Human Studies (2006) 29: 257–262 DOI 10.1007/s10746-006-9024-7

Ó Springer 2006

Book Review

The Principle of Nature Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature, Course Notes from the Colle`ge de France, compiled and with notes by Dominique Se´glard, translated from the French by Robert Vallier. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003, pp. xx, 313. The publication of Nature, which presents in English three lecture courses that Merleau-Ponty taught at the Colle`ge de France (during the academic years 1956–57, 1957–58, and 1959–60), allows us finally to lay a rumor to rest. For decades Merleau-Ponty scholars have been saying that out of all the courses Merleau-Ponty taught at the Colle`ge de France during the Fifties, the courses on nature give us the clearest insight into his final thought. This rumor, we can now confirm, turns out to be true. These lecture courses on nature are so important that they rival Merleau-PontyÕs posthumous The Visible and the Invisible, or, more precisely, they complement The Visible and the Invisible. While the publication of HeideggerÕs lecture course called The Basic Problems of Phenomenology gave us a sense of what Part Two of Being and Time would have looked like, the publication of Nature gives us a sense of what ‘‘the propaedeutic’’ for The Visible and the Invisible would have looked like (204). They prepare us to remember, as Merleau-Ponty says in The Visible and the Invisible, the originary sense of being as the ‘‘jointure’’ (or balance) between the visible and the invisible. All three courses are simply called ‘‘The Concept of Nature.’’ The first, however, falls into two parts. The first part, which is called ‘‘Study of the Variations of the Nature,’’ lays out the conceptÕs philosophical evolution in the modern period, from Descartes to Husserl, by way of Kant, Schelling, and Bergson. The modern tradition defines nature as ‘‘a product,’’ as ‘‘pure exteriority’’ (9); nature, according to Merleau-Ponty, loses the interiority and orientation, the finality or teleology that the concept still retained from the Stoics up to the Renaissance. In the modern epoch, nature becomes a machine; it is spread out (partes extra partes) as a pure object before the pure understanding, and interiority now resides in God who is the artisan of the machine. Because this conception requires an artisan, Merleau-Ponty calls it anthropomorphic (10). For Merleau-Ponty, modern science still retains this ‘‘Cartesian’’

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concept of nature, and its prevalence in modern science is why the Cartesian concept still ‘‘explains us’’ (8). Part Two of the first course examines modern science: ‘‘Modern Science and the Idea of Nature.’’ As already indicated, Merleau-Ponty claims in the first part that this concept of nature originates in Descartes. Nevertheless, and this is what makes the first course so interesting, all the figures that Merleau-Ponty examines do not simply express the Cartesian or objectivistic conception of nature. All exhibit a kind of ‘‘strabism’’ or ‘‘diplopy’’ (127, 134). The ‘‘oscillation’’ that Merleau-Ponty locates in each figure means that none in fact give us Merleau-PontyÕs own position (55). Indeed, if we look at a text that is contemporaneous with the nature lectures, ‘‘Everywhere and Nowhere,’’ we would have to say that Descartes comes closest to presenting it. Descartes – the Descartes of the Sixth Meditation especially – sets up the problem that drives the modern philosophical tradition forward, the problem with which Merleau-Ponty himself grapples. The union of the body and soul implies that nature contains a ‘‘residue’’ that cannot be understood through the machine idea; it contains a ‘‘contingency’’ in its productions that cannot be reduced to teleology (83, 32). Neither mechanism nor finalism are adequate to nature. For Descartes, the residue that cannot be understood resembles God whose ways also cannot be understood. The relation to God here is very important for Merleau-Ponty. It is precisely the idea of God as being infinite, according to Merleau-Ponty, that leads to the Cartesian conception of nature (8). Yet, Descartes conceives of God and nature in ‘‘separation’’ from one another (66). For Merleau-Ponty, GodÕs infinity must be ‘‘mixed’’ in with nature (37). Repeatedly in the course, Merleau-Ponty expresses this mixture by saying that nature ‘‘carries’’ us (44, the French verb is ‘‘porter’’). Carrying us, nature is ‘‘larger.’’ Therefore, as in ‘‘Everywhere and Nowhere,’’ the later Merleau-Ponty always stresses that the techniques of modern science, which are ‘‘smaller,’’ have to be related back to nature. So, in the second part of the first course, Merleau-Ponty examines contemporary science, especially, contemporary physics. Even though contemporary physics remains bound to Cartesian ontology, it also criticizes this ontology (85). According to wave-based mechanics, particles are no longer individuated or separated beings; there are only ‘‘families of trajectories’’ (93). Despite overcoming the partes extra partes definition of nature, modern science, for Merleau-Ponty, cannot, however, elaborate a new conception of nature. This new conception can be found only in WhiteheadÕs philosophy. On the one hand, Whitehead, for Merleau-Ponty, makes modern scienceÕs self-critique explicit; he criticizes the idea that each event in nature has a unique location in time and space. On the other hand, and more importantly, for Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead

