Merleau-Ponty and Nature

RENAUD BARBARAS
Université Blaise Pascal de Clermont-Ferrand

ABSTRACT
The course on nature coincides with the re-working of Merleau-Ponty’s
breakthrough towards an ontology and therefore plays a primordial role. The
appearance of an interrogation of nature is inscribed in the movement of
thought that comes after the Phenomenology of Perception. What is at issue is to
show that the ontological mode of the perceived object — not the unity of a
positive sense but the unity of a style that shows through in Ž ligree in the
sensible aspects — has a universal meaning, that the description of the per-
ceived world can give way to a philosophy of perception and therefore to a
theory of truth. The analysis of linguistic expression to which the philosophy
of perception leads opens out onto a deŽ nition of meaning as institution,
understood as what inaugurates an open series of expressive appropriations.
It is this theory of institution that turns the analysis of the perceived in the
direction of a re ection on nature: the perceived is no longer the originary
in its diVerence from the derived but the natural in its diVerence from the instituted.
Nature is the “non-constructed, non-instituted,” and thereby, the source of
expression: “nature is what has a sense without this sense having been posited
by thought.”
The Ž rst part of the course, which consists in a historical overview, must
not be considered as a mere introduction. In fact, the problem of nature is
brought out into the open by means of the history of Western metaphysics,
in which Descartes is the emblematic Ž gure. The problem consists in
the duality — at once unsatisfactory and unsurpassable — between two
approaches to nature: the one which accentuates its determinability and
therefore its transparency to the understanding; the other which emphasizes
the irreducible facticity of nature and tends therefore to valorize the view-
point of the senses. To conceive nature is to constitute a concept of it that

22
MERLEAU-PONTY AND NATURE 23

allows us to “take possession” of this duality, that is, to found the duality.
The second part of the course attempts to develop this concept of nature by
drawing upon the results of contemporary science. Thus a philosophy of
nature is sketched that can be summarized in four propositions: 1) the total-
ity is no less real than the parts; 2) there is a reality of the negative and there-
fore no alternative between being and nothingmess; 3) a natural event is not
assigned to a unique spatio-temporal localization; and 4) there is generality
only as generativity.

It is only very late in Merleau-Ponty’s work that the concept of nature becomes
the object of a separate re ection. Until 1956–57 Merleau-Ponty utilized this
notion in a non-critical way and conferred upon it the current philosophical
meaning. Thus, The Structure of Behavior opens with these words: “Our goal is to
understand the relations between consciousness and nature: organic, psycho-
logical or even social. By nature we understand here a multiplicity of events
external to each other and bound together by relations of causality.”1 This cer-
tainly is the classic conception of nature, common to Descartes and Kant,
which Merleau-Ponty retains here, even if, to be sure, he inquires at the same
time into the possibility of the upsurge of consciousness in the midst of this
nature. But Merleau-Ponty is led to put into question this acceptance of natu-
ralism common to classic philosophers. The discovery of the body itself,
irreducible to natural causality as to transcendental consciousness, will allow
precisely the thinking of an insertion of consciousness into nature that would
not exclude this nature’s appearing to consciousness under the form of a per-
ceived world. It is nonetheless true that throughout Phenomenology of Perception,
there persists the horizon of a nature in itself, as totality of objective events gov-
erned by laws. Thus, for example, at the conclusion of his long and decisive
analysis of space, in which he demonstrates the speciŽ city of spaces that he calls
anthropological, Merleau-Ponty concludes: “We must contrive to understand
how, at a stroke, existence projects round itself worlds which hide objectivity
from me, at the same time fastening upon it as the aim of the teleology of con-
sciousness, by picking out these ‘worlds’ against the background of one single
natural world.”2 The perceived world, correlative of corporeal existence, is very
clearly inscribed in the midst of a nature, which prescribes to it a horizon of
objectivity. The phenomenology of perception reveals the descriptive speciŽ city
of the perceptive layer but does not go so far as to inquire about the relation-
ship of this perceptive layer to reality in itself: the sense of being of nature does
not necessarily seem to be questioned by the discovery of the perceived world.
It is therefore only on the occasion of a lecture series given at the Collège
de France that nature becomes the object of a speciŽ c inquiry. Moreover, if we
refer to the published lectures, we are struck by the absence of a philosophical
justiŽ cation prior to the lectures themselves that, for the Ž rst year, dealt with
24 RENAUD BARBARAS

