Matière et mouvement

This essay aims to contribute to the development of a phenomenological cosmology, along the path opened by Fink, Patočka, or Renaud Barbaras. From this perspective, naturalism must be combated, for things (phenomena) are not material systems reducible, in the last instance, to their elementary constituents. Yet, against subjectivism, phenomena are not equivalent either to their meaning as constituted in consciousness. Consciousness, like any thing, is situated in the world, which alone makes everything that is appear. To appear means to enter into presence, to attain individuation through a movement whose productive ground is the world itself. This essay maintains that such movement is an essential structure of appearing, or what Husserl would have called an material a priori. It remains to understand how consciousness can access such structures, if it is itself limited by the finite constitution of the anthropological faculties that mediate its openness. Must a realist-inspired phenomenological cosmology reinvest the Kantian opposition between things in themselves and phenomena? Above all, it is necessary to show how consciousness, despite its finitude, has access to the absolute insofar as it shows itself, and thus to envision phenomenology as a methodological path toward a renewed form of metaphysics.