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RETURN TO THE SENTIENT
哲學的回歸 - 與意識生命的實存連結
房曼琪 Mira Fong
A link to the ontology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
With all its eyes the natural world looks out into the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward, and surround plant, animal, child like traps, as they emerge into their
freedom. We know what is really out there only from the animal's gaze.
Rilke, Duino Elegy, The Eighth Elegy
The Phenomenology of Openness and Gaze
Rilke's poem, says Heidegger is "The song that sings of this different relation of living
beings and of man to the Open". Indeed, these words hold the clue to understand
Heidegger's later philosophy regarding the relational aspects of being. The meaning of
Open and Gaze progresses in a dialectic manner disclosing the dynamic character of
being, and its significance to language, truth, poetry, nature and animals. As a
metaphor, "Open" has the connotation of communion with beings. It refers to a portal
where animals can escape from traps and cages into a free world. Open also signifies the
opening of oneself to life, and a way for man to return to his primordial dwelling. The
other word, "Gaze" serves as a point of contact between man and the world. Gazing is
equivalent to a "phenomenological seeing" of that which lies in front of us. Truth and
being, the essential elements in Heidegger's ontology, are always given together as one
gazes into the light of their manifestation. For Merleau-Ponty, to gaze is "to enter a
universe of beings" and to co-inhabit their "abodes".
This essay is not an attempt to explicate the whole spectrum of the ontology of
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but to explore their ideas, namely, man's relatedness to
being as a pathway to deliver "that which is" into a palpable existence, in addition to
their criticism of the unreasonable thinking of the conventional philosophy which
demands the sensory world to conform to reason, thereby omitting the peculiarity of
individual being.
Phenomenology was first developed by Edmund Husserl who was a mathematician
influenced by Gottlob Frege in the early 1900'. He later became critical of Frege's
scientism, a theory that only logic and mathematics can determine an objective truth.
Husserl thought such method limits philosophy as it predetermines its outcome.
Instead, he thought that the grounding of truth is located in the intentional act of
consciousness without relying on any presupposition. Husserl's phenomenology, as a
method of perceiving "what is given in experience", legitimizes the whole range of
human experiences. In particular, he was interested in the internal time consciousness.
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Phenomenology, as a new school of thought in continental philosophy, has been applied
to other fields as well such as psychology, sociology and literature.
Husserl introduced the idea of "Lebenswelt" meaning "The life's world", an idea that
originates from the German Romantic movement, a revolt against mechanistic
materialism. The "life's world" refers to the sum total of one's experience including the
activities of philosophy, art and science and the world at large. This new approach to
knowledge was intended to dissolve the empirical division, the subject and object
dichotomy. In Husserl's view, an object is not an isolated entity, it involves a gestalt
relation with the world. But Husserl was more concerned with the intentional activities
of consciousness yet unable to form a connection to the real world, hence his method
could easily falling into a form of solipsism. Having studied Husserl, Heidegger and
Merleau-ponty, both decided to move away from his transcendental orientation. Rather,
they viewed phenomenology as a way to understand the emergence of being and its vital
involvement with the real world.
The Greek word "phainomenon" links to the word "light" and "Speech", that language
has the power to reveal the light which is the essential character of truth. In this sense,
phenomenology, as a way of seeing, allows "that which is" to manifest itself. MerleauPonty, a close colleague of Sartre, developed an ontology of the Flesh by adopting
phenomenology as a pre-conceptual approach to the question of being. He maintains:
"It is to return to things themselves, to return to that world which precedes knowledge,
of which knowledge always speaks...philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing
truth but like art, the act of bringing truth into being. One may well ask how this
creation is possible and if it does not recapture in things a pre-existing Reason. The
answer is that the only pre-existing logos is the world itself."
What he meant is that the idea of being, no longer a transcendental entity, is located in
the sensuous embodiment with the world.
Ontology by Way of Deconstruction
Western philosophy, in Heidegger's view, has been a history of forgetting being. The
concept of being, from Aristotle, Kant to the contemporary analytic philosophy, has
been subjected to a deductive treatment. Thinking means a matter of judgment
according to a set of pre-determined concepts such as Descartes' innate ideas. Aristotle
did extensive researches on animal lives and developed the idea "The great chain of
Being". It is a hierarchical construction of nature in which animals are arranged into
eleven grades according to their ability to reason, of which humans are on the top. But
Heidegger, who gave classes on Aristotle, disagreed with such assumption of being. In
commenting on the western view of being, he says: "Plato had a directive to think of
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Beings as idea, Kant had the directive to think of beings as the transcendental
character of objectness as position (being posited)."
To ask the question "What is Being?", Heidegger thought that one must first trace the
question back through the history of being. Most importantly, to locate the un-thought
region of Western metaphysics, where one can uncover the original manner of
"openness to being" in the Pre-Socratics. In "The End of Philosophy and the Task of
Thinking", Heidegger states:
"For every attempt to gain insight into the supposed task of thinking finds itself moved
to review the whole history of philosophy".