the historical variations of the concept of nature. On the other hand, if we refer
to the resumé written at the end of the academic year, we discover that this
choice is motivated by the necessity of avoiding the impasse in which contem-
porary philosophy had become engaged. In fact, Merleau-Ponty remarks that
the abandonment in which the philosophy of nature has fallen involves a cer-
tain conception of the mind, of history and of the human person. It is, he
writes, “the permission that we give ourselves to make them appear as pure
negativity. Inversely, by returning to the philosophy of nature, we turn away
only apparently from these preponderant problems, we attempt to Ž nd a solu-
tion for them that is not immaterialist. All naturalism aside, an ontology that
ignores nature encloses itself in the incorporeal and it gives, for this very rea-
son, an unrealistic image of the human person, of the mind and of history.”3
This re ection on nature appears therefore as motivated by the necessity of a
kind of re-balancing and, so to say, of reexamining, the stakes of which we will
see shortly. Now, during the succeeding years, the preliminary philosophical
justiŽ cation takes on a greater and greater importance, not only in the resumés
but also in the lectures themselves. Thus, in the introduction to the third year’s
lectures (1959–60), from which we have only notes, we can read in this
instance: “Nature as thin sheet or layer of total Being — the ontology of nature
as way toward ontology, way that we prefer here because the evolution of the
concept of nature is a more convincing propaedeutic, revealing more clearly the
necessity of ontological mutation” (N, 265). The philosophical style has changed:
the questioning about nature is inscribed in an explicitly ontological project,
and the privileged character of the approach through nature depends on its
history, as if in it there appeared a theoretical impasse calling for a change
in orientation.
Now, if we refer at this point to his notes for The Visible and the Invisible,4 we
observe that the orientation concerning the question of nature is not circum-
scribed in the lectures, and that, quite to the contrary, it gradually impregnates
the elaboration of an ontology. I want to use as proof for this the outlines for
The Visible and the Invisible, that Merleau-Ponty has left us, all of which foresee
a part dedicated to nature and which, above all, manifest an evolution regard-
ing the place given to this question. (Ibid.).
In the earliest outlines (end of 1959, beginning of 1960), the analysis of
nature appears as either a chapter of a Ž rst part entitled “Being and World,”
or as a second separate part following a part on the world. In any case, clearly
it appears that nature was conceived as subordinated to the study of a primi-
tive dimension that Merleau-Ponty calls vertical world or brute being. In the
later outlines (end of 1960), the work is conceived as structured according to
the opposition between Nature and Logos (for example: I. The Visible and
Nature, II. The Invisible and Logos). Thus, the study itself of the vertical world
is referred to a re ection on nature. With this series of lectures on nature that
MERLEAU-PONTY AND NATURE 25

was not foreshadowed by anything, we see that something decisive took place.
First of all, it is clear that this lecture series is contemporaneous with the
Merleau-Pontian turning point that leads him toward ontology, and that the
very elaboration of the ontological question is inseparable from the re ection
on nature. We must therefore attempt to examine more closely this movement
to ontology through nature. On the other hand — and such is the ultimate
horizon of a re ection on nature — we can ask at what point the element in
which ontology is elaborated does not come to in ect the meaning of it in a
direction that would turn it away from phenomenology. Otherwise stated, if it
is incontestable that it is by means of the inquiry surrounding nature that
Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is elaborated, it is legitimate for us to ask to what
degree this ontology takes the form of a philosophy of nature, which remains
to be characterized.
We must therefore try to show initially that the inquiry concerning nature
corresponds to an in ection of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, which is inscribed in
its overall movement. The Phenomenology of Perception has an essentially critical
and descriptive focus: it is a question of denouncing the intellectualist concep-
tion of perception (and its accompanying empiricism) in order to expose the
perceived as such, liberated from the idealizations that covered it like layers of
sediment. However, the return to the immediate is not itself immediate: it
requires a phenomenological reduction that, in Merleau-Ponty’s work, takes on
an unusual meaning. In fact, by proceeding in a direct way, according to what
Husserl himself calls the Cartesian way, one runs the risk of identifying the per-
ceptive cogito with the re ective cogito, of bringing down the perceived world on
a universe already objectiŽ ed. This is what justiŽ es the detour through physi-
ology and the psychology of form. It involves in fact showing that science is led
by its own conclusions to reform its spontaneous ontology to the extent that
it discovers, under the name of behavior, a mode of existing which is not
inscribed in the objective world without nonetheless being confused with the
cogito. Thus, the Merleau-Pontian reduction, in its original form, is understood
as reduction to the incarnate subject; by means of Gestalt psychology and phys-
iology, the perceived world is then attained as world, no longer constituted by,
but correlative of or inhabited by this incarnate subject. The Phenomenology of
Perception consists therefore, in its essence, in an archeological work of unearth-
ing a perceptive layer buried under the strata of objectifying activity.
However, at the level of the Phenomenology of Perception, the exact signiŽ cance
and scope of this description of the perceived are not clearly thematized. In
particular, as we have already seen, the true status of the body itself and the
sense of being of the correlative perceived world are not clearly established:
does the speciŽ city of perceptive life have a transcendental meaning or merely
a psychological one? Does the perceived world deŽ ne nature or is it inscribed
in a nature in itself accessible to understanding? What is at stake here is nothing
26 RENAUD BARBARAS

