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Alessio Rotundo
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1 Preliminary Remarks

Peri physeos is a title that appears for the first time in Plato. In the Phaedo Socrates tells us that as a youth he was “wonderfully desirous of that kind of wisdom called investigation of nature [περὶ φύσεως ἱστορίαν].” While this claim points us back to the pre-Socratic thinkers, it is only with Aristotle that the concept of nature is explicitly defined by way of contrast with artefact products or the products of techne.1 This delimitation of nature over against the products of human activity still determines our understanding of nature, which in many essential ways is deeply un-Aristotelian, as the modern dichotomy of “Nature” and “Spirit” testifies.2 Even deeply transformative philosophies of the twentieth century, such as phenomenology and hermeneutics, could be variously labeled “Platonist” or “existentialist” depending on the degree of integration or separation of natural and spiritual factors in their inquiries into the human being. While these titles are grossly misrepresentative of these efforts, or for that matter of any genuine philosophy, they could usefully mark in our current state of thought the extreme limits to be avoided while at the same time delimiting the field in which to pursue a renewed integration and complementarity of conflicting insights. “The problem of nature” is the indicative designation of the point of this integration.

The study that follows sketches out a radically integrative phenomenology of nature through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By revisiting novel empirical findings in the sciences and advances in scientific methods and concepts, Merleau-Ponty leads us to the rediscovery of a first nature to be found right at the heart of the subject, that is, in the very onsetting and rich coursing of animal and human perception. Speaking of “first nature” and of its “rediscovery” may sound badly misleading in two respects. First, what is not meant is the conceptual unearthing of some primordial object or even structure that would be grounding, as absolute principle, all else coming after it. Second, the conceptuality involved in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of nature is forcefully aimed at unsettling and thinking away central modern assumptions about the relationship between consciousness and nature while projecting a philosophical enterprise that puts transcendental insights at the center of its investigation of nature. This preliminary double qualification of the philosophical sense of Merleau-Ponty’s studies on nature should be supplemented right at the outset with a further consideration about the seemingly obvious designation of Merleau-Ponty’s enterprise as “phenomenological.” This title rests on a widely familiar albeit too often poorly represented thesis about intentionality. When this is taken to refer to the activity of acts of “consciousness” directed towards objects in one’s surrounding as they are given in the self-reflective operation of a thematizing consciousness, then everyone is agreed that Merleau-Ponty from the beginning precisely works against this “spirit-”phenomenology as not finding a place for the natural sensuousness and materiality of incarnated life. The incorporation of intentionality in bodily organic life, however, yields projects aimed at naturalizing consciousness in terms that only shift the issue without shedding real light on the critically transformative operation Merleau-Ponty deploys in his analyses of perception, bodily intentionality, and nature. What one ends up with is a “nature-” or, if you will, “naturalized” phenomenology that may well offer sophisticated and insightful accounts of how one’s living organism interacts with one’s surroundings, but that misses the primary sense that intentionality assumes in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical enterprise, and which commands his understanding of phenomenology across various stages of radicalization. Consequently, what one must also fail to appreciate is the prime lesson that emerges from this enterprise about the fundamental status of our incarnated experience and life in the world and the full scope of the truth of naturalism that speaks through it.3 Once more, if nothing else, various versions of “spirit-”phenomenology and “nature-”phenomenology mark the extremes we should avoid and within which we are to recover a complementarity but also the whole problematic tension between intentionality as living and intentionality as thinking.

The aim of the present study is to follow Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological inspiration for this integrative project and to show its systematic relevance and coherence for Merleau-Ponty’s rethinking of the phenomenon of nature as situated in the framework of a distinctive transcendental project. In so doing, the book traces and documents the presence of a constitutive double meaning of nature affecting Merleau-Ponty’s vast analyses of sense perception, organic development and behavior, but also cognition, language, and history: nature as what is first and primordial is both the ensemble of genetic and productive processes that are attainable in experience (phenomenal nature) as well as that which enables this experience (transcendental nature). This study argues that the intriguing twofoldness of the problem of nature in Merleau-Ponty receives a methodological clarification and proves coherent if we pay attention to the way Merleau-Ponty understands the thrust of radicalization in play in Edmund Husserl’s later work in phenomenology, especially regarding his expansion of the notion of intentionality within transcendental philosophy. The mention of this Husserlian background of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy may seem redundant in light of the vast scholarly coverage of this theme, especially as the latter is a recurring, and perhaps too much recurring, fixture of scholarship on Merleau-Ponty. While the fact of this background is well known, essential particulars of that same background are not, in particular the centrality of operative intentionality as presented in Formal and Transcendental Logic for Merleau-Ponty’s reception of Husserl’s thought as well as for taking this thought beyond the usual and classic presentations of Husserl’s own phenomenology. The concept of operative intentionality is often referred to in Merleau-Ponty’s scholarship but the precise phenomenological and transcendental grounding of operative intentionality is equally often inadequately appreciated and understood. The widely limitative grasp of this concept, which is often restricted to the insistence on the importance of Husserl’s descriptions of perceptual experience in the second volume of Ideas, thus warrants this mention.

