The Tale of a Translation
In 2011 Niall Keane (MIC, Limerick) and I translated a short text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'La Nature ou le monde du silence'. The text is an introduction to a much larger unpublished manuscript from the 1950s that is currently being edited by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert. It was published in French in 2008 in a volume titled Maurice Merleau-Ponty, edited by Saint-Aubert and published by Hermann. We presented our translation and discussed it with experts in the field at the inaugural meeting of the Irish Phenomenological Circle in Dublin, June 2011. Our aim was to publish this translation in a reputable international journal. Unfortunately, for reasons that remain unclear, we were unable to gain permission to publish the translation, although no other English translation has been planned (to our knowledge). Editions Hermann is the rights holder of the text (to our knowledge). Our request was first met with a demand for €3000 (for permission to publish about 2000 words of text), and then with increasing levels of obfuscation. After considerable efforts we abandoned our goal of publishing the translation. Nonetheless, we made it available to the French publisher and indicated that they were free to use it as they wished as long as our contribution was acknowledged. I am now making it available here solely for private use. Please cite only from the original French version and not from this translation.
The Text
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
“La Nature ou le monde du silence” (Pages d’introduction)
“Nature or the World of Silence” (Introduction)
[25](1)/
§ 1. Why Nature?[i]
We scarcely speak of nature any longer, and the “philosophy of nature” would be rightly discredited if it reduced itself to a biased treatment of all the genres of being as variants of natural being.
It is clear that Nature in itself is not given to us; there is only a human experience of Nature of which nearly all the elements are symbols which would be absurd to transcribe into “natural” realities, and which, as we said, do not have a physical signification. Moreover, these symbols are not without relation to those that make up the fabric of our history. “Nature” is thus not only the artifact of disinterested scientific consciousness, it is a myth where, at each moment, historic subjectivities project and hide their conflicts. /[25]v(2)/ To speak of Nature as an object of reflection separable from mankind/humanity or history, would in fact be to subordinate, in advance, the being of the human to an exterior and unknown principle; to be rendered blind to the negation of nature that makes the human precisely capable of conceiving or dreaming a Nature. These are the decisive reasons that we can oppose to the concept of Nature as omnitudo realitatis. These are good reasons, but they do not permit us to reduce the concept of nature to a branch of anthropology. If we were to accept this formal demand [mise en demeure], and this humanism, it would not only be Nature, but also philosophy that would have to be eliminated. We are in the presence here of a moral vision of the world that forbids all interrogation and that dissolves, alongside false problems, truths.
It is no longer permitted to ask what it is that Nature is. All philosophy of Nature is a philosophy of history in disguise […]. We must not take this too literally; we must turn to the latent content. Each proposition that it [philosophy of nature] puts forth must be taken as an operation of a subject, translated before the tribunal of the philosophy of spirit or the philosophy of history, and finally assessed [appréciée] according to this bias. We do not contest that the concepts of Nature, history, and mankind/humanity form a web [écheveau], even a web without end. But this is precisely why it is impossible to treat Nature as a detail of human history; we have to somehow, through the ideologies of Nature, restore the true traits of the “veiled idol” [idol voilée]. Every positing of a [d’une] Nature implies a subjectivity and even an historic intersubjectivity. This does not make it such that the sense of natural being is exhausted by its symbolic transcriptions, that there is nothing to think before these transcriptions. It only proves that the being of Nature is to be sought below [en-deçà] its being posited [être-posé]. If a philosophy of /[26](3) / reflection is permitted to treat all philosophy of Nature as a philosophy of spirit and of mankind/humanity in disguise, and to judge it on the basis of the conditions of all possible objects for a spirit or a human, this generalized suspicion, i.e. reflection, cannot exempt itself from investigation. It must turn against itself. And, upon having measured what we risk losing if we start with Nature, we [must] also account for what we surely lack, if we start from subjectivity: the primordial being against which all reflection institutes itself, and without which there is no longer philosophy for want of an outside against which it has to measure itself.