less than the question of knowledge; as Merleau-Ponty expresses it in his text

supporting his candidacy at the Collège de France: “Now if we consider, above
the perceived world, the Ž eld of knowledge properly so called — i.e., the Ž eld
in which the mind seeks to possess the truth, to deŽ ne its objects itself, and thus
to attain to a universal wisdom, not tied to the particularities of our situation —
we must ask: Does not the realm of the perceived world take on the form of
a simple appearance? Is not pure understanding a new source of knowledge, in
comparison with which our perceptual familiarity with the world is only a
rough, unformed sketch?” 5 This question directs Merleau-Ponty’s research for
the ten years following the Phenomenology of Perception: it involves the elaboration
of a theory of truth beginning with the fundamental principles of this work.
This is tantamount to demonstrating that the mode of being of the perceived
object — not positive unity of meaning but unity of a style that appears in
Ž ligree in sensorial aspects — has a universal signiŽ cance, that the description
of the perceived world can therefore give rise to a philosophy of perception
revealing, at the heart of everything that can exist for us, an identical mode of
being. This is why the theory of truth is constituted as a theory of expression.
There is no pure understanding appropriating truth without mediation: just as
perceptive meaning appears only in a perceptible material, the meaning of ide-
ality is given in Ž ligree in a linguistic fabric, it is essentially interdependent with
an act of word. The years, which follow the publication of the Phenomenology of
Perception, are therefore dedicated to the elaboration of a theory of expression.
This theory possesses two distinct aspects. On the one hand, it consists of the
examination of expression itself in the light of linguistics and artistic/literary
creation. It then leads to a general theory of intersubjectivity that concerns
“the exchange not only of thoughts but of all types of values, the coexistence
of men within a culture and, beyond it, within a single history”6 — the theory
of expression becomes philosophy of history. The articulation of these two
aspects takes place around the concept of institution. Indeed, linguistic expres-
sion allows us to understand, more clearly than did perception, that the latency
of the pre-objective meaning has a temporal signiŽ cance: it corresponds to the
open ensemble of its possible renewals. The unity of meaning is nothing more
than the axis or the principle of equivalence according to which its expressions
are accomplished. Meaning is instituted rather than constituted and, as such, it
institutes itself a future. As Merleau-Ponty expresses it, what we must under-
stand by institution are “those events in experience which endow it with
durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will
acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or a history — or again those
events which sediment in me a meaning, not just as survivals or residues, but
as the invitation to a sequel, the necessity of a future.”7 We therefore see how,
by understanding expression as institution, Merleau-Ponty simultaneously Ž nds
in this concept elements for a theory of history. This movement of generaliz-
MERLEAU-PONTY AND NATURE 27

ing the theory of expression, starting from institution, is evident in the order of
the lectures delivered at the Collège de France during the Ž rst four years: after
the examinations of word and expression, there follows a lecture on institution
that leads to a re ection on history and dialectic.
It is in this context that we must understand the emergence of an inquiry
regarding nature. In fact, if the shortcomings of the Phenomenology of Perception
created a re ection centered on the problem of ideality and therefore of expres-
sion, on the other hand, this re ection in ects the approach of the perceived.
The ultimate question, which is on the horizon of The Visible and the Invisible, is
the one concerning the mode of unity between expression and perception,
between truth and experience; the response to this question demands that we
return to the perceived starting with the knowledge from the study of expres-
sion. As Merleau-Ponty expresses it in a summary of the lectures quoted above,
if one wants to escape from an immaterialist vision, in other words untenable,
of man and history, one must question the foundation of expression. Now, it is
precisely because it is apprehended in the light of a theory of institution that this foundation
is determined as nature. The perceived is no longer understood as the immediate
diVerentiated from the derived or as the sensorial in opposition to the intelligi-
ble, as it was in the context of an inquiry that began with perception: it is
henceforth conceived of as the natural in opposition to the instituted. It is there-
fore precisely the extension and the confrontation to the order of logos that
in ects the phenomenology of perception in the direction of a re ection on
nature. Instead of approaching nature starting with perception, as what this lat-
ter ultimately aims at, Merleau-Ponty approaches perception beginning with
nature, understood as what is not instituted. The perceived therefore occupies
a place in a new system of oppositions that is going to allow the signiŽ cant
deepening of its meaning. In the Phenomenology of Perception, the study of the
meaning of being of the perceived was dependent on that of perception, itself
referred to the body. Thereby, it had an essentially negative scope that impeded
the possibility of an ontological inquiry. Indeed, in grasping the subject of per-
ception at the level of corporeal existence, Merleau-Ponty showed that percep-
tion could not consist in the intellectual apprehension of a transparent meaning,
as in Descartes’, he showed that the perceptive meaning was always incarnated,
in short, that perception manifested the original unity of fact and meaning.
However, from the moment that he took the perceptive subject as his starting
point, Merleau-Ponty was condemned to approach perception in terms of the
very categories themselves of that it is an actual contestation: he was able in a
way to reduce the gap between fact and meaning to show their unity, but this
unity remained a unity of fact and of meaning. This is why the ontological ques-
tion of the meaning of being of the perceived cannot be asked: the perceived
was grasped at once in the perspective of consciousness, and its sense of being
became exhausted therefore in that of correlative of incarnated consciousness
28 RENAUD BARBARAS

that is initiated to it. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty, so to speak,

