Abstract
In much of his later work, such as Le théâtre des philosophes of 1995, and perhaps most succinctly in his essay “Was Merleau-Ponty on the Move from Husserl to Heidegger?” of 2008, Taminiaux acknowledges the inspiration of Hannah Arendt’s concern for the lifeworld as a realm of shifting appearances and of human heterogeneous plurality and interlocutory political praxis. He traces Arendt’s insights back to Husserl’s late concern for the lifeworld, as well as to Aristotle, insofar as the Stagirite, in disagreement with Plato, recognizes the autonomous intellectual excellence of phronêsis (as indispensable to fully developed moral action), and also understands tragic drama in its political importance as a mimêsis of action itself (rather than of character) and as accomplishing an intrinsic purification (katharsis) of the powerful passions that it arouses, such as pity and terror. As the title of the 2008 essay indicates, and as Taminiaux acknowledges, however, Merleau-Ponty’s thought also plays a major role in this intellectual nexus.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
- 2.
Taminiaux (2012), 112. I thank Pavlos Kontos for this reference.
- 3.
Vanzago (2008), 171–181.
- 4.
Vanzago (2008), 172.
- 5.
I discuss this shortfall more specifically, with regard to Heidegger’s 1929–1930 lecture course on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, in Fóti (2013, chap. 4). Heidegger’s Heaven and Earth are part of his late notion of the Fourfold, along with mortals and divinities; but animals or other natural beings have no place in it.
- 6.
Merleau-Ponty (1964a), 22.
- 7.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 4. The first course dates from 1956–1957 and is transmitted in the form of an anonymous auditor’s lecture notes. Given this fact, one needs to keep in mind that textual references and quotations are not necessarily faithful to Merleau-Ponty’s own articulation.
- 8.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 58.
- 9.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 70. In “Notes on Bergson and Sartre,” on this page, Merleau-Ponty elaborates that neither Bergson’s nor Sartre’s thought allows for any amalgamation of being and nothingness, and that both remain committed to the subject/object dichotomy. He concludes that “a valid concept of Nature” requires one, therefore, to renounce both the negativism and positivism discussed, and to recognize, contra Bergson, nature’s inter-involvement with contingency.
- 10.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 70–72.
- 11.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 76. The masculine-gendered language is Merleau-Ponty’s and can be difficult to mitigate.
- 12.
“The Philosopher and his Shadow” in Merleau-Ponty (1964a), 159–181.
- 13.
Merleau-Ponty (1964a), 180–181.
- 14.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 116.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 119.
- 17.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 117, 118.
- 18.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 103. Compare the passage in Signs referred to in note 5, above.
- 19.
“Animality, the Human Body, and the Passage to Culture” (1957–58) in Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 123–199. This course is also transmitted only through an auditor’s lecture notes.
- 20.
Beith (2013), 213.
- 21.
- 22.
Merleau-Ponty focuses chiefly on two of Jakob von Uexküll’s works: Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere of 1919, and Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen—Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten of 1932. Heidegger (who was familiar with Uexküll’s work) strictly limits the articulation of an Umwelt to Da-sein in Being and Time.
- 23.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 177.
- 24.
See Vanzago (2008), 177.
- 25.
See Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 171.
- 26.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 176.
- 27.
- 28.
The sudden truncation of Merleau-Ponty’s life in 1961 did not allow him to study Portmann’s revisions of Die Tiergestalt, which focus on unaddressed appearances.
- 29.
“Nature and Logos: The Human Body” (1959–1960) is transmitted in the form of Merleau-Ponty’s own, charateristically sketchy or “stenographic” lecture notes, which served as a basis for his labor of thinking rather than as a text to be delivered in the manner of a Vorlesung.
- 30.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 208.
- 31.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 210.
- 32.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 211.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
- 35.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 212.
- 36.
See Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 227.
- 37.
Merleau-Ponty (1964a), 5.
- 38.
Now that the ongoing publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks has given new urgency to the questions concerning the collusion of his thought with the anti-Semitic rhetoric of National Socialism, one fruitful avenue of approach to these issues may indeed lead through Heidegger’s philosophy of nature, and in particular through his engagement with Uexküll, which involves a distressing transformation of the animal Umwelt or Gegenwelt into an incarcerating ring (Umring) that, in a quite mechanistic fashion, serves only for the disinhibition of drives. See Heidegger (1983). I discuss this text in Fóti (2013), 71–75.
- 39.
Merleau-Ponty (2003a), 204.
- 40.
Kontos (2011, chap. 5).
- 41.
In Taminiaux (1993), 1–19.
- 42.
Taminiaux (1993), 3.
- 43.
In the essay “The Critique of Judgment and German Philosophy” in Taminiaux (1993), 24–25, Taminiaux notes that Friedrich Schiller not only found in Kant’s Third Critique an approach to thinking the juncture of the aesthetic with the political, but also sought an affinity between art and the processes of nature.
- 44.
I thank Pavlos Kontos for pointing out that Aristotle’s science of nature and his analyses of ethical and political life share a concern for what holds “for the most part” (hôs epi to polu) and is thus contingent; see Henry and Nielsen (2015). This concern for contingency resonates with Vanzago’s point (referenced in Note 2, above) that, for Merleau-Ponty, nature shows the contingency of being.
- 45.
Taminiaux (1993), 17.
- 46.
“The Aesthetic Attitude and the Death of Art” in Taminiaux (1993), 71.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Taminiaux (1993), 153–169. See Heidegger (1963), 7–68, and Heidegger (1976). Taminiaux also considers the history of the publication of “The Origin of the Work of Art” in France. Basically, however, the 1936 elaboration of the text is the one that was presented in Freiburg in 1935 and in Zürich in early 1936.
