HPhil Seminar: March 5, 2026
The HPhil (History of Philosophy) Research Group of the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon announces the 2025/26 edition of its permanent seminar on the history of philosophy, devoted to the presentation of conferences by renowned specialists while also creating opportunities to emerging scholars, aiming to promote advanced studies in groundbreaking debates and the permanent training of its academic community.
In this session of the seminar, Jan Halák (University of Olomouc) will present a paper, entitled “Merleau-Ponty, Michotte, and the Gestalt of Life”. (abstract below)
The session will take place on March 5, 2026 at 5 p.m., in the Room 201.J (Room Mattos Romão, Department of Philosophy). Admission is free
Abstract
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy offers a deep and unparalleled analysis of the meaning of nature in general, and of living beings or organisms in particular. In his lectures on Nature (1956–1960), he recognizes, on the one hand, an autopoietic, self-organizing aspect of nature, which renders it an “autoproduction of sense” independent of human cognitive or pragmatic sense-giving. In this sense, nature is an absolute, “barbaric principle” that carries all human life, intermingled with other beings of nature, including animals. Here, Merleau-Ponty substantially approaches the theory of autopoiesis and current organizational approaches within theoretical biology.
On the other hand, he repeatedly insists, consistent with his position in earlier works, that this nature can only be conceived of as a “perceived” nature, a being relative to our bodily experience. Against Raymond Ruyer and, by extension, frameworks like current organizational approaches in biology, Merleau-Ponty refuses an ontologically realistic conception of the organic form. For him, the organic whole is not a positive entity, but rather a “pattern of negations” effective in the organism – an “operative non-being,” or a “set of vanishing equilibria liberating a set of regulative causalities.” Merleau-Ponty argues that the double insight into the autopoietic and simultaneously perceived nature of organic forms can only be integratively understood through an ontological “rehabilitation of the sensible world,” leading to the acknowledgement of an ontological link between natural organic bodies perceiving one another, which he also calls interanimality.
In this lecture, I will reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analyses of human bodily interaction with other organisms that support this ontological claim. In particular, I will explain how Merleau-Ponty uses the findings of experimental psychologist Albert Michotte to shed light on inter-animal resonance. Based on Michotte’s work, as well as Husserl’s, Merleau-Ponty argues that to grasp the aforementioned “pattern of negations” as an organic unity, one must entertain an “empathetical” (Einfühlung), rather than observational, relationship with it. Crucially, Merleau-Ponty clarifies how the Gestalt of life can only appear to an embodied being who is such a Gestalt. My aim is to explain how, in this context, Merleau-Ponty aligns with thinkers like Husserl, von Weizsäcker, Jonas, and current enactivists who claim that “life can only be known by life,” yet how he articulates a uniquely relational, non-subjectivist argument by grounding our subjective experience of other living beings in a precisely described bodily infrastructure.
This activity is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UID/00310/2025, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa (https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00310/2025)
