Taking Natural History Seriously: Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty’s Ontological Approach
Abstract
:1. Introduction
In a sense the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language. And in a sense, as Valery said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests.[14] (p. 155)
In Greek, the word “nature” comes from the verb φυω-, which alludes to the vegetative; the Latin word comes from nascor, “to be born”, “to live”; it is drawn from the first, more fundamental meaning. There is nature wherever there is a life that has meaning, but where, however, there is not thought; hence the kinship with the vegetative. Nature is what has a meaning, without this meaning being posited by thought: it is the autoproduction of a meaning.[13] (p. 4, emphasis added)
The status of life in nature (…) is the modern problem of philosophy and of science. Indeed it is the central meeting point of all the strains of systematic thought, humanistic, naturalistic, philosophic. The very meaning of life is in doubt. When we understand it, we shall also understand its status in the world. But its essence and its status are alike baffling.[15] (p. 148)
[We do not seek a] philosophy of Nature as referring to a separate power of being, in which we would envelop the rest, or that at least we would posit separately, against the philosophy of Spirit or of History or of consciousness.—The theme of Nature is not a numerically distinct theme.—There is a unique theme of philosophy: the nexus, the vinculum “Nature”-“Man”-“God”.[13] (p. 204)
2. “The Leaf of Being”2, or: How Ontology Should Start from (Experienced) Nature
Can we validly study the notion of nature? Are we not then subject to Valery’s critique when he says that philosophy is only the habit of reflecting on words while supposing that each word has one meaning which is illusory since every word has known shifts in meaning? We would be bound to the history of mistaken meanings. But are these changes fortuitous? Wouldn’t there be something that had always been intended, if not expressed, by those who use words? Must we not recognize a life in language, which would be neither fortuitous nor a logical, immanent development? For this reason Lachelier, in a note in Vocabulaire philosophique, is against the use of precise words: “The words of a language are not tokens and are themselves a φύσις”.[13] (p. 3)
We can neither conceive of primordial being engendering itself, which would make it infinite, nor think of it being engendered by another, which would reduce it to the condition of a product and a dead result. As Schelling has remarked, there is in nature something which makes it such that it would impose itself upon God himself as an independent condition of his operation. Such is our problem.[16] (p. 66)
because the evolution of the concept of Nature is a more convincing propaedeutic, [since it] more clearly shows the necessity of the ontological mutation. We will show how the concept of Nature is always the expression of an ontology—and its privileged expression.[13] (p. 204)
We passed between causal-realist thinking and philosophical idealism, because we found in brute, savage, vertical, present Being a dimension that is not that of representation and not that of the In-itself. (…) We will have to disengage better this idea of Being, i.e., of what makes these beings (Nature, humans) be—and be “in one another”, i.e., makes them be together on the side of what is not nothing; and we will have to specify in particular the relation of the positive and the negative in them, of the visible and the nonvisible.[13] (p. 212)
3. “Nature Is Full-Blooded”6, or: Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty’s Characterization of Nature
co-naissance expresses “a radical conception of the life of perception as experience [épreuve] of being, in the double passive-active sense of the verb ‘to experience’ [éprouver] (to feel and to put to the test, to perceive and interrogate)”.[17] (p. 238)
But today, when the very rigor of its description obliges physics to recognize as ultimate physical beings in full right relations between the observer and the observed, determinations that have meaning only for a certain situation of the observer, it is the ontology of the kosmotheoros [contemplator of the world] and of the Great Object correlative to it that figures as a prescientific preconception.[14] (p. 15)
Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves; the rose for its scent; the nightingale for his song; and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.[20] (p. 56)
Our bodily experience is the basis of existence. How is it to be characterized? In the first place, it is not primarily an experience of sense data, in the clear and distinct sense of that term. (…) our feeling of bodily unity is a primary experience. It is an experience so habitual and so completely a matter of course that we rarely mention it. No one ever says, Here am I, and I have brought my body with me. In what does this intimacy of relationship consist? The body is the basis of our emotional and purposive experience.[15] (p. 114)
defines the living by history: the living organism is “a unique series of acts constituting the true history.” (…) By describing the organism, Bergson leaves behind substantialist thinking, which saw in the end an immutable form, both at the origin and at the end of development. He defines the organism and life as types of temporality and thereby places them outside of every comparison with a physical system. The physical system is its past (Laplace). The organism, and the whole universe defined as natural system, is defined, on the contrary, by the fact that the present is not identical with the past. We can say of the physical system that it is re-created at each moment, that it is always new, or that it is uncreated and is identical to its past.[13] (p. 59, emphasis added)
