INVENTIONS SIXTEEN Nature and animality Scott Churchill Merleau-Ponty’s interest in nature in general and animality in particular was first made known in his Structure of Behavior, which was an effort to explore the relationship of consciousness and nature by establishing the “founding” of consciousness in nature itself. At the same time, he wanted to explore how nature was in turn “given” to consciousness, and this in fact is the question raised on the first page of The Structure of Behavior. One can already observe here the ambiguity at play within Merleau-Ponty’s thought, in this case his alternating between the givenness of nature to consciousness and the “foundedness” of consciousness in nature. Alphonse de Waelhens observed that for Merleau-Ponty “the natural experience of man situates him from the beginning in a world of things and consists for him in orienting himself among them and taking a stand” (SB: xxiv). While his Phenomenology of Perception is situated mostly at the level of this “natural [pre-scientific] experience”, The Structure of Behavior took scientific experience as its point of departure. His aim was to show that “the facts and the materials gathered together by this science are sufficient to contradict each of the interpretive doctrines to which behaviourism and Gestalt psychology have implicitly or explicitly resorted” (ibid.: xxv). His examination of the scientific experience of nature was first approached through a critique of the behaviourists’ efforts to observe behaviour as reducible to antecedent events and contingencies of reinforcement. MerleauPonty was interested, however, in deeper issues: what is the “being” of nature and the “being” of consciousness such that an understanding of one by the other is possible? This enquiry drew Merleau-Ponty 174 9781844651153_4_016.pm5 174 25/03/2008, 14:42 NATURE AND ANIMALITY into a discussion of Gestalt psychology’s notion of isomorphism – the thesis that there is a corresponding kinship between consciousness and nature such that “in a given case the organization of experience and the underlying physiological facts have the same structure” (Köhler 1947: 177) – and eventually into a critique of its intellectualist bias (in so far as isomorphism names but neither explains nor clarifies the ontological relation of consciousness and nature). Within Merleau-Ponty’s critique of existing psychological theories, the intellectualist bias of the Gestalt psychologists became the counterpart to the realist bias found in the behaviourists’ untenable epistemological stance (empiricism). Eventually, in the third part of The Structure of Behavior, MerleauPonty had begun to take another approach, examining nature through a consideration of the physical and vital orders, and consciousness (as an extension of nature) through an examination of the human order. The result of this explication was to place consciousness and nature into a structural relation, where, in so far as consciousness is a distinctive characteristic of the human order (which, in turn, both transcends and subsumes the orders below it), consciousness must accordingly incorporate the order of nature within itself. The relationship between consciousness and nature was referred to by Merleau-Ponty as a “structure” because of the double implication of this term in so far as it refers both to the order of knowing (the perceptual relation of the knower to the known) and to the order of being (the ontological kinship of knower and known). Thus MerleauPonty could say, “I am able, being connatural with the world, to discover a sense in certain aspects of being without having myself endowed them with it through any constituting operation” (PP: 217, emphasis added). It is because the world of nature and my own lived consciousness are of the same “flesh” (as he would later refer to it in The Visible and the Invisible) that consciousness is able to enter into a relationship of knowing through kinship with the world. Genuinely scientific knowledge of nature would ultimately be a “knowledge by acquaintance” rather than a merely theoretical “knowledge about” nature. Indeed, this experientially grounded way of knowing led MerleauPonty to articulate the structural connection between consciousness and nature on the basis of a relational bond. Merleau-Ponty was interested in showing “how a higher order is founded on a lower and in a sense contains it, but at the same time takes it over and integrates it into new structures which cannot be explained by those that are taken over” ( John Wild, Foreword SB: xiii). In this dialectical play of 175 9781844651153_4_016.pm5 175 25/03/2008, 14:42 INVENTIONS “parts” within a “whole”, human existence is viewed as emerging from nature. It was Merleau-Ponty’s aim to show how the human order is founded upon, while taking up and transforming, the vital order (which in turn is a taking up and transforming of its own foundation in the physical order). It is interesting to note that this follows a similar train of thought in Husserl’s Ideas II, which moved from Material Nature to Animal Nature to the Spiritual World, in order to show how the “constitution” of each level both leads to and is surpassed