


The paper sets out to offer a brief overview on the elaboration of phenomenological understanding in its original form within Husserl’s program and in later developments (Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau–Ponty). It is argued that the still overarching idea of science leads Husserl’s self–understanding of the task of phenomenology. Heidegger’s far–reaching criticism of this stance as well as later critical approaches within the tradition of hermeneutical philosophy (Gadamer) are presented as working on the rehabilitation of the vital substructures that sustain any scientific endeavor, included that of Husserl’s phenomenology. Hermeneutical criticism and its thematization of an unreflected “life of spirit” (embodied by the notion of “understanding”) calls however for a necessary integration that pays heed to the aspect of the unreflected “natural life” operative in our experience of reality. I claim that this latter integration is achieved by Merleau–Ponty’s reformulation of the notion of cogito and of “intuition” in Phenomenology of Perception.



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Alessio Rotundo
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operative intuition
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Alessio Rotundo
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                                                            trópos • anno X • numero 1 • 2017 – ISBN 978-88-255-0482-8
                                                             DOI 10.4399/97888255048289 – pag. 143-160 (giugno 2017)




                                  The Cogito in Nature and History
                                   Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Aspects

                                                                                 Alessio Rotundo⇤




    abstract: The paper sets out to oVer a brief overview on the elaboration of pheno-
       menological understanding in its original form within Husserl’s program and
       in later developments (Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau–Ponty). It is argued that
       the still overarching idea of science leads Husserl’s self–understanding of the task
       of phenomenology. Heidegger’s far–reaching criticism of this stance as well as
       later critical approaches within the tradition of hermeneutical philosophy (Ga-
       damer) are presented as working on the rehabilitation of the vital substructures
       that sustain any scientific endeavor, included that of Husserl’s phenomenology.
       Hermeneutical criticism and its thematization of an unreflected “life of spirit”
       (embodied by the notion of “understanding”) calls however for a necessary
       integration that pays heed to the aspect of the unreflected “natural life” operative
       in our experience of reality. I claim that this latter integration is achieved by
       Merleau–Ponty’s reformulation of the notion of cogito and of “intuition” in
       Phenomenology of Perception.

    keywords: phenomenological tradition, hermeneutic philosophy, life–philosophy,
       cogito, operative intuition.




1. Husserl and the Notion of Intuition

Phenomenology can be said to designate a certain “how” of research and
knowledge.1 If this is so, then what is expressly indicated by phenomenology
in its methodological self–understanding must also determine the concep-
tion of the specific “how” of phenomenological intending.2 In this regard, it
    ⇤
        Duquesne University (rotundoa@duq.edu).
     1. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006 [19th ed.]), pp. 34–35.
    2. “Granting that a decisive judgment concerning a philosophical doctrine can be made from
the point of view oVered by a criticism of method, we are still permitted to take as philosophy’s
genuine method only what is expressly indicated by this philosophy within the framework of its own
methodological self–understanding.” Eugen Fink, “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund
Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik,” in Studien zur Phänomenologie, 1930–1939. Phaenomenologica 21
(The Hague: Martinus NijhoV, 1966). Transl. by R. O. Elveton, “The Phenomenological Philosophy


                                                                                                                143
144      Alessio Rotundo


seems that a specific concept of knowledge leads Husserl’s determination
of the kind of exhibiting and demonstration defining phenomenology. In
Ideas I, Husserl begins his introduction into the idea of a pure phenome-
nology with considerations about “natural knowledge,” the knowledge
belonging to the sciences as sciences of the real, true being. In Kantian
fashion, Husserl writes, “Natural knowledge begins with experience [Er-
fahrung] and remains in experience.”3 The epistemological relation to “real
being” (reales Sein) is further determined by its original source (Urquell), by
what Husserl names the “giving intuition” (gebende Anschauung) of “natural
experience” (natürliche Erfahrung) which, finally, he eminently identifies
with “perception” (Wahrnehmung). The extent to which “perception” is thus
philosophically understood must determine the way in which the task of
scientific knowledge is ultimately conceived (especially with regard to the
usual rendering of cognitive activity as the relationship between a “subject”
and its “object”). In this connection, Heidegger clearly acknowledges Hus-
serl’s merit in having reawakened an understanding for the philosophical
sense of the “empirical,” but more importantly also to have taught the
necessary path to achieve such understanding.4
    In spite of Husserl’s explicit critical attitude towards the “naturalism”
of natural science, i.e., the project of capturing life in terms of the causal
relationship between discriminable elementary and fixed components, the
still overarching idea of science can be said to lead Husserl’s philosophical
concerns.5 Both in its narrower modern sense, mostly identified with natural
science, and in its broader original form as ‚pist†mh, this idea signifies the
eVort to arrive at a detailed explanation of what is in play in the reality that
is met with in experience. In the scientific explanation, however, there is an
intrinsic tendency to assume a separate and independent existence of the
subject–matter of study with a corresponding disappearance from view of
the one doing the investigation. This is in a way a matter of necessity insofar
as when we experience something, we cannot at the same time apperceive that
by means of which we experience it. In other words, because it is in the nature
of experience in general to be “objectifying,” then also scientific experience
must be “objectifying.” Yet, on the other hand, this leads to a misrecognition

