Philippe S. Blouin

Although Marcel Conche enjoys a certain notoriety for his exegetical work, his own thought — namely, his metaphysics of Nature — is too often overlooked. Yet it is of considerable interest, insofar as it offers a way out of the classic antinomy between materialism and idealism. Neither inert matter governed by impersonal laws, nor the organ of a transcendent or transcendental spirit, Nature appears in Conche’s work as a “living Poem,” that is as a creative spontaneity. The aim of this article is to clarify the meaning of this third path and to situate its originality in relation to its historical precursors.

The metaphysics of Marcel Conche is rooted in what he calls “the metaphysical experience of the infinity of Nature.” However, at least two important objections can be raised against such a notion, that were indeed addressed to Conche recently : first, one can question whether the very idea of an experience of the Infinite is not a contradiction in terms, every experience being finite ; second, even if one grants that such an experience is possible (namely in the form of R. Rolland’s “oceanic feeling”), one can still doubt that such an experience has any metaphysical relevance, since a subjective experience proves nothing about reality in itself, as Kant insisted. The object of this article is to better explicate Conche’s conception of metaphysical experience and to defend it against these objections. Far from being impossible, it will be argued that this experience is constitutive of human existence as such.

By placing “creative Chaos” at the origin of all things, Conche’s metaphysics of Nature deliberately opposes all theistic metaphysics. Yet, according to Conche, “philosophy does not abolish the divine.” The aim of this essay is twofold : first, to better understand the meaning of the notion of the divine in Conche’s work, and second, to evaluate its coherence within the broader framework of his metaphysics of Chaos. The thesis defended here is that these two elements of his thought are in fact incompatible. Conche’s journey towards an alternative understanding of the divine — mystical rather than ontotheological — should have led him to abandon the Nietzschean thesis that Nature is Chaos (Chaos sive Natura), which itself remains trapped within ontotheology.

The present paper explores anew the question of Husserl’s metaphysics by contrasting H. Philipse and D. Zahavi’s respective position on the matter. I argue that these positions fall victim to opposing exegetical pitfalls. On the one hand, while I concur with Philipse’s general characterisation of Husserl as an ontological phenomenalist, I disagree that this implies Husserl was a subjective idealist similar to Berkeley. On the other hand, while Zahavi’s correlationist interpretation of Husserl avoids this subjective idealist interpretation, I argue that it inadvertently succumbs to the realist alternative that construes the world as existing independently from subjectivity. The way out of this dilemma is to interpret Husserl as an experiential monist, where the phenomenal stream (Erlebnisstrom) is taken to be ontologically primary, by virtue of its antecedence over the subject-object or mind-world dichotomy.

The present article has for main purpose to reassess the meaning and validity of Husserl’s distinction between living (erleben) and perceiving (wahrnehmen), in response especially to Claude Romano’s critique of the adumbration (Abschattung) theory of perception and of phenomenological idealism. To do so, we examine firstly the way in which Husserl develops this distinction in the Logical Investigations, and attempt to identify certain early motifs behind the transcendental turn. A comparison of the Husserlian conception of experience with William James’ descriptive psychology is in this regard instructive. Finally, we argue that it is the thesis that perception is grounded in lived experience, or that identical being is grounded in fluent being, that ultimately allows Husserl to overcome certain difficulties related to the Cartesian way towards the phenomenological reduction.