The Logos of the Living World

Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language

Louise Westling

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780823255665
  9780823255658
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823255672
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Today we urgently need to reevaluate the human place in the world in relation to other animals. This book puts Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy into dialogue with literature, evolutionary biology, and animal studies. In a radical departure from most critical animal studies, it argues for evolutionary continuity between human cultural and linguistic behaviors and the semiotic activities of other animals.

In his late work, Derrida complained of philosophers who denied that animals possessed such faculties, but he never investigated the wealth of scientific studies of actual animal behavior. Most animal studies theorists still fail to do this. Yet more than fifty years ago, Merleau-Ponty carefully examined the philosophical consequences of scientific animal studies, with profound implications for human language and culture. For him, "animality is the logos of the sensible world: an incorporated meaning." Human being is inseparable from animality.

This book differs from other studies of Merleau-Ponty by emphasizing his lifelong attention to science. It shows how his attention to evolutionary biology and ethology anticipated recent studies of animal cognition, culture, and communication.

CHAPTER

1

A Philosophy of Life

Human beings and their cultures are deeply enmeshed in the coevolutionary history of life forms, as well as being dynamically involved with the nonliving forms, materials, and energies of the world. But most of Western philosophical tradition has defined humans in dualistic terms as essentially outside of nature, functioning as disembodied minds with access to timeless spiritual realms. As philosopher Mark Johnson puts it, “Although most people never think about it very carefully, they live their lives assuming and acting according to a set of dichotomies that distinguish mind from body, reason from emotion, and thought from feeling.”¹ Johnson locates the source of such mistaken assumptions in the way embodied thinking is hidden from our normal awareness, so that we have the illusion that our minds are separate from our bodies. Whatever the physiological cause, this way of thinking is an ancient pattern that is clearly expressed in Plato’s works, in Christian theology, in humanist proclamations of the Italian Renaissance, and most systematically in the mechanistic philosophy of Descartes, which until the late nineteenth century dominated the intellectual life of our culture.

Perhaps as part of a reaction against Enlightenment reason and the blight of industrial cities, a fascination with the animal world and the planet’s history gave birth to a wave of new life sciences in the nineteenth century, among which Charles Darwin’s work was a climactic breakthrough. In a sense, everyone in Western intellectual life has been a Darwinian since the ideas published in the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man began to overwhelm resistance in the last decades of the nineteenth century. But at the same time, modern urban life and its increasing technological sophistication have allowed popular culture and much of intellectual life to continue assuming Enlightenment concepts about human superiority to all other life and essential separation from it. But the deepening sense of environmental crisis brought by widespread extinctions, melting glaciers, droughts, and extreme weather events associated with global climate change makes these contradictory assumptions increasingly impossible to sustain. Phenomenology, and particularly the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, moves beyond this confusion, offering a coherent theoretical grounding for environmentally oriented perspectives on culture and particularly for ecocriticism with its attention to literature’s exploration of the human place in the natural world. 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 project, enough of the work in progress exists in manuscript to indicate its shape and importance as a radically ecological philosophy.

Because phenomenology was developed by Edmund Husserl early in the twentieth century in reaction to a European philosophical tradition which seemed to have reached a dead end, at the outset we should briefly sketch the specific terms by which that tradition has defined the human place in the natural world. Pico della Mirandola provided one of the most extreme formulations of humanism in his Oration on the Dignity of Man of 1486. There he described man as an amphibian who can move at will up and down the hierarchy of nature, with the power to transcend the flesh, the earth, and even the position of the angels. As a free and proud agent, a human being can shape his or her own being, descending “to the lower, brutish forms of life” or rising to the superior, divine orders as “a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the chambers of the mind, … [neither a creature] of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed with human flesh.”²

Pico’s vision became systematized during the scientific revolution that began in the seventeenth century. In England, Francis Bacon transformed such tendencies into what Carolyn Merchant describes as a program advocating total control of nature for human benefit through science. In France, René Descartes and his fellow rationalists Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi introduced a mechanistic view of the world “as an antidote to intellectual uncertainty and as a new rational basis for social stability,” according to Merchant.³ Descartes determined never to accept anything as true that was not certain and evident in his mind, and therefore he believed that doubting was the same as ignorance. In order to attain certainty, he insisted that only simple problems with clear solutions should be explored, and from those solutions one could move by degrees to composite knowledge.⁴ Because our senses often mislead us, he decided that they could not lead to certainty. Instead he relied on Mind as a disembodied essence outside an essentially inert, mechanical Nature, and this Cogito links our species with the divine order through the clear language of mathematics. The first truth that struck him with certainty was his famous declaration, “I think, therefore I am,” which he made the first principle of his philosophy (51) and which he extended to humans in general. Our whole essence or nature is to think and is something which, in order to exist, “does not have need of any place, and does not depend on any material thing” (53). In contrast to humans, animals “do not have any mind at all, and … it is nature that acts in them according to the disposition of their organs,” Descartes explained, “just as one sees that a clock, which is composed only of wheels and of springs,” can register accurate time (83). Isaac Newton fully realized the kind of vision Descartes espoused by providing what Merchant calls “the most powerful synthesis of the new mathematical philosophy” in his Principia Mathematica of 1687, thus epitomizing the “dead world resulting from mechanism” (276). As we can see in retrospect, the Cartesian-Newtonian picture of human existence outside a mechanistic, static natural world prevailed for at least two hundred years but began to erode as late nineteenth-century scientific discoveries in biology, geology, and even physics gradually undermined its premises.

