International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol.

15(4), 501–519

Merleau-Ponty, Metaphysical
Realism and the Natural World1

International
10.1080/09672550701654917
RIPH_A_265333.sgm
0967-2559
Original
Taylor
402007
15
s.p.james@durham.ac.uk
SimonJames
000002007
and
& Article
Francis
(print)/1466-4542
Francis
Journal of Philosophical
(online) Studies
Simon P. James
Abstract
Environmental thinkers often suppose that the natural world (or some parts
of it, at least) exists in its own right, independent of human concerns. The
arguments developed in this paper suggest that it is possible to do justice to
this thought without endorsing some form of metaphysical realism. Thus the
early sections look to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception to
develop an anti-realist account of the independent reality of the natural world,
one, it is argued, that has certain advantages over the accounts proffered by
‘environmental realists’. The concluding sections draw upon certain of
Merleau-Ponty’s later works to defend a rather bolder claim: that the concep-
tions of realism endorsed by environmental thinkers are not just ill equipped
but, in fact, unable to acknowledge what may be provisionally referred to as
the more-than-human dimension of reality.
Keywords: Merleau-Ponty; environmental philosophy; metaphysical realism;
environmental realism; flesh ontology

1
‘Environmental’ or ‘green’ thinkers are typically metaphysical realists. They
tend, that is, to suppose that at least some of our talk about the natural
(roughly, non-artefactual) world captures how that world ‘anyway is’,
independent of human perspectives, attitudes, practical concerns, and the
like. Few of their number have been impressed by idealist or constructivist
arguments to the effect that such discourse reflects nothing more than
certain facts about us. To be sure, they would no doubt accept that our talk
about the natural world reflects our cultural heritage, say, but in the view of
‘environmental realists’ (as I shall call them) it also refers to something that
exists in its own right. Nature, in their view, is not merely a ‘cultural product’
or anything of the kind.2
This might not seem particularly surprising. After all, environmental
thinkers tend to be defined as such on account of their moral concern for the
natural world, and this sort of concern – an attitude of respect for natural
things, say, or a sense of obligation towards them – would seem, at least on

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online © 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09672550701654917
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

the face of it, to presuppose a broadly realist attitude. To think that

mountain streams, humpback whales, and Californian redwoods need our
care and attention, one must presumably see these things (and perhaps the
kinds they represent) as enjoying some kind of existence in their own right.
After all, as one writer asks, ‘If nature is only a social and discursive
construction, why fight … to preserve it?’ (Hayles, 1995: p. 47).3
The work of Holmes Rolston is a case in point. In his defence of
environmental realism, Rolston objects to Hilary Putnam’s claim that it is
‘We [i.e., us humans] who cut up the world into objects when we introduce
one or another scheme of description’ (1997: p. 53). Surely, he contends,
‘we do not think that lion-objects come into being when we humans arrive
and cut up the world into such objects’ (ibid.: 54). On the contrary, ‘The
Earth-world was quite made up with objects in it long before we humans
arrived’ (ibid.: 55). To support his case, he asks the reader to consider
taxonomy. In many cases at least, he maintains, it is clear that botanists
‘put down in words some descriptions of what is objectively there in the
world’ (ibid.: 52). Likewise, when biologists realized that the rabbit-like
hyrax is in fact more closely related to elephants than to the lagomorphs,
they were discovering something about phenomena in the world as they
‘exist in themselves’ (ibid.: 52).
Now there are, of course, many different kinds of metaphysical realism.4
And indeed different environmental realists, though agreeing that our
descriptions to some extent capture how the world anyway is, might
subscribe to different conceptions of realism. Rolston is evidently commit-
ted to the objective reality of natural kinds; another environmental realist
might reject any such thesis. Yet such thinkers exhibit a more unified front
in opposing certain theses. For regardless of the particular conceptions of
realism they endorse, environmental realists tend to stand as one in their
opposition to certain anti-realist theses, their complaint being that anti-real-
ism, of whatever kind, tends to evince a human chauvinism or anthropocen-
trism quite out of keeping with a proper concern for the natural world. This
seems, for example, to underlie Rolston’s objections to Putnam: the claim
that it is we humans who ‘cut the world up’ into objects would seem to make
Homo sapiens the measure of all things – an exemplar of anthropocentric
hubris. For similar reasons, other environmental realists take issue with
certain exponents of postmodernism. Thus Peter Coates suggests (rather
implausibly) that for many ‘thoughtful Greens’ postmodernism represents
the ‘greatest threat to nature today’ (1998: p. 184) – a view echoed by Paul
Shepard:

There is an armchair or coffeehouse smell about [postmodernism].