of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism” in The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical
Readings, edited by R. O. Elveton, (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), p. 75.
     3. Hua III/1, p. 7. Forthwith, all textual references to the volumes of the Husserliana (abbreviated
as Hua) will indicate the number of the volume and the number of the page of the original German
edition.
     4. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 50.
     5. One need only to take a look at the consistent return on the meaning of the idea of science in
Husserl’s work from the essay on Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911) through the designation of the
“guiding idea” for a comprehensive work on phenomenology as “Philosophy as Universal science”
(see Ergänzungsband to the VI. Cartesianische Meditation, p. 10) to the Crisis of European Sciences (1936).
                                                       The Cogito in Nature and History       145


of one’s own perspective as grounded in the soil of an experience of reality
that is and remains in the world.
    The bracketing eVect of Husserl’s epoché with respect to the thesis of
being of the reality given in experience is aimed at turning at once the “natu-
ral” regard, always directed towards objects, into the “phenomenological”
regard as an “Archimedean point of view” beyond the actual “objective”
world in order to make the world the theme for an autonomous reflection.6
This reflection is accomplished through a phenomenological reduction consi-
sting in a move of “regression” towards the experiencing subjectivity and
its intentional acts. Husserl’s common analyses, setting thus with a correlati-
vistic starting point and being carried out following the model of perceptual
experience, establish an equation between “being” and “appearance.” The
latter is taken in its constitutive relation to the intentional subject, i.e., the
“appearance” or the “phenomenon” is taken as object. The aim of Husserl’s
canonic analyses appears thus to be that of elucidating the constitution of
objects by following the epistemological subject–object schema ultimately
oriented after the Cartesian rubric “ego–cogitatio–cogitata.”7 As a result,
Husserl’s philosophical project as guided by the idea of science seems to
still operate under the framework of the kind of cognition exercised in any
science and, for this reason, there arises the impression that such cognition
remains naïve with respect to the fundamental way in which it is bound to
a world. And all this in spite of the “anti–naturalizing” eVect of the epoché.
    In a work conceived as a comprehensive introduction to phenomenology
and bearing the unequivocal title Cartesian Meditations, Husserl claims that
Descartes’ Meditations draw the prototype for the necessary reflections of
any beginning philosopher. The reason for this claim, following Husserl,
lies in their turn to the subject both in the sense of a return to and radical
self–questioning of the philosophizing subject, and, most importantly, for
their discovery of the subject as the absolutely certain ground for any
knowledge and science that claims to be apodictic. Husserl himself presents
his phenomenological project as an attempt to renew the radicalness of
Descartes’ Meditations, even though this project is obliged, and precisely
by the radical development of Cartesian motives, “to reject nearly all the
well–known doctrinal content of the Cartesian philosophy.”8 In this context,
however, one could ask what doctrinal elements are in fact still operative

     6. It is interesting to note that Eugen Fink in one of his notes in part shares the view that
Husserl’s phenomenology is a “philosophy of reflection” since through the epoché phenomenological
reflection purports to withdraw into what Fink calls a “topos hyperouranios,” a place beyond the
world. Cf. the comments on this note by Ronald Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink. Beginnings
and Ends in Phenomenology. 1928–1938 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 327.
     7. Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink, p. 431.
     8. Hua I, p. 43.
146       Alessio Rotundo


in the attempt to follow the radical Cartesian motive of demonstration in
evidence as a characteristic feature of Husserl’s phenomenology across his
writings and as established by Husserl’s Principle of Principles in § 24 of Ideas
I. Following this principle, the phenomenological reflecting and analyzing
aims at an intuitive grasp (Wesensschau) of “the originally given [. . . ] simple
experiential world [. . . ] as directly and immediately perceived in its present
and as having been perceived and recalled to memory with regard to its
past.”9 Phenomenological exhibition in evidence thus works against all
conceptual constructions that cannot be demonstrated with recourse to this
method of direct demonstration.
    The reflective turn to the direct and immediate experience is thus ac-
complished in terms of a demonstrative exhibiting in evidence of an object
given in vivid givenness to an actual intuitive intending. If we go back to
the beginning statement in Ideas I according to which “Natural knowled-
ge begins with experience and remains in experience,” then “experience,”
from its first unreflected onset to the most explicit reflective activity, can
be said to begin with and to remain in intuition. In § 69 of Being and Time
Heidegger speaks of Husserl linking all cognition to “intuition.” As Fink
notes in one folder from 1939, Husserl takes thinking to be “an intentional
modification of intuition, and one that is thus characterized by a certain mediacy
and distance from phenomena.”10 Knowledge is for Husserl “intuition.” This
general significance of the notion of “intuition” thus determines “evidence”
as basic mode of intentionality in general and may be said to represent Hus-
serl’s radical novel reformulation of Descartes’ motive of the clara et distincta
perceptio.11 Yet the way Husserl almost invariably presents the “laying open”
done by the reduction as the regressive move from the unity of the object
into the manifold of functioning syntheses in the published introductions
to phenomenology appears to cast “being” as “appearance” fundamentally
as the object–being for a thematically intending subject. This aspect can be
counted as a still doctrinal element in Husserl’s thought. The procedure
towards the thematization of the subject of experience in Cartesian fashion
namely runs the risk to identify the subject discovered by reflection with the
subject of reflection and the world unfolding in experience with an already
“objective” world. Such way of proceeding can be considered responsible,
furthermore, for Merleau–Ponty’s claim in his Nature lectures about a “dou-
ble postulate” of Husserlian phenomenology: i.e., (1) the postulate according
to which the spontaneous thesis of the world in the natural attitude must be
bracketed in order to open up and allow the emergence of the field of pure