On the other hand, the organism is never identical with its past, nor is it ever separated from it: it continues. Duration becomes the principle of the internal unity of it. “Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.” (Creative Evolution, p. 16) And this register is neither a consciousness interior to the organism, nor our consciousness, nor our notation of time. What Bergson thereby designates is an institution, a Stiftung, as Husserl would say, an inaugural act that embraces a becoming without being exterior to this becoming. This intuition of life as history brings out the value of several passages in Creative Evolution (…).[13] (p. 59, emphasis added)
4. “Like a Pure Wake That Is Related to No Boat”10.: From Nature to an Ontology of Practices
That is what I have been saying all my life, and I have said little else. Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them. The idea must constantly be seen in some new aspect. Some element of novelty must be brought into it freshly from time to time; and when that stops, it dies. The meaning of life is adventure.[22] (p. 250, emphasis added)
We must avoid two errors: placing the phenomena of a positive principle (idea, essence, entelechy) behind us, and not seeing the whole of the regulative principle. We must place in the organism a principle that is either negative or based on absence. We can say of the animal that each moment of its history is empty of what will follow, an emptiness which will be filled later. Each present moment is supported by a future larger than any future. To consider the organism in a given minute, we observe that there is the future in every present, because its present is in a state of imbalance.
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
1 | |
2 | See [13] (p. 204). To conceive of nature as “the leaf of being” means that the authors cannot see nature as being apart from its ontological import. To this extent, “being” corresponds here to the level of general ontology, and the emphasis on it underlines how every discovery in the field of natural sciences (as well as of human sciences) is not a mere accidental result or contingency, but makes ontologists realize how they should think of being, in general. |
3 | Peirce writes: “Every symbol is a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figure of speech. The body of the symbol changes slowly, but its meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and throws off old ones” [23] (p. 264, 1903). |
4 | In this regard, both Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty share a similar critique of the philosophers’ exaggerated trust in language. It is expressed, for instance, by Whitehead’s famous fallacy of the perfect dictionary: “The fallacy of the perfect dictionary divides philosophers into two schools, namely, the “Critical School”, which repudiates speculative philosophy, and the “Speculative School” which includes it. The critical school confines itself to verbal analysis within the limits of the dictionary. The speculative school appeals to direct insight, and endeavours to indicate its meanings by further appeal to situations which promote such specific insights. It then enlarges the dictionary. The divergence between the schools is the quarrel between safety and adventure” [15] (p. 173). For his part, Merleau-Ponty, speaking of a risk often run by the philosopher, says: “Too quickly trusting language, [s]he would be the victim of the illusion of an unconditional treasure of absolute wisdom contained in language, and that we would possess only by practicing it. Hence the false etymologies of Heidegger, his gnosis. The absolute in language is not an immediate absolute. If language must be the soul of the Absolute, it must be absolute in the relative” [13] (p. 87). |
5 | Merleau-Ponty further comments on this point: “This is what is both exciting and exasperating in the scientist: he looks for a way to grasp the phenomenon, but he doesn’t seek to understand it. (…) The concern of the philosopher is to see; that of the scientist is to find a foothold. His thinking is directed by the concern not of seeing, but of intervening” [13] (p. 86). |
6 | See [15] (p. 144). |
7 | |
8 | Whitehead’s insistence on the concept of organism is widely acknowledged. On the contrary, the fact that the organic structure of experience can also be well-fitting to Merleau-Ponty’s thought may be questioned. In this regard, it is helpful to specify that this point has been overall motivated by the fact that, in his lectures, Merleau-Ponty endorses Whitehead’s concept of organism and shares with the latter the gist of his discourse. Furthermore, there are at least two reasons why the organic structure of experience can also be claimed to be characteristic of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The first is that, in these courses on nature, Merleau-Ponty adopts “organism” quite extensively, not only following Whitehead’s reflection but also those of other biologists and thinkers, such as Von Uexküll or the neuropsychologist, Kurt Goldstein (see, for instance, his masterpiece of 1934, Der Aufbau des Organismus). Secondly, at least from The Structure of Behaviour (1942), Merleau-Ponty refers to those scientists because vital behavior and, accordingly, the interaction between organism and environment, represents for him the privileged angle from which to reach a new understanding of both mental and physiological levels. To this extent, although Merleau-Ponty’s vocabulary pivots around behavior and (more generally) experience, it is indisputable the central position that organism has in his reflections upon nature and ontology. This hypothesis seems to find an eloquent “ex-post proof”, if one then considers the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s influence on the systematic–theoretical–biological hypotheses advanced by Maturana and Varela, who put the organism as “autopoiesis” at the very heart of their proposal. |