Lyotard and his fellows have about them no glimmer of the earth, of
leaves or soil. They seem to live entirely in a made rather than a grown
world; to think that ‘making’ language is the same as making plastic
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trees, to be always on the edge of supposing that the words are more
real than the things they stand for…

(1995: p. 20)

Postmodernism, in Shepard’s view, is ‘more like a capstone to an old

[anthropocentric] story than a revolutionary perspective’ (1995: pp. 24–5).
What is needed, to quote another environmental realist, is not another post-
modern deconstruction of nature, or, more generally, another dose of anti-
realism, but ‘a real appreciation of a genuine Otherness, a world not limited
by what we make of it’ (Clark, 1994: p. 125).
It is not my aim in this opening section to appraise these claims. That said,
the realist is surely right to emphasize the importance of acknowledging the
independent reality of the natural world. Although I shall not argue the
point here, it seems clear to me that any satisfactory philosophical account
of the natural world must indeed do justice to the way in which that aspect
of reality reveals itself as existing in its own right. To maintain this, however,
is not necessarily to endorse realism, for it is a further question whether
justice might be done in this regard by an anti-realist account. It remains to
be shown, in other words, whether an anti-realist can furnish an adequate
account of the independent reality of the natural world.
Now, clearly much hinges here on what we mean by ‘justice’ and
‘adequacy’, and I will address these matters below; however, pace Rolston
et al., I believe that such an account can be provided. Thus in the early
sections of this paper I present an anti-realist account of the independent
reality of the natural world, one drawn from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenol-
ogy of Perception. This done, I move on to argue that this account has
certain advantages over those proffered by environmental realists. In the
concluding sections of the paper, I draw upon certain of Merleau-Ponty’s
later works to develop a rather bolder case: that environmental realism is
not just ill equipped but, in fact, unable to do justice to what may be provi-
sionally referred to as the more-than-human dimension of reality.

2
Before addressing the issue of environmental realism, however, it may be
helpful briefly to recap the basic features of Merleau-Ponty’s thought,
drawing attention to their anti-realist implications. And a good place to
begin in doing this is with the man’s most famous and influential work,
Phenomenology of Perception.
The principal aim of this book is to describe, in as unprejudiced way as
possible, the world of pre-reflective experience, ‘the perceived world which
is simply there before us’ (UT: 34).5 At first sight, this might seem a rather
modest objective. Isn’t the content of our pre-reflective experience simply
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obvious, unproblematic? Before me, at this very moment, I can see a

bookcase with four shelves stacked full of books. Beside that, a table with a
green tablecloth. On the table, a fruit bowl, my keys and wallet. And so on.
It is, one might think, clear that these things seem to surround me. Surely the
task of philosophy is to investigate the relation between these appearances
and reality, to determine whether things really are as they appear?
For Merleau-Ponty, however, an account of experience set out in such
familiar, everyday terms cannot provide a faithful account of pre-reflective
experience (or ‘perception’) at all. It is, he stresses, no small task faithfully
to describe the world, and a phenomenological description of perception
must therefore come, not at the beginning of one’s inquiry, but at the end,
as an accomplishment.
So how may perception be described?6 For one thing, it is, on Merleau-
Ponty’s account, holistic: the character of any particular element of
perception is, he maintains, always a function of its relation to other
elements. This is evident, for example, in his rejection of the notion that the
world of perception is a collection of atomistic sensations from which things
are constructed by a Lockean ‘association of ideas’ or some other synthesis.
One does not initially perceive a set of discrete qualities – a dark brown
colour, a certain softness and smoothness, the smell of leather – which then
coalesce in one’s consciousness into a certain form (a wallet). On the
contrary, any particular quality of a thing is internally related to all the
others in such a way that it only discloses itself in the context of a primary,
unified disclosure. It is, to paraphrase the man himself, impossible
completely to describe my perception of the dark brown colour of my wallet
without saying that it is the colour of a wallet (and perhaps, even, this
particular wallet), and without implying in this colour a certain softness and
smoothness, a particular odour, a certain resistance to sound, and so on (cf.
PP: 313, 323; CD: 15; VI: 161).
Relations of this kind do not only obtain between the qualities of
particular things. For on Merleau-Ponty’s conception any particular thing
shows up in pre-reflective experience as the thing it is because of the
internal relations it bears to other perceptual elements. The wallet presents
itself as being dark brown on account of certain relations between it and
other coloured items in my visual field – the light green of the tablecloth, for
instance. It is, moreover, the particular close-weaved texture of that
tablecloth’s fabric which gives the wallet’s surface its particular smoothness.
More generally, ‘Our perception in its entirety is animated by a logic which
assigns to each object its determinate features in virtue of those of the rest’
(PP: 313). The world of perception, again, is a holistic network of internally
related elements and not a collection of externally related determinate and
independent objects.
Clearly, more would have to be said to explain the exact nature of
Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on these matters, and a great deal more work
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would have to be done to demonstrate the truth of his account. But it is not
my aim here to do either of these things. The important point to note for
present purposes is that this network of internally related elements is said to
be internally related to us, to our concerns as human beings – our projects,
purposes, practical commitments, and the emotions with which they are
bound up. Thus the wallet reveals itself as a thing because of the place it
occupies in a field of practical significance, one focused, at this precise
moment, on my current project of finding a good example to make the
point I am trying to make here. In general terms, the wallet shows up in my
experience because it plays a role in my life.
On Merleau-Ponty’s account, then, the world is not primarily an object of
contemplation, but a field of significance with which I am always already
engaged in the living of my life. The world, in this sense, is something one
has and not an objective arena one is located in as one item amongst others.
Yet to have a world in this sense a being cannot be entirely foreign to the
order of things in the way that a disembodied mind, say, would be. On the
contrary, Merleau-Ponty maintains that to have a world a being must be
embodied. This is not to endorse materialism. Indeed, to say that we are in-
the-world in this special sense is to say that our experience cannot be
understood from any such third-person standpoint, whether materialist or
not. It is true that I can picture myself as a human-shaped conglomeration
of matter – I am trying to do this right now, but even as I try I find myself
already inhabiting a world charged with vital meaning and practical signifi-
cance, sitting (now) in front of a computer screen in a public-access site, the
taste of cafeteria coffee still on my lips, dimly aware of the low chatter of the
other users, of my fingers resting on the keys. To affirm one’s embodiment,
then, is to concede little or nothing to the materialist, for my body is said to
be pre-reflectively evident, woven, as it were, into the fabric of that which is
‘primordially’ given, namely, the world of perception. Consider the percep-
tion of space, for instance. I do not perceive a certain stretch of space
between my fingers and the computer mouse – it is ‘to hand’, as Heidegger
might have said. Likewise, the room is not Euclid’s, a volume of such and
such magnitude; it discloses itself as oppressive, and viscerally so. More
generally, the spatial relations between things, which might at first appear
to trace out an objective dimension of the world, are in fact ‘existential
dimensions’ (PP: 267), functions, in other words, of my embodied being-in-
the-world. And so it is with the world as a whole: ‘its articulations are those
of our very existence’ (PP: 320).

