Abstract

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception discloses reflection’s dependence on the prereflective and anonymous life of the body, which follows a cyclical temporal rhythm distinct from the linear time of personal history. This immemorial past is disclosed only indirectly as a resistance constitutive of reflection. The ontological significance of this “natural time” is developed, first, in The Visible and the Invisible’s account of nature as “always at the first day”, as an unending process of productive creation; and, secondly, in the nature lectures’ account of subjectivity as participating in the “memory of the world”.