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Merleau-Ponty’s Ecophenomenology
- University of Virginia Press
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LOUISE WESTLING Merleau-Ponty’s Ecophenomenology Maurice Merleau-Ponty is the only major European philosopher who embraces the consequences of evolution and sees humans as interdependent members of the ecosystem. His thinking manifests a lifelong engagement with modern science, which he saw in a necessary complementarity with philosophy. Although his untimely death prevented the completion of his ambitious philosophy of nature, enough of the work in progress exists in manuscript to indicate its shape and importance as a radically ecological philosophy. In contrast to the long tradition of Western philosophical dualism, phenomenology from Husserl to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty restores attention to the human immersion in nature and the meaning immanent in ordinary experience. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty saw literature as a central mode of biocentric dwelling. Heidegger argued that humans are the shepherds of Being who care for the earth by ‘‘letting things be.’’ However, he was horrified by the bodily resemblance of humans to other animals and argued that an abyss yawns between us and them.∞ Merleau-Ponty, in contrast , came to embrace the kinship of living organisms through coevolution and described language as an embodied force emerging in many dimensions and beings in the natural world. He argued that that each human—like any other organism—exists in a chiasmic embrace with the surrounding world. Posthumanist theory and a new wave of theoretical attention to human/ animal relations, such as Derrida’s late writings, are congruent with much of Merleau-Ponty’s thought and extend its concerns into interdisciplinary work in evolutionary biology and recent studies of animal sentience and culture. Merleau-Ponty’s thinking moved from early assumptions about human superiority to other beings, in The Structure of Behavior, to an exhaustive examination of embodiment in Phenomenology of Perception. His late work developed a chiasmic ontology of wild being in The Visible and the Invisible merleau-ponty’s ecophenomenology ∞≤π and a simultaneous exploration of the philosophical dimensions of modern science in lectures published recently in English as Nature. He saw human language as a late event in biological evolution, growing out of immanent structures of meaning throughout the natural world.≤ Merleau-Ponty suggests that all organisms exist intertwined and in constant interaction with the flesh of the world around them. He explained, ‘‘This environment of brute existence and essence is not something mysterious : we never quit it, we have no other environment.’’≥ Such a philosophy is congruent with sciences such as quantum physics and molecular biology which revolutionized the understanding of the natural world in the twentieth century, and whose philosophical ramifications Merleau-Ponty was considering in the Nature lectures. Though he did not live long enough to know the genetic and molecular discoveries which would demonstrate a common heritage and sharing of genetic material for all organisms, his concept of the flesh of the world anticipated it. His understanding of its dynamic unfolding through geologic time accords with Lynn Margulis’s recent assertion that ‘‘all beings alive today are equally evolved. All have survived over three thousand million years of evolution from common bacterial ancestors.’’∂ We share the same fate as equal participants in the biota with its dense ecological texture of interdependence. Merleau-Ponty’s lifelong relationship with science was appreciative yet critical. In the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, where he seeks to place his own enterprise in the context of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s work, he defines uncritical scientific thought as ‘‘both naïve and at the same time dishonest’’ because it fails to admit that its access to the world comes only indirectly, mediated by human consciousness. In contrast, phenomenology seeks to restore awareness of that world ‘‘which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.’’∑ Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s work was consistently engaged with the science of his day, particularly with Gestalt psychology and the disciplines of neuroscience during the 1930s and 1940s, and with physics, animal studies, human physiology, and evolutionary biology in the 1950s. There is no contradiction between his insistence on recognizing the limitations of scientific knowledge and his lifelong interdisciplinary involvement with its major disciplines. He valued the careful attention to nature that science alone provides, while at the same time his critical distance enabled his style of phenomenology to complement...