3
Even from this barest of sketches (and I admit that it has been a very bare
sketch), it is evident that Merleau-Ponty’s account is at odds with the
general kind of metaphysical realism described in the opening section of this
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paper. For by its lights we are never privy to how the world anyway is,
independent of human perspectives, attitudes, practical concerns, and the
like;7 indeed, for Merleau-Ponty the very notion of a way the world ‘anyway
is’ makes little sense:

To our assertion … that there is no world without an Existence

[roughly, a human existence] that sustains its structure, it might have
been retorted that the world nevertheless precedes man. … [But] what
precisely is meant by saying that the world existed beyond any human
consciousness? An example of what is meant is that the world origi-
nally issued from a primitive nebula from which the combination of
conditions necessary to life was absent. But every one of these words,
like every equation in physics, presupposes our pre-scientific experi-
ence of the world, and this reference to the world in which we live goes
to make up the proposition’s valid meaning. Nothing will ever bring
home to my comprehension what a nebula that no one sees could
possibly be.

(PP: 432)

‘Poor Maurice!’ I imagine Rolston replying. ‘Not to be able to conceive a

nonhuman world! His life must be poorer as a result.’ But Merleau-Ponty is
not denying that he can comprehend the nebula. Of course he can – he is
writing about it, after all. He is suggesting that our talk about even so
ostensibly non-human a thing as the prehistoric nebula fails to refer to how
the world anyway is, for insofar as such talk has meaning it must bear upon
our lived experience in some way.8
Yet to deny the possibility of our stepping out of our skins in this way is
not to say that the world is constituted by our understanding. Rolston
maintains that ‘perception is only intelligible if it is contact with objects and
events out there’, i.e., in the world (1997: 56). Merleau-Ponty would have
agreed. ‘I have’, he writes, ‘no doubt that I am in communication with [the
world]’ (PP: xvii). Although the world is one in which ‘every object displays
the human face it acquires in a human gaze’ (WP: 70), it is not merely a
product of human understanding. On the contrary, it has an otherness to it,
a side that could not have been constituted by us, and which we encounter
in perception (cf. Madison, 1981: p. 31).
Merleau-Ponty maintains that this otherness is sometimes evident in
perception itself. When viewed in a particular way, the thing discloses itself
as what he calls ‘a thing in itself’ (a ‘thing-in-itself-for-us’), as ‘aloof from us
and … self-sufficient’, as ‘hostile and alien … a resolutely silent Other’
(PP: 322). This, at least in part, is to say that it exceeds our understanding:
‘We find that perceived things, unlike geometrical objects, are not bounded
entities whose laws of construction we possess a priori, but that they are
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open, inexhaustible systems which we recognize through a certain style of