The Greek word "onto" means "being or that which is". Ontology is the study of being or
the logos, meaning the way of reality. The function of language for the early Greeks was
to form a rapport with "That which is". This is the reason why Heidegger resorts to
etymology as a clearing in order to access a deeper insight. It was not his intention to
abolish metaphysics but to retrieve what had been forgotten, the potent meaning of
being. As Otto Poggeler suggests, Heidegger's thinking must be understood as "a way
into the neighborhood of being"
The notion of being evolves as Heidegger deconstructs traditional metaphysics. The
ontological "what is" gradually obtained a more sentient character of "that which is". In
the heart of Heidegger's deconstruction was a critic of human centric stance of ordering
the natural world.
Merleau-Ponty also rejects the separation between man and beings. Furthermore, he
thought that the formulation of categorical knowledge, such as Kant's pure concepts of
time and space, actually intercepts the dynamic flow of time preventing one enters a
vital and reciprocal "relations" with beings. In ancient time, the inner meaning of time
is "Ek-stase" which has to do with the mystical experience where beings are animated.
In essence, the ontology of both thinkers is to reverse the antagonistic view towards
other beings by intimating beings. All beings are co-arising from the same Earth
dwelling, in order to meet and be met, as expressed in Rilke's "Book of Hours":
I know that nothing has ever been real, without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me, my looking ripens things,
And they come toward me, to meet and be met .
From Dasein to That Which Is
For Husserl, phenomenology is a rigorous science of studying human consciousness. His
approach was later revised by Heidegger for the purpose of investigating man's
existential conditions. Dasein, as human being, is the subject of Heidegger's major work
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"Being and Time" published in 1927. Why Dasein? Because man is part of the world and
the constituting consciousness of the world, who is the only being asks question of Being.
Heidegger was primarily concerned with the concrete analysis of Dasein and its
temporal characters. Dasein is involved with projects and is always looking to the future.
Dasein's facticity includes personal projects, social, political and cultural involvement.
Most significantly, Dasein is finite, a being towards death. But in the thirties,
Heidegger's thinking switched from Dasein's existentiality to the enquiry of Being (Sein)
as the central theme of his ontology.
But what is Being if Heidegger would not allow the access to its meaning by either a
readymade concept or a representation (a mental picture)? Being, for Heidegger, has the
notion of "origin (der ursprung)", it denotes the first emergence of being from the
hidden. Heidegger's ontology harkens back to the way the early Greeks, their direct
relation with being. A being could be a tree, an eagle, a horse, a poem or a person.
Heidegger claims that: "The ground of beings has since ancient times been called Being,
das Ereignis". Being as ereignis means "lit up", it is the way of truth when being reveals
itself into the open.
Being is not a substance behind the world of appearance nor a transcendent reality, it is
simply a presence. One must keep in mind that the meaning of being evolves as
Heidegger extends his enquiry into the natural world in that Being refers to Nature,
Earth and animal being. Classical ontology studies the essence of being conceptually but
resisted concretizing "that which is" in relation to existence. Whereas the
phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty explore the living characters of beings
thus rescued them from the hollow abstractions and distillation. In response to the
question of what being implies, Heidegger's answer is:
"An investigation into Being really ought to be able to inquire about the Being of any
being-an elephant in the jungles of India or the chemical process of combustion on
Mars-any being at all".
Being, as all encompassing, simply means "that which exists concretely".
The irreducible nature of being bears similarity to Taoism. Heidegger worked with a
Chinese scholar to translate the Taoist text "Tao Te Ching" in 1946, and probably
thought that the illusiveness of Tao is interchangeable with his notion of Being. For
instance, the way of Tao is described in chapter twenty-five of Tao Te Ching:
"Tao is quiet and elusive. It is invisible, the prior force of regeneration, ever moving in
the cycles of growth. As mother nature, Tao is encompassing, nourishes and sustains
all living beings. Ever flowing, day and night, Tao pervades all existence and returns
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to itself. It is the way of Nature, between heaven and earth, therefore, it is the way of
man."
In Chinese philosophy, "Tao" refers to a natural course of all existence (the visible) and
non-existence (invisible). Tao symbolizes the cosmic vessel that sustains all beings.
Similar to the Taoist view, Heidegger advises man to give up his will power and "To let
them (beings) be what they are". From the stellar sphere to the earth body, Tao gathers
all beings in the hidden and releases them into venturing as they take shapes, "to meet
and be met."
Either Being or Tao is not a pure concept, it involves a reciprocal relation with all
existence. Between heaven and earth, the Tao encompasses all the myriad beings of
Nature. Tao as the great being, has many names, the moon path that circles around the
earth, the cycles of the seasons, scents of the dead and the new born, fermenting fruits
in the fall, a swelling river from the melting snow. In "The Thinker as Poet", he describes
an experience, a profound rapport with Nature as if he were summoned by beings. He
writes:
"When on summer's day, the butterfly settles on the flower, wings closed, sways with it
in the meadow breeze...all our heart's courage is the echoing response to the first call
of Being which gathers our thinking into the play of the world".
Unconcealment, the Happening of Truth
Philosophers of early centuries were polymaths, preoccupied with the science of
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Descartes. During the age of Enlightenment, Kant
organized knowledge into a framework of categories. In early 20th century, Bertrand
Russell asserted that only an ideal language could provide absolute clarity and reliable
truth. But such knowledge could not address moral issues, value judgment, political
rights, arts, the realm of unconsciousness and human emotions. Heidegger rejects their
formalization of truth in accord with scientific reasoning by providing his own view. He
asks: "How does truth happen?" and his answer is: " truth is about the way of truth...It
is what was brought into unconcealedness and held therein".