by the succeeding level. Merleau-Ponty would return to this general theme in his lecture courses at the Collège de France during the mid- to late 1950s, where he was developing a philosophy that would dialectically weave together and transcend the existing conceptions of nature represented by the Cartesian and Kantian traditions. These modern philosophies had effectively positioned consciousness (as a self-reflective agent, a for-itself that is always anchored in the concrete) against nature (as the sum total of all material objects, the in-itself, which is in turn transformed by human history). In these lecture courses he presented nature as “an object from which we have arisen, in which our beginnings have been posited little by little until the very moment of tying themselves to an existence which they continue to sustain and aliment” (TL: 64). One hears in this an echo of the way in which he had earlier posited the relation between existence and carnality, both in The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception. In his assessment of mechanistic physiology, Merleau-Ponty had been struck by the fundamental contingency of our freedom: “The question is . . . Why our being in the world, which provides all our reflexes with their meaning, and which is thus their basis, nevertheless delivers itself over to them and is finally based upon them” (PP: 86). Such a dilemma exists only when we allow ourselves to dwell within the alternatives posed by a materialist conception of the body and an intellectualist conception of the soul. That is, when the body is brought into the discussion merely as a system of reflexes, and when the soul is conceived as an ethereal subject that presides over the world, we then have no way of bringing these two realms together into a true synthesis. It is not, however, the ideas of body and soul that need to be overhauled, but rather the perspectives of naturalism and intellectualism (which have distorted our conceptions of them). What is required to undercut the horns of this dilemma is more than just the “common middle term” proposed in Phenomenology of Perception (77) as a tentative solution to the dualistic opposition of mind and body (see especially his discussion there of the problem of 176 9781844651153_4_016.pm5 176 25/03/2008, 14:42 NATURE AND ANIMALITY the phantom limb: 76–82). The question for Merleau-Ponty was how to integrate impersonal physiological processes and personal acts into a singular conception of the human subject; and to point the way to such a synthesis he appealed to Heidegger’s notion of “Being-in-theworld” (ibid.: 77–81) as a unifying concept. Just as “isomorphism” for the Gestaltists alluded to a solution to the problem of how consciousness can know the world, without their having succeeded in working this solution out completely, there was something lacking in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the same problem in Phenomenology of Perception where he appropriated the expression “being-in-theworld” as a “middle term” without fully liberating himself from the dilemmas posed by Descartes’s dualism of “body and mind”. Perhaps this is why he returned to the problem of the body-subject in his later reflections on nature and animality. In the lectures he gave at the Collège de France from 1952 to 1960, Merleau-Ponty was in the process of finding a new direction for understanding the meaning of nature, consciousness, existence and being-in-the-world. He was determined in these courses to address the “fundamental problems” of a philosophy of nature (N). His goal was to lay the ground for a solution to these problems, which would (a) avoid the tendency to go merely in the opposite direction from materialism, thereby evoking a purely spiritualist conception of nature that would be both “incorporeal” and “fantastic”; and (b) result in an ontology that gave place to nature, man, spirit and history without reducing one to the other. In the first lecture course his effort took the form of indicating the direction for subsequent development. There he observed that “However surcharged with historical significations man’s perception may be, it borrows from the primordial at least its manner of presenting the object and its ambiguous evidence” (TL: 65). This “borrowing from the primordial” means more than a simple “receiving” of nature’s objects by means of our senses. It also implies a “borrowing” or appropriating of the primordial perceptual apparatus within ourselves, an apparatus that transcends mere anatomy and suggests a carnal presence to the world. This carnal presence that we are – this is the primordial “always already” constituting schema of all our perceptions, including our perception of nature, as well as ourselves, others, art and history. Hence the body in its “natural” state is for Merleau-Ponty no longer just an object of perception, but a constituting (noetic) presence as well. Following a path similar to that of Husserl in his Crisis, MerleauPonty first critiqued the Cartesian idea of nature for reducing the 177 9781844651153_4_016.pm5 177 25/03/2008, 14:42 INVENTIONS facticity of nature to its bare existence (TL: 67) – because such a conception