Nature and Logos

A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty's Fundamental Thought

William S. Hamrick, Jan Van der Veken

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438436166, 9781438436173
• eBook ISBN: 9781438436180
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

This is the first booklength account of how Maurice Merleau-Ponty used certain texts by Alfred North Whitehead to develop an ontology based on nature, and how he could have used other Whitehead texts that he did not know in order to complete his last ontology. This account is enriched by several of Merleau-Ponty's unpublished writings not previously available in English, by the first detailed treatment of certain works by F.W.J. Schelling in the course of showing how they exerted a substantial influence on both Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, and by the first extensive discussion of Merleau-Ponty's interest in the Stoics's notion of the twofold logos —the logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos. This book provides a thorough exploration of the consonance between these two philosophers in their mutual desire to overcome various bifurcations of nature, and of nature from spirit, that continued to haunt philosophy and science since the 17th-century.

I

NATURE AS A PHENOMENON

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Nature appears in Merleau-Ponty's early texts more as a context for a phenomenology of embodied existence than as a topic of interest in its own right.¹ Since the philosopher became intensely interested in nature only from 1955 or 1956 on, one might think that an exploration of the earlier phenomenology of perception and behavior constitutes a digression from the later “new” ontology. Yet there are at least two reasons why this is not so.

First, although Merleau-Ponty deploys his phenomenology as a critical response to previous philosophies, principally Cartesianism and its progeny, it also serves as a groundwork for the “new” ontology to come. The latter preserves the early work because, as noted in the Introduction, although Merleau-Ponty significantly changes his conception of method for doing philosophy, he does not repudiate his earlier descriptive results. Merleau-Ponty's late work “remains passionately phenomenological” in some sense because it thinks “as closely as possible to phenomenality in order to better inhabit it” (Janicaud 1991, 15). However, the later writings will advance a new way to think phenomenality and, as we shall see, drive the earlier phenomenology beyond its limits.

Furthermore, the expression, “new” ontology, shows that Merleau-Ponty does not regard his later texts as replacing phenomenology with an ontology. Since he already considered his early work to be an ontology, the later writings consist of what he took to be a more adequate ontology. In the early works, nature appears as a phenomenon, a correlate of consciousness, albeit a body-consciousness that he distinguished from a Cartesian cogito or a Kantian and Husserlian transcendental subjectivity. In The Structure of Behavior, nature is the complex of “indifferent” things, and the structure of behavior disengages the body from that complex and reinserts the body “as a totality to be understood in the perception of the spectator” (PC II, 17). In Phenomenology of Perception, perceptual consciousness is situated within nature rather than outside it, but in both works nature appears as a correlate of a body consciousness. By contrast, in the later writings, nature is no longer only what one can “show,” or “let appear” as phenomenon inasmuch as the visible is always doubled by an invisible that on principle cannot itself appear.²

Second, the earlier phenomenology provides necessary concrete details for the otherwise largely empty notions in the late texts, chiefly The Visible and the Invisible. As Rudolf Bernet rightly points out, revisiting the earlier texts prevents the central notions of The Visible and the Invisible from languishing as puzzles and remaining void of “phenomenological content” (1993, 55). One cannot go directly to the flesh for ontological understanding any more than, as Husserl never tired of stating, one can go directly to an essence. Therefore, in the current work we will approach Merleau-Ponty's late ontology of nature as he himself did—through his earlier phenomenology.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE

In these earlier writings, Merleau-Ponty portrays nature from the perspective of the lived body—also called “the phenomenal body,” “the body proper” (le corps propre), “my own body,” and “incarnate cogito”—and its correlative life world. These topics, as well as his conception of phenomenology, have been the subjects of multiple lengthy commentaries, including our own, over at least the last forty years, and Lawrence Hass's fine new study (2008) is only the latest addition. Therefore, it is not necessary or even desirable to resurvey the same ground in fine detail. Rather, our interest lies only in its major outcroppings that are most important for understanding Merleau-Ponty's early view of nature.³

To begin with, the lived body is immersed in the world with others, and exists in perceptual-behavioral circuits with things. To express this fundamental, inextricable involvement, Bernet states that Merleau-Ponty's sense of the phenomenological reduction consists of a “reduction to natural life” in place of a “reduction of natural life” (1993, 57). This is true, but only if we bear in mind that there are also certain senses of nature that Merleau-Ponty rejects. One of these, discussed by Bernet himself, is nature considered as scientific objects in the sense of wholes of isolable parts existing in external relations with each other—partes extra partes. Another is the conception of nature as an immutable substratum to which cultural meanings get added. For Merleau-Ponty, there is no fixed and abiding layer of human nature to which culture gets added. Everything about us is equally “fabricated” and “natural,”⁴ rooted in “simple biological being,” but also what eludes “the simplicity of animal life” (PhP 189/221).⁵

For example, at times our existence is dominated by biological norms, as when our desire for self-preservation holds sway. At other times, however, those norms can be displaced by a “personal choice” (Ibid., 78/93) that places our continued existence in jeopardy, such as risking our lives to save others in danger of being killed. Because there are “many ways” for a body and consciousness to exist (Ibid., 124/144), the body supports “an indefinite number of symbolic systems” that surpass the meanings of “ ‘natural’ gestures,” but which also atrophy if not continually funded by our bodily involvement with other people and with things around us (RC 9/18).