What grants our thinking? According to Heidegger, it is simultaneously linked to the
presencing of being. He explains:
"Truth is the clearing that first grants Being and thinking, and their presencing to and
for each other. The quiet heart of the clearing is the place of stillness from which alone
the possibility of the belonging together of Being and thinking, that is, presence and
apprehending, can arise at all."
What he suggests is that truth is not about correctness of a mental judgment which puts
beings in distant, but rather to build a relation with beings.
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The Greek word for truth is Aletheia which means the presence of what is present in
unconcealment. It refers to a state when Being emerges as self-revealing, arising from
the hidden. For Heidegger, the way to locate the meaning of a word is to get to the
etymology of the word, particularly its Greek root. "Unconcealment" has its
archaeological origin from the mystical ritual of the ancient Greek, the way one receives
truth by going into an underworld and to wait for truth to be revealed by the spirit. The
experience of the presencing of truth described by the Greeks as a state of ecstasy (ekstasis), it literally means: "when one is besides oneself" or "to make room for truth to
happen". Such state was recorded in poetic manner found in the writings of Xenophanes,
Parmenides, Empedocles and Heraclitus. The ontology of Parmenides was divided into
"the way of Truth" and "The Way of Seeming". Truth is being unconceals itself whereas
false is when being conceals itself. Heidegger adopts their views and perceives truth
as:"truth happens in the temple's standing where it is." In fact, he himself gave several
lectures on Parmenides and Heraclitus in the 1940' and early 50'.
Coincidentally, one can find the voice of Parmenides, his invocation of truth, in Rilke's
"Book of Hours":
I want to unfold, let no place in me hold itself closed,
For where I am closed, I am false,
I want to stay clear in your sight.
There is a parallel between the state of truth as the self-illumination and the experience
of "suchness" in Zen Buddhism, and both requires a receptive manner. Likewise, the
way of being resembles the natural path of Tao, both transcend language and thoughts
as described in Tao Te Ching: "The Tao can be spoken is not the Tao itself" (Tao as the
logos or the way). The quiet awareness of Zen is itself an opening to what is. One may
conclude that the way of truth, either according to Parmenides or the meditative
practice of the East, is a transformation of consciousness.
Language Speaks Man
Linguistic philosophy investigates speech activities as propositions and statements.
Richard Kearney, author of "Modern Movements in European Philosophy", explains the
reason why he objects such treatment of language. He argues:
"Language has become a matter of propositional logic concerned with the
representation and classification of the world. Words were used impersonally to define
or map reality as a collection of objects 'present-at-hand'. And in the process
language was tailored to the requirements of a one-dimensional objectivisation." He
was thinking of liberating language from science.
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During the 1920's and 1930's, logical positivism, an early stage of linguistic philosophy,
aimed to make logic, mathematics and physics as the model of knowledge. In response,
Heidegger set out to deconstruct (de-building) the rational and utilitarian practice of
language. He asks:"In what way does language occur as language?". He thought that
the question of language is the same as the question of truth. He was not interested in
the structure and use of language, but rather, its dimensional manifestation. He
describes:
"Language is the primal dimension within which man's essence is first able to
correspond at all to Being and its claim."
Because language has the power to inaugurates things and world into man's
consciousness.
Jacques Derrida, whose Deconstructionism involves a free play of language as an
endless "differance" of meaning, proclaims that deconstruction began with Heidegger.
Heidegger often plays out his ideas in a dialectic process which is intended to disrupt
the habit of thinking, particularly in exploring the way of language. In the essay
"Language", Heidegger introduces the word "dif-ference" as a method of paradoxical
reasoning. This method, originated from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus,
demonstrates that meaning is unstable and is already contained in its opposite. It is
precisely this dilemma that enables us to access the full meaning of language. For
Heidegger, dif-ference, as an operative principle, deconstructs concepts that are in a
binary opposition, at the same time, establishes a bonding. Dif-ference, as a threshold,
binds world and things and bids the unnamed beings into nearness. This explains why
Heidegger proclaims that it is language that grants the world, because he says:
"Language is a bidding, calling the unnamed into the presence."
Parmenides, a major philosopher of the early Greek, had thought that listening to the
words of truth is the same as thinking and being. Language and the silence of listening
are both take place in stillness. Heidegger endorses such view, he adds: "It is language
that needs and uses the speaking in order to sound as the peal of stillness for our
listening". Here, the speaking is the language that speaks man. It entails a reversal of
which speaking becomes listening. Hermeneutically, listening means to let aletheia take
the initiative because being discloses itself only when man gives up the speaking.
Aletheia is not definable, it is a presencing in the silence of language. It is a meditation
in that one's senses are open to faraway things, the careful steps of a baby fawn into a
deep woods, a falling leaf carried by the autumn wind, a flower opening its soft petals
and a night owl with its gaze turning toward you as the moon rises. Here, man and the
world join together as they are absorbed into the peal of silence.