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seeks an element that is not a part but a whole (116). The whole, which is again larger than any part, consists in ‘‘overlapping’’ relations; MerleauPonty translates WhiteheadÕs English ‘‘overlapping’’ as ‘‘empie`tement’’ (115), a term that will re-appear frequently in Merleau-PontyÕs final writings. Even more, nature in Whitehead is a creative principle, an ‘‘activity’’ that cannot be compared to the activity of consciousness or the mind (118). For Whitehead, nature is, of course, a ‘‘process’’, but Merleau-PontyÕs French translation is ‘‘passage,’’ a term that implies the past. For Merleau-Ponty nature is the past that is still there affecting the present, giving the present a kind of thickness and depth. Nature, therefore, in Merleau-PontyÕs interpretation of Whitehead is a kind of memory; this implies that it persists in its very ‘‘unfolding’’ (119, 120). Nature is the ‘‘soil,’’ ‘‘the earth,’’ that not only carries us but also, as in pregnancy, carries the future. The images of the soil and the earth come from Husserl and imply that Merleau-PontyÕs nature lectures are something like an archeology (268). In the first course, Merleau-Ponty was able to unearth (in Whitehead in particular) the ‘‘principle’’ of nature, the arche. The principle to which we are returning is the principle of nature as dynamism in the literal sense of the word, as potency. Nature, for Merleau-Ponty, is the power to invent the visible, and, continuing in the same direction as the visible, the power to invent the invisible, to invent what we can call an idea (190). In other words, nature is the power to invent ‘‘sense’’ (sens, with its double sense of meaning and direction) (84). The archeological retrieval of sense then allows Merleau-Ponty to ‘‘reconstitute’’ a genesis that goes from the dynamic source to symbolic forms, to language, to ideas and knowledge by way of animality and the human body (120). Thus in the second course, which is called ‘‘Animality, the Human Body, and the Passage to Culture,’’ Merleau-Ponty investigates contemporary trends in biology. What Merleau-Ponty recognizes is that biology is no longer substantialist or mechanistic, but instead ‘‘dialectical’’ (139). Here, Merleau-Ponty takes up some of the themes of his earlier work, The Structure of Behavior: stimulus-response relations in an organism are behaviors with structures or forms (Gestalten). As Coghill had shown, maturation in animals does not occur as though the animal contained ahead of time possibilities that needed only to be realized. Instead, the organism contains ‘‘a reference to the future,’’ meaning both that the organism develops gradually and that its entire body is stylized in a pattern (144–45). For Merleau-Ponty, von Uexku¨llÕs idea of an environment (Umwelt) is equally dialectical. In particular, Merleau-Ponty takes up von Uexku¨llÕs image of a melody (173–74). The relation between the animal and its environment resembles a song, the environment calling

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forth a response and even a refrain. The melody that comes about deposits, as Merleau-Ponty says, ‘‘a surplus of signification’’ (173). Merleau-Ponty sees the same surplus in animal mimicry. As Hardouin and Portmann show, for Merleau-Ponty, animals mimic each other and copy their environment even when no advantage can be gained. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty claims in the third course, such non-instrumental creativity makes animals be our ‘‘kin’’ (214). They are a kind of ‘‘caricature’’ of human creativity (214). The third course, which is called ‘‘Nature and Logos: The Human Body,’’ consists of a series of ‘‘sketches’’ of the human body, all of which aim to grasp humanity as a way of being a body, at its point of emergence in nature (208). Unlike the first two courses (which are based on student notes and which are presented in clear prose), the third course comes from Merleau-PontyÕs own lecture notes, which are rather fragmentary and at times very obscure. Nevertheless, over the eight sketches we get a picture of the genesis of language that is fuller than what we find in the fourth chapter of The Visible and the Invisible. Indeed, these sketches explain a brief description of the human body in ‘‘Eye and Mind,’’ where MerleauPonty claims that the human bodyÕs arrangement is neither arbitrary nor necessary. Merleau-Ponty places the human bodyÕs arrangement in the process of evolution and wants to show that within this context there is no ‘‘rupture’’ with animality; man, as he quotes de Chardin, ‘‘comes silently into the world’’ (272, 267). The morphological variation from the ape is ‘‘miniscule’’: the human body is bipedal; being upright allows the hands to take over from the jaw the function of prehension; in turn, the freeing of the jaw allows the muscle of the head to relax; the brain expands while the size of the face diminishes, which allows the eyes to come closer together in order to focus on what the hands grasp (267). The eye and the hand in the evolutionary description refer us to Merleau-PontyÕs famous theory of the flesh. As in The Visible and the Invisible, here Merleau-Ponty primarily defines the flesh by means of the seeing–seen relation and the touching–touched relation (209). The flesh for Merleau-Ponty therefore is ‘‘eminently in being’’, a ‘‘leaf’’ or ‘‘fold’’ of being, insofar as the human body is first of all something seen, like any other thing (210, 205, 208). And yet, it is something that sees; the soul or mind does not ‘‘descend’’ into the body; it finds itself there, having evolved from animality (229). Because it is something seen, the human body, according to MerleauPonty, has the possibility of ‘‘empathizing’’ (he uses the German term, ‘‘Einfu¨hlung,’’ from Husserl) with all things seen (209). Empathy implies that all things seen have a perceptual side like the human body, that is, they are things that see. In ‘‘Eye and Mind’’ Merleau-Ponty quotes the painter Paul Klee who says that in the forest he fells as though the trees