would mean that nature contained no latent meanings within itself, “no hidden possibilities” (outside of the being given to it by God) (ibid.: 68–9). If Descartes’s concept of nature as the mere “effect” of an ultimate cause did not satisfy Merleau-Ponty, then neither did Kant’s humanistic view of “a nature that is nature for us”, constituted under the rational functions of human understanding (ibid.: 71, emphasis added). The problem for Merleau-Ponty with these views was that nature remains in both cases a mere object. Merleau-Ponty’s originality enters the picture when he tells us that we must find a way of articulating the “interior” of nature itself: It seems that within an entity that is in the world one encounters a mode of liaison which is not the connection of external causality, that is, an “interior” unlike the interior of consciousness, and thus nature must be something other than an object. (Ibid., emphasis added) What is, then, this “mode of liaison” which is an “interior” that can be reduced neither to what philosophy conceives as the interiority of consciousness nor to the external relationships which for science govern physical objects? To arrive at an improved conception of nature, Merleau-Ponty considered some of the paths taken by others, most notably Schelling (representing philosophy) and von Uexküll (representing biology). Merleau-Ponty observed that “Schelling tries to think, or rather live (leben) and experience (erleben)” (ibid.: 75) his way through the issues, and thus Schelling’s thought might avoid some of the limitations of the empiricist–intellectualist alternatives. What he found in Schelling was an “intellectual intuition” in which nature was regarded as though it were an object in a mirror – and for Merleau-Ponty, “consciousness cannot be a detached spiritual or intellectual mirror or reflection. It is intertwined with the body, which is intertwined with the world” (Low 2000: 41). Reflecting on our pre-reflective access to nature, Merleau-Ponty, following Fichte and Schelling, observed that human beings represent a development of consciousness within the natural order, and yet, “he who becomes nature is distancing himself from nature in order to learn about it” (TL: 76). It is for this reason that he turned his attention, with renewed interest, to our perception of the lives of animals: “For they bring to light the movement by which all living things, ourselves included, endeavour to give shape to a world that has not been preordained to accommodate our attempts to think it and act upon it” 178 9781844651153_4_016.pm5 178 25/03/2008, 14:42 NATURE AND ANIMALITY (WP: 73–4). Merleau-Ponty called for a “rehabilitation of the animal world” (ibid.: 77) in which we might see the ways that other living beings “proceed to trace in their environment, by the way they act or behave, their very own vision of things” (ibid.: 75). What a wonderful expression – a “rehabilitation” of the animal world, implying both our capacity to “inhabit” and “share” in the animal world and perhaps even an ethical commitment to “restoring” it to its proper place in our relations with the environment. Merleau-Ponty was inspired by the work of the early ethologists who, rather than distancing themselves from nature in order to learn about it, plunged themselves into a direct perceptual experience of it. Merleau-Ponty observed, on the basis of their studies, “all zoology assumes from our side a methodical Einfuehlung into animal behaviour, with the participation of the animal in our perceptive life and the participation of our perceptive life in animality” (TL: 97–8). Among those from whom he drew inspiration, Köhler is cited for his early efforts (in The Mentality of Apes) “to sketch the structure of the chimpanzee’s universe” (WP: 75). From Köhler, Merleau-Ponty learned the importance of lending our attention to the spectacle of the animal world, of being prepared to “live alongside” the world of animals, and of holding in abeyance our tendency of “rashly denying it any kind of interiority” (ibid.: 75). In his “Second Course on Nature”, Merleau-Ponty observed, in relation to his reading of von Uexküll, that an organism’s “behavioural activity oriented toward an Umwelt begins well before the invention of consciousness” (N: 167). Here, following his early studies in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty recognized that even before the advent of reflective consciousness, there is evidence of an interior presence to the world revealed in animal behaviour. Von Uexküll’s contribution to the history of animal psychology, Gestalt biology, and semiotics – with which he has been variously identified – was his professed interest in how living beings subjectively perceive their environment and how this perception determines their behaviour. Von Uexküll’s (1909/1932) Umwelt theory has sometimes been described as a form of neo-vitalism and therefore con-sidered a “romantic philosophy of nature” (T. von Uexküll 1992: preface). According to von Uexküll’s position, what we call the reality of the individual organism “is not to be found ‘outside’ . . . And is not to be found ‘inside’. Rather it manifests itself in Umwelten (subjective-self-worlds) like a bubble: ‘subjective-selfworld-bubbles’” (ibid.: 281). The ultimate reality – Nature – which lies “beyond and behind” the nature conceived by science – reveals 179 9781844651153_4_016.pm5 179 25/03/2008, 14:42 INVENTIONS itself only through signs. These signs therefore comprised the only true empirically given reality for von Uexküll – and the laws of signs thus became for him the only true laws of nature. Within this overall system of nature, “the mind – in the final analysis – is an organ created by nature to perceive nature” – and hence cultivation of our own minds provides proper methodological access to the world of nature. Von Uexküll asserted in his classic essay A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds, the rudiments of an approach to the world of others that would later be taken up by Merleau-Ponty: We no longer regard animals as mere machines, but as subjects whose essential activity consists of perceiving and acting . . . Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt. These different worlds, which are as manifold as the animals themselves, present to all nature lovers new lands of such wealth and beauty that a walk through them is well worth while, even though they unfold not to the physical but only to the spiritual eye. So, reader, join us as we ramble through these worlds of wonder. (1957: 6, emphasis added) To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed . . . A new world comes into being . . . This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal. (Ibid.: 5) Note that what comes into view does so only in the presence of our own perceptual apparatus which, itself being a part of nature, enables us to “resonate” with the Umwelten of the species we are attempting to know. Such an approach to the world of animals would eventually inspire a new generation of phenomenological psychiatrists to build their own approaches to understanding the “worlds” of their patients upon von Uexküll’s Umwelt research (see May et al. 1958). What we learn from von Uexküll – as well as from the existential psychiatrists – is that it is through the lived experience of identification with the behaviour of another that we discover our common ground, which is the body gifted with intentions. When I enter into a playful exchange with an ape at the zoo, I find myself living in this shared moment of experience in which his expressions belong not to him alone but to the two of us. This is how we as phenomenologists 180 9781844651153_4_016.pm5 180 25/03/2008, 14:42 NATURE AND ANIMALITY might elaborate and expand upon von Uexküll’s more rudimentary conceptualization of “participatory observation” (see Churchill 2007). It is not surprising, then, that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty saw in von Uexküll a point of departure, if not a foundation, for phenomenological considerations of animality. In his first lecture course on Nature, Merleau-Ponty called attention to the definition of nature given in Ideas II in which Husserl referred to a “domain of common primal presence for all communicating subjects” as the first and original sense of “nature” and thereby of intersubjectivity (N: 78). Husserl’s (1973) thesis was that we “originally” experience (that is, in primordial experience, or “Ur-präsenz”) both our bodies and the bodies of others – including both animals and humans – as expressive. In Ideas II he wrote: “Each movement of the Body is full of soul, the coming and going, the standing and sitting, the walking and dancing, etc.” (1989: 252). Furthermore, for Husserl empathy (Einfühlung) or “feeling-one’s-way into” the expressive body of an other was the means of my entering into a consciousness of the other. Taking this a step further, Merleau-Ponty observed: “Einfühlung is a corporeal operation . . . to perceive the other is to perceive not only that I shake hands, but that he shakes my hand” (N: 76). This would mark the move from first-person to second-person perception, in so far as it involves a recognition of the subjectivity – and not merely the objectivity – of the other (see Churchill 2006, 2007 and Thompson 2001 for elaboration of the “second-person” perspective). Note that in Merleau-Ponty’s working out of the perception of others, it is his notion of the positing of an aesthesiological (that is, a perceiving but not yet a thinking/speaking) subject that will enable him to provide a basis for understanding our experience of the animal’s comportment toward us. He says: “I apperceive the body as perceiving before apperceiving it as thinking . . . The look that gropes the objects is what I see at first” (N: 76). Merleau-Ponty states that this carnal relation with the world brings with it the possibility for a radical “reversal” that we might also characterize as a reflexivity. We might understand this reversal to consist in the fact that our body orients us to the behaviour of the other, of the animal, of ourselves in the mirror, rather than to his, her or our consciousness. The “reversibility of the flesh” is a “reflexive” (gestural) and not a “reflective” (intellectual) phenomenon. When we visit the zoo and stand face to face with a great ape, we