In one sense, from the perspective of freedom, there is nothing more to find or to look for, no more that philosophy could progress or learn, no more matter for reflection, philosophy is finished as soon as it begins and we immediately attain a wisdom that authorizes all folly, since everything is equally useless and impossible.[ii] Freedom means to forever control, remake in its image and according to its ends, and convert into an object a being for which it holds itself responsible. Freedom is forever removed from being able to find in a being an unequivocal or sufficient expression of itself, which is nothing, i.e. of what is not. From the perspective of subjectivity or of freedom, all conceivable being is in front me, as what I have to be (in the mode of acceptance or refusal). Each being is in the future, or at most the present—it is what I make myself to be, or that through which I affect myself, and the resolution through which I take it as it is is only a power second to my indifference: I recognize that freedom is nothing when it is not at work, but the enterprise itself to which I devote it is without hope, since it is a matter for freedom to retrieve itself in being.[iii] A fortiori, if one starts with freedom, it is impossible to put it into the plural and pass from myself to the other: there is nothing in the appearances that is comparable to the recess of nothing that is me, and another myself can only be, for me, a phantom of my culpability or my generosity, that is to say, a region of myself.[iv]
Subjectivity is the ground of every lack, and fundamentally the lack of being: subjectivity either holds in front of itself the entirety of being as a spectacle in which it is not interested; or if it takes it up and undertakes to change it, it never operates from the milieu of things /[26]v(4)/– it chooses for the sake of choosing, it chooses choice. [Subjectivity is] The source of all value, since nothing in the world can make something valid for me, subjectivity is unable to recognize any value other than itself, nor choose anything other than itself. But that choice is practically insignificant, since subjectivity is, by definition, an intervention in the world, amongst others, and that the whole issue for subjectivity is knowing which comportment bears the character of freedom. There is as yet no choice as long as we remain at the level of values; a decision is a decision only when it comes to their incarnation. Yet if it is too early to talk about decision, when it comes to selecting amongst values; then it is too late to talk about it when we are dealing with goods, with positions, with imperfect love. For at that moment any distance that one negotiates between oneself and the object renders the endeavor suspect and impedes one from asserting that one really "tried". So a philosophy of freedom subjectivity is curiously incapable of expressing action—precisely because it is rooted in subjectivity.
As soon as we enter into this order, we are forever unable to get out. We are definitively locked within the correlation of subjectivity and its objects, and the very effort it makes to identify with one of them – its situation – is enough to attest to the fact that subjectivity presides over its own incarnation. As the young Hegel said about Fichte, reflective philosophy cannot but attain, in the best-case scenario, a "subjective Subject-Object."[v] Such is the element of folly that is essential to subjectivity: it is the conviction of being in the middle of the world when it is nothing but itself.[vi] All those who have felt freedom strongly have encountered such a delusion. Stendhal spoke of a magic lantern in his head that made him see images over and over again and, looking back at his life at fifty, he said profoundly that the energy, the pursuit of happiness, and the will to be in a world were not contrary to, but rather a variant of this dream. Descartes had already offered the dizzying motto of a philosophy of freedom, which forever transformed all being into the thought of being, when he plainly wrote: "There are things of which each of us must experience close to his or herself, rather than being persuaded by reason."[vii] Certainly there are these things and we do not even see to what other explanation we could have recourse.[viii] The fact is that subjectivity can always take up residence in what it intends [vise], means, or chooses, that there are no well thought out reasons which can by themselves convince subjectivity to change its plan, and that it can live and die in its universe without one having the grounds to say that that life is false and deceitful.
These challenges exist for everyone, they constitute the problems of solipsism and freedom, we shall meet them in turn and we do not intend to shy away from them. What I am simply saying is that they do not even constitute a problem if one starts with subjectivity or freedom: in this case, then, they are definitions, they halt the inquiry, and they suppress every interrogation of Being [être] by defining it once and for all as being-object. In demanding that we start from nature, we want to say that this restriction is illegitimate. It is vital that we take into account not only the Being which is the object of our gaze and choice, but the one that precedes us, surrounds us, and carries us; the being which carries other humans with us in a jumbled manner and which is accessible through more than one perspective. This being is already there before them, it precedes them, it grounds them, / [27]v(6) / joins one to the other and within each of them, which "holds" by itself, holds all things together, and does not reduce itself to what each of us has to be.[ix] This does not mean that we take natural being as the canon of all possible being or that philosophy of nature is first philosophy.
In truth, there is neither first nor second philosophy in itself: when it comes to philosophy, everything is first, everything is second, and each and every philosophical matter contains all others.[x] Of course, if we take seriously this idea, we can no more reduce the philosophy of nature to the philosophy of history than we can the philosophy of history to the philosophy of nature.
