Abstract

The primary aim of this paper is to explain the change that the multi-faceted conception of Nature in Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre went through when he dissected Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in the famed lectures on the concept of Nature held over a three-year period at the Collège de France. As it is well known, Merleau-Ponty’s own philosophy of Nature had been steadily evolving since his philosophical debut. A former classical or “naturalist” conception of nature as “nature-in-itself,” depicted as a “manifold of objective events bound by causal links,” had gradually unfolded into a specific “interrogation” of nature as a reality exceedingly diverse and loaded with inner diffractions. He eventually rejected naturalism because “the extraordinary confusion about the idea of Nature held by modern thinkers” ran parallel to “the misunderstandings brought by their ‘naturalism’”. Concurrently, the “per­ceived world” or “monde perçu” could no longer be enclosed in a Nature dependent on objectivist ontology.