Re-Enchanting Nature

1The first two courses come to us in the form of notes taken by a student who attended Merleau-Ponty’s lectures; the third course consists in a series of personal notes written by Merleau-Ponty himself. Although all three courses must therefore be used with caution, they nonetheless are important for at least two reasons: they offer an insight into the broader scope of The Visible and the Invisible, and they provide the outline of a solution to a problem regarding the relation between animal and human life that arises after the work of Heidegger and McDowell. The problem can be formulated as follows: Heidegger and McDowell both make use of the idea of second nature to overturn the untenable split within human nature that ensues from the traditional conception of reason as a qualitative difference ‘added’ to nature. Unfortunately, by extending the ‘space of reason’ into this reconceived idea of nature the metaphysical split within human nature simply re-emerges between humans and other animals. Despite the positive interpretation of animal life taken from the theoretical biologist Jacob von Uexkull, to whom both Heidegger and McDowell turn, the concept of nature no longer provides the support required for justifying the belief that humans and animals share a specifically natural existence. The difficulty is to articulate a sense of sameness without falling back into the traditional, factorising conception of something generically given to which a specific difference is added. I will argue that Merleau-Ponty provides a solution in The Visible and the Invisible and in the recently translated lecture courses on the concept of nature by offering a more radical re-enchantment of both human second nature and animal nature, centred on the aesthetic concept of style. I Throughout his philosophical life Heidegger criticises the form of traditional philosophical anthropology that determines man as a rational animal. This determination arises, Heidegger suggests, not simply because of the translation of the Greek definition of man as ‘something living which has reason’ into Latin but because this translation carries within it a metaphysical interpretation. Whilst not completely false, the interpretation covers over the basis for the Greek definition; with the rise of Roman humanism, man is

Animal life · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy) · Metaphysics · Relation (database) · Space (punctuation) · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy, Science, and History

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