Nature, three lecture courses: Merleau-Ponty in discussion with Whitehead

Vallier, Robert. Course Notes from the Collège de France by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Evanston, IL. Northwestern University Press: 2003.

I have a fondness for Merleau-Ponty. 1950's are a long ways away. I enjoy digging in archival notes.
I found a recent-ish book review from Leonard Lawlor (2006) in the Human Studies journal, putting in conversation some, Merleau-Ponty to Whitehead's principles of Nature. I found Lawlor to be efficient at comparing and distilling Merleau'Ponty's last courses on Nature. I also am doing a tad of research on Merleau-Ponty's unfinished book The Visible and The Invisible. From a few versions I read fast through, in English, I grit my teeth. The writings are tainted with opinions, pompous explanations, tedious strings of too much letters in one sentence. I found Lawlor a useful and clear complement to both our past class with Erin Manning on Whitehead and Nature, and explaining some, of the intent behing The Visible and The Invisible.

If you are like me, I find comparisons quite useful to remember specific notions. What does it say about my learning mode? Enjoy the review read!

I put the whole article up on my Google Drive
Review - Merleau-Ponty - Principle of Nature

Principle of Nature Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
France, compiled and the French by Robert
2003, pp. xx, 313.

The

Nature, with notes by

Course Notes from

the Coll?ge de translated from
University Press,

Dominique S?glard, Vallier. Evanston: Northwestern

The publication of Nature, which presents in English three lecture courses that Merleau-Ponty taught at the Coll?ge de France (during the academic
years 1956-57, 1957-58, and 1959-60), allows us finally to lay a rumor to rest. For decades Merleau-Ponty scholars have been saying that out of all
the courses Merleau-Ponty taught at the Coll?ge de France during the Fifties, the courses on nature give us the clearest insight into his final
thought. This rumor, we can now confirm, turns out to be true. These lecture courses on nature are so important that they rival Merleau-Ponty's

The Visible and the Invisible, or, more precisely, they comple ment The Visible and the Invisible. While the publication of Heidegger's
lecture course called The Basic Problems of Phenomenology gave us a sense of what Part Two ofBeing and Time would have looked like, the publication ofNature gives us a sense of what "the propaedeutic" for The Visible and the Invisible would have looked like (204). They prepare us to remember, as
Merleau-Ponty says in The Visible and the Invisible, the originary sense of being as the "jointure" (or balance) between the visible and the invisible.
All three courses are simply called "The Concept of Nature." The first, however, falls into two parts. The first part, which is called "Study of the
Variations of the Nature," lays out the concept's philosophical evolution in the modern period, from Descartes to Husserl, by way of Kant,
Schelling, and Bergson. The modern tradition defines nature as "a
product," as "pure exteriority" (9); nature, according toMerleau-Ponty,
loses the interiority and orientation, the finality or teleology that the concept still retained from the Stoics up to the Renaissance. In the
modern epoch, nature becomes a machine; it is spread out (partes extra
partes) as a pure object before the pure understanding, and interiority now resides in God who is the artisan of the machine. Because this
conception requires an artisan, Merleau-Ponty calls it anthropomorphic (10). For Merleau-Ponty, modern science still retains this "Cartesian"

concept of nature, and its prevalence in modern science is why the Cartesian concept still "explains us" (8). Part Two of the first course
examines modern science: "Modern Science and the Idea of Nature."
As already indicated, Merleau-Ponty claims in the first part that this concept of nature originates in Descartes. Nevertheless, and this is what
makes the first course so interesting, all the figures that Merleau-Ponty examines do not simply express the Cartesian or objectivistic conception of nature. All exhibit a kind of "strabism" or "diplopy" (127, 134). The "oscillation" that Merleau-Ponty locates in each figure means that none
in fact give us Merleau-Ponty's own position (55). Indeed, if we look at a text that is contemporaneous with the nature lectures, "Everywhere and

Nowhere," presenting

we would have to say that Descartes comes
-
it. Descartes the Descartes of the Sixth Meditation
the problem that drives the modern philosophical

closest to
especially tradition

-
forward,
union of the body and soul implies that nature contains a "residue" that cannot be understood through the machine idea; it contains a "contin

sets up

Merleau-Ponty.
to Merleau-Ponty, Yet, Descartes

that leads to conceives of God

the problem

with which Merleau-Ponty himself grapples. The

that cannot be reduced to
Neither mechanism nor finalism are adequate to nature. For Descartes,

gency" in its productions

teleology (83, 32).

the residue that cannot
cannot be understood. The relation to God here is very important for

resembles God whose ways also It is precisely the idea of God as being infinite, according

be understood

the Cartesian conception of nature (8). and nature in "separation" from one
God's infinity must be "mixed" inwith
course, Merleau-Ponty expresses this mixture by saying that nature "carries" us (44, the French verb is "por
ter"). Carrying us, nature is "larger." Therefore, as in "Everywhere and Nowhere," the laterMerleau-Ponty always stresses that the techniques of modern science, which are "smaller," have to be related back to nature.

