Nature as a Phenomenon

Nature appears in Merleau-Ponty’s early texts more as a context for a phenomenology of embodied existence than as a topic of interest in its own right.1 Since the philosopher became intensely interested in nature only from 1955 or 1956 on, one might think that an exploration of the earlier phenomenology of perception and behavior constitutes a digression from the later “new” ontology. Yet there are at least two reasons why this is not so. First, although Merleau-Ponty deploys his phenomenology as a critical response to previous philosophies, principally Cartesianism and its progeny, it also serves as a groundwork for the “new” ontology to come. The latter preserves the early work because, as noted in the Introduction, although Merleau-Ponty significantly changes his conception of method for doing philosophy, he does not repudiate his earlier descriptive results. Merleau-Ponty’s late work “remains passionately phenomenological” in some sense because it thinks “as closely as possible to phenomenality in order to better inhabit it” (Janicaud 1991, 15). However, the later writings will advance a new way to think phenomenality and, as we shall see, drive the earlier phenomenology beyond its limits. Furthermore, the expression, “new” ontology, shows that Merleau-Ponty does not regard his later texts as replacing phenomenology with an ontology. Since he already considered his early work to be an ontology, the later writings consist of what he took to be a more adequate ontology. In the early works, nature appears as a phenomenon, a correlate of consciousness,