development, although we are never able, in principle, to explore them
entirely, and even though they never give us more than profiles and perspec-
tival views of themselves’ (UT: 5–6). So reflecting on the wallet before me,
I might initially suppose that I am being presented with nothing more than
an appearance. Yet this very disclosure includes, as an integral part, the
possibility of further disclosures. I see only one side of the wallet, yet this
perception includes, as a ‘horizon’, a sense of its other, hidden face (cf.
PP: 68). And these horizons are multiplied through a kind of entirely natu-
ral, though seldom noted, synaesthesia. I am looking at the wallet, yet I
perceive how it would feel were I to touch it. And I am aware, too, of the
smell of the leather, even its rich, salty taste. The wallet, in short, is open to
unending exploration; it has, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, an ‘inexhaustible
depth’ (VI: 143).
This, however, is not to say that the existence of the thing reduces to
anticipations of further experiences. Merleau-Ponty rejects any such notion
(Hammond et al., 1991: p. 198). It is true, he maintains, that the thing is open
to unending exploration, but it also has a brute presence, a ‘thereness’
exceeding the sum of its possible appearances. Hence in perceiving a die
from one angle, and then from another, ‘there appear, not signs, but sides of
the die … not … projections or even profiles of the die, but … the die itself
at one time from this side, at another from that, and those appearances …
all radiate from a central Würfelhaftigkeit which is the mystical link between
them’ (PP: 324; cf. Place, 1976: p. 84).
The thing, then, has an ungraspable depth. And this depth, for its part,
intimates, as a horizon, the presence of a single, wider world – ‘the natural
world’ – from which all things emerge and into which they recede: ‘one
being, and one only, a vast individual from which my own experiences are
taken, and which persists on the horizon of my life as the distant roar of a
great city provides the background to everything we do in it’ (PP: 328). On
Merleau-Ponty’s conception, then, a particular thing, when attended to in
the right way, can reveal its complicity in what one commentator has aptly
described as ‘an anonymous presence that subtends and overarches my
own’ (Abram, 1996b: p. 86; see further, Madison, 1981: pp. 31–2).

4
We began, not with the issue of realism per se, but with that of environmen-
tal realism. And we have seen that in Phenomenology of Perception
Merleau-Ponty has something to say not only about the independent reality
of things, but about the natural world as well. He suggests that it constitutes
a non-human presence in the background of our everyday lives.
But one must take care not to conclude too much from this. For one thing,
there is no good reason to equate Merleau-Ponty’s ‘natural world’ with that
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of the environmental thinker. On the contrary, according to the account set

out in Phenomenology of Perception the ‘one being’ intimated in one’s
perception of a particular thing includes more than just living things and
more than just non-artefactual things. The natural world, in this sense,
encompasses everything – it is a world not just of mountains, trees and
rivers, but also of multi-storey car parks, glass skyscrapers and air-
conditioned shopping malls. The environmental thinker, of course, sees
things differently, being typically concerned with a rather smaller world, the
natural-as-opposed-to-the-human environment, the non-artefactual world.9
Has Merleau-Ponty anything to say about the non-artefactual world? In
Phenomenology of Perception, he certainly has little to say on the topic, and
in this respect that book remains thoroughly urban (Shepard would no
doubt complain of its ‘coffeehouse smell’).10 Yet on closer inspection it
becomes evident that Merleau-Ponty’s discussion has more bearing on
issues concerning mountains, trees, and rivers than might at first be
evident.11
Consider, once again, his discussion of the alterity or otherness of things.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that the alterity of things is for the most part not
evident. In our everyday lives, things reveal themselves as being little more
than a function of our practical concerns: ‘Ordinarily we do not notice [the
alterity of things] because our perception, in the context of our everyday
concerns, alights on things sufficiently attentively to discover in them their
familiar presence, but not sufficiently so to disclose the non-human element
which lies hidden in them’ (PP: 322). Indeed, the otherness of the thing only
becomes evident ‘if we suspend our ordinary preoccupations and pay a
metaphysical and disinterested attention to it’ (ibid.).12
According to Merleau-Ponty, then, things will be less likely to offer up
their non-human faces when they disclose themselves in the context of our
everyday practices. There is no good reason to conclude on this basis that
the equipment of everyday life will never reveal its otherness – perhaps a
suitably attentive or artistic frame of mind would be able to discern the non-
human element in anything.13 Nonetheless, it seems likely that some things
will yield up their alterity more or less easily than others. Consider mass-
produced artefacts, for instance. There is scarcely anything about them that
points beyond the compass of human concerns. They disclose themselves,
for the most part, as what Keekok Lee has called ‘the material embodi-
ment[s] of human intentionality’ (1999: p. 2). For example, I am, at this very
moment, sitting in front of my television set. Normally, I do not take the
time to contemplate the set as a thing in its own right – I simply switch it on,
sit myself in front of it and become absorbed in whatever show has been
scheduled. Indeed, the sheer functionality of the thing tends to militate
against contemplation of this sort. The TV, one might say, reveals itself to
be little more than a means to some immediate practical end, my viewing of
such and such a programme. When it is functioning normally it is hard to see
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it as existing in its own right; its ‘non-human element’, to use Merleau-

