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What must I do (and why me)? |91
organism that desires but desire that “organises” the manifestations of
life. Desire arises in us at the call of something that motivates the
experience from the outside. The name of this something is for Merleau¬
Ponty — and Emmanuel Lévinas — the i/ y a, something which is
without even being something. I would therefore translate it as Being
there (referring to the apparent creation by the French philosophers of
the counter-concept of the Heideggerian Dasein, being that is presence.
The i/ y a refers to the impenetrable and undiscoverable depths of the
forest surrounding the clearing in the midst of being.). Following
Merleau-Ponty, Toadvine talks of the blind spot of experience, a border¬
experience, which refers to what is not revealed in experience, cannot
be sensed and cannot be thought, but is no “absolute other” either,
merely the other side of the sensible and thinkable. “But if we are
seeking the fundamental basis of an ethical response, that basis cannot
be worldly; it cannot be within the dialectic of culture and nature, or
at the level of perception and thought. The basis for responsiveness is
in the call of a more radical Outside. Nature in this radical sense is, if
anything, the refusal of the hegemony of perception, language and
thought...”(...) He therefore claims that “the attempt to ground such
an ethics on a metaphysically homogeneous substratum be displaced
by a phenomenology of the impossible — that is, by an attentiveness to
the resistance of what cannot be thought or perceived, to the opacity
of a wild being that circumscribes our concepts and precepts.”””
How does this benefit eco-ethics, one could ask. Toadvine could
respond that nature, once we recognise that it always and of necessity
surpasses what we are capable of perceiving of it, can only be the object
of our respectful wonder. Its incomprehensibility cautions us to a careful,
sparing approach. We should also admit that the recognising subject
cannot remain on the outside, that to understand is to participate — “as
though we were the parts of a single body”, as Merleau-Ponty writes in
his work-notes — and the knowledge of original togetherness is a good
basis for solidarity. Finally, if we take literally what Abram quotes from
these work-notes, “...that the things have us, and that it is not we who
have the things (...) That it is being that speaks within us and not we
who speak of being," then man’s moral mission as the voice of the
Earth and the spokesperson of the living world seems quite obvious.
What is certain is that “the phenomenology of the impossible” is an
7 ‘Ted Toadvine: The Primacy of Desire and Its Ecological Consequences. In: C. Brown
-T. Toadvine eds.: Ibid. pp.149-50.
” David Abram Ibid. p.343.