Conception of nature as foundation of a non-fundamental ontology Merleau-Ponty between the Nature lectures and The Visible and the Invisible

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1 Conception of nature as foundation of a non-fundamental ontology Merleau-Ponty between the Nature lectures and The Visible and the Invisible Alessio Rotundo Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg 1 Ontology of nature on the basis of the phenomenon of the living being: Merleau-Ponty s Nature lectures «We will show how the concept of nature is always the expression of an ontology and its privileged expression». 1 If the concept of nature is not only the «expression of an ontology» but even its «privileged expression», then, by contrast, the elaboration of a concept of nature presents itself as the privileged point of departure of every ontological elaboration. We could even say that the concept of nature, as the privileged expression of ontology, serves as a propaedeutic for its elaboration. At the beginning of his Second Course on Nature Merleau-Ponty writes: The concept of nature does not evoke only the residue of what had not been constructed by me, but also a productivity which is not ours, although we can use it that is, an originary productivity that continues [to operate] beneath the artificial creations of man. It both partakes of the most ancient, and is something always new [...] Nature is not exhausted or used up by the very fact that endures. 2 The first question we shall ask in this respect is: how do we approach the concept of nature? How do we experience the natural world? Or, since the goal is the elaboration of an ontology, «what does philosophy make of this experience of the natural?». 3 We can take up two main explicative positions in relation to nature in order then to proceed to analyze Merleau-Ponty s conception of nature. Descartes elaboration of the natural world in terms of extension separates it from the human world, conceiving the latter in terms of a non-extended res cogitans. The co-existence of a non-extended cogito with an extended nature and, among the natural things, with our body, is explained by referring to the intervention of God, who thereby appears rather as the standing guarantor of their separation. Referring to Descartes, thus, we do not find any tenable description of the way in which we experience the natural world. In fact, strictly speaking, we never have experience of the natural matter but only of a cogito conceiving of it in terms of extension, that is to say, in mathematical terms. Descartes makes of the sensible experience of the natural a 1 Merleau-Ponty 2003, 204. Merleau-Ponty courses on nature were held by him at Collège de France respectively in the years , and Merleau-Ponty died in These lectures are published in the original French edition under the title La nature; Notes, Cours du Collège de France, établi et annoté par Dominique Séglard, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, We will refer to the English translation by Robert Vallier: Nature, Course Notes from the Collège de France, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, 125. ISSN

2 186 Alessio Rotundo non-experience or an experience of error, which enters into the constitution of the cogito as the experience of extended matter, whereby extension is considered the only true attribute of nature. Descartes methodological doubt, in fact, leads us from the variety of the sensible world to the absolute fact which accompanies the perception of the world, namely that we are there facing this variety, assuming or rather questioning it. This absolute reality is our thought. Due to the always given possibility to stand up in front of the perceived object and to question its nature, thought is taken as the only clear and evident reality of which we can have proper knowledge. The fact that there is a natural variety perceived by the senses, thus, is reduced to an occasion for the cogito to return back to itself and to the knowledge of itself. At this point, we could say, the natural world should vanish into thin air with the perceiving experience that we have of it, letting therefore the cogito alone with itself and its questioning faculty. On the contrary, the natural world receives a definitive foundation as res extensa and our perceiving experience turns into something that we always have to be suspicious of. In this sense, Kant was more consistent and after having described the world of experience as the constituted result of our own way of experiencing it, he did not conceive of the thing-in-itself in substantial terms, but rather, as it becomes clear particularly in the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, as a limiting concept of reason. Since Descartes view does not seem to offer a satisfactory answer concerning the problem of our experience of nature, to answer this question, and to develop a proper description of such an experience, we shall take other approaches into consideration. Particularly, we shall look for an approach that, instead of conceiving nature and subjectivity as two separated substances, rather describes the way in which subjectivity is bound to nature. To this aim, we refer, with Merleau-Ponty, to the phenomenology of Husserl, whose goal was precisely «to not so much break the bond that unites us with the world as to reveal it to us and explicate it.» 4 However, as Merleau-Ponty says, «Husserl s thought is divided between two tendencies». 5 On the one hand, Husserl s phenomenological descriptions aim at breaking the «natural, naïve attitude» 6 in order to make the grasping of our basic way to interact with our own world possible. Therefore, the whole of man - nature is transformed by the reduction into a noema to be thought, implying thereby a noesis which is no longer subject to the natural attitude and which therefore allows a description of the way in which subjectivity interacts with the world. On the other hand, Husserl s descriptions aim precisely at a clarification of this very natural attitude as the ground of every experience of the world from which a possible noesis of the relations of man with nature also stems: «Consciousness» Merleau-Ponty points out about Husserl s transcendental philosophy «even reduced, keeps a corner to itself, a fundamental and originary zone on which the world of idealizations is constructed». 7 This second direction will lead the later Husserl (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy) to the conception of the Lebenswelt, i.e. to the conception of a pre-reflexive world which is at the bottom of all human productions but that is not itself a result of a subjective activity. 8 This is an «originary passivity», 9 more original and more primordial than every philosophical or scientific activity. The pre-reflexive world is the 4 Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Husserl 1976, 123 ff. 9 Merleau-Ponty 2003, 71.