Phenomenology was born during the collapse of Cartesian science under the challenge of the New Physics early in the twentieth century, during the same general period that saw the gradual emergence of evolutionary biology in the work of such scientists as Ernst Haekel, Jakob von Uexküll, J. B. S. Haldane, and Theodosius Dobzhansky. Phenomenologists sought a radical new way of doing philosophy, not trapped in any tradition or a priori metaphysical premises such as those of Kant, Hegel, or the positivists. Explicitly initiated as a coherent program by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology was a radical return to “concrete, lived human experience in all its richness”⁵ and away from the long Western tradition of idealism and skepticism about the reality of the external world. Husserl’s followers Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty extended his thinking into the immanent richness of everyday life and the profound consequences of embodiment within the dynamic life of the earth. Merleau-Ponty describes the experience of discovering phenomenology in terms that aptly describe its value for environmentalists, for it is less an encounter with a new philosophy than it is a recognition of what we have been waiting for (PP lxxi).

Three overlapping generations are represented in this turning of Western philosophy: Husserl, who lived from 1859 to 1938 and was Heidegger’s mentor and friend; Heidegger, born in 1889 and living until 1976; and Merleau-Ponty, born in 1908 but living only until 1961. Their work opened a new direction for Western philosophy, and it provides a crucial grounding for ecological thought. Husserl and his followers believed that the proper approach to thinking was to describe phenomena instead of trying to capture truth in abstract logical systems. Phenomenology also rejected the Cartesian objectivist position assumed in classical scientific practice, and the naive positivism (or naturalism) based on it, that places human subjects outside or above a material world whose mechanical operations they can precisely describe. As Merleau-Ponty explains in Phenomenology of Perception, phenomenology seeks to define a middle ground between the dualistic extremes of intellectualism (idealism) and empiricism (realism) or, in other words, to join “extreme subjectivism with an extreme objectivism through its concept of the world or of rationality” (lxxxiv). In postmodern terms, such a position between extreme constructivism and naïve assertions of direct access to reality means that practical experience in the natural world is mediated by human perceptual abilities and culture but can be described in provisional ways by modern scientific disciplines. Phenomenology approached such a theoretical basis in Merleau-Ponty’s late work, in which he sought to establish a theoretical grounding in biology and ethology, as we shall see in the next chapter. “Merleau-Ponty wants always to emphasize the particularities of the relations to the world of different kinds of organisms, their specific kinds of embodiment, and their different environments” (Moran 417). Because Merleau-Ponty extended phenomenological thought in ways which anticipated concerns and discoveries of the life sciences of our own day, Renaud Barbaras says that his ontology deserves a place beyond Husserl and Heidegger, where “phenomenology can read its own future.”⁶ Before directly engaging Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, it will help to suggest how his work moves beyond Husserl’s and Heidegger’s.

Edmund Husserl urged a refocusing of philosophical attention on ordinary lived experience, which he called the Lebenswelt, or “lifeworld.” He described this world as intersubjective, shared with the other beings and things that also experience it (Moran 175–181).⁷ Although he called for a concentration on immediate experience, however, he never could abandon the concept of transcendent mind, which made him finally an idealist (Moran 77–78, 168–174). Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty developed Husserl’s picture of humans as dynamically engaged in an unfolding temporal reality, and both claim the language of poetry as the proper language for questioning that situation. As Charles Taylor says, “one might claim some preeminence for Heidegger, in that he got there first. In the case of Merleau-Ponty, the breakthrough is plainly built on Heidegger’s work.”⁸ But for all Heidegger’s profound radicalism, he remained bound within a deeply European frame of reference and grounded his philosophy on a cultural nostalgia for classical Greece which gives it originary status. This tendency is part of what led some of his critics in the 1930s to find idealism hovering in the background of his work. He was anti-Darwinist,⁹ antagonistic to science through most of his career,¹⁰ and a believer in a virtually sacred human superiority and separateness among living creatures. Although Merleau-Ponty continued to think in dialogue with both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s work throughout his life, he broke away from that kind of hierarchical view. He insisted on taking our existence as bodies seriously, while Heidegger evaded doing so, and that made all the difference. Merleau-Ponty’s work is engaged and congruent with twentieth-century science. He assumed that humans coevolved with all other life forms, and he embraced a profound human kinship with animals that Heidegger found appalling, as we shall see in the next chapter. Brute or wild being was for Merleau-Ponty the very ground of human life, as he explained in his final, posthumously published book: “This environment of brute existence and essence is not something mysterious: we never quit it, we have no other environment” (VI 116–117).