Because there is no immutably natural substratum of our existence, Merleau-Ponty will later criticize Marx in a way to which we shall return with Sartre. He will argue that Marx's theory of history is grounded on a view of unexplained and “perhaps mythical” Nature⁶ that is supposed to be self-contained, “pure object, being in itself,” but which is never present in our experience because the latter always “shapes and transforms it” (RC 64/93).⁷ Therefore, this pure Nature in itself is “everywhere and nowhere, like an obsessive fear” (Ibid).

In his early phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty's positive characterization of Nature begins with this unity of the physical and the spiritual, the body and its cultural milieu, and develops with increasing specificity and sophistication to symbolic systems. At the first and most basic level, Nature presents itself to us as pre-predicative, anonymous, pre-personal bodily life out of which personal life develops by means of a “recovery [reprise]” (PhP 254/293). This pre-personal life is characterized by the “on,” i.e., “one perceives” rather than a cogito that intervenes with personal acts. It is a “silent” or “tacit cogito” (PhP 402/461), “another subject beneath me” that takes up a preexisting world and that designates my place in it. This “tacit cogito” is described as a “captive and natural spirit,” as opposed to “the momentary body” that is deployed in making “personal choices” (PhP 254/294).

For Merleau-Ponty, human existence consists of a continual interchange of the pre-personal and the personal (PhP 84/99), the natural aspects of the lived body, of material things, other people, and the world around us, and the body's spiritual dimensions. However, the pre-personal and the personal are not joined together externally, an in-itself and a for-itself, as separable “parts.” Rather, they interpenetrate, so to say: personal life finds its anchorage in Nature because the pre-personal body is already animated by life. The “physiological” and the “psychic” “gear into each other” (s'engrènent les uns sur les autres) (Ibid., 77/91) because they are never separated to begin with.⁸ Moreover, just as the existential structure of Dasein for Heidegger consists of being-in-the-world-with-others, so also, for Merleau-Ponty, the lived body, other people, material things, and the world around us all form a unitary system. Thus, Merleau-Ponty writes, there is an “ontological world and body⁹ which we find at the core of the subject” (Ibid., 408/467).

In its continual oscillation with the personal, the pre-personal life of the body manifests itself most directly and primarily in perception, behavior, and expression. To describe this pre-personal life, Merleau-Ponty relies heavily on the experiential and experimental results of Gestalt psychologists. Indeed, in his 1946 address to the Société française de Philosophie in which he defended the principal theses of Phenomenology of Perception, his explanation of “perception as an original modality of consciousness” begins immediately by referring to “the unprejudiced study of perception by [Gestalt]psychologists” (Prim.Percp. 12/103).

It has proven convenient for some philosophers during and after Merleau-Ponty's lifetime to indict his work as “merely psychology”—a charge that has been leveled more than once against phenomenology itself. In the 1946 address, he showed that he was aware of this criticism (Ibid., 13/404) and subsequent discussion indicated that he was correct to anticipate the objection. As we shall see, his struggle to demonstrate the ontological import of phenomenology formed one of his main reasons for developing a “new” ontology.

Merleau-Ponty takes both Gestalt psychology and phenomenology to have significant ontological import, although the Gestaltists themselves, he believed, did not grasp how their research results undermined their causal account of perception.¹⁰ Their traditionally mechanistic account of perception construed it to be the passive effect of prior and separable stimuli, whereas their research results revealed perception to be an active process of spontaneously organizing or structuring a given perceptual field. Perception is, thus, neither passive nor separate and distinct from the stimuli that purportedly determine it. Instead, in the way that perception selectively arranges and organizes stimuli according to certain bodily norms, to achieve equilibrium with its environment, perception helps constitute the stimuli as such. Therefore, objective properties and subjective intentions are not just intermixed, but in fact create a new type of unity.

This new type of unity comes about because, as opposed to supposedly atomistic sensations of pure color, sound, and the like—which are actually the objects of a very artificially framed consciousness, usually in laboratory situations¹¹—the simplest perceptual datum forms part of a perceptual field as a focal point against a background context, and is already “laden with a meaning”(PhP 4/10). A perceptual field opens itself to us and we to it. We inhabit this field not as spectators, but as active participants, and it is this participation that explains the fact that body and world are to be found “at the core of the subject.”

This participatory structuring of a perceptual field is evident in the description of a Gestalt structure. Negatively, Merleau-Ponty defines it as a whole that is irreducible to the sum of its “parts” (VI 204/258). The structure is neither a thing, a collection of things, nor opposed to them. Positively, a Gestalt is a whole in which each part is internally related to each other part. The whole is present in each part, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and a change in one part does not leave the others undisturbed. Hence, each part is interdependent rather than independent.

