Abstract

In this essay, I intend to show the evolution that the thought of Merleau-Ponty undergoes from the Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible. I do so by employing the Merleau-Pontyian notions of “radical reflection” and “hyper-reflection,” which I will consider as expressions of two alternative ways of resolving the task of philosophy: to highlight, in the first case, the immediate relation between the subject and the world, in the second case, the chiasm between the thinking and the Being of the world. There are three main stages to my reasoning: 1) to show the conceptual differences that obtain between the first Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology and the Hegelian philosophy; 2) to illustrate the insufficiency, recognized ex post by Merleau-Ponty himself, of the existential analyses contained in the Phenomenology of Perception; 3) to identify the concept that allows him to formulate a new ontology, and to go beyond the Hegelian dialectic, in the “nature” which is spoken of in the positive philosophy of the late Schelling.