de-intellectualizes perception by demonstrating the adherence of meaning to
fact: he is unable to grasp the perceived as a speciŽ c being. On the contrary,
approached from the question of truth, that is to say in the horizon of institu-
tion, the perceived no longer refers back to perception but to a type of speciŽ c
being, natural being, where the ruinous split between subject and object disap-
pears. We should add here that, by virtue of the context we have attempted to
clarify, the concept of nature is a generic title for an examination that deals
with a certain type of being, namely, that which is not instituted: through
nature, it is the sense of being of natural being, new name of the perceived,
which is in question. The natural does not come to qualify what belongs to
nature; this latter appears rather as objectifying, at least linguistically, a natural
being conceived of as a speciŽ c sense of being. Merleau-Ponty makes this clear
in the introduction to the third year lecture series: the thorough analysis of
nature is, he says, “neither simple re ection on the immanent rules of the sci-
ence of nature — nor recourse to nature as to a separate and explicative being —
but clariŽ cation of the meaning of natural-being or being-naturally.”8 We see
that the inquiry regarding nature can also be understood as an in ection, if not
an inversion, of the very meaning of phenomenological époché. The latter has
ultimately for its purpose to achieve the true meaning of what Husserl calls nat-
ural attitude. Now, vis-à-vis this attitude, which designates initially our imme-
diate relationship with the world and the thesis of existence that it implies, two
very diVerent kinds of readings are possible. One can stress the fact that the
natural attitude is a spontaneous altitude and not a thematic one. We can then
take possession of it only by transforming it into a re ective attitude or rather
by revealing a speciŽ c mode of thought at work in this very spontaneity, hence
the putting in parentheses of the thesis of the world, to allow bringing about a
conversion of the gaze toward what the thesis suggests from the beginning,
namely, the life of the transcendental subject. In this perspective, which is
Husserl’s, the naturalness of the natural attitude possesses an essentially nega-
tive connotation, and it suggests therefore a re ective resumption. But one can
also put the accent on the fact that the natural attitude is the attitude that ini-
tiates us to nature in its original meaning (which is not yet that of the natural
sciences): one no longer sees then an absence of knowledge in its spontaneity
but rather a guarantee of its originalness, that is to say an absence of symbol-
ization. In this perspective, which is Merleau-Ponty’s, it is by clarifying the
meaning of natural being that we can take possession of the true meaning of
the natural attitude. One does not go from a neutralization of nature to the
aYrmation of transcendental consciousness, but rather from the clariŽ cation of
nature to a reform, indeed a calling into question of, consciousness.
Be that as it may, this context clariŽ es the manner in which Merleau-Ponty
sketches a preliminary deŽ nition of nature. It is clear that it can be a question
MERLEAU-PONTY AND NATURE 29

only of a sketch since the goal of the study of the historical concept of nature
is precisely to conquer the meaning of natural being. It is nonetheless true that
the several preliminary deŽ nitions at our disposal are characterized by this
problematic context. They conjoin two aspects. On the one hand, “nature is
the primordial, that is to say the nonconstructed, the noninstituted; from
whence the idea of an eternity of nature, of a solidity”; but, inasmuch as it is
not only soil but also cradle of expression, inasmuch as the ultimate horizon of
inquiry is the unity of perception and expression, nature cannot be confused
with raw being in itself, the night of non-sense, and this is why in the short
introduction to the lectures Merleau-Ponty refers to the primordial meaning of
fæsiw: “there is nature everywhere where there is a life which has a meaning,
but where, however, there is no thought . . .: nature is what has a meaning
without this meaning having been posed by thought.”9 We can only be struck
by the proximity of this deŽ nition to the deŽ nition of the perceived. An
undated, unpublished note, which sums up well the double tenor of the mean-
ing of nature, echoes this idea: “to describe a world of nature, one in which
nothing has not yet been said, symbolized, expressed, neither space, nor time,
nor, all the more so, particular processes, — and which is not however amor-
phous, formless and without signiŽ cance, which is nevertheless a world.”10
Thus, after this moving through the question of truth, itself giving rise to a
theory of institution, inquiry concerning perception, which remains the center
of Merleau-Pontian thought, becomes inquiry about natural-being. Hence this
long lecture series on nature, unfolding in two phases, the necessity of which
we must understand: on the one hand, a long, historical overview, organized
around the opposition between the humanist conception and the romantic con-
ception of nature; on the other hand, a detailed study of scientiŽ c theories,
which moreover begins with the Ž rst year. This review is itself organized
according to three foreseeable levels: physical nature, living being, and the
human body. Now, the long historical study of conceptions of nature that pre-
cedes the study of natural being strictly speaking, must not be conceived of as
preliminary, as a way of subscribing to a didactic necessity. It is critically impor-
tant in that it allows the deŽ ning of the question of the meaning of natural
being in the form of a speciŽ c problem. This problem itself emerges from the
account of a tension, and accordingly from an insuYciency, which Merleau-
Ponty ends up aYrming, is constitutive to the history of ontology, or rather, of
ontology as it has historically unfolded. In this regard, far from remaining out-
side the philosophical question of nature, the historical exposé is integral to the
determination of the meaning of natural being. It is, more precisely, by means
of Cartesian metaphysics, which appears in this context as the emblem of
Western ontology, that Merleau-Ponty brings to light the ontological problem
underlying the question of natural being. However, his reading of Descartes is
itself enlightened by the critique of metaphysics that Bergson developed in
30 RENAUD BARBARAS