2 Historical Contextualization

To the extent that philosophy is the working out for oneself and the making one’s own of what others have said and thought, it is only by rethinking the thoughts of others that one carries thought further so that thought itself is never in principle finished as to claim ultimate definiteness. But if thought is the very stuff of a living human soul, one can also take the dramatic lesson of this non-closure to be that the possibility to arrive at the “borders” or the “bottom” of the soul would demand accounting for the whole natural adherence of the soul with the reality in which it lives and thinks. But, again, if this adherence is fundamentally in the going and working before and during any going of our own, then the soul must confront a fundamental limitation as to the complete probing of the very ultimate current and depth of its own living existence as not givable for it with definitive finality. Thus, in whatever sense we may take philosophy ultimately to be about, if philosophizing begins in the actual living of one’s life, then it must remain essentially incompletable in its radical probing, i.e. the probing down to ultimate “roots,” of this very life. One could summarize in this way the conclusion, which was meant to be a mere beginning, of Husserl’s last project to present a comprehensive statement of his phenomenology and what phenomenology at its core was really about. It is therefore even more astonishing that at the point in which Husserl presents the statement about this non-finality of all philosophizing, including his own phenomenology as effort to critically reconfigure the principal lines of inquiry from the history of philosophy, he finds a point of coherent effort between his philosophy of transcendental subjectivity and the founding statement about the soul from the beginning of philosophy: “if we could equate this subjectivity with the ψυχή of Heraclitus, his saying would doubtless be true of it: ‘You will never find the boundaries of the soul, even if you follow every road; so deep is its ground.’”4 Thus, since in philosophy coherence is not a matter of systematically laying out doctrinal solutions but rather about the recognition of a continuity of integrated effort, in what follows I will outline a summary consideration about the kind of philosophical endeavors and lineage that the phenomenology of nature presented in this study in many ways continues but also reorients.

