Imagining Bodies: Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Imagination

SEVEN. Elemental Imagining

E l e m e n t a l I m a g i n i n g 1 2 1 121 SEVEN Elemental Imagining W hile studying at college I often found myself on the weekend peering out the window of a Greyhound bus as it drove through the countryside toward home. The route followed a beautiful river valley lined by ancient elms and closed in by colorful rolling hills of hay and cattle. About halfway down the valley the bus would take a sharp turn toward the river and ascend the tall steel girder bridge that straddled the two banks of the river. As we began our ascent, my attention was divided between the scenery around me and the book that I had been reading, especially the following paragraph, which seemed to leap off the page: The bridge swings over the stream “with ease and power.” . . . It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighbourhood, [and] guides and attends the stream through the meadows. Resting upright in the stream’s bed, the bridge-piers bear the swing of the arches that leave the stream’s waters to run their course . . . the bridge holds [their] flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more. . . . Always and ever differently the bridge initiates the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to other banks and in the end, as mortals, to the other side. . . . The bridge gathers, as a passage that crosses, before the divinities [such as when] we explicitly think 1 2 2 E l e m e n t a l I m a g i n i n g of, and visibly give thanks for, their presence, as in the figure of the saint of the bridge. The bridge gathers to it itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.1 These are, of course, the words of Martin Heidegger, and they assumed a particular meaning for me on this Friday evening journey toward home. Heidegger’s description of the bridge suggests that it is more than simply steel and coil, but precisely the activity of the gathering of the river’s banks, of the autumn sky overhead, of the spiritual mood punctuated by the spire of a church in the background, and of me, the traveling mortal, for whom the bridge is a passageway home. The gathering, as well, occurs in “its own way,” in a way different from a hydroelectric dam or a small stone bridge over a country stream. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty sought to revive a sense of wonder concerning our experience with things, and in particular to renew the philosophical study of Nature. In a working note he reminds himself of the need to conduct “a psychoanalysis of Nature” (VI 267/VIF 321), a curious suggestion, for traditional psychoanalysis is applied to human beings who have minds and souls, things that are traditionally not attributed to rocks and rivers and trees. Behind Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion, however, lies a radically new way of understanding our relation to Nature and the meaning that Nature offers to us. Since there are only a few references to a psychoanalysis of Nature in Merleau-Ponty’s work, we are left to piece together what it would involve by considering similar comments by his contemporaries . Two, in particular, are Jean-Paul Sartre and Gaston Bachelard. Sartre, for instance, describes what he calls the “material meanings” of things such as “the human sense of needles, snow, grained wood, of crowded, of greasy, etc.,” and claims that they “are as real as the world, neither more nor less, and to come into the world means to rise up in the midst of these meanings.” His proposed analysis is “to be concerned with establishing the way in E l e m e n t a l I m a g i n i n g 1 2 3 which each thing is the objective symbol of being and of the relation of human reality to this being.” He continues: “All this comes to pass as if we come to life in a universe where feelings and acts are all charged with something material, have a substantial stuff, are really soft, dull, slimy, low, elevated, etc., and in which material substances have originally a...