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88 | THe Puitosopny oF Eco-PotLIrics
world and the invisible world. (...) ...it is necessary to re-examine the
definition of the body as a pure object in order to understand how it can
be our living bond with nature,” opines Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” The
struggle on two fronts by the great figure of French phenomenalism
against naturalism and transcendentalism promised to be a particularly
apt starting point for ecophenomenology. According to Ted Toadvine,
“the difference between Merleau-Ponty’s thought and classical
phenomenology then lies in the fact that he situates the meaning¬
bestowing subject within the meaningful world itself (...) rather than
succumbing to the anthropocentric temptation which situates the
transcendental subject outside of the mundane world,” but for him the
material of the world is not the ‘matter’ of the physicist, nor the ‘soul’
of the psychologist, but instead the /ife of the body, at once perceiving
and perceptible.” “The perceived world (like a painting) is the ensemble
of my body’s routes and not a multitude of spatio-temporal individuals”
— in one of his notes on the unfinished main work, Merleau-Ponty
expresses with emblematic conciseness the essence of this reality — which
he calls the corporeality of the world — that is bodily, yet not physical
and coming to be rather than established.”
Perhaps it was David Abram who first recognised the importance
of the turn carried out by Merleau-Ponty from the perspective of
ecophilosophy. “If this body is my very presence in the world, if it is the
body alone that enables me to enter into relations with other presences,
if without these eyes, this voice or these hands I would be unable to see,
to taste and to touch things, or to be touched by them — if without this
body, in other words, there would be no possibility of experience — then
the body itself is the true subject of experience.” This body can however
by no means be regarded as one object among others: my body is the
place I occupy in the dialogue of living beings, i.e., beings reflecting on
each other and the mode in which I perceive them and, in the encounter
with them: myself. “To acknowledge that „I am this body” is not to
reduce the mystery of my yearnings and fluid thoughts to a set of
mechanisms, or my , self" to a determinate robot. Rather it is to affirm
the uncanniness of this physical form. It is not to lock up awareness
6° Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Visible and the Invisible, p.27. Northwestern University
Press, Evanston, 1968.
Ted Toadvine: Naturalizing Phenomenology. Philosophy Today 43. 1999. p.126.
71 Maurice Merleau-Ponty op. ibid. p.247.
2 David Abram: The Spell of the Sensuous — Perception and Language in a More-Than¬
Human World. Vintage Books, New York, 1997. p.45.