Merleau-Ponty and a Critique of Science

That Merleau-Ponty, among the continental philosophers, was uniquely hospitable to science is a commonplace observation in commentary on his work.  The case for Merleau-Ponty’s porosity to scientific insight can be made by recourse to the footnotes and bibliographies that accompany his major works: completed books, published essays, as well as work set aside or left incomplete at the time of his early death.  Indeed one can argue that the earlier phenomenological work builds upon scientific insights more that the later ontological turn in his work[i].  For instance, “Phenomenology of Perception” (1945) is dense with reference to psychology, physiology, and neurological studies, whereas “The Visible and Invisible” (unpublished at the time of his death in 1961) does not refer to scientific literature (with the exception of some infrequent and glancing references to some major European scientists, for example, Eddington[ii]), building its arguments in dialogue with his own previous work, other philosophers, and with literature.  That being said, his lecture course on Nature shows that even relatively late in his too brief career, he was willing to maintain a connection with the major scientists of his time when the topic called for it.  That lecture course: a meditation of the significance of Nature, a problematic term in many disciplines, balances its account of the philosophical interest in nature in Bergson, Descartes, Kant etc. with a lively account of contemporary theories in biology (in particular, he makes good use of work of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, ethologists who later won the Nobel prize in Medicine for their work in setting the foundations of modern behavioral biology).   Although the lecture notes on Nature complicates a claim that the mature Merleau-Ponty had, in his later career, tempered his regard for scientific resources, nevertheless in his final published essay Eye and Mind starts with a succinct and forceful critique of science. 

Science manipulates things and gives up living in them.  It makes it own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals.  Science is and always has been that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general – as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our use.[iii]

Kant’s body and other natural disasters

This post is part of a series of occasional posts I am working on concerning the body and ecology.  I start somewhat circuitously by examining the re-introduction of the body into philosophy in the work of Kant.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in tones braggadocio, prefaced his intellectual autobiography, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, with the following sentence (suggestion: read it slowly and dramatically), “Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am.”

Nietzsche proceeded to review the challenges he confronted us with in several chapters with titles progressively more grandiose (or jocular, depending upon your sensibility): "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", "Why I Write Such Good Books" and "Why I Am a Destiny".  My objectives are more humble than Nietzsche’s.  I am interested in re-examining the relationship between the comportment of our bodies and the founding of knowledge about the natural world.  Does having a body matter at all for deepening our relationship with the rest of nature? Though my objectives are modest, nevertheless it may be mannerly to take Nietzsche’s lead and say a little more about who I am.

Once a week or so for the last three years I metamorphose into a graduate student of philosophy at the same school where I am a professor of environmental science.  Though I am a clamoring scientific cuckoo dumped into the philosophical nest, my professors have been affable, hospitably taking my fledgling efforts seriously.  They have taken me under their capacious wings, (to keep the metaphor straight I can say they have placed this outlandish egg alongside the rest of their brood beneath their downy underbellies) and they treat me as one of the clutch.  And though I have perhaps been a little more impatient than my fellow students to sweep philosophy up into rapid use, I have nonetheless taken to heart their teacherly advice to be a slower and more attentive reader.  (Could it be that scientists, in general, are less patient readers of their foundational texts than are philosophers? Surely not all biologists have read their Origin of Species line by line, though it might be harder to imagine a philosopher that has left unread The Critique of Pure Reason).  These days I am as entertained as the next man by, let us say, lengthy disquisitions on the use by Kant of the two German words translated as “object” in the English rendering (Objekt and Gegenstand).  Despite my newfound persnicketiness when it comes to texts, I remain relatively impatient to launch myself from the nest’s edge and try out my new feathers.