Poetry, the Heart of Kinship
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Heidegger prefers poetry over semantic interpretation because the poetic expression is a
form of hermeneutics which has the power to change one's perspectives. In his view, the
essence of poetic language is unconcealment. Poetry opens to the life world from its
roots. Unlike the technical language that strives to represent entity by approaching from
its externality, poetic language befriends beings and responds to their silent tolling with
deep listening. He elaborates: "Poetry is a form of primordial hermeneutic text that
reveals the word as an opening, it offers to us the experience of being." In his essay,
"Poetically Man Dwells...", Heidegger differentiates between the poetic and the
informational language. He explains:
"The poet calls all the brightness of the sights of the sky and every sound of its courses
and breezes into singing words and there make them shine and ring...he does not
describe the mere appearance of sky and earth."
As technology makes its close association with science and commerce, it also alters our
sense of place and time. The task of poetry, according to Heidegger, is to bid man to
return to his earth dwelling. Poetry can create a communal spirit and bring people
together, an idea inspired by the Homeric poems as epic poems were intended to bring
people together.
To counter the condition of man's straying away from his true belonging, Heidegger
offers the idea of dwelling. His essay "Building dwelling Thinking" is specifically written
for the modern technological man who is ever searching anew for material things. The
meaning of dwelling is to call for man's return to his proper locality on Earth. The
etymological meaning of dwelling, explicated by David Farrell Krell, provides us a
deeper understanding. He writes:
"Dwelling, or Wohnen in German, means to reside or to stay, to dwell at peace, to be
content; it is related to words that mean to grow accustomed to, or feel at home in a
place. It is also tied to the German word for "delight". For Heidegger, to dwell signifies
the way we human beings are on the earth."
In other words, all existence is a dwelling on Earth. As a verb, dwelling means becoming
home, to make man to make home on earth.
Poetry, for the Romantics, has the magic to transform man's soul and even the whole
society. Heidegger's turn to the poetic language comes from a deep sentiment with the
German poets such as Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Holderlin. They were regarded as
seers and visionary of their time. In the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution (during
the 1800'), the Romantic poetry sought to revive man's spiritual connection with Nature.
They defied the reliance on the law of science which confines natural beings to the
Newtonian law. In contrast, they glorified the transformative power of imagination as
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the supreme power of understanding. Poets and artists of the movement found refuges
in the tranquil landscape away from urban environment. They were fascinated by the
mythical landscape of Greece and also drawn to Schelling's philosophy because it
contains all the Romantic themes, such as individual freedom, the pursuit of self
knowledge and the spontaneous connection with Nature and animals as they are the
giver of meanings to man. Hence, they named Schelling "The prince of the Romantics".
Poets are the troubadours wandering in the realm of beings. They sing myriad songs of
the earth, the birds and the beasts. The realm of ontology is full of happenings, rich with
meanings only a poet can decipher. This is why Heidegger preferred poetry over
speculative language. Albert Hofstadter, who translated Heidegger's "Poetry,
Language , Thought", offers his view:
"Translating Heidegger is essentially akin to translating poetry, for it is the poetry of
truth and being that he has been composing all his life."
The World's Night, the Enframing of Beings
Upon witnessing the growing power of technology along with the cold war crisis after
World War II, Heidegger turned his "eagle mind" to address the destructive aspect of
technology, especially in its connection to Rationalism which has deep roots in physical
Science. He criticizes:
"It endangers not only man's own being but also other beings." furthermore, "Not only
are living things technically objectivated in stock-breeding and exploitation; the attack
of atomic physics on the phenomena of living matter as such is in full swing. At the
bottom, the essence of life is supposed to yield itself to technical production."
In his essay on the poetry of Rilke and Holderlin, Heidegger mourns for the loss of the
brotherly light of beings and man's enchantment with the world as the days are
darkened by the shadows of machines. Technology, the new tyrant on Earth, strip-mines
the very meaning of things. The world's night refers to a destitute state, a new form of
nihilism. There is a sense of groundlessness that prevails over man's existence. He
comments:
"This day is the world's night, rearranged into merely technological day. This day is
the shortest day. It threatens a single endless winter. Not only does protection now
withhold itself from man, but the integration of the whole of what is remains now in
darkness."
The word "science" in Greeks means enquiry. Originally, science means a passion for
discovery. Today's sciences are often motivated by profitability. When technology is
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propelled by the demand of productivity, the question about human relation with
Nature is even more urgent. Based on his critical observation, Heidegger protests:
"Not only does it establish all things as producible in the process of production; it also
delivers the products by means of the market. In self-assertive production, the
humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market
value which not only spans the whole earth as a world market, but also, as will to will,
trades in the nature of Being and thus subjects all beings to the trade of a calculation
that dominates most tenaciously..."
How does technology develop? What is its relation to Nature? In 1949, Heidegger gave
four lectures concerning the essence and danger of technology. One of his lectures, "The
Enframing", was published with the title" The Question Concerning Technology".
According to Heidegger, the word "technology" derives from the Greek word "techne",
meaning the manner of making something appear such as the work of arts and crafts.
