Being Toward Birth: Natality and Nature in Merleau-Ponty

Being Toward Birth: Natality and Nature in Merleau-Ponty Author: Kascha Snavely Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/1186 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2009 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Philosophy BEING TOWARD BIRTH: NATALITY AND NATURE IN MERLEAU-PONTY a dissertation By KASCHA SNAVELY submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2009 © copyright by KASCHA SNAVELY 2009 ii Abstract Being Toward Birth: Natality and Nature in Merleau-Ponty By Kascha Snavely This dissertation articulates Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature in relation to the existential condition of “natality,” as defined by Arendt. Where Heidegger emphasizes mortality in his post-metaphysical ontology, these investigations follow Merleau-Ponty and Arendt who emphasize that humans are not only mortals but “natals,” beings who begin. The project has a twofold aim: 1. to present an exegesis of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre with a special emphasis on the Nature Courses and 2. to sketch out a natal ontology in its own right. This ontology depends on Merleau-Ponty’s methodological advancement beyond genetic phenomenology to generative and “poetic” phenomenology, a practice that incorporates historicity and expressivity. He offers a critique of science, particularly of evolutionary biology, that is shown to be relevant in a contemporary context. His natal ontology co-emerges with an ethical standpoint; he shows that a natural prereflective relation to a plurality of others, rather than only a single other, fundamentally conditions human existence. In a natal ontology, knowledge depends on being born with others, through a co-naissance of one’s worldly situation. iii I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Jeffery Bloechl for his patience and guidance in this project. My thanks also goes to Richard Kearney who has offered invaluable advice, and to my outside reader, Galen Johnson. I could not have completed this project without the help of my mother Roxanne Semon and the support of my husband, John Snavely. iv Table of Contents Introduction: Of Being Numerous Chapter 1 Of Being Born: Connaissance, Comportement and the Structure of Behavior Chapter 2 Of Being Moved: Motivation, Momentum, Freedom, and Nature the Phenomenology of Perception Chapter 3 Of Being with Others: Natality and the Atmosphere of Humanity in the Phenomenology of Perception Chapter 4 Retrieving Nature’s Interiority: Toward Poetic Phenomenology Chapter 5 Beginning Elsewhere: Generative Phenomenology and Poetic Phenomenology Chapter 6 Totality: Animality, Genesis and Development Chapter 7 Plurality and Visibility Conclusions Practical Implications of a Natal Ontology List of Abbreviations Works Cited v Introduction: Of Being Numerous “Shipwrecked by the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous” – George Oppen Natals and Plurals: Toward a Natal Ontology through Merleau-Ponty We are not born alone, nor do we live alone. That will be basic assertion of this project. This is not a novel suggestion. But it is one that I would like to situate in a particular philosophical history. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this history is for the most part a Cartesian history. In his courses on nature, Merleau-Ponty describes how the Cartesian project marks a certain origin of modern and contemporary thought on being and nature and, perhaps more importantly, the beginning of a method for approaching the origin of one’s self and other selves. Following Merleau-Ponty, let us return to that beginning. In his famed Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes reflects on his origin, reinitiating philosophy as a sort of naval-gazing: philosophy as reflection, as a turn toward interiority. Descartes considers his origins, but he considers these origins without regard to his exterior. Descartes ask himself: “From what source, then, do I derive my existence? Why, from myself or from my parents, or from whatever other things there are there are that are less perfect that God” (32). Initially, it seems to Descartes that his parents caused him: he recognizes that his parents brought him into the world. Yet this moment of appearing in the world does not satisfy Descartes’s quest for his origins. Parents, human lineage, and generation do not define sense of origin that Descartes intends; behind particular parents must lie an infinite series of other parents, and other 1 causes that began these other people (Descartes 34). In order to escape this evident infinite regress, Descartes returns to the classical Scholastic postulation of a metaphysical God as the absolute site and source. This God not only sets in motion the chain of events leading to Descartes’s birth, but also preserves Descartes’s and others existences (Descartes 34). In the third of his Meditations, Descartes