3 Conception of nature as foundation of a non-fundamental ontology 187 place in which the subject lives out his/her original relationship with the world in the natural attitude before every production or conceptuality intervene. This is the spot of the world that I don t make happen, but rather that happens and allows me to let things happen. Merleau-Ponty recognizes already in Husserl s Ideen II a tension between a natural dimension that is sometimes extended as to include also consciousness and, by contrast, a dimension in which the spirit becomes absolute. 10 Another sign of this tension is expressed by the Husserlian idea of Weltall. Merleau-Ponty reports that, at the beginning of Ideen II, 11 Husserl describes nature in terms of a sphere of pure things which emerges as soon as the subject detaches himself/herself from his/her lived world and starts wanting to grasp an object in the world. The result is that nature becomes all what we can question and that toward which we can assume a detached attitude. This is, as we have seen above, the Cartesian conception of nature as the object in front of which the thinking substance stands up and which the thinking substance questions in its variety and opacity until a clear and evident knowledge is achieved. Thus, nature appears as the totality of correlations between reality and the questioning consciousness. For, since everything within the sphere of the real can be addressed as an object for a knowing activity, everything becomes nature and nature therefore identifies itself with the whole universe, it becomes, in fact, Weltall. As we can see, according to Merleau-Ponty, Husserl moved from a conception of nature intended as the layer of reality that has to be bracketed in order to discover one s own way to relate with the world, to a conception in which nature is the result of the objectifying activity of the subject and, finally, to a conception in which the natural attitude appears to be the basis of every human activity. As a result, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that Husserl s phenomenology does not overcome a duality, according to which the natural attitude is broken and at the same time rehabilitated. According to Merleau-Ponty, the goal of an interpretation of Husserl s works should consequently be that of detecting «the double postulate» 12 of his thought. This means that Merleau- Ponty intends to preserve the fundamental phenomenological approach of Husserl, taking up from his texts the structure of explanation that he tried to take hold of. This structure, we could say, seeks sometimes to unveil what is proper to the higher layers of experience but at other times it tries to ground such higher layers on the lower. Referring to this structure, Merleau-Ponty intends to preserve first of all a relation between different levels of reality. Yet, the specificity of such a relation is something that needs to be unveiled through a description which can never be definitive. For, in his elaboration of the concept of nature, Merleau-Ponty does not simply intend to criticize Husserl s results but, as we can infer from his own conception of nature, he rather intends to pursue the phenomenological work that Husserl first started about nature and the natural. How is then nature as Lebenswelt and as Weltall to be understood? How is the relation between nature as primordial and passive world and nature as world of pure things to be described? Merleau-Ponty takes up Husserl s overall observations describing nature as the structure in which a «universe of theory subtends an already present universe [...] an originary world, anterior to all activity, world before a thesis : the perceived world». 13 The universe of pure things is thus grounded in the universe 10 «Husserl shows in Ideas II that there are oscillations in which, one after the other, nature is that which includes all, both philosophy and consciousness, for which he uses the term spiritual nature, saying also that spirit is the absolute», Merleau-Ponty 2003, Husserl 1952, 24 ff. 12 Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, 73.

