Fare Terra. Istituzione ed espressione in Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In this article, we aim to focus on the notion of Earth in Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the concept of nature and his reinterpretation of the Husserlian Umsturz. In doing so, we will use the expression“Earth-making” to describe a particular instituting dynamic, where by the term “institution”we wish to refer to the Husserlian concept of Stiftung and its original reworking by Merleau-Ponty during his 1954-55 course at the Collège de France: L’institution -La Passivité. We will therefore identify the concept of institution asa privileged way to describe our relationship with the Earth, understood as Boden[soil], envisaging in the instituting dynamic as something close to art. Finally, we will try to illustrate what Merleau-Ponty means by transcendental geology, namely the capacity to grasp the original relationship between space and time and a new way of conceptualizing the Earth as an encompassing being, as that which both precedes and surpasses us