The borders of the soul you will not find in going, traveling each path; so deep is its logos.5 Placed at the beginning of philosophical thought, this Heraclitean fragment connects the soul with the idea of the unlimited. The paradox expressed by Heraclitus’ fragment is striking if we take the capacities of the soul to set the limits of the experienceable while the soul itself goes beyond what can be fully and comprehensively experienced and known. This paradox, however, is especially instructive in relation to the traditional schematizing of the human being into parts, functions, or faculties. This schematizing is first laid out systematically by Aristotle who recognized that the operations of living beings are not “apeiron” or unbounded but rather they take place according to a certain proportion (“logos”) and within specific limits (“peras”).6 Aristotle identifies these aspects as characteristic of the first appearance of life in general and their entelecheia he prote, the soul, as their principle.7 The soul, as principle of life, is principle of all the ways in which life is spoken of, as nutrition, growth, decay, perception, locomotion, intellect.8 This doctrine issues in the conception of the soul as a layered or many-storied structure as stratified according to its various operations.9 The decisive aspect of this conception is the determination of the relationships between the different layers or strata as a relationships of mutual dependence and autonomy.10 This conception is meant to argue for a fundamental unity of the soul’s functions under one structurally integral principle.11 Aquinas will latch on this Aristotelian line of thought in order to rethink and recast the Neoplatonic hypostatic doctrine and its basic notion of emanation (fluere) when it comes to the problem of the human soul. The conception of the soul’s powers in the broader framework of the doctrine of emanation makes each hypostasis dependent on the higher one and ultimately on the highest of all, from which the lower hypostases “hang.”12 The Neoplatonic model, applied to the powers of the soul, represents an inversion of the Aristotelian descriptive model concerning the soul. The emanation model removes all autonomy from the lower psychical operations and makes them completely dependent on the higher principles of reason and intellect. While Aristotle denies that the soul is a body, he also claims that the soul does not exist without a body and it is something belonging to a body (σώματος τι) and existing in a body (ἐν σώματι ὑπάρχει).13 Aquinas embraces this Aristotelian insight when he remarks that it pertains to the soul in its own right to be united to the body (quod secundum se convenit animae corpori uniri), so much so that “the human soul retains its proper being when separated from the body, having an aptitude and a natural inclination to be united to the body.”14 In sum, according to this tradition, a living human being is not a pure spiritual soul and rather has its perfection in the unity with a body and therefore in the context of pregiven sitedness in a natural world.15 The theory of the soul as part of natural philosophy in Aristotle as well as in the later Scholastic tradition is conceived within the framework of an ontology that has a firm grasp on a nature that is first and already integrally given as condition of life but also of knowledge.16 While the Platonic conception of the soul admits of a more radical separation between the sensible and the ideal, the Aristotelian notion of a possible “separation” (chorismos) of mind is embedded in a polysemic context in which the attempt to define and refine the account of soul as united to the body is in keeping with the probing of the soul’s specificity and thus with entertaining some sort of separateness.17 If the latter is mainly associated with the knowledge of the universal and with the presence of the divine in the human, then the study of the soul is as much object of physics as it also moves beyond physics. This study is appropriately said to be an investigation (“historian”) rather than a science proper as not readily fitting within a single domain of inquiry, thereby remaining in closer proximity to the pre-Socratic meditation about the paradoxicalities of the soul and nature than more modern approaches and their stronger metaphysical assumptions about “spirit”/“mind” and “matter.”18 In its theological frame, which made any human knowledge and ultimately philosophy into ancillae theologiae, pre-Cartesian Scholastic philosophy maintained rather a strong sense for one’s limitations as for the capacity to achieve comprehensive self-understanding, thereby staying close to the phenomena and challenging some of our modern preconceptions.19 The interest in this Aristotelian and Scholastic conceptuality, whose rich complications is not my intention to pursue further here, lies in the vivid attempt to develop an analysis that would account for the totality of the descriptive features of our natural being in the natural world outside of modern “spiritualisms” or “naturalisms” as conventionally represented by Cartesian dichotomies of body/soul or trichotomies of God/human being as human spirit/nature.20

3 Renewed Setting of the Problem

This study is a modest attempt to follow the rehabilitation and advancement of this Aristotelian conceptuality in the context of phenomenological philosophy. Thus, the present study inserts itself in the context of the thematic investigation of the sense and implications of the idea of natural belongingness in the history of metaphysics, which has the potential to call into question recent and current theories of mind and nature.21 One can argue that much of the philosophy of the twentieth century can be approached in terms of either a reaction to or a siding with various forms of naturalism. This is eminently the position of phenomenology, which sees in the counteraction against “naturalism” the main step to be taken in order to initiate a genuine philosophical interrogation of the presuppositions of scientific inquiry, thereby accomplishing the inner telos of scientific inquiry itself. By naturalism, phenomenology, and Husserlian phenomenology in particular, means to address a widely accepted metaphysical conception of nature as the domain of the purely physical. This is the “nature” construed by the modern mathematical science of nature in terms of quantitative material stuff worked by “forces” that get framed and schematized in the very spiritual formulas of mathematics.22 Since the birth of the modern age, the goal of science is to find efficient causes, and thus to explain our perceptual phenomena in terms of a reality underlying them. This results in a conflict between the objective reality determined by natural science and the merely subjective reality of perceptual experience. Subjective life becomes in modern accounts a byproduct of objective reality. Dominant trends in twentieth-century philosophy, such as scientific realism and logical positivism, have in different guises continued to uphold this idea. These currents of thought believe that our subjective world picture is not the real world. The basic idea behind these approaches is this: the philosopher and the scientist belong to nature, but nature does not belong to them. Contemporary naturalistic theories have taken this idea to imply that the knowledge of nature demands liberation from any subjective contamination. Due to its specificity, the subjective perspective needs to be set aside, if we are to achieve a true or objective knowledge of reality. Objectivity can only be reached by abandoning individual behaviors and what appears as immediately meaningful to the human subject. The modern severing of ties between our experience of reality and our conception of the natural world is motivated by belief in a reality which is thought to be fundamentally independent from the experiencing and cognizing human subject.