4 188 Alessio Rotundo of perception which is the primordial, the Ursprung of every production or idealization. It is an origin that is not graspable with the instruments of human activity, since the latter find their foundation precisely in what they want to take hold of. However, for this very reason, since the pure things of the world of theory cannot detach themselves from the ground that founds them, they always carry in their very nature a reference to it. Thus, when we assume a more detached attitude towards things in order to grasp their meaning, what we actually find is their reference to a perceptual and lived ground, reference which constitutes also their very meaning. On the other hand, since the perceptual world will still constitute the ground of the discovered meaning, this meaning can never be a definitive one. The unveiling of the meaning of a thing, thus, requires that we constantly return the ground from which such meaning stems. As a result, we can certainly take hold of the meaning of the perceptual world into which we and the things of our production are plunged. Yet, this is possible only by means of a constant «retrospective movement of intentionality», 14 i.e. no longer recurring to practical and theoretical tools in order to reach a clear and distinct idea of one s own original situation, but instead constantly referring to these tools only in order to review and describe over and over again their reference to their own ground. 2 Ontology of the living being Our question was: what does philosophy make of this experience of the natural? We saw that, by dismissing the dualistic model of a Cartesian approach to nature, Merleau-Ponty turned to an approach that tries to take up the bond which unites man with nature, finding it in Husserl and in his descriptions about the natural attitude, which Husserl respectively dismisses and recovers. Merleau-Ponty pursues Husserl s fundamental phenomenological insights in order to eventually unveil what he considers to be missing in Husserl s descriptions. To this aim, however, he carries out the same phenomenological work as Husserl. To be more concrete, Merleau-Ponty went through the duality that characterized Husserl s approach to the natural attitude, transforming the still resulting double dimensionality of the natural in a unity of a vertical dimensionality, which grounds the higher degrees upon the lower. The latter, in relation to the concept of nature, are described as the original ground of perceptual and lived experience, from which all human productions stem and from which all human productions gain their meaning. Since every attempt to grasp the meaning of things will always unveil their reference to a natural and more primordial ground, how do we have to describe the meaning that is unveiled? Or, in Merleau-Ponty s words, «what will we find as the references to which the pure things necessarily allude?» 15 The following remarks will not only present Merleau-Ponty s conception of nature but, according to our initial quote, they will also start to reveal the ontology which he was trying to get at. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty s conception of nature is assumed to be both expression of and propaedeutic to such an ontology. The question of nature is approached by Merleau-Ponty in his Nature lectures by recurring to the phenomenon of animal life. By referring to this phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty tries to describe the way in which meaning can in general emerge in life. Thereby, as we shall see, he shows that a gap is the source of every possible meaning and this allows him to eventually grasp the general relation between the appearance of the particular thing and its source, i.e. the coming about of meaning 14 Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, 73.

5 Conception of nature as foundation of a non-fundamental ontology 189 überhaupt. Facing the problem of life, Merleau-Ponty first focuses on an epistemological change which took place in the theory of the living organism, namely the substitution of the antithesis materialism/vitalism with a dialectical understanding of life. Although still not removed, the antithesis materialism/vitalism as such seems no longer to constitute the real concern of the different tendencies and schools of thought in relation to the phenomenon of life. Instead of this antithesis and of the substantialism which it implies, the real issue seems to be nowadays the understanding of the dialectical meaning the problem of life has assumed within the science that investigates the phenomenon of life, namely within biology. In fact, we observe an application of concepts, in particular that of behavior, 16 which shows a real «mutation of biological concepts» 17 with relevant consequences for the very ontology of the living being. What do we understand with the relation of the concept of behavior to the concept of organism? We can start by arguing that behavior can be defined as the unifying attitude of the organism in a specific situation. Thus, by means of the concept of behavior, we already start to define the terms of a relation which would determine the living being as such: in fact, we face behavior as the integrated response to the variety of a situation. If we now look more carefully at what we have just found out, in facing the problem of life by means of a concept like that of behavior, we are actually facing the question of the relation of the whole to its parts. We should retain this relation as the leading relation for our question about the living being. This will allow to overcome the limits of the traditional understanding of the parts-whole relationship, according to which the whole is the mere sum of its parts. In the Nature