It is not a question of reducing one to the other. We must simply follow an order that is indicated by the very sense of our experience. If Nature is positivity and the human being its negation, and if we have to say, at least at first glance, that being is and that non-being is not, or that nothingness needs being to come into the world, then there are more reasons to go from being to nothingness than from nothingness to being: the perspective of philosophy cannot be merely centrifugal, nor the definition of being reduced to that of being-object. The human being reveals itself as wakefulness, and hence we cannot speak about the human being as if he/she were not born, or as if he/she did not sleep. We do not expect an ontology of Nature to provide us with the principles from which we could simply deduce a philosophy of the human being and history, but rather that it teaches us ways of connection, a sense of the sense in which the philosophy of freedom is entrenched, yet which are present at the origin of all human history and ignorance of which ultimately falsifies our concept of history and mankind/humanity [homme].
Hence, nature does not interest us for itself as a universal explanatory principle, but rather as an index to what, in things, resists the operations of free subjectivity and as a concrete entry point into the ontological problem. If we were to refuse to attribute any philosophical meaning to the idea of nature, and if we were to reflect directly on being, we would risk placing ourselves immediately at the level of the subject-object relationship, which is sophisticated and secondary, and we would risk missing an essential component of being: brute or wild being which has not yet been transformed into an object of vision or choice. It is this that we would like to rediscover.
Translated by Darian Meacham and Niall Keane
(Draft not for circulation, citation or distribution)
22/06/2011
[i] Merleau-Ponty later writes in the margin: “Add to this critique of the philosophy of freedom that it converts what is before freedom into an obstacle constituted as an obstacle for it, [constituted] by its projects, and thus into an object.”
[ii] This sentence had already been edited twice on page [50](3), where Merleau-Ponty spoke of a hopeless wisdom [sagessee désespérée]. We note here the sudden introduction of the theme of freedom. It was obvious to Merleau-Ponty that to “start with subjectivity” was to adopt the “perspective of freedom”.
[iii] “That it rests in itself, or to the contrary, devotes itself to the object (or in the end, inevitably, passes unceasingly from one extreme to the other), freedom, understood as an originary fact knows nothing other than itself and the pure object that is its point of explanation, sometimes it declines all responsibility and sometimes it assumes, to the point of absurdity, total responsibility. It travels, in vain from the interior to the exterior, it does not appreciate itself less in its sacrifice than in its egoism, it does not worry itself less in its narcissism than in its devotion.” ([50]v(4)-[51](5))
[iv] In this philosophy [of freedom], there is only a place for the responsible and that which it assumes responsibility for. The alter ego, like the object, can only be a phantom of freedom’s culpability or generosity. Others, like Nature and history, are what I have to be in hate or in love, in hate and in love. When the philosophy of freedom succeeds in putting itself into the plural and teaching [itself] that one must love others as one loves one’s self, it transforms freedom into a concept under which it [freedom] reunites myself with the others. But when we take hold of freedom in practice, and like the junction of what is [or: “one who is”] not yet with what [or “one who”] will have to be, then freedom imposes, without remission, the solipsist alternative, and its apparent resolution by way of devotion is once again a triumph of subjectivity.
[v] Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, Trans. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf. Albany: SUNY Press, 1977.
[vi] “The subjective folly is hence at its peak since it disguises itself as a respect for the object.”
[vii] “Talia enim sunt ut ipse quilibet apud se debeat experiri potius quam rationibus persuaderi.” Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, Responsio Authoris ad Quintas Objectiones, A.T. VII, p. 377, 11.19-20.
[viii] “Admittedly there are some things that one needs to experience by oneself, and at the same time we wouldn’t see to what other form of experience we could have recourse, and nothing is for us but what we recognize to exist. And what we do not recognize is for us as if it didn’t exist. However, this expression of wisdom is also the expression of folly.”
[ix] “What we are precisely saying is that there is no problem for those who begin with freedom due to the lack of a real outside against which such a freedom could measure and confront itself, what we are saying is that a philosophy of freedom would mean the end of philosophy. In short, it is either one or the other: we either begin with free subjectivity and we will no longer face the ontological problem, in front of subjectivity being is that which is, the pure object that subjectivity alternatively contemplates and blindly takes up, or we truly conceive a concrete and embodied freedom, then we must stop thinking of being as being-posited, we must acknowledge in the natural and human world a way of being which is neither the way of being of pure things nor of subjectivities. We must let appear these freedoms in a world which is already there, which “holds” by itself, which holds them together and which does not reduce itself to what each of them has to be.”