Ponty’s phrase, is hard to discern.
Not all things are like this, however. Heidegger wrote of the way in which
a usually hidden non-human dimension (the ‘earth’) manifests itself in great
artworks, and in his post-war essays and lectures he came to believe that
even everyday objects – some of them, at least – harbour such depths.14 This
non-human element is especially evident in natural (non-artefactual) things.
After all, it has long been recognized that natural phenomena are on the
whole better able to invite disinterested appreciation than artworks
precisely because they disclose themselves as being less tied up with distinc-
tively human concerns, about the character of the artist, say, or the intended
message.15 Likewise, since in contemplating the natural world we see less of
immediate practical interest, natural things might be able better to invite the
disinterested attention needed on the part of the perceiver to discern their
non-human aspect. A man intent on discovering the ‘non-human element’
in things of which Merleau-Ponty writes would be well advised to take to the
woods, for that aspect of the world might be harder to overlook in such a
context.16 Or as Merleau-Ponty himself puts it in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’:

We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses,

streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the
human actions which put them to use. We become used to thinking
that all of this exists necessarily and unshakeably. Cézanne’s painting
suspends these habits of thought and reveals the basis of inhuman
nature [le fond de nature inhumaine] upon which man has installed
himself.

(CD: 16; cf. PP: 324)17

5
In the opening section of this paper, I suggested that any satisfactory
account of the natural world must do justice to the way in which it exists
independent of human concerns. Of course, much rests here on what counts
as ‘justice’. We have seen that Merleau-Ponty is keen to acknowledge the
felt sense that things stand over against us and, for my part at least, I am
satisfied that this counts as ‘doing justice’ to their independent reality. And
I have suggested, further, that this independent reality is especially evident
in our encounters with natural things.
But a realist would, no doubt, remain unconvinced. For one thing, the
claim that the independent reality of things is most evident in our encoun-
ters with natural things might strike her as banal. For another – and more
importantly – the phenomenologist’s basic approach might seem, in her
eyes, to be merely another example of anthropocentric anti-realism. After
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all (the realist would no doubt note), although Merleau-Ponty rejects the
notion that the thing is merely a product of human understanding, it remains
the case that in Phenomenology of Perception at least this ‘non-human’,
unconstituted part of the thing is only considered insofar as it shows up as a
horizon in the perception of a human subject. One could say that Merleau-
Ponty is not interested in the more-than-human world per se; his concern is
to elucidate the role that world might play in (human) perception. Thus
although he writes of the thing as an ‘in-itself-for-us’, he is quick to add that
it ‘is inseparable from a person perceiving it, and can never be actually in
itself because its articulations are those of our very existence …’ (PP: 320).
However independent it may appear, the thing is in actuality the perspicu-
ous embodiment of a secret ‘communion’ between perceiver and perceived
(ibid.). And the same holds true of the natural world of which it is part; this,
too, takes the form of a horizon of (human) perception (cf. PP: 328;
Barbaras, 2001: p. 27).18

6
Merleau-Ponty’s account may therefore be too ‘human-centred’ to satisfy
the realist. But this conclusion does not, in itself, render his account
irrelevant to the environmental realism debate. On the contrary, though it
may be anthropocentric in some respects, Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the
non-human world has the potential to shed considerable light on the issue
of the reality of the natural world.
Recall the debate with which we began. Environmental realism, we saw,
tends to be regarded as a philosophical position, one, in other words, that is
articulated and defended by academic philosophers. Yet this way of framing
matters can be misleading. For although environmental philosophers (at
least when they have their professional hats on) may be much exercised by
the question of whether environmental realism can ever be a tenable
position, many other green thinkers will be left cold by such debates. After
all, for many such thinkers the reality of the natural world is not merely a
proposition to be articulated and defended, but something that is immedi-
ately evident, at least some of the time.
By way of example, I am, right at this moment, sitting on a grassy bank,
pencil in hand, shaded from the midday sun by the canopy of an elm. In
defiance of certain aesthetic ideals, the tree has grown lop-sided, but on
account of what combination of rain, wind and sun I have no clue. I can be
sure, however, that it has stood here on this bank for decades, silently catch-
ing rain and sun, responding to the changing seasons, hosting generations of
mammals, birds, and insects, playing its part in that wider natural world that
persists like a heartbeat on the horizon of my perception. It is not my consid-
ered opinion that the elm exists in its own right, the conclusion, say, of a
convincing argument – its reality is immediately evident to me.
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This, admittedly, is only a single example. The independent reality of

things can disclose itself in all manner of ways – in the strange gaze of a
wild animal, perhaps, or in the stark indifference of the desert, or in the
‘mysterious presence of surrounding things’ that so captivated Word-
sworth.19 It is true that Merleau-Ponty had little to say about such experi-
ences. But their diversity can be readily accommodated within the
approach he championed, for phenomenology, after all, takes it as its
express task to bring to light the richness of lived experience. And such
inquiries could, of course, yield more than the bare claim that the
independent reality of things is especially evident in our encounters with
natural phenomena. Indeed, one of the great virtues of phenomenology is
that it is able to do what more abstract epistemological and metaphysical
debates on environmental realism cannot, namely, to deepen our under-
standing of such moments, to show, that is, what it means to perceive, in
an immediate and visceral way, the independent reality of the natural
world. And phenomenology can achieve this precisely because it is
anthropocentric, because, in other words, it is focused, not on abstract
conceptions of an objective world, but on how the world discloses itself to
beings like us. After all, even the ‘mind-independent’ world so beloved of
realists can only matter to the extent that it bears upon our lives. Any
part of reality that failed entirely to connect with our lived experience
would, like Merleau-Ponty’s nebula, be nothing to us, an idle wheel in our
understanding.20