Exactly how such experiences are “laden with meaning” depends on how values of space and motion and rest are distributed according to the focal point and background of the phenomenon. To consider only spatial values, there is the way that a change of the spatial significance of some part(s) within the whole changes its (their) experiential identity as, for example, in Edgar Rubin's famous illustration of the “face or vases” (see, for instance, Gurwitsch 1964, 118–19), or in the equally familiar “duck/rabbit” example that Ludwig Wittgenstein discusses in The Philosophical Investigations (1968, 194). Such examples illustrate the first entry into Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the celebrated theme of ambiguity—that “what we live or think always has several meanings” (PhP 269/197). Here, as with bodily phenomena discussed below, the chief significance of ambiguity is to stress the active structuring of a perceptual field as opposed to deterministic causal accounts of perception and behavior. Ambiguity also permeates Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of social phenomena, as discussed in detail elsewhere (e.g., Hamrick 1989).

For the same reason, such phenomena also contradict the ontology of the object. They demonstrate that what is given in perception is not something purely objective to a spectator-like subject, but rather comes into being in the way that the lived body participates in the fact that and how it is given.

This is certainly the case with the well-known Müller-Lyer illusion (PhP 6/12) in which, when angled lines are attached to horizontal lines of equal length, the two horizontal lines appear unequal. What is particularly interesting about this example is that not only does the phenomenon not correspond to the stimulus, but also one can know theoretically that the two horizontal lines are parallel before, during, and after the addition of the auxiliary lines and yet the illusion appears anyway. For Merleau-Ponty, this is no mere psychological curiosity, but rather something with ontological weight. Therefore, he will argue against placing the Gestalt in the framework of consciousness and cognition (VI 205–206/258–59). Each “part” has a functional significance within the whole that is, in turn, “considered as the equilibrated and balanced coexistence of its functional parts in their thoroughgoing interdependence” (Gurwitsch 1964, 149).

The selective structuring of a perceptual field is also temporal. A melody, for instance, does not equal the sum of its notes because each note has only a functional significance within the whole, and Merleau-Ponty points out that this fact explains why the melody survives transpositions to a different key. Conversely, one change merely in the relationships between the notes will suffice to decisively change the melody (SNS 49/87). Similarly, in films the perception of any given shot is contextualized by what precedes it, and this sequence of shots generates a new whole that does not add up to the mere sum of its individual shots (Ibid., 54/97).

The organization of a perceptual field likewise characterizes behavior, for different situational responses occur to the same bodily excitation. We react to stimuli holistically, and in different situations they will assume different meanings for the bodily organism. The reflex is not the product of preexisting stimuli because there is a reversibility between the two such that the reflex “turns back upon” the stimuli and gives them a meaning that derives from the entire situation (PhP 79/94). Therefore, subjective intentions and objective properties are thoroughly mixed up with each other and comprise “a new whole” (SC 13/11).

For Merleau-Ponty, this “mixed-upness” implies that perception and behavior are intelligible sense-giving activities that evidence a pre-reflective motor intentionality anterior to the intervention of conscious acts or reflective constitutions of meaning. It is usual to point out that intentionality, as Husserl conceives it, means that consciousness is always of something, but it is not as common to add that intentionality is much more than that. Motor intentionality for Merleau-Ponty is not just one feature of experience among others, but also their common pivot. It is the axial theme of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of incarnation because it is through our motor intentionality that, as opposed to the objective body, the lived body, also called “the knowing body” (PhP 390 n. 1/357, n.4), becomes a system of powers for exploring and making sense of its world. It becomes an “I can” in addition to an “I think,” a view that persists in Merleau-Ponty's later works as well (OE 163/21). This “I can” or “I am able to,” which Merleau-Ponty borrows from Husserl's unpublished papers (PhP 137/160)—possibly the manuscripts that became Ideas II (see §60, 277)—is the means by which perception can become “a nascent logos” (“un logos à l'état naissant”) (Prim. Percp. 25/133).

In the birth of this logos, consciousness and mobility are so intimately intertwined that either can be said to be the cause of the other (RC 8/17), though they are simply two “halves” of the same whole. Conscious awareness and movement measured in objective space amount only to two abstract aspects of one existence (Ibid.). Or, as Merleau-Ponty expresses it later in “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” motor intentionality “ties together the stages of my exploration, the aspects of the thing, and the two series to each other” (Ibid., 167/211).

Further, the motor intentionality through which we possess many holds on the world provides in the same movement both the unity of the senses and the more inclusive unity of bodily processes and systems. In our intentional directedness toward the world, the senses achieve a “never-finished integration into one knowing organism” (PhP 233/270). The senses have a synergy in virtue of which they inte...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Nature as a Phenomenon
• Chapter II: From Dualism to a Twofold Ontology
• Chapter III: The Way of All Flesh
• Chapter IV: Logos Endiathetos and Logos Proforikos
• Chapter V: The Schellingian and Bergsonian Heritage
• Chapter VI: Nature and Life
• Chapter VII: Beyond the Limits of Phenomenology: The Fate of the Subject
• Chapter VIII: Com-prehending the Flesh
• Conclusion
• References