In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

125 Concluding Thoughts What if seeing the world’s beauty—and that of human works and bodies—would merely consist in removing the waste of appropriation ? . . . I wish for and practice the dispossession of the world . . . Ecstatic, fervent, rare . . . dispossession admires lucidly and protects efficiently. —Michel Serres, Malfeasance (2010) The trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, with its complex philosophical and interdisciplinary engagements, which are at least partially interconnected by the thematic of expression, is oriented toward re-visioning ontology. Although his late ontology is phenomenologically inspired, it moves beyond phenomenology in seeking to divest itself of any traces of a philosophy of consciousness and in taking up the late twentieth-century problematic of difference. Much like Heidegger, he holds that an ontology must be articulated “in the beings.” Hence his sustained and searching meditations on the visual and literary arts, his effort to formulate a philosophy of nature in dialogue with the history of philosophy as well as with scientific research (ranging from physics to zoology, evolutionary theory, and psychology), and finally his challenging readings of thinkers who were his contemporaries or near-contemporaries, including Husserl , Bergson, Sartre, and Whitehead. The fundamental importance of ontology, or of seeking to articulate the parameters of an understanding of reality, manifestation, or phenomenalization cannot intelligently be disputed. Nonetheless, for many contemporary readers of Merleau-Ponty, ontology has not retained a comparable primacy, especially since his aesthetics, philosophy of embodiment and of nature, or his dialogues with other thinkers are rich resources in their own right (as is also true of his political thought which has not been addressed in this study). In conclusion, then, it may be fitting to reflect on the bearing that his thought, centered on expression, may have on more “ontic” areas of inquiry, singling out here environ- 126 T R A C I N G E X P R E S S I O N I N M E R L E A U - P O N T Y mental ethics and environmental aesthetics. This concluding reflection takes up Merleau-Ponty’s own tantalizing remark that expression is capable of yielding not only a metaphysics but also “the principle of an ethics.”1 The dispossession of the world that Serres considers to be imminent , since “after exhausting the number of its occurrences, acts of appropriation [in the globalized world] will inevitably lead to the end of property,”2 may prove to be salutary and even necessary to enable one to see and treasure “the world’s beauty,” but it may not in itself be sufficient. Leaving aside the complex question of how, in the context of aesthetics, to think beauty and its relevance today, the very experience (or “seeing”) of beauty is also what has long lighted the fires of the lust for possession (even though possession may then be established, as Serres thinks, by acts of defilement, such as dirtying or polluting). There is certainly no question today as to the need to rethink, in a philosophically sophisticated manner, the ethical interrelations of humans with nature (an interrelation that the Western ethical tradition has, for all its brilliance, distressingly neglected). This rethinking cannot meaningfully be done on a purely empirical or pragmatic basis (important though pragmatic thought and “hands-on” work continue to be); but it must ultimately issue from deeper intellectual wellsprings. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of expression, as articulated in the contexts of aesthetics, the study of nature, and ultimately ontology is promising for environmental thought for a plurality of reasons. Most obviously, Merleau-Ponty seeks philosophically to expose the phylogenetic bond of humanity with animality and ultimately with all of nature. He interlinks carnality and ideality and, in treating expression as fundamentally equal to phenomenalization, he allows it to encompass animal appearance and behavior (including embryonic maturation), and animal pre-culture, as well as, on the human and historical level, institution, reinstitution, the creation of symbolic forms, and the passage to culture. It is striking that Merleau-Ponty’s privileged interlocutors, the rationalists , and in particular Spinoza and Leibniz, seem to be insensitive to the ethical implications of their own expressive understanding of nature. Hans Jonas succinctly characterizes Spinoza’s understanding of the organismic individual as the sustained sequence of states of a unified plurality, with only the form of its union enduring, while the parts come and go. Substantial identity is thus replaced by formal identity, and the relation of parts to [3.145.23.123] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 07:08...

Share