Techne is actually a dimension of human being, however, it also manifests itself in the
invention of technologies. Heidegger describes the essence of technology is " enframing
(ge-stell)". It converts living things into a "standing reserve (bestand)". Nature and all
its beings are ordered to stand by or on call for a further ordering and for easy
manipulation and control. One such example is the motorized operation of factory
farming where animals are kept as inventory. Technology shrinks living beings into
commodity and the entire natural world is made to submit to man's endless demands.
Although the inventiveness of techne originated from the essence of being as a destining
of revealing, but Heidegger thought that the creative force of techne has transformed
itself into a mode excess. As a result, it covers over the truth of Being, blocking its
original opening. Such outcome has a causal connection with the metaphysical system
that began with Plato. Thus Heidegger concludes that the modern day technology is in
fact the completion of Western philosophy. His reason is:
"In the age of Greek philosophy, a decisive characteristic of philosophy appears: the
development of sciences within the field that philosophy opened up. The development
of the sciences is at the same time their separation from philosophy and the
establishment of their independence. This process belongs to the completion of
philosophy."
The technological man is a modern version of the Cartesian man who is cut off from the
real world, absorbed in mechanical production and material consumptions. Heidegger
attributes this problem to a human centric mentality which glorifies man's infinite
power, a stance endorsed by most philosophers including Nietzsche, whose idea, "
Ubermensch, the Higher Man", represents man's will to power, the ultimate fulfillment
and triumph of human species
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Above all, the problem of technology has to do with its mechanistic treatment of nature.
Today, science and technology are advancing in a lightning speed. Man's relation with
beings is at a crossroad. Man can choose either to be in the company of cold machines or
the warmth of the living beings. Realistically, man can no longer go back to a tribal
culture. What Heidegger argues is that technological invention and application should
not be taken as a dominant activities and that eventually, man will come to term with
his own alienation and begin to restore his natural connection with beings. Bruce V.
Foltz clarified Heidegger's view in his book "Inhabiting the Earth":
"Heidegger sees technology as bound up with the very texture of Western thought;
rather than prescribing a retreat from it, he argues that it is only through our coming
to terms with technology that the horizon of what he calls a "new beginning" can
emerge. "
The Great Reversal
Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, whose metaphysical dualism splits reality
and being into two kinds of substances, the mind as the cogito substance and the body, a
mere biological entity with spatial extension which is controlled by the law of motion.
He also thought that man has reason and intelligence, whereas animals are automata,
their sensory faculties are governed by a mechanical law. Thus, animal can be
experimented with and dissected, their screams of pain are merely the sound of
machines. Descartes' theory justified the physical science and the study of anatomy at
that time. But his dualistic division of beings is refuted by Merleau-Ponty. In his main
work "The phenomenology of Perception" published in 1945, Merleau-Ponty
endeavored to reverse Descartes' "I think therefore I am" to a theory in which the body
is the cogito. Instead of attributing the thinking mind as the cogito, Merleau-Ponty
designates the body as the primary locus of perception. In other words, the cogito is
located in the body and is always intertwined with other bodies. This was his way of
breaking out of the Cartesian solipsism where reality and thoughts are sealed inside a
mind separated from the living world. The new ontology seeks its meaning in the
concrete and finite world that precedes conceptualization.
Merleau-Ponty also rejects traditional Realism and Idealism, as well as the Positivist's
definition of truth. He thought that their foundational philosophy has wedded to science,
lacking resemblance to the real world. As for their question "whether the world is real?"
His answer is: "They fail to understand what they are asking, since the world is not a
sum of things (a collection of objects linked by causal relations) which might always be
called into question, but the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn."
Merleau-Ponty discovered Husserl's phenomenological method in the early thirties. He
incorporated the method into his study of man's immediate experience of the lived
world (Lebenswelt) through the intentional act of consciousness. Like Heidegger,
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Merleau-Ponty rejects the idea that reason is the absolute measure of objective truth. He
argues that a logician cannot tell us the truth about the world because his view lacks
emotional meaning and signification. He thought that justice is needed to acknowledge
all elements of human experience, particularly the sensual experience of man's
interaction with the world. Not that he denies the value and function of science, but it
needs to remain in its own field and best to leave the world of beings "opaque".
What Merleau-Ponty offers to us is a kind of ontological metamorphosis of beings. In
his essay "The theory of the body is already a theory of perception", he describes the
body is the primordial habitation of consciousness as well as the origination of our
knowledge of the world. The facticity of the body is in its inter-woven with the world and
things. He elaborates:
"It is precisely my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that
other body, a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions...so my body and other's
are one whole being and is already situated in the inter-subjective world".
The point Merleau-Ponty tries to make is that beings are not isolated entities, but rather
in a relation of mutual belonging. This is his way of converting the Cartesian doubt, the
mistrust of beings, to a trusting relation, in that man and world choose each other.
Merleau-Ponty's great reversal of Descartes' dualism is revolutionary. It overturns a
mechanistic view of Western philosophy in which beings are taken out of their natural
places, creating a discontinuity between man and other living beings. In MerleauPonty's bio-ontology, the notion of body takes on a sentient nature. He says:"The body
can symbolize existence because it realized it and is its actuality". The body is
conscious being with an intention to connect, it articulates and resonates with other
bodies. Each body is an opening for beings to touch and be touched. Unlike Heidegger's
being appears to be obscure, Merleau-Ponty's notion of being is animated with flesh and
blood as sentient beings.