Despite the wide acceptance even today of various forms of naturalism, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a chorus of critics has emerged. In particular, the modern process of “disanthropomorphization” of nature has been held responsible for the spiritual crisis of modern humanity.23 We no longer live in certainty that our attempts at understanding reality, both philosophically and scientifically, refer to the same world that we experience in ordinary life. The understanding of nature remains therefore a key theme of philosophical concern today, especially fueled by debates about the environmental and technological implications of human relations with a dehumanized natural world. These debates span from apocalyptic and catastrophic claims regarding natural, socio-economic, and socio-political degradation, to utopian projects of technological omnipotence.24

The phenomenological orientation of thought before and after the Second World War was characterized by the attempt to generate an understanding of nature that opposed physicalistic (“naturalistic”) and psychologistic currents of thought, both of which took the objectivity of nature to designate a mind-independent reality. According to this phenomenological orientation, objectivity originates within the frame of subjective conditions reflecting the structures and operations of human experience. Following in the footsteps of transcendental idealism, phenomenology intended thereby to recuperate a unitary picture of the human subject that naturalism always threatened to split. Phenomenology draws inspiration from the conceptual framework of Kantianism and the fundamental intuition that the truth in the things and in the world that we can understand is of a different order than that of reality itself.

This study follows this line of thought from a specific thematic and historical angle. By “nature” we usually understand both the reality that our natural sciences study according to methodically controllable procedures and the reality that we confront “outside” of our human cultural productions. We are no longer sure how to harmonize the experiences of science and culture with our ongoing experience of nature in ordinary life. In fact, we no longer know what this nature – prior to any theory – is. Phenomenological authors realized that any possibility of achieving an understanding of this primordial nature demanded that we radically revisit the modern tendency to separate knowledge and thought from the “nature” around us and the “nature” within us. In this separation, nature remains extrinsic to the concrete living of the cognizing and reflecting human subject. The method of phenomenology prescribes therefore to suspend our mostly unwarranted beliefs about the reality outside or inside of us. This method aims to describe the constitution of nature confronting me from without or animating me from within in terms of various relations of experience – of space and time in perception, and of their modifications in memory, in imagination, in theoretical thought, etc. – as they come to take on sense in our experience and not as they are uncritically preconceived in terms of mechanistic and naturalistic concepts. Historically, this manner of philosophizing was inaugurated by Edmund Husserl but underwent transformative recasting by a variety of leading philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In this landscape, I consider Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological investigations about behavior, perception, and nature as offering a perspective of urgent contemporary interest. In his series of lecture courses at the Collège de France from 1956 to 1960 on the theme of La Nature, Merleau-Ponty works out a phenomenology of nature by paying close attention to recent discoveries in the sciences, from quantum physics to the new advances in embryological biology and ethology. Merleau-Ponty’s close study of how nature was already being studied in empirical science purports to counter naïve presuppositions in the philosophical understanding of nature. However, his analyses are carried out under the guidance of phenomenological principles regarding how to best analyze the relationship of consciousness and the world. These principles, to put it schematically, ruled out the idea of a mind-independent reality while also challenging a certain absolutizing modern conception of subjective consciousness. Phenomenology’s “psychological subjectivism” fits already into a certain tradition in philosophy that takes the phenomenality of the real as a starting point for the ontological elucidation of human experiencing in the world. On the other hand, however, the radicalization of self-understanding in phenomenology takes on the form of a demand for a total clarification of consciousness, so that phenomenology can be said to continue and, more importantly, even to bring to completion the whole endeavor of modern philosophy.25 A way to present Merleau-Ponty’s reconsideration of the “natural” can be that of reading it as a radicalized “transcendental logic” understood as “a priori logic” of the being said to be “natural.” Yet the “logic” here in play is “a priori” only in terms of its thrust towards what in fact precedes it, a “first nature” that always encompasses it and from which it itself comes. This “a priori logic” of nature then is fathomed to find a quite different “transcendental” than that of critical philosophy.26 If the latter solidifies into a metaphysics of nature whereby nature turns into an objective unity that gets constituted for a consciousness, we will have to see how Merleau-Ponty’s “a priori logic” can rethink the “constitution” of nature without falling back upon the contrary but equivalent metaphysics of nature of the realism of modern biology or of “atomistic psychology,” which rests on the prejudice of a nature existing in itself or of a being that is already determined in itself and whose determinations only need to be uncovered by a not further determined “observer.”