- 49.
Taminiaux (1993), 167.
- 50.
Heidegger (1963), 41; my translation.
- 51.
Taminiaux (1993), 167. Heidegger’s own terminology of the Verlässlichkeit (reliability) of utensils draws on the verb lassen (“to let” or “to allow”) and forms part of a constellation of terms counterposed to terms derived from stellen (“to posit”). Given that prefixes modify the meaning of German verbs and of related nouns, Verlässlichkeit (“reliability”) has the connotation of abandoning (verlassen) or, in the reflexive mode, of entrusting oneself; hence my term “self-abandonment.”
- 52.
Heidegger (1963), 59.
- 53.
“Geschichte ist die Entrückung eines Volkes in sein Aufgegebenes als Einrückung in sein Mitgegebenes” Heidegger (1963), 64. Heidegger’s conjunction of the ecstatic transport of entrücken with the military resonance of einrücken as “marching into” is startling.
- 54.
Heidegger (1963), 56.
- 55.
- 56.
Heidegger (1963), 32.
- 57.
Merleau-Ponty (2003c), 123.
- 58.
Merleau-Ponty (2003c), 78.
- 59.
Ibid. This “teleology of the whole” is also important in Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on organismic development.
- 60.
Merleau-Ponty (2003c), 124.
- 61.
Merleau-Ponty (2003c), 37. I cannot here address the complex question of what may be the relationship between Arendt’s notion of natality and Merleau-Ponty’s stress on nascency. It has been addressed by Coward (2013). Merleau-Ponty’s dissociation of nascency from action (Merleau-Ponty (2003c), 38) seems to me to make for a divergence from Arendt’s thought; but I leave the question open.
- 62.
Merleau-Ponty (2003c), 86.
- 63.
- 64.
See Alloa (2009), 249–262.
- 65.
See note 63, above.
- 66.
- 67.
Merleau-Ponty (1964b), 85/375.
- 68.
Alloa and Jdey (2012), 27.
- 69.
Alloa and Jdey (2012), 18.
References
Alloa, Emmanuel. 2009. La chair comme diacritique incarnée. Chiasmi International XI: 249–262.
Alloa, Emmanuel, and Adnen Jdey, eds. 2012. Du sensible à l’œuvre: Esthétiques de Merleau-Ponty. Bruxelles: La lettre volée.
Beith, Donald. 2013. Merleau-Ponty and the institution of animate form: The generative origin of animal perception and movement. Chiasmi International XV: 201–216.
Coghill, E. George. 1929. Anatomy and the problem of behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Coward, Nathaniel. 2013. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt: The intersection of institution, natality, and birth. MA Thesis, University of Western Ontario.
Fóti, M. Véronique. 2013. Tracing expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, philosophy of biology, and ontology. Evanston: Northwestern UP.
———. 2014. Revisiting Greek tragedy in dialogue with Jacques Taminiaux. Epochē 19 (1): 49–64.
Gesell, Arnold, and S. Catherine Amatruda. 1971. The embryology of behavior: The beginnings of the human mind. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1963. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. In Holzwege, 4th ed. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann.
———. 1976. Einführung in die Metaphysik. 4th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
———. 1983. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit. GA 29-30. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann.
Henry, Devin, and Karen Nielsen, eds. 2015. Bridging the gap between Aristotle’s science and ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Kontos, Pavlos. 2011. Aristotle’s moral realism reconsidered. Phenomenological ethics. New York: Routledge.
Lorenz, Konrad. 1970. Studies on animal and human behavior. Trans. R. Martin. London: Methuen.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964a. Signs. (trans. R: McCleary). Evanson: Northwestern UP. French Edition: Merleau-Ponty, M. 1960. Signes. Paris: Gallimard.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964b. L’Oeil et L’Esprit. Paris: Gallimard. Eye and mind. In The Merleau-Ponty aesthetic reader (trans: Johnson, G.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
———. 2003a. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. (trans. R. Vallier.). Evanston: Northwestern UP. French Edition: Merleau-Ponty, M. 1995. La Nature: Notes de cours du Collège de France. ed. Dominique Séglard. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
———. 2003b. L’institution dans l’histoire personnelle et politique; le problème de la passivité; le sommeil, l’inconscient, la mémoire. Notes de cours au Collège de France. Paris: Belin.
———. 2003c. L’ Institution. La Passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955). eds. D. Darmillacq, C. Lefort and St. Ménasé. Paris: Benin.
———. 2008. The structure of behavior. Pittsburgh: Dusquesne UP. French edition: Merleau-Ponty, M. 1942. La structure du comportement. (trans: Alden L. Fisher.). Paris: PUF.
Portmann, Adolf. 1960. Die Tiergestalt: Studien über die Bedeutung der tierischen Erscheinung. 2nd rev ed. Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt.
Taminiaux, Jacques. 1993. Poetics, speculation, and judgment: The shadow of the work of art from Kant to phenomenology. ed. and Trans. M. Gendre. Albany: SUNY Press.
———. 1995. Le théâtre des philosophes: la tragédie, l’être, l’action. Grenoble: Jerôme Millon.
———. 2008. Was Merleau-Ponty on the move from Husserl to Heidegger? Chiasmi International XI: 21–30.
———. 2012. Sillages phénoménologiques. Bruxelles: Ousia.
Vanzago, Luca. 2008. Nature, negativity, event. The question of the emergence of the centre in the ontology of the flesh. Chiasmi International XI: 171–181.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fóti, V.M. (2017). Nature, Art, and the Primacy of the Political: Reading Taminiaux with Merleau-Ponty. In: Fóti, V., Kontos, P. (eds) Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 89. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56160-8_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56160-8_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-56159-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-56160-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)