[x] “The very way in which philosophy describes or articulates nature implies a certain way of conceiving the spirit that knows such nature and that intimately consorts with a privileged portion of it, i.e. its body. The philosophy of nature is already the philosophy of spirit, of mankind/humanity and history, and in general each philosophical theme is a disguise of all others. In this sense, there is neither first nor second philosophy” ([49]v(2)).
“La Nature ou le monde du silence” (Pages d’introduction)
“Nature or the World of Silence” (Introduction)
[25](1)/
§ 1. Why Nature?[i]
We scarcely speak of nature any longer, and the “philosophy of nature” would be rightly discredited if it reduced itself to a biased treatment of all the genres of being as variants of natural being.
It is clear that Nature in itself is not given to us; there is only a human experience of Nature of which nearly all the elements are symbols which would be absurd to transcribe into “natural” realities, and which, as we said, do not have a physical signification. Moreover, these symbols are not without relation to those that make up the fabric of our history. “Nature” is thus not only the artifact of disinterested scientific consciousness, it is a myth where, at each moment, historic subjectivities project and hide their conflicts. /[25]v(2)/ To speak of Nature as an object of reflection separable from mankind/humanity or history, would in fact be to subordinate, in advance, the being of the human to an exterior and unknown principle; to be rendered blind to the negation of nature that makes the human precisely capable of conceiving or dreaming a Nature. These are the decisive reasons that we can oppose to the concept of Nature as omnitudo realitatis. These are good reasons, but they do not permit us to reduce the concept of nature to a branch of anthropology. If we were to accept this formal demand [mise en demeure], and this humanism, it would not only be Nature, but also philosophy that would have to be eliminated. We are in the presence here of a moral vision of the world that forbids all interrogation and that dissolves, alongside false problems, truths.
It is no longer permitted to ask what it is that Nature is. All philosophy of Nature is a philosophy of history in disguise […]. We must not take this too literally; we must turn to the latent content. Each proposition that it [philosophy of nature] puts forth must be taken as an operation of a subject, translated before the tribunal of the philosophy of spirit or the philosophy of history, and finally assessed [appréciée] according to this bias. We do not contest that the concepts of Nature, history, and mankind/humanity form a web [écheveau], even a web without end. But this is precisely why it is impossible to treat Nature as a detail of human history; we have to somehow, through the ideologies of Nature, restore the true traits of the “veiled idol” [idol voilée]. Every positing of a [d’une] Nature implies a subjectivity and even an historic intersubjectivity. This does not make it such that the sense of natural being is exhausted by its symbolic transcriptions, that there is nothing to think before these transcriptions. It only proves that the being of Nature is to be sought below [en-deçà] its being posited [être-posé]. If a philosophy of /[26](3) / reflection is permitted to treat all philosophy of Nature as a philosophy of spirit and of mankind/humanity in disguise, and to judge it on the basis of the conditions of all possible objects for a spirit or a human, this generalized suspicion, i.e. reflection, cannot exempt itself from investigation. It must turn against itself. And, upon having measured what we risk losing if we start with Nature, we [must] also account for what we surely lack, if we start from subjectivity: the primordial being against which all reflection institutes itself, and without which there is no longer philosophy for want of an outside against which it has to measure itself.