       9. Hua IX, p. 58.
      10. Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink, pp. 399–400.
      11. Fink, The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism, p. 83.
                                                     The Cogito in Nature and History      147


transcendental subjectivity and (2) the postulate according to which the
thesis of the natural attitude needs to be bracketed not in order to remove
it as an obstacle but in order to find a way to access it à l’état naissant, as
Merleau–Ponty might put it.12
    In the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Hus-
serl develops a yet further, and last, approach to present his phenomenology
to the public based on the theme of the life–world as fundament for any
scientifically interpreted construal of reality. The enthusiastic interest in
Husserl’s notion of the life–world seems to have been fostered by the fact
that this idea appears to represent for him a decisive rejection of a Cartesian
conception of human being in order to finally bring to a firm thematic
focus its underlying structural frame of experience, thereby surpassing
the “objectivistic” or “naturalistic” approaches embodied in the modern
scientific concept of nature. A more substantial analysis of the exceptional
achievements of the Crisis cannot be oVered in the present context. Howe-
ver there are some important clues in the Crisis–texts that would allow us
to put the notion of the life–world in a first sketchy perspective suYcing for
our present purposes.
    For example, if the notion of “horizon” takes on a consolidated role in
Husserl’s analyses as inseparable from any object–focused intentionality
starting as early as Ideas I, Husserl’s tendency is to treat this notion in the
sense of a “potentiality” for consciousness, that is, as something with a
derivative meaning with respect to the constitutive function of actual ob-
ject–structuration in the present. Still in the Crisis, in spite of the deepening
of insight into the “understanding that rules in concealment, i.e., that rules
as constituting the always already developed. . . ‘intuitively given surroun-
ding world,’” (§ 28),13 Husserl reaYrms the ego–centered epistemological
schema of subject–object as canonic for phenomenology (see for example §§
50, 52, 53). In other words, Husserl’s approach to the life–world still operates
in terms of the entry–level function of the constitution of objects (see §§
47–49). This approach draws from the conception of “inner perception” after
the model of the “Cartesian ego cogito” (see § 30), i.e., from the delimitation
of intuitive evidencing as ultimate methodological feature for the grasping
of phenomenological findings but also ultimately for the transcendental
operations in phenomenology’s investigations. Yet such delimitation that
follows the paradigm of object–perception parallels in Husserl at the same
time the tendency to determine the character of being from the status
being has in being known, that in Husserl is mainly embodied by a certain

   12. Maurice Merleau–Ponty, La nature; Notes, Cours du Collège de France, edited by Dominique
Séglard (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), p. 103V.
   13. Quoted by Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink, p. 430.
148     Alessio Rotundo


declination of the doctrine of the “eidetic method” in the at least apparent
direction of an epistemological idealism. In other words, Husserl tends to
bring the phenomenological (knowing) stance of analysis into the way in
which “being–as–appearance” itself is to be understood. Yet the “subject”
discovered by phenomenological analysis as the subject of the life–world
is not to be identified at once with the “pure spectator” of phenomenological
procedure. Then the “disinterested spectator” doing the phenomenologizing
is to disclose the transcendental grounds of the “empirical subject,” rather
than be those grounds ipso facto as phenomenologically operating.14 Hus-
serl’s tendency, however, is that of reaching to the “transcendental” form
of the life–world — i.e., the constitution of the basic temporal and spatial
horizons of being–as–intending and being–as–appearing — via regressive
analysis within egoic self–reflection, thereby also taking the operation of
primordial constitution as itself egoic in form.15


2. Husserl, Life–Philosophy and Hermeneutics

A decisive criticism that intended to break with the phenomenological
conception of a consciousness accomplishing the fundamental operation
of meaning–bestowal (Sinngebung) and more generally with the modern
epistemological subject–object schema that sustains it finds one of its princi-
pal directions of development in a “meditation about history,” especially in
dialogue with Dilthey and the philosophy of life.16 Heidegger’s pathos–laden
raising of the question of being of man and his elaboration of the concept
of understanding as the original characteristic of the being of human life
itself is an eminent and far–reaching example of such meditation. Gaining
an insight into the facticity of this understanding, that is, into its uncircum-
ventable historical mode of being, is to be considered a pivotal step in order
to advance phenomenology beyond both the ontological obstructions of
the scientific concept of objectivity, on the one hand, and the conception of
a “harmless subject” (Heidegger’s critique), on the other.
    The conceptual articulation of Heidegger’s placing of philosophical re-
flection within a system of principles that articulate the dynamics of finitude
required the implementation of an adapted version of the phenomenologi-