another (66). For Merleau-Ponty,

nature (37). Repeatedly in the

So, in the second part of the first course, Merleau-Ponty contemporary science, especially, contemporary physics. Even

examines
though it also
parti are only
"families of trajectories" (93). Despite overcoming the partes extra partes definition of nature, modern science, for Merleau-Ponty, cannot, how ever, elaborate a new conception of nature. This new conception can be

contemporary physics remains bound

to Cartesian ontology, to wave-based mechanics,

criticizes this ontology (85). According
cles are no longer individuated or separated beings; there

found only inWhitehead's philosophy. On the one hand, Whitehead,

for

Merleau-Ponty, makes modern science's self-critique explicit; he criticizes the idea that each event in nature has a unique location in time and space.
On the other hand, and more importantly, for Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead

seeks an element that is not

a part but consists in

a whole (116). The whole,

pregnancy,

larger than any part, translates Whitehead's

relations;
as "empi?tement"

For Merleau-Ponty nature present, giving the present
therefore, in Merleau-Ponty's

is the past that is still there affecting the a kind of thickness and depth. Nature,
interpretation of Whitehead is a kind of

which is Merleau

again
Ponty
(115),
writings. Even more, nature inWhitehead is a creative principle, an
"activity" that cannot be compared to the activity of consciousness or the mind (118). For Whitehead, nature is, of course, a "process", but Mer
leau-Ponty's French translation is "passage," a term that implies the past.

memory; this implies that it persists in its very "unfolding" (119, 120). Nature is the "soil," "the earth," that not only carries us but also, as in

carries the future.

IS THERE ANY WORLD TO COME?

Here is a fragment of Danowski & Viveiros de Castro's 2014 book, "Há Mundo Por Vir? Ensaio sobre os meios e os fins" (Is there any World to come?) in which they discuss the Anthropocene and Amazonic indigenous cosmology (they have already passed through many "ends of the world"). Also, they make a good critique of the correlacionism discussion (Meillassoux, Brassier, etc.). It's in this text an passant but it's better discussed on the physical book (I'll transcribe or scan these pages in order to post them on the blog soon).

Deborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Translated by Rodrigo Nunes

Drawing of two masked Jurupixuna Amerindians, a now extinct Amazonian tribe, registered during Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira’s naturalist expedition to the Amazon (1783–93) for the Portuguese crown.

The problem of the end of the world is always formulated as a separation or divergence, a divorce or orphaning resulting from the disappearance of one pole in the duality of world and inhabitant—the beings whose world it is. In our metaphysical tradition, this being tends to be the “human,” whether called Homo sapiens or Dasein. The disappearance may be due to either physical extinction or one pole’s absorption by the other, which leads to a change in the persisting one. We could schematically present this as an opposition between a “world without us,” that is, a world after the end of the human species, and an “us without world,” a humanity bereft of world or environment, a persistence of some form of humanity or subjectivity after the end of the world.

But to think the future disjunction of world and inhabitant inevitably evokes the origin of its present, precarious conjunction. The end of the world projects backward a beginning of the world; the future fate of humankind transports us to its emergence. The existence of a world before us, although regarded as a philosophical challenge by some (if Meillassoux’s subtle argument is to be believed ), seems easy enough for the average person to imagine. The possibility of an us before the world, on the other hand, is less familiar to the West’s mythological repertoire.

Yet it is a hypothesis explored in several Amerindian cosmogonies. It finds itself conveniently summarized in the commentary that opens a myth of the Yawanawa, a people of Pano-speakers from the western Amazon: “The myth’s action takes place in a time in which ‘nothing yet was, but people already existed.’”  The variation of the Aikewara, a Tupian-speaking people who live at the other end of the Amazon, adds a curious exception: “When the sky was still very close to the Earth, there was nothing in the world except people—and tortoises!”

At first, then, everything was originally human, or rather, nothing was not human (except for tortoises, of course, according to the Aikewara). A considerable number of Amerindian myths—as well as some from other ethnographic regions—imagine the existence of a primordial humankind, whether fabricated by a demiurge or simply presupposed as the only substance or matter out of which the world could have come to be formed.

These are narratives about a time before the beginning of time, an era or eon that we could call “pre-cosmological.” These primordial people were not fully human in the sense that we are, since, despite having the same mental faculties as us, they possessed great anatomic plasticity and a certain penchant for immoral conduct (incest, cannibalism). After a series of exploits, some groups of this primordial humankind progressively morphed—either spontaneously or due to the action of a demiurge—into the biological species, geographical features, meteorological phenomena, and celestial bodies that comprise the present cosmos. The part that did not change is the historical, or contemporary, humankind.

One of the best illustrations of this general type of cosmology is described in great detail in the autobiography of Yanomami shaman and political leader Davi Kopenawa.  We could also recall ideas from the Ashaninka (Campa), an Arawak people both geographically and culturally distant from the Yanomami:

Campa mythology is largely the story of how, one by one,the primal Campa became irreversibly transformed into the first representatives of various species of animals and plants, as well as astronomical bodies or features of the terrain … The development of the universe, then, has been primarily a process of diversification, with mankind as the primal substance out of which many if not all of the categories of beings and things in the universe arose, theCampa of today being the descendants of those ancestralCampa who escaped being transformed.

Complete text here