The Perception of Inter-subjectivity
Phenomenology is the study of mental act which involves a perceptual field which
directly links to the life world. Such method enables Merleau-Ponty to explore the
dynamics of the actual happening of perception experientially. Thus opens a whole new
perspective on human cognitive process because each perception is not limited to one
single experience but a relational event. In his "Phenomenology of Perception",
Merleau-Ponty describes:
"It is simply an expansion of my field of presence without any outrunning of the
latter's essential structure, and the body remains in it but at no time becomes an object
in it. The world is an open and infinite unity in which I have my place."
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Perception is not a demarcation of a subject/object dichotomy, rather, it is involved
within a unified field of inter-subjectivity.
In "The Visible and the Invisible", Merleau-Ponty expresses his appreciation of
Heidegger's work of recovering the meaning of Being and the idea of truth in accord
with the early Greeks. He himself incorporated the notion "gaze" into his theory of
perception. For Merleau-Ponty, there is no objective truth because perceptive
experience is unique for each being and is always situated. In other words, perception is
an engagement with the world through bodily senses such as the audio and visual
apparatus input. Every perception is an act of sensing and gazing, to summon the light
of being. Through the "gaze", a fresh landscape "opens" before our eyes. The trees and
grass grow as they gaze into the sky, wild animals gaze the alternating light of the sun
and the moon and live in harmony with one another, and humans behold the changing
colors of seasons as they conduct their activities.
All beings have their perceptive ways of knowing and are mutually involved with one
another through a sensible body. As Merleau-Ponty describes:
"The objects which haunts our dreams are always meaningful, our relation with things
is not a distant one, each of them speaks to our body and to our life."
The sentient world is utterly conscious and active. Humans can rejoin the world by
opening their perceptual fields to the gaze and voice of other earth bodies.
Incarnating Philosophy
Merleau-Ponty's ontological formation of the embodied being is indeed significant. In
"Primacy of Perception" published in 1952, he emphasized that the perceiving mind is
an incarnated mind. It is imbedded in the vital body. Further, Merleau-Ponty
introduced the idea of flesh as the locus of his ontology. It was discussed extensively in
his unfinished book " The Visible and the Invisible". Flesh has multiple implications.
Ontologically, flesh is both a primordial substance of Being preceding particular beings,
and the connective tissue that gives shapes to sentient beings. The intertwining nature
flesh serves to dissolve the division between transcendental idealism and empiricism. It
enables the ontological Being to seek corporeal fulfillment.
As the ground of beings, flesh portrays the sustaining character of the Earth. In a course
Merleau-Ponty gave between 1956-1960, he clarified: "Flesh is a realm, a habitat
shared by all beings". What it implies is that Flesh, as an indiscernible zone between
humans and other animals, can blur the conventional division. Merleau-Ponty's theory
of flesh is the very first attempt to endorse sentient beings and the corporeal world as
the subject of ontology. It acknowledges beings in a natural setting and helps connecting
ontology to a greater world inhabited by equally sensible beings besides human beings.
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Unlike conventional metaphysics, living beings never got a fair hearing of their presence
on Earth.
In contrast to Sartre's existential analysis of human being within the context of
historical, cultural and political affairs, and inter-personal conflicts of self and others,
Merleau-Ponty's ontology transcends human affairs. He aims to uncover man's beingin-the sentient world. It is beautifully described by David Abram, in his "The Spell of the
Sensuous":
"The sensible world is described as active, animate and in some curious manner, alive:
it is not I, when sleep, who breathes, but "some great lung outside myself with
alternately calls forth and forces back my breath."
The expression of the body is like an open language and is rooted in Nature. It intuits
the intention of other bodies, very much like the way animals and children intuit the
world outside cultural signification. Nature is the great Being that participates in an
ongoing dialogue with all earth beings. For Merleau-Ponty, Nature is independent, free
from man's epistemological and technological grip. In defending Nature, he holds that:
"The natural world presents itself as existing in itself, over and above its existence for
me...we find ourselves in the presence of Nature which has need to be perceived in
order to exist''.
As a species, human kind prefers to live in a self-made world, walled off from other
beings, bereft of genuine connection with the flesh of the Earth. But realistically, it is we
humans need to collaborate with Nature for survival. In Merleau-Ponty's view, our
knowledge and experience of the world have significance only for us, however, human
existence is not complete without being touched and recognized by other beings.
And the Animals Go There
In 1942, Heidegger gave a course on the poem "Der Ister , The Danube River" by
Friedrick Holderlin (1770-1843) who was a colleague of Hegel and Schelling. Heidegger
felt a great affinity with Holderlin's poetry and shared the same nostalgia for the PreSocratic Greek, a time when human and animals were all connected, and Nature was
regarded as the very source of life giving. Holderline, a thinker in his own right, who
viewed Nature as the source of spiritual inspiration. He declared:
"The world of Nature is a world which is consciousness's own encompassing object,
soaked with value and replete with nourishment."