   14. Ibid., p. 498.
    15. Ibid., p. 513.
   16. See for example Martin Heidegger, Ein Rückblick auf den Weg, in Martin Heidegger, Besinnung,
Gesamtausgabe 66, edited by F.–W. von Hermann (Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1998), pp. 411–417.
For an account of the dispute between phenomenological and life–philosophical approaches to the
concept of “life,” see Bruzina, Eugen Fink and Edmund Husserl, ch. 6, in particular pp. 316–341.
                                                          The Cogito in Nature and History          149


cal method in contradistinction to the directly intuitive Husserlian kind.17
In § 1 of Being and Time Heidegger makes clear very soon the need on
phenomenological ground to move behind the schema with which Hus-
serl regularly begins his analyses, namely, the epistemological subject–object
schema. Not such schema, but rather Dasein’s “hermeneutical situation”
must for Heidegger be the starting point of the analysis of the meaning
of being. For Heidegger the talk of the “subject” in terms of a “phenome-
nological residuum” of the “neutralization” of the world, of a “universe
of pure subjectivity,”18 of “subjective apperception in pure sense”19 would
represent a relapse into the mundane “objectifying” situation of the natural
attitude because the way this subject is conceived follows the “intraword-
ly” model of the wakeful reflective subject. Even if Heidegger certainly
shares with Husserl the idea that the “world” cannot be clarified by means
of a regress to an intrawordly being (the transcendental I is not “of this
world” Husserl writes), he holds against Husserl the claim that Dasein as
“transcendental subject” is and remains a being in the world that is however
nothing like any other wordly, entitative being.20 Instead therefore of the
determination of the “essence” of something in terms of a structural enti-
tative property intuitively grasped at the end of a process of evidencing in
descriptive analysis, Heidegger’s method of disclosure of the “essence” of
the particular kind of being that must function as the onsetting theme of
study of the question of being is framed after the non–entitative character
of Dasein’s being. In order to respect the special character of the theme of
inquiry, Heidegger stresses that the features that must represent the initial
determinations of Dasein’s “essence” can only be indicated “formally,” that
is, as not implying any definitive, and entitative, content–filling determina-
tion. Thus Heidegger’s choice of wording the structural particularities of
Dasein’s being “existentials,” thereby stressing the peculiar nature of the
theme under investigation as not being able to be articulated in terms of the
classic modes of definition according to genus and species and thus in terms
of the possible “categorization” of any entitative being.
    Such radical appropriation of the phenomenological method with re-
spect to the special “situation” of Dasein — Heidegger’s “hermeneutic”
phenomenology — has been taken as being quite in contrast with Husserl’s
method of intuitive evidencing. Later hermeneutical criticism drew inspi-
ration from Heidegger’s rethinking of the thematic of “life” and “history”
as elaborated by Dilthey’s work. Indeed a life–philosophical background of

  17.   See especially the methodological discussions in Being and Time, §§ 2, 7, 32, 45, 61, 63.
  18.   Hua IX, p. 249.
  19.   Hua IX, pp. 274–275.
  20.   Hua IX, p. 601.
150     Alessio Rotundo


hermeneutics is indisputable. Contemporary hermeneutics as well as the
philosophies of life of the beginning of the 20th century both endeavored to
highlight the unarticulated fore–structures of thinking and understanding
in order to account for the totality of the aspects of concrete human life
with special focus on the non–rational side with its experiential, libidinal,
and instinctive moments.21
    Dilthey’s conception of the historical world in terms of a Wirkungszu-
sammenhang is inspired by a reflection on the nature of Erlebnis as lived
nexus of eYcacy that cannot in principle be “dismembered” in analytical
elements such as the “objective units” of the sciences and neither being
accounted for by means of the natural scientific concept of causality. On
the level of historical realities, moreover, Dilthey does not see the unity of
what we could call now “spirit” being fulfilled in the absolute knowledge of
philosophy, as it is for Hegel. This is due to the fact that all psychological
life, both on the individual and the universal level, is always subject to the
force of circumstances. Life is always limited by the course of its eVect (Wir-
kungsverlauf ). This limitation, however, is not an obstacle, but is constitutive
for the peculiar fusion into the unity of coherence that characterizes any
form of life.22
    In spite of the aYnity between Hans–Georg Gadamer’s notion of Wir-
kungsgeschichte and Dilthey’s notion of Wirkungszusammenhang, Gadamer
points out in Truth and Method an “inner conflict” in Dilthey’s analysis of hi-
storical consciousness between science and life–philosophy.23 Such conflict
supposedly stems from what Gadamer refers to as Dilthey’s “unresolved
Cartesianism.” Dilthey’s Cartesianism is linked by Gadamer to the scientific
ideal of certainty that underlied his epistemological project and that led him
to unquestionably assume the concept of natural scientific objectivity as
the paradigm of all knowledge.24 In other words, Dilthey’s epistemological
approach was still characterized by the tendency to assume the nexus of
eYcacy operating in living experience to be studied as an independent and
separate structure.25 This structure, in Gadamer’s words, is established as
“the result of a critical method [of reflection and doubt] that admits only

    21. Bruzina, Eugen Fink and Edmund Husserl, p. 331. See also Jan–Ivar Lindén, “Wirkungsmächtige
Tradition. Hermeneutische und lebensphilosophische Aspekte,” in Studia Phaenomenologica XI (2011):
128V.
   22. See Hans–Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, Gesammelte Werke Band 1 (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 1990), pp. 226 and 229. Henceforth, I will abbreviate all references to Gadamer’s
Gesammelte Werke as GW, followed by the number of the volume and the page number of the
original German edition. The quotations in English follow the translation by Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G. Marshall (Truth and Method, London / New York: Continuum, 2014).
    23. GW 1, pp. 235–246 (Part Two, I. 2. b.)
   24. GW 1, p. 241V.
    25. LindÈn, Wirkungsmächtige Tradition, p. 130.
                                              The Cogito in Nature and History   151