7
This, then, is my first response to the charge of anthropocentrism: to
concede that the approach taken in Phenomenology of Perception is in a
certain sense anthropocentric, but to maintain that that human-centredness
might in fact be to its advantage and is, at any rate, something that ought not
to perturb environmental thinkers. But there is more to be said here. For
although the account set out in Phenomenology of Perception is, in one
respect at least, human-centred, in another it is not. Indeed – and this is my
second response to the charge of anthropocentrism – the line of inquiry
initiated in Phenomenology of Perception, if followed through to its conclu-
sion, results in a singularly non-anthropocentric account of perception. And
this, I will argue, is something that the environmental realists with whom we
began would do well to note.
In order to see why this is the case, it is necessary to recall Merleau-
Ponty’s claim that perception is a kind of ‘communion’ (PP: 320). As we saw
above, for Merleau-Ponty, the thing (the wallet, or whatever) which seems
so obviously to exist ‘out there’ beyond the limits of our consciousness is at
least in part constituted by our relations to it. ‘[I]ts articulations’, he writes,
‘are those of our very existence’ (ibid.).
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It is not, however, obvious how such a communion should be understood.

In particular, it is not clear what elements are, so to speak, communing. In
my earlier discussion of this point I suggested, provisionally, that the
communion is between the perceiver and the perceived. But that claim is
problematic, for on Merleau-Ponty’s account the relation between
perceiver and perceived is so intimate as to militate against any attempt to
conceive either element in isolation from the another. For this reason a
communion between the two cannot be regarded as the combination of two
elements that might otherwise have remained apart, even in thought.
Perception is no more a communion of perceiver and perceived than a vase,
say, is a combination of an outer surface and an inner one.
In Phenomenology of Perception, the peculiar intimacy between
perceiver and perceived is conveyed through a series of reflections on the
role of the body in perception. I am able to ‘commune’ with the thing,
Merleau-Ponty suggests, because I am not foreign to it. I am able to perceive
it, that is, because I am embodied. The claim here is not that one’s body is a
mere means by which one interacts with an apparently external world. The
relationship between embodied perceiver and perceived is more intimate
than that. And this is precisely what Merleau-Ponty means to convey in his
various descriptions of how things disclose themselves in relation to one’s
body – as having a certain texture under the fingers, say, or as being within
reach.
The general theme of the kinship between perceiver and perceived is
continued in The Visible and the Invisible and the famous discussion, in
that work, of the experience of touching one hand with the other. The
significant feature of such an experience, Merleau-Ponty claims, is that is
‘reversible’. It seems initially as though my right hand is touching my left,
but then it is as if my right hand is itself being touched. Then, once again,
it is as if my right is touching my left. And so on. An oscillation is set up,
the hands, like two Sartrean individuals, playing alternately at being
active and passive, yet neither at any single moment taking on both roles
(cf. PP: 93).
Merleau-Ponty uses the example to make several points, only some of
which we will need to consider here. First, he draws attention to the fact that
the hand (either hand) is only able to touch because it is itself a touchable
thing:

[B]etween my movements and what I touch … there must exist some

… kinship. … This can happen only if my hand, while it is felt from
within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other
hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in
a sense one of them.

(VI: 133)
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In the modern scientistic climate of academic philosophy, these claims