lectures, Merleau-Ponty refers in particular to two biologists Coghill and Gesell whose use of the concept of behavior concerning the living being shall help us to unfold the question about this very being. Without re-proposing the description that Merleau-Ponty exhibits on Coghill s studies 18 in details, here we shall take up the results of this description. On the basis of the analysis of such studies Merleau-Ponty claims that a biological theory that takes the concept of behavior into account must reject a description of the living being exclusively founded on the nervous system. The latter, indeed, cannot be understood as the ultimate ground to explain behavior. In fact, by means of the study on a particular lizard, 19 Coghill intended to show a preneural activity of the organism according to which «the organism appears precociously adapted to its function». 20 The responses of the organism of the lizard, or its behavior, are led by so called «preneural gradients», 21 from the activity of which the nervous system only secondarily emerges. In other words, there is a growth of the whole organism so that «the embryological development progressively realizes the individual parts (anatomically and functionally), at the same time that the behavior invades the 16 To be sure, the notion of behavior was not new to Merleau-Ponty, who already thematized it in an early treatise with the title The Structure of Behavior. Significantly, regardless if he already knew of the new positions about the notion of behavior within biology or not, he writes there: «We will come to these questions [that is, the relationship between the mental and the physical] by starting from below and by an analysis of the notion of behavior. This notion seems important to us because, taken in itself, it is neutral with respect to the classical distinctions between the mental and the physiological and thus can give us the opportunity of defining them anew». Merleau-Ponty 2008, 4. In relation to the conception of nature, we could say, Merleau-Ponty seems to refer to the notion of behavior still in tune with his early purpose to start from below in order to define anew the idea of nature. 17 Merleau-Ponty 2003, Cf. Coghill The axolotl lizard. 20 Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, 143.

6 190 Alessio Rotundo periphery of the body». 22 As we can see, this theory ends up being incompatible with a mechanical explanation, since the latter requires a static or «congealed anatomy», 23 whereby every part is connected to the others by means of a relation of «conduction». 24 According to Caughill, the living organism has instead a «dynamic anatomy». 25 Thanks to such anatomy, the organism always refers to future states integrating them in a new and unifying behavioral response and in relation to which, furthermore, «the maturation of the organism and the emergence of behavior are one and the same thing» 26 without any reduction of the organism to its own parts being possible. With this we are facing a true philosophical problem, as Merleau-Ponty points out, namely the problem of how we have to understand the totality within which behavior emerges without falling back into a vitalistic position. In order to discuss this point, we have to keep in mind once more how the totality of behavior has not to be mistaken as the sheer sum of its parts. In fact, as we can read: the local observed phenomena, such as of gradient, form a totality when they are considered in their whole, a totality which is not reducible to its parts. [...] How are we to understand this relation of totality of parts as a result? What status must we give totality? Such is the philosophical question that Caughill s experiments pose, a question which is at the center of this course on the idea of nature and maybe the whole of philosophy. 27 After having reached, with Caughill, the notion of a dynamic anatomy by means of the concept of behavior, Merleau-Ponty discusses the work of another biologist, namely Gesell, 28 in order to get at the notion of a dynamic body. The dynamic of the body is inscribed within the very living body as «a templum where events will have an organic significance. Among these events, the gestural elements are defined». 29 Also, in Gesell we face a reciprocal relation between behavior and the organism, in this specific case between behavior and the body: «On the one hand, the body is like the envelope, the sketch of behavior; on the other, behavior is literally a second body which is added to the natural body». 30 The unity of the totality behavior-body is further defined as a form, 31 which always remains a transcendent form. In other words, this form can be seen as the milieu or the field that behavior outlines and that always stays out of reach, but wherein, at the same time, the body moves as if everything was already familiar. Finally, Merleau-Ponty asks: «What does this new notion of behavior bring to the relation of the whole to the parts?» 32 We face once again the concept of behavior as defining a totality that can never be reached as such and that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. However, we are not dealing with an organic totality without which the parts would lose their being. The behavioral totality which arises out of the living being is reliant on every single part without being reducible to the sum of these parts. Hence, it is a transcendent totality, a totality which is always absent, which is always lacking (i.e. missing ), and for this reason always moves to future realizations. For the living organism, behavior 22 Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Gesell and Amatruda Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Cf. Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, 151.

