that is to say fertility, would later become the very name
of that earth that doesn’t move, for example in Merleau-Ponty’s lecture notes
on The Origin Of Geometry, where the earth as principle of precession is com-
pared to a “mother,” in the very same weeks as he elsewhere calls upon himself
to one day carry out a “psychoanalysis of nature,” as “the flesh, the mother.”27 In
the context of the lecture course on child psychology of 1949–50, the allusion
was mysterious. However, Merleau-Ponty clarifies the idea in “the Philosopher
and his Shadow,” which is strictly contemporaneous with both the notes on
the earth and the nature course. There he writes that “the most natural life of
man aims at a certain ontological milieu that is none other than that of the in-
itself and which therefore cannot be derived from it in the constitutive order.”28
That is to say that the strictest given can only send one back to a ground that
precedes and constitutes the in-itself, thus triggering a double reflection:
the entrance into the matter, if it is to really take place “in the middle,” points
to the earth as a principle of precession that as such can only point to the
horizon of the in-itself insofar as it finds its meaning only as a motivation for
the movement of constitution. If it is true that phenomenology can only ever
begin in the middle, it is therefore necessary for it to accommodate within
itself a double movement of reduction and constitution, for these two pro-
cesses do not take place sequentially, as they do in Husserlian orthodoxy.
On the contrary, the proper object of phenomenology is no longer the blosse

26  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952,
trans. Talia Welsh (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 78.
27  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 315.
28  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 166.

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Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth 67

Sagen, but the very movement by which constitution always leads into reduc-
tion and vice versa, a movement that is none other than the earth itself as a
principle of self-precedence. It is in this way that phenomenology succeeds
in recuperating the world while recuperating itself, and therefore succeeds in
conjugating the order of causes and the order of reasons without conflating
them. The reconciliation of the ground (Boden) with the object is the same
as the reconciliation of the earth with the terrestrial, a reconciliation that can
only be found within the movement of constitution that, after having been
brought to the ontological status, shall become renamed by Merleau-Ponty
with appeal to another geological formulation: “sedimentation.”

4 Conclusion: Merleau-Ponty’s Hyper-Dialectics

As a result, we can say that the moral of the problem of the two orders is pre-
cisely that any philosophy will fail as long as it remains unable to recuperate
itself. Interestingly, this is the conclusion Fink arrives at through different
channels, when he invokes a phenomenology of phenomenology in his Sixth
Cartesian Meditation. Indeed, if it is true that the alternative between the pure
separation and the pure identity of the two orders must be overcome, it is
because the two terms of the alternative are different only from each other’s
point of view. Remaining at the level of this mutual opposition however would
only drag us into what Merleau-Ponty often calls “false dialectic” (for example
in his critique of the Sartrean dialectic in the chapter of the Visible and the
Invisible entitled “Interrogation and Dialectic”) or a “strabismus.” According to
Merleau-Ponty, these two terms of the alternative, assuming they ever really
oppose each other at any given point, can be reunited at one crucial point any-
way: neither the one nor the other possesses the resources to incorporate the
order of discovery (that is to say, of philosophy) into the order of the discov-
ered. Indeed, the entire project of the last lecture course on philosophy and
non-philosophy (that is to say, on the relations between philosophy and the
world), is contained in this problem. For the ambiguous relations of the two
orders only reveals a constant and paradoxical position that one finds both
in Husserl and in Descartes, and that regards philosophy as transparency. For
opposing thought and world can only ever amount to affirming their mutual
independence, and therefore the non-participation of the one into the other.
Conversely, positing their identity only leads to saying that either the world
or thought does not exist, that is to say, it is saying nothing. For the cogito,
in its strict sense of an absolute precession, signifies nothing if we see clearly
that it contains no thesis about either itself or the world. It is in fact only in

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68 Chouraqui

a­ ffirmation that the cogito both precedes the world and determines itself
against it, and it is only in this affirmation that it accesses its full significa-
tion. But this of course, is nothing but the intellectualistic strabismus (and the
initial passage of one order into the other, the aforementioned illicit passage
from the that I am to the what I am in the second Meditation), a strabismus
that brings us back to the earth by teaching us that meaning can only arise as
a reference to a principle of precession: a principle of which one should say
nothing for fear of saying everything.
Therefore, if it is indeed the transparency of philosophy as θεωρία that leads
to the problem of the confusion of the orders. Then the helplessness of tra-
ditional philosophy before this problem becomes obvious: philosophy, in its
obsession with the world, simply forgot to make room for itself within it and
only gave itself the role of a mere accident. This accident cannot help but echo
the two Husserlian accidents mentioned earlier and diagnosed by Merleau-
Ponty: that of the accidental precedence of the constitution and the accidental
impossibility to complete the reduction. As Merleau-Ponty declares, both in his
discussion of Husserl’s Erde and of Descartes, one should overcome the double
fantasy of the “absolute observer”29 and of “philosophical immanence.”30
From a Merleau-Pontian point of view on the contrary, the confrontation
of phenomenology with the question of nature should not lead to the dis-
missal of phenomenology. On the contrary, it offers it a chance to achieve its
own maturity, a maturity in which it ceases to see itself as the last moment of
some philosophical history, but instead takes possession of a new status, that
of a philosophy that succeeded in recuperating philosophy itself by acquiring
a new ground on the basis of which the observation of the world and the
reflexive observation of thought become reconciled. The name of this new phi-
losophy, which overcomes the bad dialectic inherited from Descartes through
Husserl and Sartre is “hyper-dialectic,” the theory of the relation between “phi-
losophy and non-philosophy.” Let us recall the remark of the young Merleau-
Ponty in the discussion about the primacy of perception. In 1947 already, it
seemed to him that “one cannot imagine philosophy being phenomenol-
ogy from the beginning” for that would require that we begin thinking with
thought and it would amount to ignoring history, which is only the infinite
reconciliation without conflation of matters with reasons.

29  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, edited by Leonard

Lawlor and Bettina Bergo, translated by John O’Neill and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2002), 9.
30  Ibid., 14.

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Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth 69

We can therefore trace how Merleau-Ponty’s concern for the relations

between Husserlian Erde and Copernican Earth inform the evolution of his
thought towards an ontology of pure relations.31 His reading of Husserl’s
fragment known as “the Ur-Arche Earth Does Not Move” reveals that, unlike
Husserl, his interest is focused on the continuity between the two senses
of earth, leading him to revise the traditional view of philosophy as θεωρία.
Philosophy is indeed a pertinent part of its own object, and only an ontology
that can account for the necessary movement whereby Erde becomes Earth
can be satisfactory.32

31  This reading suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s cosmological reflections lead him into an
ontology of pure relations and therefore a dynamic ontology. It is therefore in full agree-
ment with the argument of Renaud Barbaras’s Dynamique de la Manifestation. My point
of disagreement with Barbaras is purely historical: this is a view he believes Merleau-
Ponty should have held, but didn’t. See Renaud Barbaras, Dynamique de la Manifestation
(Vrin, Paris, 2013). On Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of relations without terms, see also my
Ambiguity and the Absolute (Fordham, NY, 2014), especially pp. 217 ff.
32  I wish to thank one anonymous reviewer for Research in Phenomenology for their useful
and generous suggestions.

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