Holderlin privileges poetry over philosophy because he thought poetry could grasp the
whole of reality, hence it is the way of truth. His view of poetry became a chief interest
for Heidegger which led to his further elaboration of poetry as a clearing of Being. Der
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Ister, according to Heidegger, symbolizes the journey of the river as well as a dwelling
detached from human ordinance. The poem portrays the generosity of the river as it
provides sustenance for all beings. The final part of the poem depicts man's
homecoming by following the footsteps of wild animals to the river. Although what the
river does is forever unknown to man's groping for meaning:
And the animals go there
During Summer, to drink,
Then human will go there too.
This one, however, is called the Ister.
But what He does, the river, no one knows."
The celebration of the great Earth Being is the central theme of the Romantic Poetry.
There is reason to believe that their notion of Earth is close to the idea of Gaia. The
poem "Der Ister" can be made more revealing if we compare to the ancient Homeric
Hymn "To Earth, Mother of All". Here, the opening stanza expresses a profound
gratitude to the Mother Gaia:
Gaia, All-mother will I sing! Revered
Firm- grounded nourisher of everything on earth.
Whatever traverses holy earth or the seas
Or climbs the air enjoys your dispensation.
From you sprout fine fruits and offspring;
Lady, you have power to give mortal men life
Or take it. But happy those you care for in
Your heart; all is generously present to them.
Beneath Heidegger's acquiescent reflection on the poem, is an persuasion that urges
man to let beings be.
Man is the Shepherd of Beings
Heidegger wrote only fragments in direct reference to sentient beings, he thought that
there is a difference in world formation between humans and other animals. Humans
have the ability to use of language to form ontological relation with the world and can
also anticipate suffering and death in advance. Nevertheless, the underlying implication
of his central tenet, the Being of beings (Being as the gathering of beings), is pregnant
with meaning relevant to concrete earthly beings.
In "The Origin of the Art Work of Art", Heidegger resonates with the painting "A pair of
peasant shoes" by Van Gogh as it reflects the simple life of old world peasants and their
close connection with the Earth, and he reveals a profound attunement with the rural
landscape:
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"From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome thread of the
worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes, there is the
accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform
furrows of the field swept by raw wind, on the leather lies the dampness and the
richness of the soil. Under the soles stretches the loneliness of the field-path as evening
falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent the silent call of the earth...".
There is also a sense of moral implication in his writings after his turn against the
pervasive anthropocentric mentality as expressed in his words:" Man is not the lord of
Beings, man is the shepherd of beings". Heidegger points out that there is a causal
connection between Western metaphysics and modern technology that have led man to
a wrong path. Today, science has succeeded in partner with technology in its control and
manipulation of the natural world. Goethe's comment on the limitation of science still
rings true today. He said:
"With the whole of scientific law and experimental medicine, man is no wiser than he
was as the spring of life has been smothered".
Heidegger's postwar essays serve as a sustained criticism of man's self-estrangement
from the natural world. Once, during one of his seminars, Heidegger held up a piece of
tree bark and remarked: "There is more philosophy in this piece than there is in all the
philosophy books ever written." His view is not very different from that of the present
day environmental ethics. In his comment on the technological enframing of being, he
laments:
"Its value is determined by its usefulness and serviceability...in fabricating equipment
a human centric mentality."
To summarize, a brief recap of Heidegger's later thoughts as a defense of beings is
necessary. Firstly, Heidegger thought that it is being that grants us the way to truth and
there can be no separation between being and truth. Each being is a conscious self, can
either conceal or reveal itself outside man's validation. He clarifies: "Only this clearing
grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are
not, and access to the being that we ourselves are." Secondly, he proposes that the way
to language is through poetry because it is the language of the heart. It can form kinship
with beings and to invite beings into a warm and brotherly light. Thirdly, He questions
the conventional thinking which puts beings in distance, instead, thinking is to give
thanks. The German word "an-denken", to think on, also means to remember.
According to Heidegger, the act of thinking is both a remembering and thanking.
Richard Kearney in "Modern Movements in European Philosophy" explains Heidegger's
view that the most essential form of thinking is thanking. He states:
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"The thinking which Heidegger counsels is a non-objectifying, non-systematic, noncalculative receptivity which enters the play of Being by giving thanks..."
He also thought that thinking is to think what was un-thought. It is like coming to a
clearing in the woods, it opens the whole realm of beings that exists in a state of
"harmonia".
Facilitating Intimacy
Generally speaking, ethical discussions on the humans-animals relation within the
academic circle (from Plato to Kant) tend to focus more on their distinctions. In contrast,
Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, with their complementary view on Being, endeavored to
dissolve the demarcation of the two through the notion of inter-relatedness. Thus
facilitated an empathetic towardness to beings. They both championed for the natural
world by proposing an ontological openness to beings, the sky and Earth, the forests and
animals.
The full implication of flesh elaborated by Merleau- Ponty bears resemblance of a
natural philosophy which favors the concretization of beings. Metaphorically, being or
flesh, in each case, implies a sentient consciousness of being. Such recognition of beings
did exist in a time before a distinction was drawn between humans and non-human
animals. Unfortunately, throughout history the word "animal" inherited a derogative
connotation as inferior being. Derrida, whose main work is to deconstruct
Logocentrism, asserts that the use of the word "animal" is to force each sentient being
into a category which is the same as partaking in the violence that humans exercise
toward other kinds. For instance, the slaughter houses and their industrial treatment of
non-human beings. According to Derrida, there is no such thing as "animal" but only
specific individual being such as a bee, a monkey, or a dog...etc.