7 Conception of nature as foundation of a non-fundamental ontology 191 is the indication of a future balance in a present of continuous imbalance. In relation to the phenomenon of life, the problem seems to be therefore that of the presence of a never given totality which requires to be clarified on the level of a «natural history»: 33 «To grasp life in the things is to grasp a lack in the things as such». 34 To sum up, the transformation of the understanding of life which was taking place in biology shows the outlines for an ontology of life based on the leading idea of behavior, according to which the living being grows up by means of a continuous and unitary behavioral response to the variety of a situation, projecting a future unity of the situation which, however, is never given to the living being in a totality that has a beginning and an end. The beginning and the end, like birth and death, are never given, although they are there circumscribing the field of operations of the organism. What is at issue, however, is precisely the status of a totality which is projected but not pre-figured in terms of a fixed beginning and a fixed end. The totality indicated by the behavioral response, thus, is not something to be found as ready-made. Rather, it is always in play, it is the whole of organism-environment, in which, we could say, the organism selects the environment by means of an outlining behavioral response and, at the same time, the environment selects the organism inducting a certain behavioral response to be effected. The dynamics of the living being, then, can be described as the opening up of a totality and at the same time of a void which separates the organism from that same totality. Aiming at a description of the natural experience of the living being by referring to the current understanding of the latter in biology, Merleau-Ponty was able to describe the emergence of meaning in life - i.e., the emergence of a meaningful response of the organism to what surrounds it - in terms of a behavioral response which, at the same time, is outlining the totality of a situation and is outlined by the presence of the concrete variety of a situation. We will soon see what this means for the human subject as living being. For now, it is essential to indicate that every conscious response of the organism to its situation is never a strict mechanical response to external conditions nor the unfolding of an internal finalism. Assuming these positions, one exclusively focuses on those aspects of reality that fit into the one or the other model of explanation. The conscious response of the organism to its environment is, instead, a behavioral response, according to which «we would thus have to allow an instrinsic relation between the substratum and the animal, a possibility of indivision between the surrounding and the animal». 35 This allows us to precisely preserve the bond of reality that we want to describe, while mechanicism and finalism always start from a standpoint of division which obstacles all attempts to explain the relationship between organism and its surrounding. 36 As a result, referring to the notion of behavior, Merleau-Ponty is able to describe the specific experience of the living being as natural being. Such a description shows that every response of the organism to reality cannot be reduced to this or that definitive aspect of reality, rather being identical with the very expression of the real. 37 The way 33 Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Cf., for example, what Merleau-Ponty writes in relation to the phenomenon of mimicry: «If we wanted to explain these facts of mimicry by consciousness, and to speak of psychosomatic action, the animals would have to be conscious. Moreover, to make consciousness intervene is not more clear than making nature intervene. The advent of consciousness is not more clear than the indivision between the outward appearance of the animal, like the zebra, and its surroundings. In the two cases, there is a contamination of the two terms by each other», Merleau-Ponty 2003, The notion of expression can maybe help to describe what Merleau-Ponty means by saying that «The

8 192 Alessio Rotundo the living organism acts through a unitary behavioral response, outlining a situation in which behavioral responses would not be required any longer (a situation that, however, remains always out of reach), shows the presence of a disequilibrium, of a gap, of a variety not to be united, which, at the same time, founds the meaning of the behavioral response of the organism. This, however, indicates a way in which reality itself works. In such reality the living being finds itself in relation with a being which is always a coming to be, maturation and emergence: We discover between the situation and the response an internal articulation that we understand, but that we cannot reduce to its elements [...] Entirely by reincorporating meaning, the notion of behavior remains something anchored in a body, but the body is no longer a machine, and if the organism is no longer a machine, consequently behavior becomes a quasi-organic reality (Gesell). The whole development is on the one hand maturation [our italics], linked to the gravity of the body, but on the other, the becoming of this body has a meaning: the spirit is not what descends into the body in order to organize it, but is what emerges [our italics] from it. 38 The notion of behavior, thus, allows us to describe the emergence of meaning within the living being as taking part in a being which is not already fully spread out in separated and fixed entities. Such being is rather unveiled by the living being through its behavioral response; the latter is already deeply integrated with being, even before every unveiling of being itself. 39 Rephrasing Merleau-Ponty s words in relation to the capacity of vision, we could say that the organism sees something and this seeing is already its response to something, thus its behavior is accomplished on the basis of something which can be affected by a behavioral act: «the animal sees according to whether it is visible». 