In one sense, from the perspective of freedom, there is nothing more to find or to look for, no more that philosophy could progress or learn, no more matter for reflection, philosophy is finished as soon as it begins and we immediately attain a wisdom that authorizes all folly, since everything is equally useless and impossible.[ii] Freedom means to forever control, remake in its image and according to its ends, and convert into an object a being for which it holds itself responsible. Freedom is forever removed from being able to find in a being an unequivocal or sufficient expression of itself, which is nothing, i.e. of what is not. From the perspective of subjectivity or of freedom, all conceivable being is in front me, as what I have to be (in the mode of acceptance or refusal). Each being is in the future, or at most the present—it is what I make myself to be, or that through which I affect myself, and the resolution through which I take it as it is is only a power second to my indifference: I recognize that freedom is nothing when it is not at work, but the enterprise itself to which I devote it is without hope, since it is a matter for freedom to retrieve itself in being.[iii] A fortiori, if one starts with freedom, it is impossible to put it into the plural and pass from myself to the other: there is nothing in the appearances that is comparable to the recess of nothing that is me, and another myself can only be, for me, a phantom of my culpability or my generosity, that is to say, a region of myself.[iv]
Subjectivity is the ground of every lack, and fundamentally the lack of being: subjectivity either holds in front of itself the entirety of being as a spectacle in which it is not interested; or if it takes it up and undertakes to change it, it never operates from the milieu of things /[26]v(4)/– it chooses for the sake of choosing, it chooses choice. [Subjectivity is] The source of all value, since nothing in the world can make something valid for me, subjectivity is unable to recognize any value other than itself, nor choose anything other than itself. But that choice is practically insignificant, since subjectivity is, by definition, an intervention in the world, amongst others, and that the whole issue for subjectivity is knowing which comportment bears the character of freedom. There is as yet no choice as long as we remain at the level of values; a decision is a decision only when it comes to their incarnation. Yet if it is too early to talk about decision, when it comes to selecting amongst values; then it is too late to talk about it when we are dealing with goods, with positions, with imperfect love. For at that moment any distance that one negotiates between oneself and the object renders the endeavor suspect and impedes one from asserting that one really "tried". So a philosophy of freedom subjectivity is curiously incapable of expressing action—precisely because it is rooted in subjectivity.
As soon as we enter into this order, we are forever unable to get out. We are definitively locked within the correlation of subjectivity and its objects, and the very effort it makes to identify with one of them – its situation – is enough to attest to the fact that subjectivity presides over its own incarnation. As the young Hegel said about Fichte, reflective philosophy cannot but attain, in the best-case scenario, a "subjective Subject-Object."[v] Such is the element of folly that is essential to subjectivity: it is the conviction of being in the middle of the world when it is nothing but itself.[vi] All those who have felt freedom strongly have encountered such a delusion. Stendhal spoke of a magic lantern in his head that made him see images over and over again and, looking back at his life at fifty, he said profoundly that the energy, the pursuit of happiness, and the will to be in a world were not contrary to, but rather a variant of this dream. Descartes had already offered the dizzying motto of a philosophy of freedom, which forever transformed all being into the thought of being, when he plainly wrote: "There are things of which each of us must experience close to his or herself, rather than being persuaded by reason."[vii] Certainly there are these things and we do not even see to what other explanation we could have recourse.[viii] The fact is that subjectivity can always take up residence in what it intends [vise], means, or chooses, that there are no well thought out reasons which can by themselves convince subjectivity to change its plan, and that it can live and die in its universe without one having the grounds to say that that life is false and deceitful.
These challenges exist for everyone, they constitute the problems of solipsism and freedom, we shall meet them in turn and we do not intend to shy away from them. What I am simply saying is that they do not even constitute a problem if one starts with subjectivity or freedom: in this case, then, they are definitions, they halt the inquiry, and they suppress every interrogation of Being [être] by defining it once and for all as being-object. In demanding that we start from nature, we want to say that this restriction is illegitimate. It is vital that we take into account not only the Being which is the object of our gaze and choice, but the one that precedes us, surrounds us, and carries us; the being which carries other humans with us in a jumbled manner and which is accessible through more than one perspective. This being is already there before them, it precedes them, it grounds them, / [27]v(6) / joins one to the other and within each of them, which "holds" by itself, holds all things together, and does not reduce itself to what each of us has to be.[ix] This does not mean that we take natural being as the canon of all possible being or that philosophy of nature is first philosophy.
In truth, there is neither first nor second philosophy in itself: when it comes to philosophy, everything is first, everything is second, and each and every philosophical matter contains all others.[x] Of course, if we take seriously this idea, we can no more reduce the philosophy of nature to the philosophy of history than we can the philosophy of history to the philosophy of nature.
It is not a question of reducing one to the other. We must simply follow an order that is indicated by the very sense of our experience. If Nature is positivity and the human being its negation, and if we have to say, at least at first glance, that being is and that non-being is not, or that nothingness needs being to come into the world, then there are more reasons to go from being to nothingness than from nothingness to being: the perspective of philosophy cannot be merely centrifugal, nor the definition of being reduced to that of being-object. The human being reveals itself as wakefulness, and hence we cannot speak about the human being as if he/she were not born, or as if he/she did not sleep. We do not expect an ontology of Nature to provide us with the principles from which we could simply deduce a philosophy of the human being and history, but rather that it teaches us ways of connection, a sense of the sense in which the philosophy of freedom is entrenched, yet which are present at the origin of all human history and ignorance of which ultimately falsifies our concept of history and mankind/humanity [homme].