It is the adventuring into "what once was here", the forgotten region of beings that sets
ontology in motion, linking philosophy to what was un-thought. Precisely, it was the
hermeneutic discourse of Heidegger along with Merleau-Ponty's metamorphosis of
being that gave impetus to a new way of doing philosophy. Their work, as an effort to
liberate Nature from a mechanical law, marks a renewal of the Romantic spirit which
champions the truth of the heart and the commemoration of all living beings. For the
poet, Shelly, a being can manifest itself as the full heart of a skylark. The same for Keats,
it is the nightingale that sings the voice of the earth.
Perhaps someday man would allow the wood path (Holzweg, the title of Heidegger's
essay) of other beings to take the lead as Rilke envisioned in his Duino Elegy:
If the animal moving towards us so securely
In a different direction had our kind of consciousness
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It would wrench us around and drag us along its path
But it feels its life as boundless, unfathomable
And without regard to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze
And where we see the future, it sees all time
And itself within all time, forever healed.
The beings of the non-human world have nothing to do with our utilitarian needs. Only
a receptive and spacious mind can enter the tactile dimension of their world. Such state
is described by Wordsworth in his poem about animal tranquility that how he marvels
the little hedgerow birds, their facial expressions and bodily movements bespeak a
peaceful composure.
To be is to be inside the great pulse of the earth, pulsating like deep veins that stretch
into the realms of the visible and the invisible. To ask "What is being?" is to have a
dialogue with the corporeal world and to respond to its calls by rejoining the chorus of
beings, to ride with the flapping wings as a lone eagle swirl above a snowy peak, to feel
the speed of leaping coyotes across the desert plain, and uncoiling of a snake out of its
winter sleep, or listen to the great whales as they recite their epic poems to their young.
The return to the sentient world is perhaps the only way for man to get out of the jungle
of machines. I shall end this piece with a poem by Rilke from his "Book of Hours". It is
both an apology of man's failing to safeguard Nature and an expression of indebtedness.
Dear darkening ground
You've endured so patiently the walls we've built
Perhaps you'll give the cities one more hour before you become forest again
And water, and widening wilderness
In that hour of inconceivable terror
When you take back your name from all things
References:
1. Basic Writing-Heidegger. Edited by David Farrell Krell
2. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays-Heidegger.
Translated by William Lovitt
3. Poetry, Language, Thought-Heidegger. Translated by Albert Hofstadter
4. Phenomenology of Perception-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
5. Visible and the Invisible-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
6. Phenomenology and Existentialism. Edited by Robert C. Solomon
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7. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Stephen Mitchell
8. Book of Hours-Rilke. Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
9. The Spell of the Sensuous. David Abram
10. Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics and the Metaphysics of
Nature-Bruce V. Foltz
11. Tao Te Ching-Chinsese Texts, chapter 25 : 有物混成， 先天地生 ，肅兮寥兮 ，獨立
而不改 ，周行而不殆 ，可以為天下母， 吾不知其名， 字之日道， 吾強為之， 名日大，
大日逝 ，逝日遠 ，遠日反 ，道大， 天大 ，地大， 王亦大， 國中有四大， 而王居一
焉，人法地， 地法天 ，天法道 ，道法自然 。
Chapter 64: The last sentence, 以輔萬物之自然，而不敢為。
後註:
寫這篇文章主要動机 是要將海德格的後期思想 及梅洛龐提的現象學中, 一些可以具体化
的實存觀念 being 引伸出來, 和生命哲學作連結, 為人類在地球上從新定位 (reappropriation). 這兩位哲人, 皆不贊同人類中心論 Anthropocentrism. 文中根據
Heidegger 的思想源頭, 從古西臘到老子以及浪漫主義的詩人等等, 來支持本文的意旨.
雖然, 他們的思想表達接近詩 的象徵性, 比較難讀, 可是在當代歐陸哲學里, 他們算是主要
的兩位哲學家, 將本体實存 ontological being 和大自然生命相聯繫, 給抽象的思考, 帶來
新的光照 Clearing. 本文最後兩節是我個人的觀點, 為有情生命作哲學上的肯定和辯護, 因
為, 這議題一直被排斥在傳統哲學之外. 唯有浪漫主義, 是持著對自然生命的尊重.
後期的 Heidegger, 放棄分析思考. 轉向東方的靜觀, 思索 Being of beings 的多元內含,
Being 意指所有的存在 existence, 遠離他早期在 Being and Time 中, 針對 Dasein 分析性
的探究. 文里的 beings, 己包括了動物生命, 所以不用 animal, 因為 這名詞對一般人而言,
多具有反面的含意. 雖然, 動物也包括人類. 本文內容十分簡要, 但是重點明確. 以方便閱讀.
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Heidegger 晚年傾向詩的隱喻, 為了使語言具有開放性 openess, 以避免概念上的約束.
我也頗有同感, 因為, 詩可以激發非抽象對立性的靈思.
因為, 我喜愛里爾克 的詩, 他也是 Heidegger 欣賞的詩人, 便引用他的詩作起首和結尾.