might seem compatible with some version of materialism. But they are not.
For one thing, Merleau-Ponty’s aim is not to postulate the existence of some
material object (the body, say) of which one’s hands are both parts, but to
reflect on the conditions that must obtain in order for anything to reveal
itself as an object in the first place. At any rate, these thoughts are not
presented as merely theoretical postulates. Merleau-Ponty is not inferring
that some kinship exists between toucher and touched – he is suggesting that
these conclusions are presented at some level in experience. Thus he main-
tains that the awareness of what it feels like to be touched enters into one’s
very experience of touching so that one cannot fully understand the
phenomenology of touching without understanding what it is to be touched.
The two aspects, he claims, are ‘intertwined’.
Merleau-Ponty sees the example of the touching hands as exemplifying a
general truth about the relation between perceiver and perceived. Thus the
curious relation brought to light in the account of touch is taken to hold of
other senses, too. Consider vision, for instance. On Merleau-Ponty’s
account, I would not be able to see if my eyes, oily, epispherical globes that
they are, were not part of the visible world. Nor would anything show up in
my visual field were I not a being occupying a certain location in the world,
from which things radiate outwards in varying degrees of depth. I can only
see, he maintains, because I am part of the seeable world: ‘he who sees
cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it’ (VI:
134–5). And, as with touch, a phenomenological account of seeing is taken
to refer to the possibility of being seen – Merleau-Ponty writes of the
painter’s sense that he is ‘looked at’ by what he paints (VI: 139; cf. 151) and
of a state wherein ‘the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we
no longer know which sees and which is seen’ (ibid.).
The general picture here is of a peculiarly intimate relationship between
perceiver and perceived, one more intimate than is suggested by talk of a
‘communion’ between the two. I do not stand over against the world as an
active subject before a collection of merely passive objects (as was acknowl-
edged in Phenomenology of Perception). Nor, however, is the world to be
understood as the correlate of my embodied subjectivity (which, as Madison
(1981: p. 27) notes, was how matters were conceived in that work). Rather,
my perception of the world is, in truth, not mine at all – not entirely. I touch
the thing, but at the same time I am myself susceptible, worldly, embodied
being that I am, to what may be described as its touch (VI: 261). Better, then,
to say that there is only a single moment of ‘Tangibility’, from which both
man and thing are abstractions. Likewise with vision. It is not that I see the
thing, or even that the thing sees me, but that we, the thing and I, are
brought into the fold of a wider dimension of ‘Visibility’.
Merleau-Ponty tries to evoke this general relation between perceiver and
perceived with the word ‘flesh’ (la chair). Just as the aspects of touching and
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being touched are ‘intertwined’, so he suggests that the general relation

between human being and world gestured towards by the term ‘perception’
must be understood as a self-reflexive relation of a single ‘element’, a
‘coiling over’ or ‘intertwining’ of flesh.
There is clearly much more to be said here, but it is not my aim in this
paper to provide a comprehensive explanation, still less a defence, of
Merleau-Ponty’s notoriously difficult ontology of flesh.21 For the purposes
at hand, it will suffice to note that to conceive perception as a self-reflexive
relation of a single ‘element’ is to picture it, not as a human act (cf. VI: 249),
but as something like an event, and one, moreover, that has a transpersonal
and indeed trans-human dimension.22 ‘All flesh’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘…
radiates beyond itself’ (EM: 186) so that ‘this flesh that one sees and touches
is not all there is to flesh’ (VI: 144). Flesh exists also ‘in other fields’ (VI:
144), enveloping not just one’s own body but ‘the whole of the sensible of
which [that body] is part, and … the world’ (VI: 139; cf. VI: 142).
These are abstruse thoughts, and it is unclear how, precisely, they should
be understood. Yet even on this cursory sketch it should be clear that we are
dealing here with an account of experience that is to some degree non-
anthropocentric.23 So while Merleau-Ponty’s account may be human-
centred in one respect, in another sense it is not – and, moreover, the seeds
of this non-anthropocentrism are evident as early as Phenomenology of
Perception and the idea, mooted in that work, that perception is a kind of
communion (cf. Madison, 1981: p. 21).

8
None of this suffices to demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty’s account is a bona
fide form of realism, still less a distinctively environmental one. Certainly, a
flesh-centred realism (if it may be so described) is quite unlike the positions
advocated by Rolston and other environmental realists. This may be
conceded; however, it must, I think, also be granted that Merleau-Ponty’s
account, to the extent that it is flesh- rather than human-centred, embodies
some of the non-anthropocentric sentiments that motivate realist accounts
in the first place.
Recall the elm on the grassy bank. A realist, were she contemplating the
tree, might very well maintain that it exists in its own right, independent of
human perspectives, attitudes, practical concerns, and the like. She might,
in other words, regard the more-than-human dimension to reality to which
she is committed as existing out there, as it were, at the terminus of her
experience. In her view, the elm, like Dr Johnson’s rock, gives the lie to all
anti-realist pretensions. Now, Merleau-Ponty endorses the realist’s bare
claim, that there is some aspect of reality that transcends the human. But he
does not conceive this dimension as residing in the world. Instead, he sees it
at work in the perception of the world. So, to be sure, Merleau-Ponty would
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deny that this tall, leafy being before him enjoys the kind of independent
existence the realist attributes to it. Yet he would at the same time affirm
that in placing my palm against the tree’s bark or in looking up through its
branches I am party to an event which is to a certain extent trans-human, a
‘communion’ of man and tree, or better, an intertwining of a flesh that
‘traverses’ me (VI: 140; cf. Abram 1996a: 68).24