Creative Evolution. “Both historically and philosophically our idea of natural being
qua object in itself, which is what it is because it cannot be another thing,
derives from the idea of an unlimited being, inŽ nite or causa sui, and this in turn
comes from the alternation between being and nothing.”11 Because it is put in
balance with a possible nothingness, nature is conceived of as proceeding from
an inŽ nite being: it can emerge from nothingness only by its plenitude of being.
Now, by virtue of the identity of understanding and the will in God, nature is
through and through what it is for understanding, i.e., realized possibility; this
ontological complex, Merleau-Ponty notes “. . . obliges every being, under pain
of being nothing, to exist completely without hiatus, and with no hidden pos-
sibilities. There is to be nothing occult or enveloped in nature any more. Nature
must be a mechanism. . . .”12 Such a nature is deŽ ned by radical exteriority of
its parts, it does not possess a peculiar unity outside that conferred upon it by
the laws of nature: it is naturated nature (nature naturée). Thus, as Bergson sees
quite clearly, to grasp nature on the basis of a possible nothingness, is to refuse
it any peculiar form of negativity, it is confusing it with the thinkable.
Nonetheless, this thesis of the unity of being and essence must be denied at the very
instant that it is posited, and this by the virtue itself of what leads to positing it.
Indeed, because being is put in balance with nothingness, it can be only by
being fully, but, for the same reason, it is not necessary that it be, and this is why
its being envelopes not only essence but also its realization in existence, real-
ization of that there can be no thought. To the extent that being is grasped on
the basis of nothingness, we must recognize in it a dimension of pure existence
that falls outside essence. This signiŽ es that “. . . by maintaining the contin-
gency of the act of creation, Descartes upheld the facticity of nature and thus
legitimated another perspective on this existent nature than that of pure under-
standing.”13 In eVect, while the essence of natural being is oVered to under-
standing, that is to say to reason, its existence is accessible only by a “natural
inclination,” which pushes me to believe in the existential eVect that my senses
deliver to me passively. Correlatively, the composite of soul and body, dis-
qualiŽ ed from the point of view of understanding, is seen as rehabilitated by
virtue of its aptitude of establishing a relationship between me and a naked exist-
ence. Thus, Merleau-Ponty interprets the duality of the meanings of nature in
Descartes (reason/natural inclination) as the index of an ontological tension, the
full dimension of which he unfolds, between what he calls an ontology of the
object and an ontology of the existing (or of the event).
Whatever the accuracy of this interpretation, what is important here is that
Merleau-Ponty sees in it the thematic manifestation, so to speak, of an ambi-
guity that characterizes Western ontology: “Do we not Ž nd everywhere the
double certitude that being exists, that appearances are only a manifestation
and a restriction of being — and that these appearances are the canon of every-
thing that we can understand by ‘being,’ that in this respect it is being in-itself
MERLEAU-PONTY AND NATURE 31

which appears as an ungraspable phantom, an Unding? Could we not Ž nd what

has been called an ‘ontological diplopy’ (Blondel), which after so much philo-
sophical eVort we cannot expect to bring to a rational reduction and which
leaves us with the sole alternative of wholly embracing it, just as our gaze takes
over monocular images to make a single vision out of them.”14 Thus, the his-
tory of ontology reveals in each thinker the recurrence of a tension between
two approaches toward Nature: one that places the accent on its determinabil-
ity, its transparency to understanding, the other that underlies its irreducible
facticity and tends therefore to value the standpoint view of the senses. Now,
such is the problem of nature, it is not a question of stopping at this duality,
because, as the study of Descartes demonstrates, there arrives a moment when
it ends up involving incompatible theses; nor is it, however, a question of purely
and simply going beyond it, since any attempt at reducing these two terms to
a third one sooner or later revives the duality. Such is the diYculty that the
study of nature involves: one cannot stop at the duality, and yet there is no pos-
sible synthesis. This is what an unpublished note conŽ rms (1958–59): “value of
dualism — or rather refusal of an explicative monism which would have re-
course to ‘intermediary’ ontology. I am seeking an ontological midpoint, the
Ž eld which reunites object and consciousness. . . . But the Ž eld, raw being (that
of inanimate nature, of organism) must not be conceived as a cloth in which
would be cut out object and consciousness, and the order of causality and the
order of meaning.”15 As Merleau-Ponty writes, the only way out consists there-
fore in “taking possession” of duality, that is to say, in accordance with the opti-
cal comparison, in determining an original plan in which this duality is resolved
internally, but at the center of which it is also rooted in such a way that it is
possible to make of it the birth of a new approach. It is a question of creating
an original meaning of natural being, of which the duality between punctual
event and determined object is like an abstract portrait. This requires the undo-
ing of the ontological complex characteristic of classic metaphysics and whose
central core consists, as we have seen, in the tripartite division (in reality never
really thematized by Merleau-Ponty) among nothingness, essence, and exis-
tence: it is by virtue of an identical act that nothingness is posited as necessary
condition for being, that this latter is identiŽ ed with the knowable, and that this
identiŽ cation is seen at the same time as contested by the emergence of a pure
facticity falling outside essence. In other words, what is at stake here, so to
speak, is the obvious conception of nature as ensemble of spatio-temporally
determined occurrences of generic realities.
The question then posed is the question involving the mode of access to this
natural being. To the extent that pure philosophy is always threatened by onto-
logical diplopia, it is on the very ground of contemporary science that Merleau-
Ponty Ž nds the necessary means to contest the ontological complex that dictates
classical conceptions, and this is why the historical overview of the conceptions
32 RENAUD BARBARAS

