Merleau-Ponty and the Essence of Nature
A Return to Elemental Symbolism
Reconfigures our concept of nature through the concept of the element
- Evaluates and builds upon Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to the twentieth century return to the Greek idea of nature as a dynamic principle
- Utilizes the phenomenological tradition to offer a new interpretation of the relationship between philosophy and its origin in mythological modes of thought
- Integrates Merleau-Ponty into the history of philosophy
- Articulates a new ontology for the ecological age
- Presents the first book-length study of a key concept in Merleau-Ponty’s late thought: the idea of being as element
Taylor Knight reveals the way in which phenomenology initiates a return to ontology construed through a dialectical relationship between being and element. Within phenomenology’s return to the elemental, Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy is a key locus, opening critical paths forward into an ontology for the ecological age. With reference to his phenomenological forebears - Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas - his non-phenomenological influences - Bachelard, Schelling, Freud - and his dialogue with Greek thought - Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle – Knight shows what is authentically new in Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology.
Foreword by Emmanuel Falque
Introduction: The Return to the Element
- The Powers of Becoming: Early Greek Thought and Contemporary Biology in Merleau-Ponty’s Elemental Ontology
- The Correlation of Sensation: From Act to Power
- The Elemental Bond: Surpassing Phenomenological Atomism
- Cosmogonic Elementals in Phenomenology: From Husserl and Heidegger to Levinas and Merleau-Ponty
- The Savagery of the Symbol: The Barbarian Principle and Elemental Negation
- Symbolics of the Flesh: From Tautegory to Chiasm
- What the Sea Left Behind: The Element as the Unconscious
Conclusion
Knight works against the grain both of readings of Merleau-Ponty as a forerunner of Derrida or Foucault, and of the idea that many of his claims are strongly implicit already in the work of Husserl. Merleau-Ponty is instead situated in a line from Plato through some speculative idealism, as a philosopher turning endlessly around the knot of phenomenality and what it occludes.