40 On the other hand, what is visible is never totally spread out in front of the organism, rather being visible because there is a gap that the organism tries to fulfill by means of a behavioral act that projects itself towards a future visible. Accordingly, life is also «a power to invent the visible» Nature as leaf of being To complete our picture on Merleau-Ponty s conception of nature, which anticipates and outlines his future ontology, it is necessary to make this conception explicit according to the results of Merleau-Ponty s analysis of living being. We have seen that the living being lives out its being as a totality never to come. The fact that the living being experiences the staying out of a totality not as a lacking mode of being to be fulfilled, but as its very mode of being, is informative about the same reality of which the living being is an integral expression. First of all, discovering the living being as integral part of being on the basis of Merleau-Ponty s descriptions, we can make the perceptual character of reality explicit. If there is a reality in which a living being exists, this has to be a perceptual reality. This shall not be misunderstood in terms of Berkeley s argument of esse est percipi, i.e. to be is to be perceived, since, according to this argument, every reality is reduced to form of the animal is not the manifestation of a finality, but rather of an existential value of manifestation, of presentation», Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Cf. the examples reported by Merleau-Ponty about the formation of the lungs before the embryo even has oxygen to breath, Merleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, 190.

9 Conception of nature as foundation of a non-fundamental ontology 193 representation. In fact, for Merleau-Ponty, perception is not the faculty of a subject in front of an object, i.e. of a subject which «makes a perceptual spectacle of [the body and of the world]». 42 Reality is perceptual in the sense that it comes about in the perceptual walks of a living being. By contrast, saying that reality is perceptual does not mean to let perception descend into reality by transforming it into just the expression of mechanic matter. As a result, a reality conceived in terms of perceptual walks cannot be other than a vertical reality, in which even matter goes through a process of «Einfühlung», 43 empathy or a feeling-into, which, however, also by higher levels of organization, never comes to detach itself from the lower levels. Perceptual reality, thus, determines an ongoing process in which reality comes to be perceptually. Let us analyze further what it means for reality to come to be perceptually given. Let us imagine the situation of an art museum in which we stand before a picture. We look toward the picture moving our gaze, without an explicit knowledge about our movement, respectively back and forth in order to get the picture as it is, capturing the details without losing the overview. 44 In this process of perception, the picture comes out with all its variety of colors and forms and nonetheless as one and the same picture. As a matter of fact, it is not necessary to go to a museum to describe this perceptual process. We continuously encounter things and continuously we come up with them without any particular effort of the mind. We continuously know how to grab a glass, to look at something from afar; we even know what shape this table has without ever having seen this table from an alleged objective perspective. In fact, there is no objective perspective in the sense of an Archimedean point outside of the world. There is, on the contrary, only an objective perspective as the perspective of the thing that we encounter and experience. We continuously have a perspective of the thing which gives us the thing as it is, before we even start thinking about what the thing in reality looks like. The thing, in fact, is always already spread out in full reality in front of us. This reality can only result from a continuous process of perception, of adaption to the thing, of regulation of the fuzziness through which the thing appears. Thus, the perceptual coming to be of the thing requires, in order to be, a perceptual being. Consistently, our body necessarily takes part to a perceptual process in which the reality of the thing comes to be. Our body is always already oriented toward the real thing; it is perceptually engaged with its reality. The coming to be of the thing is bound to a process of perception of a body, through which, conversely, the encounter with the real thing is possible in general. 45 The coming to be of nature, thus, happens through perception, i.e., as we have seen, through the presence of a perceiving body. Now, for Merleau-Ponty, body is not only body of human being or of this or that living being, but is the body of the world: The flesh of the body makes us understand the flesh of the world. We have found the correlate in sensible nature [...]: it is the sensing body. Natural negativity (by the exclusion of fragmentary, corpuscolar being) of the hard nucleus of being, 42 Merleau-Ponty s marginal note, Merleau-Ponty 2003, «Theory of the flesh, of the body as Empfindbarkeit and of things as implicated in it. This has nothing in common with a consciousness that would descend into a body-object. It is, on the contrary, a wrapping of a body-object around itself [...] It is not a surveying of the body and of the world by a consciousness, but rather is my body as interposed between what is in front of me and what is behind me, my body standing in front of the upright things, in a circuit with the world, an Einfühlung with the world, with the things, with the animals, with other bodies (as having a perceptual side as well) made comprehensible by this theory of the flesh», Merleau-Ponty 2003, I refer with this example to a contribution of Professor Theodore Toadvine of the University of Oregon during an informal talk held in the Fall Semester 2011 at the University of Kentucky. 45 Cf.: «I live in my body, and by means of it I live in the things», Merleau-Ponty 2003, 74.