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are looking at him. But insofar as the trees or all visible things see, they have an inside, which cannot be seen, something invisible, something silent. It is this silence that calls forth, for Merleau-Ponty, language. In forming language the human body, therefore, continues the symbolic behavior of the animal body; humanity then becomes historical. In the later sketches of the third course, Merleau-Ponty struggles with the problem that the genesis he is reconstituting might be either too factual or too ideal (229, in particular). It seems to me that, as in HusserlÕs final writings on transcendental history, Merleau-PontyÕs final writings produce no resolution for this struggle. Nevertheless, as I said at the beginning, all three courses are remarkable insofar as they give us a great insight into Merleau-PontyÕs final thought. But, I think, the three courses are very important for philosophical thinking in general, even now, 50 years after Merleau-Ponty presented them. These three courses present in the clearest way possible what requirements we today must still follow in order to determine what an origin or principle (an arche) is. Indeed, ‘‘principle’’ (principe) is a word that Merleau-Ponty uses throughout the courses (152, especially). For Merleau-Ponty, the principle must be conceived neither as positive nor negative, neither as infinite nor finite, neither as internal nor external, neither as objective nor subjective; it can be thought neither through idealism nor realism, neither through finalism (teleology) nor mechanism, neither through determinism nor indeterminism, neither through humanism nor naturalism, neither through metaphysics nor physics. Veering off into one of these extremes is precisely today what we still must not do; there must be no separation. Instead, we must place ourselves in the ‘‘mixture’’ (152). Then, in the mixture, we must find a difference, we must find ‘‘un e´cart’’ or even ‘‘un e´cart infime’’ (a miniscule hiatus). Merleau-Ponty conceives the miniscule hiatus as ‘‘a hollow’’ (un creux) (210). For him, nature is not a positive ‘‘reservoir’’ of possibilities (241). Instead, nature is hollowed out, a ‘‘hollow’’ that nevertheless presents in relief what is necessary for nature to be filled in. Even more, nature is, for Merleau-Ponty, eternally hollowed out; this gives it the sense of inertia, solidity, obstinacy, a sense of life as eternally self-regenerating. Echoing Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty suggests in the opening pages of the first course that the principle of nature is ‘‘eternal return’’ (4). Here, however, we have to raise a question. Is it not the case that the essence of life is revealed only through death? In Nature, Merleau-Ponty discusses death only in passing. Most importantly, Merleau-Ponty concludes his examination of animal behavior by rejecting the definition of life that the French biologist Xavier Bichat invented at the beginning of the 19th Century: life as the set of functions that resist death. For Merleau-Ponty, this definition (which will reappear

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without being identified as such in Chapter Three of The Visible and the Invisible) implies that life concerns itself only with survival; it implies, for Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘Darwinism’’ (175). Nevertheless, it must be recalled that Michel Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic (in 1963), will praise Bichat for having invented, through this definition, a new form of vitalism, one based on ‘‘mortalism.’’ Following BichatÕs definition, Foucault conceives death as being internal to life (still no separation), turning life into a conflict. Unlike Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, it seems, does not see that BichatÕs conception of life implies not only that being is always ‘‘out of joint’’ (there is no ‘‘jointure’’ or balance), but also that knowledge itself (medical knowledge for example), even a surplus of knowledge, is produced in conflict. Here it seems we have to confirm as well what many commentators have said over the last couple of decades: Merleau-PontyÕs thought is based on a kind of tranquility. Perhaps, only this opposition between tranquility and conflict can allow us to determine the difference between Merleau-PontyÕs thinking and that of Foucault. Determining the difference in their thinking will have the additional benefit of allowing us to start to determine the difference in their political thought. Here is the difference in its most reduced form. In his 1955 Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty claims that, ‘‘politics begins with accepting mediations.’’ Barely 20 years later, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault claims (reversing ClausewitzÕs saying) that ‘‘politics is the continuation of war.’’

References Foucault, M. (1994). The Birth of the Clinic. New York: Vintage. Michel, M. (1978). Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage. Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Albany: SUNY Press. Heidegger, M. (1982). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993). ‘‘Eye and Mind,’’ In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Ed. G.A. Smith and M.B. Smith Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

LEONARD LAWLOR The University of Memphis Memphis, TN, 38152, USA (E-mail: [email protected])