of nature leads to an examination of the status of the idea of nature in mod-

ern science. As he expressed it in the lecture notes, if there are not reasons to
ask science for a new, ready-made conception of nature, because science is not
philosophy, “we Ž nd in it the means to eliminate false conceptions of Nature.”16
Otherwise stated, if science is in general upheld by naïve ontological presup-
positions, it is led by its own results to a realization and to a reform of these
presuppositions to the point where it can indicate at least the path of a new
philosophy of nature: “it is the internal critique of physics which leads us to
become conscious of the perceived world. . . . The mediation of knowledge
allows us to rediscover indirectly and in a negative way the perceived world
that prior idealization had made us forget.”17 Here again we Ž nd the method
used in The Structure of Behavior: it is on scientiŽ c grounds and by means of an
internal critique of its own prejudices that the phenomenological reduction
operates. Just as in The Structure of Behavior, the experience derived from the
scientiŽ c study of behavior justiŽ ed the critique of intellectualism and thus led
to perceptive consciousness. The study of the results of contemporary physics
and biology nourishes the critique of the presuppositions of metaphysics and
allows a renewed determination of natural being. However, we must not con-
clude from this that philosophy is not required to make its contribution; on the
contrary, we can interpret the second part of the historical exposé, which con-
cerns the “romantic” conception of nature, as a Ž rst attempt, at least a nega-
tive one, at what the scientiŽ c approach will allow us to clarify.
As one could expect, the study of contemporary sciences, in particular
of biology, leads therefore to the undoing of the constitutive ontological pre-
suppositions of classical metaphysics. We can summarize the Merleau-Pontian
conception of nature in four propositions that, to be sure, are profoundly
interdependent: 1) “the totality is not less real than the parts” (F22); there is a
reality of the negative and therefore no alternative between being and noth-
ingness; 3) a natural event is not assigned to a unique spatio-temporal localiza-
tion; 4) there is generality only as generativity. We will attempt to clarify rapidly
each one of these propositions. We have seen that, in Descartes, the principle
of nature  ows back towards God, so that nature itself is nothing other than
the sum of its parts and therefore possesses no unity of its own. On the con-
trary, as the reading of Bergson foresees, Merleau-Ponty sees in the modern
conceptions of nature the rehabilitation of an intrinsic unity of natural being.
In other words, there is a natural totality that is irreducible to the sum of its
parts without however being something else, without referring to a positive
principle. Natural being exists in the global mode, in that what happens in each
localized part and what occurs at each moment is tributary to the relationships
of each part with all the others, in other words, of what happens to the total-
ity. Or rather, if it is true that the whole is real, the decoupage of spatial and
temporal parts depends already on an abstraction: in the same way that the
MERLEAU-PONTY AND NATURE 33

reality of the notes is inseparable from the reality of the melody; the reality of
any event situated in time and space depends on what happens to the whole.
We have here a striking conŽ rmation of what the psychology of form reveals
on the perceptive level. This conŽ rmation can Ž rst be obtained on the basis of
physics. This is why Merleau-Ponty is interested in the relativist rethinking of
Newtonian physics that leads to the revelation of the constitutive interdepen-
dence of space and time and, thereby, to the impossibility of adopting an
absolute point of view that would situate any temporal occurrence at the cen-
ter of a unique time. Modern physics, as Merleau-Ponty expresses in a radical
way, “studies a massive Being in which what is time, space matter, etc., must
not appear as just so many juxtaposed realities, but as an indivisible reality.”18
In truth, in this regard, Merleau-Ponty owes almost everything to Whitehead
to whom he dedicates an entire chapter. Indeed, by deŽ ning nature as projec-
tion or moving on, Whitehead conceives of it as a massive event; thereby, space
and time, far from constituting nature in the sense in which what is situated
would compose it, are only abstract modes of determination of the relationships
at the center of this global event. Here I will give just one formula, taken from
the Concept of Nature, of which Merleau-Ponty’s text could be considered through
and through the commentary: “the germ of space is to be found in the mutual
relations of events within the immediate general fact which is all nature now
discernible, namely within the one event which is the totality of present
nature.”19 Now, this all-encompassing dimension of natural being is conŽ rmed
on the level of living nature to which Merleau-Ponty dedicates indeed the
essence of his lecture series. Whether we re ect on behavior or on embryology,
we discover that we can account for facts only if we admit that each part of
the organism carries in it the reference to a total form, which is none other
than the organism as such. The organism is not the sum of its parts — and thus
we escape from mechanism — without however referring to a transcendental
principle, and this is why vitalism is just as inadequate: the living is like a whirl-
wind, which is nothing more than water and which gives it however its form.
In other words, as Canguilhem had seen so clearly from his perspective, life is
emerging in relationship to the physical-chemical level. We grasp life only by
refusing to restrict ourselves to the analytical point of view and to local phe-
nomena: the organism, Merleau-Ponty says, is a macro-phenomenon or an envelope-
phenomenon, which invests the instantaneous-local, which is situated between the
components, that is to say everywhere and nowhere. We attain life in its real-
ity only by renouncing the implicit identiŽ cation between being and corpuscle:
“life is visible and exists only at a certain scale of observation, the macro-
scopic — but at this scale, it is entirely true and original. It exists therefore in
solidarity with vision. It does not exist in itself as the indivisible corpuscle
does.”20 In other words, the distinction between physical-chemistry and life is
that between the ontic and the ontological: the physical-chemical phenomena
34 RENAUD BARBARAS

