Merleau-Ponty's Human-Animality Intertwining and the Animal Question

Abstract

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's late work locates humans within a wild or brute being that sustains a synergy among life forms. His Nature lectures explored the philosophical implications of evolutionary biology and animal studies, and with The Visible and the Invisible describe a horizontal kinship between humans and other animals. This work offers a striking alternative to Heidegger's panicky insistence on an abyss between humans and other animals that Derrida questions but cannot seem to discard. For Merleau-Ponty, literary works probe the invisible realm of wildness that is our only environment, a realm full of language and meaningfully experienced by all animals. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's late work defines a chiasmic ontology in which human experience is part of a wild or brute being that sustains all life and provides a synergy among its distinct forms. His Nature lectures at the Collège de France explored the philosophical implications of modern science, including evolutionary biology and animal studies, and together with the unfinished manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible gestured toward a horizontal kinship between humans. This work offers a striking alternative to Heidegger's panicky insistence on the abyss between humans and other animals, an abyss that Derrida questions but cannot seem to discard in The Animal that Therefore I Am. Matthew Calarco wonders why Derrida would resolutely refuse to abandon the humananimal distinction and "why he would use this language of ruptures and abysses when the largest bodies of empirical knowledge we have concerning human beings and animals strongly contest such language." 1 But Derrida explicitly resists any claims of "biological continuism, whose sinister connotations we are well aware of. .. ." 2 As a Jew he might have been particularly aware of the cruel history of Social Darwinism, eugenics and animal coding for abjecting human groups during the twentieth century. However, accepting a continuum between our species and

Our Intertwined Animality: Forgoing Ultimacy for Intimacy in Dialogue with Eschatology and Science

“…There was no rupture that clearly denotes the ontogenesis of the mind of the modern human (2003: 267). Louise Westling (2010) argues that in affirming the broad evolutionary view, the interconnections and continuities between humans and other animal species in the embodied world of flesh manifest the relational intersubjectivities present in descriptions of the perceptual field. Animals are not "poor in world" as Heidegger affirmed but rather are co-sharers and shapers of the common world of the flesh through which we come to be (Westling, 2014;Tonner, 2011).…”

Animal Subjects

“…Merleau-Ponty, whose 1957-8 "Nature" lectures drew on embryology, Jakob von Uexküll's Umwelten, and Konrad Lorenz's ethological work on animal instincts, "[built] a case for the profound interrelationship of creatures with their environments," Westling writes. 62 For Merleau-Ponty as for Woolf, "our sensations are the active expression of relationship, a continuing communion with the living world." 63 Sultzbach, meanwhile, explores how Woolf 's evocations of the sensory world prefigure ecophenomenology by flattening out the divide between subject and environment in order to emphasize their shared materiality and "interrelated existence."…”

Lupine Sensibilities: Dynamically Embodied Intersubjectivity between Humans and Refugee Wolves

“…[that is] congruent with evolutionary biology and ecological thought." 8 Other scholars, such as Brett Buchanan and Kelly Oliver, join Westling in suggesting that this is precisely what Merleau-Ponty's concept of "the flesh of the world" was meant to accomplish by serving as a theoretical window into the coconstitutive, intercorporeal nature of all life. 9 There are, however, important qualifications that should be made in resurrecting the concept of the flesh.…”