proves God and thereby shows himself that he is “not alone in the world” (Descartes 29). Locked in his interiority, withdrawn from his senses, without flesh, Descartes required a metaphysical God to secure him access to the world and to company in that world. But if, following Merleau-Ponty and his phenomenological contemporaries, we abandon the Cartesian appeal to metaphysics as the absolute origin, then we find ourselves in a post-metaphysical era searching for our origins. No longer does an appeal to classical formulations of God, the soul or freedom suffice to describe either our beginnings or our aims in life. With the end of metaphysics, philosophy no longer poses the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Instead, we look at where we stand in relation to that question, to its appearance in our tradition. We might then, as Heidegger suggests, ask instead, “How does it stand with being?” (Introduction to Metaphysics 27) Or, how is being disclosed? That is, how is being for the one who poses the questions? Heidegger offers these alternatives to traditional metaphysical questions which cannot address the phenomena of life’s appearance for us. For Heidegger in Being and Time, being discloses itself to the mortal being, to Da-sein. It is the human condition of mortality that first and foremost discloses being. This Heideggerian turn follows a long philosophical tradition, perhaps first instantiated with Plato’s record of Socrates’s death in the Phaedo, persisting through Kierkegaard’s double 2 emphasis on selfhood and fear of death, and continuing into Heidegger’s own work which emphasizes mortality over natality. Provocative and formative as this revelation of existence in relation to mortality has been, such phenomenology risks preemptively foreclosing and overlooking the very phenomenal appearance of life in birth. In this project, I repose Heidegger’s question and consider another post- metaphysical response, one oriented toward beginnings. This response is suggested by the work of Heidegger’s contemporaries, Hannah Arendt and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Perhaps death is not the phenomenological event par excellence as Heidegger implies (Dastur 183). Perhaps birth, perhaps natality not mortality, discloses being. As Heidegger would no doubt affirm, death eludes experience: “One could say that death is the event par excellence, except that it is never present, it never presently happens. It does not open up a world, but rather closes it forever” (Dastur 183). After death, I cannot reflect on death in this world; after birth, I can reflect on the ramifications of that event, if not the event itself. Given this non-appearance of death, perhaps phenomenology might pursue birth rather than death as the paradigmatic event, bearing witness in phenomenological reflection to the opening and initiating of worlds. If we begin a philosophical meditation on Heidegger’s question but without Descartes’s rejection of exteriority and flesh, we see new possibilities. We ask similar and related questions: When did we, and do we begin? Do I begin or do we begin? Do I begin with my own birth? If I give birth, when does the other person begin and when does the child cease to be a part of me? Yet the answers to these questions differ profoundly when we admit our exteriority – our corporeality, our visibility – into consideration. We notice a certain fragility and passivity inherent to corporeality; we 3 note that while we begin, we cannot do so with absolute agency and freedom as the Cartesian subject might. I might ask, when I begin an action, how much of it actually originates in me? I notice that in my natality, I am motivated and caught in a momentum of existence. When we attend to our exteriority and corporeality, we also find that this momentum and flesh indicates that we are not alone as we act. When we gaze at our navel, we see our navel: We see the mark in our flesh of our connection to other bodies. We see a literal reminder of what Merleau-Ponty calls our “umbilical bond” to being (VI 107). Hannah Arendt found birth to be the paradigmatic phenomenological event for the political philosophy described in the Human Condition (HC 9). As she puts it in the Life of the Mind, Arendt suggests that we think of ourselves as “natals” as well as mortals (2 109). In the Human Condition Arendt argues that humans distinguish themselves as beings who begin: “With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is only another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man was created but now before” (HC 17). Our human actions, far from passive effects, initiate new and unpredictable trajectories of movements, events, and thoughts. Arendt’s description of human being in terms of natality contrasts sharply with that of her eminent teacher Heidegger who shaped post-metaphysical phenomenology and ontology.

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