“Brute Being” and Hyletic Phenomenology: The Philosophical Legacy of Merleau-Ponty’s the Visible and the Invisible

Abstract

In this contribution, I want to establish a theoretical confrontation between a certainty not marginal aspect to Husserl’s phenomenological analyses, concerning research on the hylectic, and the dimension that Merleau-Ponty defines as “Brute” or “Wild” Being in his final and unfinished book, The Visible and Invisible.

For each of the two thinkers, it is a question of leading all cultural formations, knowledge in its intellectual organization, back to the originary sources of the sense to which their latent intentionality attests. One is able to note that this movement of regression, which is common to both philosophers, leads Husserl to develop a broad reaching analysis of the hyletic dimension. The same is not true for Merleau-Ponty, and this fundamentally for two reasons: on the one hand, because of the impossibility within which he founds himself, not being able to carry out his research to endpoint; on the other hand, because of what is revealed to be in Merleau-Ponty a insufficient methodology in comparison to Husserl’s analysis of the perceptual sphere, in particular, the analysis such as it is done by Husserl in his Lectures on Passive Synthesis.