Leonard Lawlor

But for us who are fifty years removed from these courses, they present in the clearest way possible what requirements we must still follow in order to determine what an origin or principle is. Indeed, “principle” is a word that Merleau-Ponty uses repeatedly in the courses. For Merleau-Ponty, the principle must be conceived neither as positive nor negative, neither as infinite nor finite, neither as internal nor external, neither as objective nor subjective; it can be thought neither through idealism nor realism, neither through finalism nor mechanism, neither through determinism nor indeterminism, neither through humanism nor naturalism. What makes this principle so problematic for Merleau-Ponty is that none of these concepts and modes of thought can grasp the “residue,” or in more accessible terms, the “contingency” in which nature consists. Nature is contingent insofar as it is not a “reservoir” of possibilities. Instead, nature is hollowed out, a hollow that nevertheless presents in relief what is necessary for nature to be filled in. Even more, nature is, for Merleau-Ponty, eternally hollowed out, which gives it the sense of inertia, solidity, obstinancy, a sense of life as eternally self-regenerating, even a sense of “eternal return”. Here, however, we would have to raise a question: Does this conception of nature or life truly take account of finitude understood through the phenomenon of death? Unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, it seems, has no answer to this question.-Leonard Lawlor, The University of Memphis.

Let us begin by assembling some signs of the present philosophical situation. On the one hand, the most important living French philosopher, Alain Badiou, calls for a “return to Plato,” despite the movement of anti-Platonism that dominated French and German thought in the 20 th century. On the other hand, the present moment sees a resurgence of naturalism in philosophy in general (including and especially Anglophone analytic philosophy), despite the criticisms of naturalism that have appeared throughout the 20 th century. Phenomenology seems to be at the center of both of these movements. On the one hand, it is the idea of a mathematized ontology that requires the return to Plato, a mathematized ontology constructed without a reflection on its transcendental grounds. On the other, the resurgence of naturalism is so strong that a book could be imagined and published with the bastard name of Naturalizing Phenomenology , as if the transcendental moment of phenomenology did not transform the very meaning of nature. These signs seem to indicate that we have entered into a phase of regression or even decline in philosophical thinking. If this interpretation of the signs is correct, if we have indeed entered into a phase of regression -- a twofold regression toward Platonism and toward naturalism -- we must ask the following question: is it possible for us to define something like a project or even a research agenda that would allow us to define a way of thinking that might lead us out of the present situation, a situation, it must be said, that seems dire for philosophy in general? If we can determine such a research agenda, perhaps we can also begin to understand what the tradition of “continental philosophy” has stood for