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Nature and The “Primal Horizon”

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The Turning Points of the New Phenomenological Era

Part of the book series: Analecta Husserliana ((ANHU,volume 34))

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty underlines the problem of the mediation between the world of nature and the world of persons in Husserl’s phenomenology and points out that there is “a difficulty of principle in unraveling the connection between Nature and persons.”1 In order to shed light on the problem, this paper attempts to see in unity two divergent perspectives. On the one hand, the retrospective inquiry of genetic phenomenology leads us back from the developed correlation between the world and world-consciousness to a pre-ego level within which it attempts to clarify Husserl’s inklings of a “primal initial horizon” and a “first hyle.”2 On the other hand, the prospective inquiry of Hegel’s dialectic of the subjective spirit (and neo-Hegelian theories of feeling) begins at the stage of the “soul” with an undifferentiated sentience of the affections of the living body and advances to the phase in which subjectivity comes to distinguish itself from an external object. Having established this Husserlian and Hegelian background, we will then take into consideration Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the mutual belongingness of man and nature. The task at hand is an attempt at working out this relationship as a means to afford a clarification of the issues raised by the notion of a primal horizon.

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Notes

  1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 225. (Hereafter: S)

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  2. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Dritter Teil, Husser-liana, Vol. XV, Iso Kern, ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 604.

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  4. See Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Dritter Teil, Husser-liana, Vol. XV, Iso Kern, ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 583

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Authors
  1. Roberto J. Walton
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The World Phenomenology Institute, USA

    Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Walton, R.J. (1991). Nature and The “Primal Horizon”. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Turning Points of the New Phenomenological Era. Analecta Husserliana, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3464-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3464-4_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5533-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-3464-4

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