Le monde et la nature chez Renaud Barbaras

What we try to understand in this investigation, based in particular on texts from 2016, is the relationship to nature and the relevance of this concept in the current phase of Renaud Barbaras’s thinking, inaugurated by the 2019 book L’Appartenance. Vers une cosmologie phénoménologique (Belonging: Towards a Phenomenological Cosmology). And we realize that it is not a face, something visible, after all, that is felt in this fundamental affectivity of feeling which at the same time opens up to the world, triggers the desire for the world, so to speak, but which also, through a certain strangeness of the void (which once again can only come from the world), throws the feeling itself back on itself. What happens in this event that produces the feeling is not a deep depression of the abandoned being, nostalgic for the loss of the ground of belonging. Underlying the feeling is rather a joy, a vital acceleration, a promise of fulfillment. Such is the contact with nature in feeling, illustrated by love in particular, which attests to an ontological optimism even more pronounced than in M. Merleau-Ponty who certainly was an important inspiration for R. Barbaras in this regard.