the validity of what cannot be doubted.”26 Therefore, as it follows from the
present critique, Dilthey seems to give in to the scientific ideal of objective
knowledge and its nominalistic tendency.
    Gadamer extends his critique to Husserl’s conception of Erlebnis as a
conception that also fails to free itself entirely from the modern idea of a
pure consciousness apperceiving its experience under an idea. According to
Gadamer, Husserl’s failure to think radically the genuine “living” aspect of
life — the unreflected and pre–reflective — emerges especially in connec-
tion with the problem of intersubjectivity. Gadamer writes, “The immanent
data of reflectively examined consciousness do not include the ‘Thou’ in an
immediate and primary way.”27 It is in this context that Gadamer is able to
point to the essential role of prejudice that is inevitably involved in all under-
standing.28 As the expression “pre–judice” (Vor–Urteil) shows, prejudices are
characterized by a judgment structure. As such, prejudices seem to bear an
essential relation to speech, which Gadamer also links to the history of the
meaning of the word Verstehen from the legal domain, in which “understan-
ding” means “to stand up for.”29 As Gadamer remarks, this meaning “takes
on its true force as directed against another person, making it possible
to ‘answer’ and compel him to come with one to ‘judgment’: these are
the elements of ‘conflict’,” Gadamer continues, “which authentic dialogue
includes.”30 The logic of prejudice underlying all understanding is a logic of
dialogue, of question and answer, on the model of which Gadamer finally
defines the understanding involved in the hermeneutical task of interpreting
texts. On the dialogical model, hermeneutic experience is understood as
the experience of the Thou (Du) and thus as a moral phenomenon, since
“the Thou is not an object but is in relationship with us.”31 In Part Three
of Truth and Method Gadamer will emphasize the “operative” moments
included in the dialogical relationship against Hegel’s “dialectic” under the
guidance of the phenomenon of language.
    Following Heidegger’s pivotal impulse, Gadamer thus works a notion
of “life” of consciousness in terms of a kind of “understanding” in play in
any dealing with things as thus being fundamentally disclosive beyond, or
beneath, the explicit disclosure provided by “theoretical” understanding.
Therefore, in Gadamer’s thought, the general notion of “life” whose analysis
aims at making available the unreflected fore–structures of understanding,

   26.   GW 1, p. 243.
   27.   GW 1, p. 253.
   28.   GW 1, p. 274.
   29.   GW 1, p. 265 n. 173.
   30.   Ibid.
   31.   GW 1, p. 364.
152    Alessio Rotundo


thanks to its essential dialogical character and its relationship with logos and
language, acquires more the sense of what may be designated as “life of
spirit” than being anything close to the dynamics of natural or biological
life. And yet not only approaches can be found in connection with Dilthey’s
notion of Erlebnis that go in the direction of a rehabilitation of the natural
incarnation of consciousness,32 pace Gadamer’s Erlebnis–critique in Truth
and Method, but the phenomenological tradition also contributed decisi-
vely to such rehabilitation as it can be shown in connection with Maurice
Merleau–Ponty’s philosophy of nature. In the final part of the present essay
I will show how Merleau–Ponty’s advances in concretizing the subject of
experience delimited by phenomenological analysis follow the inherent
transcendental striving of Husserl’s phenomenology with and beyond its
doctrinal “Cartesian” moments. Husserl’s rediscovery of the “empirical” and
the way to make explicit what is in play in it shall constitute the framework
where the phenomenological “intuition” and the hermeneutic focus on “un-
derstanding” can and must remain in dialogue. The following remarks will
show therefore that Heidegger’s radical appropriation of the phenomenolo-
gical method is not so much in contrast to Husserl’s method of intuitional
evidencing as it represents a further radicalization of phenomenology’s
methodological self–understanding. As a consequence, hermeneutical criti-
cism and its thematization of a “life of spirit” in terms of “understanding” is
not opposed but it should be rather considered to fulfill an integrative task
with respect to the description of the fundamental “intuition” as opening
to a reality on the part of a natural living “consciousness.”


3. The Cogito in Nature: Merleau–Ponty’s Phenomenology of Percep-
   tion

In the following I will limit myself to singling out some lines of focus
in Merleau–Ponty’s phenomenological inquiry into the natural aspect of
living consciousness in Phenomenology of Perception. In this inquiry some
of the grounding conceptions of the Western philosophic tradition un-
dergo radical recasting and integration beyond, for example, the deeply
embedded Cartesian dichotomy, in order to gain an understanding regar-
ding the birth of meaning and meaning’s all–embracing role in human
“being–in–the–world.” It is the claim to be demonstrated in what follows
that Merleau–Ponty’s elaborating of particulars in the context of an integra-
tively non–dichotomous transcendental phenomenological project achieves

