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90 I THE PHiLosopnY oF Eco-Potirics
However, another important ecophenomenologist, Ted Toadvine,
criticises Abram too for naturalising phenomenology and not without
reason. Toadvine sees in Merleau-Ponty’s views not the possibility of a
new philosophy of nature, but the impossibility of any philosophy of
nature. He finds the dominant aim of eco-ethics problematic to start
with: the justification of the moral value of nature through kinship or
continuity (i.e., on the basis that the ethical person is at once a natural
being as well) and the viewing of morality as an evolutionary
development, something which developed as the extension of a basic
biological function — the evaluation of nature. Whether we objectify
nature or personify it so as to attribute preferences to it, according to
him we have already betrayed direct experience, which in its own
uniqueness confronts us with something which we cannot without
further ado replace with our general concepts, which contradicts our
expectations and which is inexpressible by its essence.”
But can anything be said of what precedes this expression?
According to the work quoted from Toadvine, experience is preceded
by the lack of experience, a lack, moreover, that is painful and therefore
has a coercive force: desire (which cannot be confused with biological
necessity, for that always refers to a certain state of one’s own body;
desire, however, is fundamentally directed towards something else,
precisely towards that which is unpredictable in advance). According
to Toadvine, this desire is independent of all previous expectations. It
cannot be motivated by the dialectic of either similarity or opposites;
neither goal nor meaning can be assigned to it. He claims that this is
why Merleau-Ponty uses the expressions of intertwining and
interconnection instead of “dialogue” for the description of the
connection between the sensing body and “the flesh of the world”.
Perhaps one should not even be speaking of bodily desire, but instead
of the opposite: the embodiment of desire, since it is not the living
”° Läszlö Tengelyi also draws attention to the fact that this falling short between the
always perceived individual impression and the institutionalised meaning that serves its
expression triggers, for Merleau-Ponty, the spontaneous or “wild” creation of meaning.
“The connection between impression and expression is created by a meaning that arises
and develops by itself. Experience of reality is therefore carried not so much by the first
impression as by the meaning which is uncertainly delineated at first and which carries
multiple possibilities in itself throughout. Hereafter it goes through repeated changes of
form ... We can confidently claim that the experience of reality always questions the
ossified concepts in the name of a meaning newly emerged and developing by its own
accord.” Läszlö Tengelyi Elettörtenet es sorsesemeny (Ihe Wild Region of Life-History)
p.164, 166.