By discerning a line of linkage that begins with La structure du comportement (1942) and continues through Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) on to the lecture courses on La nature (1956/57, 1957/58, 1959/60), and the writings surrounding that set of lectures, I show how Merleau-Ponty takes up Husserl’s ultimate project of working out the fundamental level of experiential sense-genesis in the systematic attempt to lay open the antecedency of sentient experience to concept-guided reflective thought.27 This study shows how Merleau-Ponty’s studies work out in detail a conception of the conditions of experience and knowledge that integrates the natural elements of human experiential materiality with the self-awareness of the living human, thereby counteracting dualist distinctions between the physical and the mental, but only if the “material” in question is understood in the way in which Merleau-Ponty reinterprets and recasts recent findings in biology as well as novel advances in psychology and neurology. As philosophy and natural science today advance our understanding of neurological processes and conscious life, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical interrogation of the constitution of nature in modern physics and biology remains exceptionally important for rehabilitating the idea of life’s corporeality and for finding the starting point for a comprehensive and transformative conception of nature and consciousness.

1

See Gadamer 1993, 42.

2

In connection with Aristotle’s determination of the essence of physis, Heidegger notes: “Hier hat auch die später aufkommende Wesensbestimmung der Natur aus der Unterscheidung zum Geist und durch den ‘Geist’ ihre verborgene Wurzel.” Heidegger 1978, 241.

3

Jocelyn Benoist lucidly points to the sense of this “truth” in his “The Truth of Naturalism,” which is part of a collection of essays on Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy (2019), eds. E. Alloa, F. Chouraqui, R. Kaushik.

4

Hua VI, 173.

5

See Fragment 45 (DK22B45) in Mansfeld 1986, 272. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. W. Kranz, 12th ed. (Dublin and Zurich: Weidman, 1966), p. 161.

6

In the context of his critique of the materialist conceptions of the predecessors, Aristotle points to the unlimited (ἄπειρον) character of “matter” in order to claim that the soul is the cause of life in natural beings due to its “proportion” and “limit”: “[Fire] is in a way a contributory cause, but not the cause simply; rather it is the soul which is this. For the growth of fire is unlimited [εἰς ἄπειρον] while there is something to be burnt, but in all things which are naturally constituted there is a limit and proportion [ἔστι πέρας καὶ λόγος] both for size and for growth; and these belong to soul, but not to fire, and to principle [λόγου] rather than to matter [ὕλης].” De Anima II.4.416a13–18.

7

De Anima II.1.412b5.

8

De Anima II.2.413a20–24. Cf. the definition of the soul as “first actuality [entelecheia] of a natural body having life in potentiality” (412a27) or “first actuality of a natural organic body” (412b4–6).

9

See Nicolai Hartmann’s essay on Die Anfänge des Schichtungsgedankens in der Alten Philosophie, in Kleinere Schriften, Band II (Berlin: de Gruyter: 1957). In his Aufbau der realen Welt (1940), Hartmann writes with regard to the De Anima, “Deutlich erkennt Aristoteles das Verhältnis dieser Stufen als ein solches der Überlagerung (also Schichtung). Denn das ist sein Hauptaugenmerk, zu zeigen, wie immer die höhere Stufe auf der niederen aufruht, ohne sie nicht bestehen kann, während diese ohne die höhere sehr wohl besteht (in der Pflanze z. B. die Vitalseele ohne Sinnlichkeit, im Tier die vitale und wahrnehmende Seele ohne Vernunft); nicht weniger aber ist es ihm darum zu tun, dass dennoch immer die höhere Stufe ihr eigenes, durchaus selbständiges Prinzip hat.” Hartmann 1967, 176.

11

For Aristotle, the soul is that which makes the animal or plant “one and continuous by nature” (ἓν καὶ συνεχὲς φύσει) as opposed to what is put together by force (βίᾳ) like a heap. Aristotle therefore holds that it is not the body that is the actuality of the soul, but rather the soul that is the actuality of the living body, making it be what it is, i.e. a living body, and holding it together in its living unity. Cf. on this point Aristotle’s criticism of the Platonists in Meta. VIII.6: “what then, is it that makes man one; why is he one and not many, e.g. animal + biped, especially if there are, as some say, an animal-itself and a biped-itself?” Meta. VIII.6.10. The Platonist view breaks the unity of the object to be defined, the human being, and has the grievous consequence of making this substance a heap (σωρὸς) of substances (the idea of animal, the idea of biped, etc.). Aristotle’s criticism of Plato at the end of book 8 in the Metaphysics takes up the problem of the unity of definition by linking it to the problem of the unity of that which is to be defined.

