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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 meaningbestowing 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-ThanHuman World. Vintage Books, New York, 1997. p.45.