10 194 Alessio Rotundo which remained enigmatic, is clarified here: natural being is a hollow, because it is the being of totality, macrophenomenon, that is, eminently perceived being, image. 46 If nature works to the same extent as the perceiving body, then it is necessary to overcome all explanations of nature exclusively in terms of atomic and subatomic particles or whatever other entities set once and for all. Referring back to the notion of behavior, we could say that perceptual nature moves by means of a behavioral act a perceiving act. For nature is being of totality. On the other hand, however, the totality of nature cannot be interpreted as the mere sum of parts, nor as a monistic totality, since, in both cases, we would not describe the reality of nature but, instead, we would explain this reality by means of another reality behind it, either as a mechanistic or a finalistic reality. 47 In both cases, we would deal once again with a definitive set of elements. The totality of nature as perceptual totality, by contrast, is a totality always to come. In fact, perception never rests upon a fixed and definitive aspect of the real, it is instead, as we have seen, a perpetual movement of back and forth in which the real is a constant coming to be. There is, in nature, the presence of a totality which is but not the totality of a clear and distinct flat being, on the contrary, «natural being is a hollow». 48 The dynamics of nature as perceptual being, therefore, shows that nature is a whole that is not pre-figured by the perceiving being in all its elements. Natural being is a hollow because nature comes to be without there being a pre-form which has to be realized. Nature as perceptual being describes a dynamics in which the perceived thing is there as a whole at each stage without the whole being of the thing fully spread out in terms of the presence of a set of definitive elements. There is something in nature, and this something is perceivable. It is not unlike what the perceivable is going to become, because perception outlines a certain totality to come. However, the outline of what is perceivable is the outline of a totality which is never fully outlined in the present perceivable itself. There is a perceptual movement of nature, we could say, from sketch to sketch, whereby something to be perceived must be there, but what we have is a gap, a rupture, no definitive being once and for all. Merleau-Ponty s attempt to describe this open space, his attempt to see «how all this holds together», 49 can be traced back to the image that maybe more than any other describes Merleau-Ponty s conception of nature and that more than any other can lead us to his ontology: «Nature», writes Merleau-Ponty, «as a leaf or layer of total being the ontology of nature as the way toward ontology the way that we prefer 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». 50 Nature, then, is understood as a leaf of being. The leaf or folio sheet recalls the image of a full uncut sheet of printer s paper prior to being folded in upon itself for the construction of individual book leaves. Nature as «folio sheet of total being» would identify nature as a whole which will be determined in parts, like precisely the unfolded folio sheet of paper, which will be folded in the individuality 46 Merleau-Ponty 2003, Cf.: «If, in the presence of primordial behaviors, we fall back on a positive principle behind the phenomena, we fall under the usual objections: for example, to double observed reality with a second reality [...] we fall in the retrospective illusion that makes us project what is yet to come into the past, or to double the sensible world with an intellectual world without first understanding», Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, 204.

