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
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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
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“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
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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
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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”
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(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
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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
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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
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“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
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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.
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