    32. See Jan–Ivar Lindén’s contribution, “Wirkungsmächtige Tradition. Hermeneutische und
lebensphilosophische Aspekte” in Studia Phaenomenologica XI (2011).
                                                           The Cogito in Nature and History          153


thereby an ontological grounding of experience already in Phenomenology of
Perception through the finding of an “ontological world” and “ontological
body” in the heart of the “subject” (467).33 In this manner Merleau–Ponty’s
resituates dualities in a single dynamic ontological thrust, so that pheno-
menology becomes no less a philosophy of living nature as a philosophy of
living spirit.34
    Merleau–Ponty’s analysis of the “body proper” (le corps propre) and of its
correlative, the “perceived world” (le monde perçu), articulates a conception
of “knowledge” in general as fundamental bodily opening to reality —
Merleau–Ponty speaks repeatedly in the Phenomenology of Perception of an
“understanding” (comprendre) of the body35 — but also a conception of
scientific or philosophical knowledge, knowledge in the proper sense, where
“spirit wants to possess the true, define itself the objects and access therefore
a knowledge that is universal and independent from our situation.”36 This
latter conception of knowledge emerges as a transcendental theory of the
eidetic that is however explicitly appropriated by Merleau–Ponty as, in
his words, the “resolution to make the world appear such as it is before
any return to ourselves, it is the ambition to match reflection with the
non–reflective life of consciousness (X–XI).” Merleau–Ponty’s conception
of phenomenology as a reflection on an unreflected shows clearly that
his analysis of intentionality has a firm grasp on the fact that the “sense”
that is understood conceptually has a living connection with an anteceding
or more fundamental “sense” as having experiential origin. This means
also however that Merleau–Ponty is fully aware that beyond or beneath
one’s own phenomenologizing the source of all that which has to have
a meaning for us is one’s own living. The implication of such conception
of the “eidetic reduction” is that the kind of philosophical understanding
reached by means of it needs itself to undergo a further “reduction” within
the system of “eidetic” findings.
    The recovery of the living element of lived experience (Erlebnis) in Phe-
nomenology of Perception can certainly be said to find a decisive radicalization
in the first lecture–course at the Collège de France (Le monde sensible et

    33. Maurice Merleau–Ponty, Phénomenologie de la perception, (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). All textual
references to this work will be found in the text put in brackets. For the quotations in English I partly
follow the translation by Richard Rojcewitz, yet unpusblished.
    34. See Rudolf Bernet, “The Subject in Nature,” in Merleau–Ponty in Contemporary Perspective.
Phaenomenologica 129 (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), p. 55.
    35. Merleau–Ponty, Phénomenologie de la perception, pp. 167, 169 (with respect to body’s move-
ment), p. 183 (with respect to body’s sexuality), pp. 272, 274 (with respect to the sensing body), p. 461
(with respect to body’s expressivity).
    36. Excerpt from “Un inédit de M. Merleau–Ponty” (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, No
4, 1962, p. 405) quoted by Reneaud Barbaras in his contribution on “Merleau–Ponty et la nature”
(Research in Phenomenology 31 (1), 2001: 22–38). My translation.
154       Alessio Rotundo


le monde de l’expression) through the courses on Nature to the unfinished
project of The Visible and the Invisible. It is however in the light of the pheno-
menological analyses of Merleau–Ponty’s second important work that the
further formulations and notions receive their full grounding evidence and
pregnancy.37 So for instance the use of the notion of Gestalt from physio-
logy and psychology allows Merleau–Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception
to articulate the material sense integrativeness that is characteristic of the
behavior of animal and human nature in the natural world as anticipating
the notion of “flesh” as the universal intercorporeity of living bodies and
non–living things.38
    If with the reduction phenomenology attempts to tackle the “senseful”
and coherent unity of experience by a regression to the manifold that per-
vades it, then the issue of the way a unity originates out of multiplicity is
clearly the issue of the coming about of an integration. The study of the
“body schema,” for example, does not lead to the conception of bodily
consciousness as a snapshot of oneself to oneself, but rather it sheds light
on an ongoing integrative process that is key in the determination of the
relations between “consciousness” and “nature,” “The notion of the body
schema,” Merleau–Ponty writes, “leads not only to a new description of the
unity of the body but thereby also leads to a redetermination of the unity of
the senses and the unity of the object (271).” Such integration is something
that gets done, that is underway, it is a “recreation” or “reconstitution” of
the world at each and every moment (240). Correspondingly, “sensing” is
not the possession of a quale but it is to be reinterpreted as a “feeling” of
a modality of existence (270). Every “perceptual act,” every “sensation” is
made explicit only out of a “global attachment” to the world (279), that is,
out of the active engagement in the world of an incarnate human body. The
subject of perception is a “power” that is co–given with a certain milieu
of “existence” (245). On the other hand, the reality that is thus perceived
is not a “natural geometry,” but rather a “framework of relations” (346) —
what is thematized in Phenomenology of Perception as the phenomenal field
—, “a living connection that can be compared or that is rather identical
to that between the parts of my body (237).” The unity of the “sensing”
and the “sensible” is thus not instantaneous but it is rather a “process,” it
is both “retaining” (habit) and “projective” (virtual movements), the body
anticipates the movements that it needs to do in order to perform a certain
task within the constraints of a certain constellation of things. This “phe-
nomenological reduction,” already introduced in The Structure of Behavior
through the way of the psychology of Gestalt, changes completely the de-