discover – if we give time to the encounter – that the ape’s gestures do seem to furnish our own intentions with a visible realization. There are different 181 9781844651153_4_016.pm5 181 25/03/2008, 14:42 INVENTIONS “layers” of experience, in which the personal, volitional body that smiles and gestures to a friend can be seen to presuppose an underlying “anonymous” body whose “operative intentionality” delivers us to the raw perceptual encounter with others, animal others, and even things (Heinämaa 2003). Inspired by her reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Nature, Elizabeth Behnke has proposed a descriptive phenomenology that speaks from a style of improvisational comportment characterized by a thoroughly bodily reflexivity. Behnke writes: “I want to move, within lived experiencing itself, from a separative, subject-facing-object type of experiencing to a more inclusive, connective mode” (1999: 96). “[F]or Merleau-Ponty the human–animal relation is not a ‘hierarchic’ one characterized by the ‘addition’ of rationality to a mechanistically conceived animal body, but a lateral relation of kinship, Einfühlung, and Ineinander among living beings” (ibid.: 99). In an effort to move towards what we might call a phenomenological ethology, Behnke suggests that “we speak from within our life among animals – from shared situations in which we and the animals co-participate, from the lived experience of interspecies sociality where it is not just I who looks at the animal, but the animal who looks at me” (ibid.: 100). In his book Corporal Compassion: Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body, Ralph Acampora likewise takes as his philosophical starting point a “background of relatedness and interconnectivity” (2006: 5). Rejecting the positions of those (including Heidegger) who would presume that an ontological gulf exists between ourselves and other creatures, Acampora draws from his readings of Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty the position that we are “always already caught up in the experience of being a live body with other living beings in a plethora of ecological and social interrelationships with other living bodies and people” (ibid.). What is being expressed here in both the work of Behnke and Acampora is, I believe, a realization of the vision of Merleau-Ponty when, in the resumption of his studies on nature in the third and final course “Nature and Logos: The Human Body” (1959–60), he speaks of an “Ontology that defines being from within and not from without” (N: 220). In light of the work of the early ethologists and of a new breed of phenomenological ethologists, it may be that Merleau-Ponty’s incorporation of reflections upon animality into his more general working out of a philosophy of nature is more than just an arbitrary starting point for a deepening of our understanding of nature. Philosophers have tended to look only at human reality – individual behaviour, artistic expression and historical accomplishments – when studying 182 9781844651153_4_016.pm5 182 25/03/2008, 14:42 NATURE AND ANIMALITY such things as consciousness, carnality and symbolic representation. It might be that a closer examination of the world of animality, accomplished through our own experiences of interspecies communication (Churchill 2001, 2003, 2007) as well as through our observations of the fascinating forms of animal expression throughout the animal kingdom (Portman 1967), will turn out to be the next step for a revitalized philosophy of nature. To quote Merleau-Ponty at the conclusion of his second lecture course on nature, We may already say that the ontology of life, as well that of “physical nature,” can only escape its troubles by resorting, apart from all artificialism, to brute being as revealed to us in our perceptual contact with the world. It is only within the perceived world that we can understand that all corporeality is already symbolism. (N: 98) What this challenging statement seems to be saying is that we must abandon the troubles ensuing from both scientific materialism (which strips nature of its inner anima as well as its inner beauty) and philosophical idealism (which makes of nature a construction of our consciousness), and revert to that primordial experience that we know through our own bodies when we come into contact with others, with things, with the world. We must learn to “tune back in” to what we have left behind when we have philosophically taken leave of our senses; we must learn to be spellbound once again, and to recognize our status as participant-observers within that mysterious world of nature that delivers us to ourselves. Further reading Abram, D. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World. New York: Random House. Behnke, E. A. 1999. “From Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Nature to an Interspecies Practice of Peace”. In Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, H. P. Steeves (ed.), 93–116. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Lingis, A. 1994. Foreign Bodies. New York: Routledge. Lingis, A. 2000. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 183 9781844651153_4_016.pm5 183 25/03/2008, 14:42