do not belong to the being of the organism (as Goldstein points out, and to whom
Merleau-Ponty refers in an unpublished note).
The consequence of this discovery is the rehabilitation of the negative, that
is to say, the refusal of thinking of it according to a massive opposition to being.
In fact, if totality is nothing more than the sum of its parts while at the same
time being eYcient (since it directs organic phenomena) and is therefore real,
we must admit a reality of the negative. As clearly expressed by Merleau-Ponty,
“the reality of organisms supposes a non-Parmenidian being, a form which
escapes from the dilemma of being and non-being. We can therefore speak of
a presence of the theme of these realizations, or say that the events are grouped
around a kind of absence.”21 Each organic event is polarized by a totality that
is nothing more than its modes of actualization and therefore never realized as
such. Thus, life can be characterized by an “operating nonbeing,” by a lack
“which is not lack of this or that,” and this is why, as Bergson had already
demonstrated, it is situated beyond the alternative of mechanism and Ž nalism
(it is not mechanism since the organism is polarized by the future and there-
fore more than itself, but it does not depend on Ž nality because what dynamizes
the living is not a transcendent and positive being, because the act of becom-
ing of the living is tributary to each of the eVective stages). The unfolding of
the animal, magniŽ cently stated by Merleau-Ponty, is “like a pure wake which
is not attributable to any boat.”22 This leads us to a third determination.
We have seen that the submission of nature to the alternative of being and
nothingness had as a consequence an irreducible and incomprehensible cleav-
age between essence and existence. Inversely, it is clear that the new determi-
nation of natural being as totality, as that with which being envelops, therefore
a dimension of negativity, has as a consequence the abandonment of this cleav-
age. Indeed, if physical nature is to be conceived of as global moving on or
massive event, it follows that any spatio-temporal localization, what Whitehead
calls a “ ash point,” is already an abstraction, and that, in its real texture, that
is to say in its natural texture, “the event spans space and time, it is transpa-
tial and transtemporal.”23 Likewise, to say that any vital process, cellular regen-
eration for example, refers to an absent form that this process aims precisely at
realizing, is recognizing that the organism’s present encroaches on its future, or
rather, is the organism’s present only in that it is already future and still past.
If the theme of animal melody is nothing other than its realization without coin-
ciding for this reason with any of its stages, we must conclude that its existence
is transversal to temporal multiplicity. In the same way, if the organic whole is
not the sum of its local parts, without referring to a transcendent principle, we
must recognize that it exists in a ubiquitous mode, as that which crosses and
connects the local parts. Natural being manifests a quite remarkable type of
existence, which we could qualify as general existence: existing in nature or as
nature, is not being situated in a point of space and time, natural existence is
MERLEAU-PONTY AND NATURE 35

not pure and simple realization of an essence. This does not mean that nature
is foreign to space and time, but that space and time cannot designate an order
or an indiVerent element to the events that occur in it. Reality no longer means
realization, that is to say inscription of a quality or of a determination in the
spatial and temporal frame of reference, but spatialization and temporalization
inherent in the quality. We would have to say therefore that the natural event
does not exist in space-time but as space-time; it does not unfold in the midst
of space-time, it unfolds space-time.
Thus we understand the last of the propositions that we set forth in the
beginning: there is generality only as generativity. In fact, to say that natural
existence is a general existence is tantamount to recognizing that there is gen-
erality only as existing generality: generality has meaning only as what spans
spatial or temporal localizations,  ash points, it is therefore not distinguished
from the plurality of events by which it is actualized. We have here the classic
conception of the possible, as ensemble of conceivable determinations, in them-
selves — separate from actuality, and accordingly, the very distinction of the
real and the possible that Ž nds itself called deeply into question. As Merleau-
Ponty expresses it in an unpublished piece the title of which is “dynamic mor-
phology”: “with the disappearance of matter, as molecular existence in time
and space, the problem of essence disappears. Not that we come back in the
least to an atemporal, intelligible world, but on the contrary, because essence
(style) is itself bountiful, because it calls forth plurality (instead of surmounting
it).”24 The generality of essence signiŽ ed no more than its transspatiality, that
is to say, in the last analysis, the plurality of events that it engenders: in this
regard, we could say that space-time, as we have described it, is the essence of
essence. The study of certain vital phenomena conŽ rms this reading. The phe-
nomena of mimicry, for example, remain incomprehensible so long as we
oppose qualitative determination to spatio-temporal localization. They are
clariŽ ed when we understand that there are active relationships, that the similarity
is not only a relationship that the mind establishes between individuals outside
one another but also a mode of speciŽ c being that spans spatio-temporal dis-
persion: beyond essential unity and spatio-temporal multiplicity, the relationship
names the meaning of the true being of natural being. As Merleau-Ponty points
out in the same unpublished piece, we no longer need to ask ourselves “how
does the child resemble his parents, but: he is his parents. How are the same
laws of nature valid here and there, how does sulfur exist in several states, but:
it is the same sulfur that is here and there. . . . Nature is of itself general.” We
could say that nature is in the sense in which the child is his parents: a given
piece of sulfur and any other piece of sulfur are at the same time identical and
diVerent: it is realized relationship, abundant similarity. Such an intuition stems
from a deep-seated anti-Platonism: it is the same sulfur, and not the same idea
of sulfur, which is here and there.
36 RENAUD BARBARAS