      37. Bernet, “The Subject in Nature,” p. 55.
      38. Bernet, “The Subject in Nature,” p. 66.
                                                        The Cogito in Nature and History   155


termination of sensing in terms of a punctual and instantaneous event as a
result of an excitation. As Merleau–Ponty points out in the Phenomenology
of Perception, it is the notion of “immediacy” itself that gets transformed
(70). Not the “impression” nor the “object,” but rather the “sense,” the
“structure,” the “spontaneous arrangement of the parts,” the “spatial and
qualitative values” are immediate (70, 72). Thus against the theory of in-
tuition understood as sudden coincidence between a “subject” facing an
independent “object” by which their diVerence is erased, Merleau–Ponty
develops already in his earlier work the idea of a perceptual experience
that rejoins its object by “plunging” into the “thickness” (épaisseur) of the
world (236) and through the “depth” (épaisseur) of an “original acquisition”
(250). These formulations clearly anticipate what Merleau–Ponty says about
“intuition” as “auscultation and palpation in depth (épaisseur)” in The Visible
and the Invisible.
    What could be described as a re–sensualization of Heidegger’s existential
analysis as the only way we can exist leads in Merleau–Ponty at the same
time to a revaluation of Cartesian ontology (a quite transformed one indeed)
that goes together with a “rescuing” of the Husserlian perspective.39 What I
would like to show in the conclusive part of this essay are some important
details about this “natural behavior” beyond the descriptive analyses of the
first two parts of the Phenomenology of Perception, that is, at the turning
point where Merleau–Ponty moves from a descriptive phenomenology into a
phenomenology of phenomenology (419) and the “cogito” that has been carrying
out the phenomenological descriptions is itself “reduced” and reabsorbed
within the framework of the findings about “natural behavior.”


4. The Cogito in Nature: The Notion of “Operative Intuition”

The concrete analyses of the first two chapters of Phenomenology of Perception
describe a form of “originary intentionality” that is that of the “movement
of the body” as a mode of behavior towards the “object” that is diVerent
than “cognition” (444). This can be clearly seen by paying heed to some
formulations. In the context of the analysis of “sensing” Merleau–Ponty
describes the latter as a “thought” subjected to a “field” (251). In the rest
of the work, Merleau–Ponty develops a detailed analysis of what he calls
the “pre–conscious possession of the world on the part of the pre–reflexive
cogito” (344). In other words, it is a question for Merleau–Ponty of addressing
the naturalness of the validity of the world, its “certainty,” in its being given
within an ongoing living experience. It is in this sense that Merleau–Ponty’s

   39. Renato Cristin (ed.), Fenomenologia (Milano: Edizioni Unicopli, 1999), p. 88.
156      Alessio Rotundo


subscribing to the radical meaning of the Cartesian “reduction to the su-
bject” (423) at the beginning of the third chapter of the Phenomenology of
Perception parallels that of Husserl at the beginning of the Méditations Car-
tésiennes. This radical meaning consists in the discovery of the absolute
“solipsism” of the subject (412–413), i.e., that there is an experience of the
world only as experience for me, that all possible appearance of “sense” can
only be appearance–to–me and “make sense” for me. Yet, having already
reduced the subject as thus universal milieu of experience to my living
body as insurmountable instance of experience, the understanding of this
universal cogito will not be identical with an abstract “unity” beyond and
behind the representations of things and ideas (427). On the contrary, the
cogitatio of this cogito has an original “contact” with itself and with the world
(432) and it is given over to events and time (429). The “unity” or “synthesis”
of experience operated by the cogito thus is not that of a subject facing an
object. It is not an intellectual synthesis, but a lived synthesis that gets done
only as the cogito is situated in it already and does not start it in any way. It
is in fact a “perceptual synthesis” (432) and the cogito a perceiving cogito. As
a result, the meditation on the cogito is at the same time a meditation on its
In–Sein, as any experience I have reveals the world as already encompas-
sing me and as something inherently independent from me or as radically
transcending my experience,
      I encompass (comprends) the world because it is for me that there are the near and
      the far, foregrounds and horizons, and because it is thereby before me that the
      world forms a tableau and takes on meaning; which is to say, ultimately, that the
      world does so because I am situated in it, i.e., because it encompasses (comprend)
      me. (467)

    The cogito as center of experience is characterized by a fundamental
freedom as “the fundamental power by which I step back and explicitly
become the subject of all my experiences (413),” power that never allows
to identify the “subject” with anything that is (438). This position however
cannot be interpreted in the sense of a conception of the world as “phe-
nomenon” for a consciousness that would exclude all “being” but it only
returns the unattainability of our own being. This unattainability however
does not imply the severing of myself from all that is: there is this “act” or
“doing” of mine (438) as opening and access to a “real,” a fundamental kind
of “living” (leben) as primordial operation starting from which it becomes
possible to have “lived experience” (erleben) of this or that world (186).
    The truth of Cartesianism is to lead us radically and inexorably to this
“evidence” of all evidence, to a most fundamental “evidence” of all expe-
rience and awareness and basis for any further reflexive “evidencing.” This
fundamental “living” — the “transcendental event” (466) — is described
                                                      The Cogito in Nature and History      157