Hence, nature does not interest us for itself as a universal explanatory principle, but rather as an index to what, in things, resists the operations of free subjectivity and as a concrete entry point into the ontological problem. If we were to refuse to attribute any philosophical meaning to the idea of nature, and if we were to reflect directly on being, we would risk placing ourselves immediately at the level of the subject-object relationship, which is sophisticated and secondary, and we would risk missing an essential component of being: brute or wild being which has not yet been transformed into an object of vision or choice. It is this that we would like to rediscover.
Translated by Darian Meacham and Niall Keane
(Draft not for circulation, citation or distribution)
22/06/2011
[i] Merleau-Ponty later writes in the margin: “Add to this critique of the philosophy of freedom that it converts what is before freedom into an obstacle constituted as an obstacle for it, [constituted] by its projects, and thus into an object.”
[ii] This sentence had already been edited twice on page [50](3), where Merleau-Ponty spoke of a hopeless wisdom [sagessee désespérée]. We note here the sudden introduction of the theme of freedom. It was obvious to Merleau-Ponty that to “start with subjectivity” was to adopt the “perspective of freedom”.
[iii] “That it rests in itself, or to the contrary, devotes itself to the object (or in the end, inevitably, passes unceasingly from one extreme to the other), freedom, understood as an originary fact knows nothing other than itself and the pure object that is its point of explanation, sometimes it declines all responsibility and sometimes it assumes, to the point of absurdity, total responsibility. It travels, in vain from the interior to the exterior, it does not appreciate itself less in its sacrifice than in its egoism, it does not worry itself less in its narcissism than in its devotion.” ([50]v(4)-[51](5))
[iv] In this philosophy [of freedom], there is only a place for the responsible and that which it assumes responsibility for. The alter ego, like the object, can only be a phantom of freedom’s culpability or generosity. Others, like Nature and history, are what I have to be in hate or in love, in hate and in love. When the philosophy of freedom succeeds in putting itself into the plural and teaching [itself] that one must love others as one loves one’s self, it transforms freedom into a concept under which it [freedom] reunites myself with the others. But when we take hold of freedom in practice, and like the junction of what is [or: “one who is”] not yet with what [or “one who”] will have to be, then freedom imposes, without remission, the solipsist alternative, and its apparent resolution by way of devotion is once again a triumph of subjectivity.
[v] Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, Trans. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf. Albany: SUNY Press, 1977.
[vi] “The subjective folly is hence at its peak since it disguises itself as a respect for the object.”
[vii] “Talia enim sunt ut ipse quilibet apud se debeat experiri potius quam rationibus persuaderi.” Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, Responsio Authoris ad Quintas Objectiones, A.T. VII, p. 377, 11.19-20.
[viii] “Admittedly there are some things that one needs to experience by oneself, and at the same time we wouldn’t see to what other form of experience we could have recourse, and nothing is for us but what we recognize to exist. And what we do not recognize is for us as if it didn’t exist. However, this expression of wisdom is also the expression of folly.”
[ix] “What we are precisely saying is that there is no problem for those who begin with freedom due to the lack of a real outside against which such a freedom could measure and confront itself, what we are saying is that a philosophy of freedom would mean the end of philosophy. In short, it is either one or the other: we either begin with free subjectivity and we will no longer face the ontological problem, in front of subjectivity being is that which is, the pure object that subjectivity alternatively contemplates and blindly takes up, or we truly conceive a concrete and embodied freedom, then we must stop thinking of being as being-posited, we must acknowledge in the natural and human world a way of being which is neither the way of being of pure things nor of subjectivities. We must let appear these freedoms in a world which is already there, which “holds” by itself, which holds them together and which does not reduce itself to what each of them has to be.”
[x] “The very way in which philosophy describes or articulates nature implies a certain way of conceiving the spirit that knows such nature and that intimately consorts with a privileged portion of it, i.e. its body. The philosophy of nature is already the philosophy of spirit, of mankind/humanity and history, and in general each philosophical theme is a disguise of all others. In this sense, there is neither first nor second philosophy” ([49]v(2)).