We should not conclude from this that any distinction whatsoever is abol-
ished between, for example, the organism and its eVective manifestations, and
we should not extol a radical monism on the pretext that the cleavage between
essence and existence is outmoded. If the organism is not yet what it is, we
must allow that it is distinguished, as speciŽ c being, from its modes of realiza-
tion. Rather it is a question of inquiring how it is possible to think of this dis-
tinction outside the duality of essence and fact, of possible and real. It appears
to us that the answer resides in the virtual in the sense that Bergson and
Deleuze thematize it: the being of natural being is virtual being. Indeed, the
virtual is not the possible, it is real as virtual; but it has “the reality of a task
to fulŽ ll,” which is tantamount to saying that it exists only as its own process
of actualization, which is always a process of diVerentiation. Reality is not an
incomprehensible leap of essence into existence, but rather the actualization of
a virtuality. The virtual is nothing other than the ensemble of its actualizations,
which are inŽ nite, since there is virtual only by and as its actualization; but it
is distinguishable from it in that it is precisely the power of this inŽ nity and that
no actuality therefore exhausts its abundance.
It now comes time to conclude this presentation on the Merleau-Pontian
approach to nature. As we have demonstrated at the beginning, the inquiry sur-
rounding nature is determined by the desire to elaborate a philosophy of per-
ception, in other words, to show that the analysis of perception has such a scope
that it allows us to understand the very phenomenon of truth; this is the rea-
son why the perceived is grasped as the non-instituted, that is to say as nature.
In other words it is a question of demonstrating that the perceived being
described in the Phenomenology of Perception has an ontological signiŽ cance, that it
corresponds to the ultimate meaning of being, that is to say, it deŽ nes the con-
ditions to which all that aspires to reality is subjected. Now, this is precisely
what the re ection on nature allows us to establish. To say in eVect that nat-
ural being is macrophenomenon is to aYrm that the very reality of nature implies
its perceptibility: there is all-encompassing being only as perceived being. Since I
grasp the organism, for example, only as total phenomenon, we must conclude
that the constitutive reference of nature to perceptibility does not belie the real-
ity of it: “to seek the real in a closer view, would be to proceed in the wrong
way. Perhaps we must take the opposite path. The real is perhaps not obtained
by insisting on appearances, it is perhaps appearance. All comes from our ideal
of knowledge, which makes a blosse Sache (Husserl) of being. But, for being
grasped only globally, the totality is not perhaps lacking reality. The notion of
real is not necessarily linked to that of molecular being. Why would there not
be molar being [molaire]”?25 Thus, it is surely due to this long passage through
the study of nature that perceived being, such as it was described in the
Phenomenology of Perception, comes to designate the very meaning of being, and
that Merleau-Ponty can therefore posit the ultimate and eminent identity of the
MERLEAU-PONTY AND NATURE 37

esse and of the percipi. A note for the third year lecture series summarizes per-
fectly the situation: “natural being is hollow because it is being of totality,
macrophenomenon, i.e. eminently being-perceived, ‘image’.”26 We are there-
fore witnesses to an inversion of the approach, ultimately still very Husserlian,
of Phenomenology of Perception. In this text, the natural world (in the “object-
ive”sense) was reduced to the advantage of incarnated subject, and the consti-
tutive reference of this subject to a perceived world was made to appear. In the
later works, Merleau-Ponty suspends subjectivity and becomes interested in only
natural being, at the heart of which he discovers a constitutive reference to per-
ception. He no longer takes consciousness as his starting point, which led him
immediately to the problem of the relationship between perceived world and
nature; he begins with nature to show the identity in it of being and being-per-
ceived. Thus, it is indeed by the re ection on nature that the transition towards
ontology comes about.
However, the philosophy of nature is not ontology, natural being is only a
“thin sheet of being.” It would therefore remain to be shown how this theory
of natural being allows taking logos into account, how the mode of speciŽ c
being that aYrms itself in nature renders conceivable its sublimation under the
form of ideality, that is to say, of expressive unity. This is why, if nature is not
being, natural being represents nevertheless, as Merleau-Ponty repeats on sev-
eral occasions, a privileged mode of access to being. Hence a question that we
will be satisŽ ed to pose by way of conclusion. If it is true that the re ection on
natural being is what allows us to move from a phenomenology to an ontol-
ogy, to what degree does this ontology remain phenomenological? Does not
Merleau-Ponty’s ontology lead toward a philosophy of nature? It appears to me
that such is the case, but this does not mean, in my view, that he abandons
nonetheless phenomenological exigency. The decisive question that engages the
ultimate meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, is therefore, to my way think-
ing, the following one: is the philosophy of nature that emerges in Merleau-
Ponty’s last work the sign of an abandoning of phenomenology or its most
demanding mode of accomplishment?
Translated by Paul Milan
Seattle University

NOTES

1. La structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), 1; translated by

L. Fisher under the title The Structure of Behavior (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983), 3.
2. Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 340; translated by C. Smith under the title
Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 294.
38 RENAUD BARBARAS

3. La nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995), 91. Hereafter cited
as N.
4. Le visible et l’invisible; Suivi de notes de travail; texte établi par Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard,
1964); translated by Alphonso Lingis under the title The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by
Working Notes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
5. An unpublished text by M. Merleau-Ponty: a prospectus of his work, translated by Arleen B.
Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 6.
6. Ibid., 9.
7. “Institution in Personal and Public History,” section 5 of “Themes from the Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1952–1960,” in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. J. Wild, J. Edie,
and J. O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 108–9.
8. N, 267.
9. N, 19, 20.
10. Untitled note, no date, Merleau-Ponty Archives, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
11. “The Concept of Nature, I,” section 8 of “Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France,
1952–1960,” in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, 137.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 138.
14. Ibid., 157–58.
15. File 22, dated 1958–1959, Merleau-Ponty Archives, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Hereafter
cited as F22.
16. N, 120.
17. N, 138.
18. N, 145.
19. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), pp.
52–53.
20. F22.
21. N, 239.
22. N, 231.
23. See N, 230.
24. “Morphologie dynamique,” in F22.
25. N, 209.
26. N, 281.