by Merleau–Ponty as the “living” of an “intuitive thought” with respect to
which any formalization is always retrospective and wherein all “certainty”
and “truth” are primordially grounded (441–442). As a result, Merleau–Ponty
accomplishes at the end of Phenomenology of Perception the task of making
explicit on the level of “knowledge” proper — be it the knowledge achieved
by mathematics or that coming about by means of linguistic expression and
cultural productions — in terms no longer of a “view from nowhere” but
rather as a “view of the world. . . in concrete form” (445), i.e., in the form of
the natural incarnation of the experiencing “subject.”
    The view of the cogito is thus no longer that of Descartes’ intuitus mentis
but that of what I would like to describe here as an operative intuition. Being
“operative” means to function unthematically and this is precisely the mode
of functioning of the natural attitude. In this tone Merleau–Ponty insists that
“It is in no way the case that geometrical thought completely transcends
perceptual consciousness; on the contrary, it is from the perceived world that
I borrow the very notion of essence.” (444) and further, “If the perceived
thing had not founded in us, once and for all, the ideal of a being that
remains what it is [l’idéal de l’être qui est ce qu’il est], there would be no
phenomenon of stable being, and mathematical thought would appear to us
as a sheer creation. What we call the essence of the triangle is nothing other
than this presumption of a completed synthesis, and such a presumption
is exactly our definition of a thing (445).” Therefore, even if in reflection
my “I” undergoes such a transformation that at the moment in which
the most radical consequences of reflection are drawn this “I” appears as
being no longer a human “I,”40 still this individual human subject remains
under the meditating ego like the weariness of the actor persists in the
performance of her character. The “original thoughts” (75) of my operative
“intuitive thought” are the onset for an irreducible “resistance of passivity
(75).” The structure of being contributing to my current perception or
to my present conviction is the irreducible starting point from which the
“ideal,” the “eternal,” or the “transcendental subject” are later aYrmed (75).
Thereby reflection is a “transformation,” a “change” of the structure of our
natural existence and this fact can never be circumnavigated.
    In other words, any grasp of the “ideal” or “eternal” requires for its reali-
zation some form of living expression in which an “implicit pre–knowledge
of essences”41 is already operative. In the Phenomenology of Perception the


   40. This is Husserl’s own formulation from Hua IX.
   41. Marc Richir, “Merleau–Ponty and the Question of Phenomenological Architectonics,” in
Merleau–Ponty in Contemporary Perspective. Phaenomenologica 129 (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1993), p. 40.
158     Alessio Rotundo


theory of truth is thus established upon a theory of expression.42 The lo-
gic of expression, that has the task of defining the notion of “concrete”
or “material” essence,43 is founded upon an ultimate logic of integration in
the analysis of temporality as the last methodological step of the genetic
phenomenology that Merleau–Ponty develops in the Third Chapter of his
work. The fundamental temporal structure of living experience reveals both
what makes possible but also ultimately unstable any intuition of essence in
reflection.
    The Cartesian motive of description in evidence leads to the discovery
of a fundamental “evidence” whose meaning obliges us to rethink the
procedure of reflective evidencing and the “evident” nature of its findings
(“essences”). It is only the reaching to the most fundamental finding of
all, that of time, that must transform the significance and scope of the
already exercised feature of “evidencing.” Only then, one can argue, the
rejoining of reflection and the non–reflective will be accomplished and
only then the notion of “essence” (Wesen) will complete the transition
from a formal to a genuine material essence. The extent of this program
that can here only be mentioned in passing seems to have been already
underway in Husserl’s summarizing statement of his studies from the 20’s
(Formale und transzendentale Logik) as well as the later sets of manuscripts
on time (C–Manuskripte).44 Merleau–Ponty’s inestimable contribution to
phenomenology in Phenomenology of Perception might be said to consist in
having made explicit the way of such program by establishing the ontological
priority of the Lebenswelt and by showing that this move does not allow to
take the necessity of a recourse to essences as a self–contained fact but shall
have consequences, requiring a more precise assessment, upon the sense of
epistemological priority.45
    If phenomenology discovers the “true concrete” or ultimate concretum,
in order to give it the proper conceptual articulation, it itself still requi-
res a critique of traditionally given schemata within its analysis such as
the schema of subject–object epistemological correlation, the schema of
act–intentionality in constitution, the schema of egoity in the analysis of

    42. Merleau–Ponty, Phénomenologie de la perception, pp. 445–452. See for instance the closing
statement of this important paragraph, “Indeed we have no experience of an eternal truth or of a
participation in the One; instead, we experience concrete acts of appropriation by which, in the midst
of the hazards of time, we forge relations with ourselves and with others. In brief, we experience a
participation in the world: ‘being–in–the–truth’ is not distinct from being–in–the–world.” (452)
    43. Ibid., pp. 147, 442.
    44. See in particular chs. 6–7 in Formale und transzendentale Logik and the three Appendices. See
also Ronald Bruzina, “Husserl’s ‘Naturalism’ and Genetic Phenomenology,” in New Yearbook for
Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 10, 2010, pp. 91–125.
    45. See ibid. 430 n.1. Frank Robert stresses a point along the same lines in “Fondement et
fondation,” in Chiasmi International (2), 2000, From Nature to Ontology, p. 369, n. 14.
                                                      The Cogito in Nature and History   159


the living temporal present, and the schema of personal identity for trans-
cendental subjectivity.46 Heidegger’s transcendental project in Being and
Time whose aim is to establish temporality as the ground of all understan-
ding of being and the further hermeneutic advance in the direction of a
meditation on the universal life of language (Gadamer) attest a clear aware-
ness of the necessity to critically address the pivotal role of the subject’s
irreducible priority in accessibility within preliminary phenomenology, but
at the same time also to decisively radicalize life–philosophical approaches
to the pre–reflective aspects of life. On his part, Merleau–Ponty follows the
inherent transcendental and methodological striving of Husserl’s pheno-
menology in order to show the possibility on phenomenological grounds
to elaborate a “facticity of the Wesen” (Richir) with reference to the natural
finitude of human life no less than to its historical finitude.


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