9 | Overall, both authors emphasize and share the organic structure of experience illustrated above. Nonetheless, a significant difference stands out when one analyzes their standpoints in detail. On the one hand, institution (from Husserl’s Stiftung) constitutes the key concept of Merleau-Ponty’s discourse, especially in understanding history (and natural history). In this regard, it is worthwhile to mention that Merleau-Ponty dedicated the courses at the Collège de France in 1954–1955 to institution and passivity. On the other hand, Whitehead construes his view of history around the categories of “concrescence” and “transition”, which, according to him, properly describes the nonlinear temporality that is characteristic of that “all-embracing fact which is the advancing history of the one Universe” [18] (p. 150). |
10 | [13] (p. 176). |
11 | As Whitehead remarks, this implies that historical facts can be “rationalized”, although without the presumption of absoluteness. History is contingent, and so are the rational interpretations that can be offered of it: “The evolution of history can be rationalized by the consideration of the determination of successors by antecedents. But, on the other hand, the evolution of history is incapable of rationalization because it exhibits a selected flux of participating forms. No reason, internal to history, can be assigned why that flux of forms, rather than another flux, should have been illustrated. It is true that any flux must exhibit the character of internal determination. (…) But every instance of internal determination assumes that flux up to that point. There is no reason why there could be no alternative flux exhibiting that principle of internal determination” [19] (pp. 46-47). |
12 | |
13 | However, one of the few scattered passages where Whitehead mentions “practice or practices” is related to the issue under discussion here. He states in Adventures of Ideas: “Civilization did not start with a social contract determining modes of behaviour. Its earliest effort was the slow introduction of ideas of modes of behaviour and of inrushes of emotion which dominated their lives. Undoubtedly ideas modified practice. But in the main practice precedes thought; and thought is mainly concerned with the justification or the modification of a pre-existing situation” [18] (p. 110). |
14 | In this regard, a worthy objection has been raised by Hans Jonas, who writes: “Whitehead, in this respect like Hegel, has written in his metaphysics a story of intrinsically secured success: all becoming is self-realization, each event is in itself complete (or would not be actual), each perishing is a seal on the fact of completion achieved. ‘Death, where is thy sting?’” [36] (p. 96). |
15 | Cf. [13] (p. 70): “There is no place for a conception of Nature or for a conception of history in this philosophy. In Bergson, the official position of positivism also ruins the idea of Nature. We can elaborate a valid concept of Nature only if we find something at the jointure of Being and Nothingness. Despite what Bergson says, there is a kinship between the concepts of Nature and radical contingency. In order to elaborate this concept, we have to leave positivism or negativism, which maintains a separation between the objective and the subjective, and which thus makes impossible the subjective-objective that Nature will always be.” |
16 | Merleau-Ponty then offers this helpful example: “Such for example is the prepubescent period in psychoanalysis. The rupture of equilibrium appears as an operant non-being, which impedes the organism from staying in the anterior phase. It is only a question of an absence, but an absence of what? That’s what is difficult to know. There is no solution in the strict sense. The passage to puberty is never perfect. There is a lack which is not a lack of this or that” [13] (p. 155). To analyze Merleau-Ponty’s idea of history more in depth, see also [37,38]. |
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Brioschi, M.R. Taking Natural History Seriously: Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty’s Ontological Approach. Philosophies 2023, 8, 31. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8020031
Brioschi MR. Taking Natural History Seriously: Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty’s Ontological Approach. Philosophies. 2023; 8(2):31. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8020031
Chicago/Turabian StyleBrioschi, Maria Regina. 2023. "Taking Natural History Seriously: Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty’s Ontological Approach" Philosophies 8, no. 2: 31. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8020031
APA StyleBrioschi, M. R. (2023). Taking Natural History Seriously: Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty’s Ontological Approach. Philosophies, 8(2), 31. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8020031