Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of nature: negativity, ontology, and the rehabilitation of the possible

© 2016 Dr. Simone Lee GustafssonThis dissertation develops an account of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature, and demonstrates the importance of nature and the concept of negativity for his phenomenological ontology. For Merleau-Ponty, nature is the unreflected, “that which carries us” (N 4); it cannot be unequivocally conceived as an object or pure extension. The first part of the dissertation frames Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature in relation to his critical engagement with Kant, Schelling, and Husserl, all of whom are working within, or at the margins of, the modern philosophical tradition instituted by Descartes. Merleau-Ponty identifies two irreducible ideas of nature in each of these philosophies, a ‘doubleness’ that destabilizes and renders ambiguous the concept of nature as object. This dissertation contends that this ambiguity intensifies in Husserl’s philosophy; Husserlian phenomenology allows Merleau-Ponty to develop a ‘chiasmic’ or binocular ontology. Furthermore, this section also traces the concept of negativity as it emerges in the work of these three thinkers. Secondly, the dissertation demonstrates the importance and continuing relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the sciences and the objectivist ontology on which it relies. According to Merleau-Ponty, modern science has begun to critique its own classical foundations, and hence serves as an important corrective to Cartesian ontology. This section focuses on the 1942 text The Structure of Behavior and the 1956-1960 Nature course, and demonstrates how the earlier emphasis on perceptual consciousness gives way to the notion of Being as interrogation. Importantly, it is in the Nature course that Merleau-Ponty introduces the concept of ‘natural negativity,’ which will be central to his ontology. This section puts forth the argument that the concept of negativity informs Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the actualism of both mechanism/causalism and finalism/idealism, thereby allowing him to develop a philosophy of life as emergence. Consequently, the critique of actualism allows him to formulate or envisage a ‘new’ notion of the possible. Finally, the third section focuses on the human body as understood within the philosophy of nature. This section draws on Merleau-Ponty’s later works and returns to his critical reading of Husserl in order to emphasize the importance of the principle of negativity and the philosophy of nature for his ontology or concept of flesh. For Merleau-Ponty, a philosophy of nature cannot be articulated without an account of the perceiving body. This section concludes with a discussion of constitutive negativity – as opposed to ‘nothingness’ or void – with regard to perception as well as organic development. This final section thus informs and deepens the preceding two, and argues that the concept of negativity allows Merleau-Ponty to overcome the vertigo of Cartesian ontology and ‘rehabilitate’ a notion of the possible. This rehabilitation of possibility and the ‘savageness’ of nature results in a phenomenological ontology that moves beyond metaphysical dualism, and which is capable of conceiving the radical openness and inexhaustibility of the world in which we live