13

De Anima II.2.414a19.

14

ST Iª q. 76 a. 1 ad. 6.

15

“The soul united to the body is more like God than the soul separated from the body because it possesses its own nature more perfectly.” Quaest. disp. de potentia Dei, q. 5 a. 10 ad. 5. In the context of Aquinas’s critical confrontation with the Neoplatonic tradition, it is important to stress Aquinas’s extremely spare usage of the term fluere in the whole corpus of his work. One of the occurrences of this term is significantly found in Iª q. 77 a. 6., which can be interpreted as a confrontation with his teacher Albert the Great concerning the problem of diversity in matter. According to Albert, following the Neoplatonic model, all diversity in matter proceeds or flows from diversity of form; according to Aquinas, on the contrary, not all but some diversity in matter proceeds or flows from diversity of form. The important aspect in this debate is that for Aquinas the soul, against Albert, does not function as a source or font of emanation for the determination of the nature of the body, but rather its individuality is bound to the distinctness of the particular body to which it belongs.

16

In this Aristotelian tradition, the soul is not separate (οὐκ ἔστιν ἡ ψυχὴ χωριστὴ τοῦ σώματος, 413a4) as requiring that kind of body having life in potentiality in order to be what it is, i.e. its “form.” On the general topic of natural pregivenness, cf. the contribution of Jan-Ivar Lindén with the title “Intentionnalité et perception: une esquisse aristotélicienne” (2011–2012).

17

See on this point, Polansky 2007, 168–170.

18

Cf. Polansky 2007, 35, 26–27.

19

Cf. Lindén 1997, 21n4.

20

Cf. Hartmann 1957, 165.

21

Cf. the comprehensive study on this topic by Jan-Ivar Lindén entitled Philosophie der Gewohnheit (1997).

22

On the phenomenological reaction to “naturalism,” cf. Patočka 2016, 3ff.; Bruzina 2010, 91ff.; Ryckman 2005, 120–122.

24

For a representative account of some of these debates, see the collection of essays entitled Trasformazioni del concetto di umanità (2020), eds. C. Di Martino, R. Redaelli, M. Russo.

25

In the closing lines of his “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty claims that phenomenology, under the point of view of its “will to seize upon the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state” counfounds itself with the whole effort of modern thought. See PhP xvi. In Phénoménologie, sémantique et ontologie, Jocelyn Benoist, with reference to Franz Brentano’s rendering of the Aristotelian theory of truth, claims that in Aristotle’s conception of the grasping of simple things through simple acts, such as in the case of perception, we find the foundation of the phenomenological legacy that goes from Brentano through Husserl to Heidegger and that, as a result, the “modern period” of phenomenology is established upon the “ancient period” initiated by Aristotle’s philosophy. If phenomenology brings to completion the inner telos of modern philosophy, if phenomenology itself is established upon the ancient (Aristotelian) endeavor of studying the self in order to understand the world, then the accomplishment of modern philosophy in phenomenology is the accomplishment of the ancient philosophical project of clarifying truth and nature. It should be added that this project exhibits also a clear legacy between the ancient and modern concept of Logos as limited capacity that however can always transcend itself. This Logos, as Paolo Zellini says, appears to be very different than the dominating and controlling Logos interpreted by modern deconstructionist philosophies. See Chiurazzi 2017, 107, who refers to Zellini’s Numero e logos (Milano: Adelphi, 1980), 135–136.

26

The positive significance of the transcendental deduction of the categories in Kant lies precisely in providing a logic of the physical world. The Critique of Pure Reason provides the logic of any nature whatsoever. See Heidegger 2006, § 3, 10–11, and also VI.CM/1, §1, 9–10. A closer analysis of Kant’s transcendenal logic, however, should show that, by starting from the epistomological results of modern science rather than from our belongingness to a nature, the contribution of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is limited to the elaboration of an a priori logic for the kind of nature known by the natural sciences, i.e. as a theory of the mathematico-geometric projection of spatio-temporality as the antecedent a priori opening upon nature.

27

Cf. PhP 20, and Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Husserl’s Formale und transzendentale Logik.

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