11 Conception of nature as foundation of a non-fundamental ontology 195 of the single pages. 51 In this sense, Merleau-Ponty further determines the notion of a «philosophy of vertical being», 52 since nature as folio sheet of total being would describe nature as a single ontological dimension that founds and unites the single dimensions of «Nature Man God.». 53 Nature would be thereby «the nexus, the vinculum» 54 between those dimensions, turning therefore into the real «unique theme of philosophy». 55 Furthermore, nature as folio sheet also presents the image of a «watermark». 56 Now, in the watermark paper there is an invisible which at the same time owns the feature of becoming visible when both properly illuminated and properly observed. In the watermark the invisible is already wholly present within the visible, it is there but not to the same extent as the rest of the visible. Thus, nature as folio sheet of total being means that nature lacks of nothing: nature manifests itself as such, as a visible part which, at the same time, reveals the whole. The mode of being of the whole or total being of nature is there in terms of an invisible watermark never to be detached from the visible surface of the folio sheet. The image of a leaf or folio sheet of total being hints at a notion of nature as the total ground at the bottom of every possible further determination. We could ask what this would mean in relation to the naturality of the individual dimensions of nature, of its folds and singular determinations. Where is nature to be found, after all? In the individual natural things or in a whole of nature which grounds them? Starting from a study of the living being, Merleau-Ponty unveiled a mode of being of a particular reality which is to be precisely considered as a way in which reality expresses itself. Finding in the notion of behavior a proper description of the way in which the reality of the living being moves and develops, he was able to discover a way in which reality itself moves and develops, i.e. as perceptual reality. Discovered the fact that one fundamental mode of being of reality is perceptual, then the only way to describe this being is grounded on perceptual experience which, by the way, is given to the human being with its very bodily existence. The particular body of the human being is, however, no longer to be conceived as an object separated from a thinking subject or as an ensemble of pure matter. The human body is instead a perceptual body within the perceptual realm of nature. Determining nature in terms of perception, Merleau-Ponty was able to describe it as the coming to be of a totality always to come, i.e. as a lacking totality. This is the mode in which nature in general works and this mode we saw unfolded in particular in relation to the living being. In the light of these remarks, it is legitimate to ask about the priority relation between the whole and the parts of the whole. Is it the character of the parts which expresses the fundamental nature of the whole or is the character of the whole which propagates investing every single part? After all, the description of the status of totality was mentioned above as the question at the center of the whole of philosophy. What we can state for now is that with his conception of nature Merleau-Ponty seemed to aim mainly at a plane of reality on which it is possible to preserve oneself in order to describe this very reality. Merleau-Ponty indicated this plane of reality in perception, so that it becomes possible for man to get at a description of his reality 51 I want to thank Professor Ronald Bruzina of the University of Kentucky for this insightful contribution on the meaning of the French term feuillet. 52 Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty 2003, 207.

12 196 Alessio Rotundo remaining on the level of perceptual experience, that is phenomenologically. Then, Regarding nature, the concern was to study it as an ontological leaf and in particular, regarding life, the concern was to study the unfolding of the leaf of nature regarding the human, the concern is to take him at his point of emergence in nature. 57 The description of the experience of the natural in relation to the living being allowed Merleau-Ponty to unfold a conception in which the source of all meanings of life is traced back to a being which properly is to the extent that something is still missing. What is missed or lacked, however, cannot be reduced to some-thing, or even to no-thing. Nevertheless this moment of lack defines the very being of the living being. Since, as we know from Merleau-Ponty, the conception of nature is always expression of an ontology, we may then finally ask in a projective trajectory which shall bring us to the ontology of The Visible and the Invisible: 58 of which kind of ontology is expression Merleau-Ponty s conception of nature? References Coghill, G. 1929, Anatomy and the Problem of Behavior, Macmillan, New York and London. Gesell, A. and C. S. Amatruda 1929, Embriology of Behavior, Macmillan, New York and London. Husserl, E. 1952, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, hrsg. von M. Biemel, M. Nijhoff, Den Haag, Bd. II. Hua IV. 1976, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, hrsg. von W. Biemel, M. Nijhoff, Den Haag. Hua VI. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1968, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by A. Lingis, Northwestern University Press, Evanston. 2003, Nature Course Notes from the Collège de France, ed. by R. Vallier, Northwestern University Press, Evanston. 2008, The Structure of Behavior, ed. by A. L. Fisher, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh. 57 Merleau-Ponty 2003, Merleau-Ponty 1968.