In order to understand this perspective, we should review the general context for Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s work and look more closely at the appeal of Heidegger’s philosophy for ecocriticism and at some key problems in Heidegger’s definition of the human. We should consider positions Merleau-Ponty shares with Heidegger and finally examine how Merleau-Ponty moved in a new direction that fulfilled Husserl’s intention of restoring philosophical attention to things themselves and to the dynamic lifeworld. Such a refutation of traditional subject/object, spirit/matter, mind/body dualisms philosophically restores human beings to the rest of the living community. The dialogic relationships among these philosophers are richly textured and can thus be described from a variety of conceptual perspectives, but their relevance for environmental thinking rests especially on the ways they define the human place in the natural world and philosophy’s relation to the life sciences.

Martin Heidegger spent ten years deeply engaged with Husserl’s philosophy in an attempt to fulfill his mentor’s project of returning to the “things themselves.” The result was Being and Time, in which he radically questioned what it is to be human in an antidualist, anti-intellectualist examination of how meaning is immanent for us in the ordinary experiences of daily life (Moran 193–194). In this enterprise, Heidegger in some respects was doing for philosophy what modernist novelists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were doing for literature. The minutiae of Leopold Bloom’s consciousness of moving through Dublin on June 16, 1904, or of Marcel’s experience of lying in bed as a boy, waiting for his mother to come up the stairs, or of Clarissa Dalloway’s complex awareness throughout a June day in London soon after World War I—all of these literary revelations of meaning, or what Joyce called epiphanies, attend to similar phenomena as those Heidegger sought to examine. He saw his work as the development of a phenomenological ontology that examined the question of Being, defining human existence with the term Dasein to indicate how Being comes into presence for us through language and self-consciousness.

After the turmoil of World War II and the political difficulties resulting from his involvement with National Socialism, Heidegger began to concentrate on the concept of human dwelling on the earth as a way to articulate the distinctively human relation to Being that he had formulated as Dasein. In 1951, he asked, “What is the state of dwelling in our precarious age?”¹¹ In a group of lectures composed around this time, he sought in the figures of myth and poetry some “saving power” that would lead to a new way of understanding humanity’s position in an age of technology. As Axel Goodbody remarks, in Heidegger’s later works, he “transferred to poetry the hopes he had once notoriously placed in the regeneration of society by National Socialism.”¹² He was concerned with many of the questions that trouble us today, such as the modern sense of homelessness, the quality of our being in relation to the planet and the cosmos (earth and sky), and the need for humans to care for the earth and respect its spaces, denizens, and things. He lamented the collapsing of distances caused by airplane travel, the draining out and flattening of experience by television, and the loss of rootedness in earthly life brought by space travel. Many environmental philosophers and literary scholars have found this thinking suggestive of hopeful grounds for a new, environmentally responsible consciousness.

Jonathan Bate’s final chapter in The Song of the Earth offers Heidegger’s late philosophy as an ecopoetics, wherein literature grounds human beings and allows them to save the earth.¹³ The poet discloses the being of entities and, in this sacred action, lets them be most fully themselves (Bate 258); Bate defines poetic dwelling as the distinctive way human beings inhabit the earth. Other writers such as poet Martin Harrison and philosopher Michael Zimmerman have also found Heidegger a central thinker for the emerging ecological consciousness. But Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism and reactionary German modernism eventually led Zimmerman to question the degree to which his philosophy offers an adequate understanding of the human place in the world and poetry’s ecological possibilities.¹⁴ Bate also raises the question of Heidegger’s political past but sidesteps its consequences by recourse to Paul Celan’s poem about a disappointing visit with the philosopher for which the sight of the healing plant arnica offered some comfort (268–273). Celan had lost both his parents in a Nazi internment camp and wanted to confront Heidegger on his Nazi past. Although Heidegger apparently remained silent on the subject, Bate suggests that the poem’s opening images of the arnica blossom “have connotations of healing, of the possibility of some soothing of the bruise of the Holocaust” (270). Greg Garrard acknowledges the ecocritical importance of Heidegger’s emphasis on harmonious dwelling but admits that it has an unfortunate association with the reactionary and xenophobic “blood and soil” enthusiasms of National Socialism (Ecocriticism 111–113). More recently, Garrard has come to a more extreme position, dismissing Heidegger’s “views on ontology, technology, history, and poetry” in order to show “that what is distinctive in Heidegger’s work after Being and Time (1927) is wrong, and what is persuasive is not distinctive” (“Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism” 251).

Putting aside the controversy over Heidegger’s Nazi associations, which will never be fully resolved, we can find in his examination of human dwelling on the earth concerns that motivated late nineteenth-century opponents of industrialism, such as John Ruskin and William Morris, and that seem even more pressing today. But a closer look at his essays from the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as “Letter on Humanism” (1947), “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (1951), and “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953), in which the concept of careful dwelling is developed, reveals a troubling humanistic elitism. Heidegger gra...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Philosophy of Life
• 2. Animal Kin
• 3. Language Is Everywhere
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List