9
Towards the beginning of this paper I quoted one environmental realist’s
call for ‘a real appreciation of … a world not limited by what we make of it’
(Clark, 1994: p. 125). We saw that despite his basic opposition to realism,
Merleau-Ponty seeks to do justice to this thought. It is, he argues, integral
to our perception of things that we see them, occasionally at any rate, as
existing in their own right. And this, I suggested, is particularly evident in
our dealings with the natural rather than the artefactual world, the world of
mountains, rivers and trees, rather than that of shopping malls and multi-
storey car parks. Yet we also saw that Merleau-Ponty’s acknowledgement
of a more-than-human world remains, at root, human-centred, and would as
such sit poorly with the professed non-anthropocentrism of environmental
realists. I responded to this charge in two ways: first, by suggesting that the
human-centredness of Merleau-Ponty’s account might not in fact be a bad
thing; and second, by noting that there is, as early as Phenomenology of
Perception, a movement in Merleau-Ponty’s work towards a markedly non-
anthropocentric account of human experience.
I admit that my discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s later writings has been
little more than a gesture towards some ideas that deserve a more thorough
treatment. Yet, with these qualifications, our discussion of these ideas,
tentative and provisional as it is, suggests a further conclusion regarding the
environmental realism debate: that the environmental realist is in a sense
right, but for the wrong reasons. For on the account sketched in the previous
few sections, reality is indeed not limited by what we make of it, but this is
not because we are able, as it were, to fix our gaze upon some part of it – the
natural world, perhaps – that exists in its own right, independent of human
attitudes, practical concerns, and the like. The trans-human dimension of
reality is at work in our gaze itself. Or rather, what we take to be our outlook
on the world is in fact not ours at all, not entirely.
These claims, if true, suggest that one cannot account for our inherence
in a world not of our making simply by proposing that we exist in the midst
of a realm that exists in its own right, independent of human concerns.
Indeed, they suggest that environmental thinkers, if they are fully to appre-
ciate the place of human beings in the larger scheme of things, would do well
not to focus exclusively on the merits or otherwise of realism. For to remain
within the confines of the realism–anti-realism debate is to overlook the
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possibility that the trans-human dimension of reality is not so much there in

the natural world, standing over against us onlooking subjects, as at work in
the very disclosure of that world. And this, in turn, suggests that environ-
mental thinkers, if they are to realize their non-anthropocentric ambitions,
would do well to pay attention, not only to the trans-human world, but also
to the trans-human nature of perception, not only, that is, to the mountains,
rivers and trees, but to that trans-human event by which these things
disclose themselves as the things they are. They would be well advised to
consider an account of the more-than-human world opposed, not just to
metaphysical realism, but to that broadly subject-centred conception of the
world presupposed by realists and anti-realists alike.

Durham University, UK

Notes
1 I would like to thank David E. Cooper, Matthew Ratcliffe, Wayne Martin, and
Alison Stone for their helpful comments on an early draft of this paper.
2 The phrase is Don Cupitt’s (quoted in Rolston, 1997: p. 50). For a recent discus-
sion of the realism–constructivism debate in environmental philosophy, see
Evanoff, 2005.
3 N. Katherine Hayles is here reporting the responses of a group of environmen-
talists to the thesis that ‘everything we think we know, including “nature”, is a
construction emerging from historically specific discursive, social, and cultural
conditions’.
4 For a discussion of the various forms of metaphysical realism in play in
discussions of environmentalism, see Tomassi, 2003.
5 References to Merleau-Ponty’s work are to: ‘An Unpublished Text by Maurice
Merleau-Ponty: Prospectus of his Work’ (UT), The World of Perception (WP),
Phenomenology of Perception (PP), ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ (CD), ‘Eye and Mind’
(EM), and The Visible and the Invisible (VI). Despite their title, Merleau-Ponty’s
lectures on the concept of nature (2003) are not especially relevant to the case I
set out in this paper, and I do not refer to them.
6 This, of course, is the central question. In this paper, however, I present a cursory
and uncritical account of Merleau-Ponty’s answer to it. For more detailed intro-
ductions, see Matthews, 2002; Madison, 1981; Hammond et al., 1991.
7 It might seem odd to describe Merleau-Ponty as an anti-realist and, indeed, I
shall suggest, towards the end of this paper, that his work (and in particular, his
later work) tends to undercut the debate between realism and anti-realism.
Nonetheless, Phenomenology of Perception is anti-realist in the specific sense
given here. For further discussion of the anti-realist implications of existential
phenomenology, see Cooper, 2002: Chapter 5.
8 Cf. Simon Critchley’s account of the debate between Merleau-Ponty, A. J. Ayer,
and Georges Bataille over whether the sun existed before the appearance of
Homo sapiens (2001: p. 36). Thomas Baldwin criticizes the theory of meaning
implied in this passage in Merleau-Ponty, 2004a: pp. 19–20.
9 There is a sense in which, because of the influence of anthropogenic pollutants
upon the weather, no part of nature remains entirely independent of human
influence (see McKibben, 1990). Yet this observation does not preclude one’s

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assessing the relative ‘naturalness’ of particular phenomena. For example, while

neither Times Square nor Death Valley are entirely natural, the former is clearly
less natural (and more ‘artefactual’) than the latter.
10 Though see PP: ix. On Merleau-Ponty’s neglect of issues pertaining to the natu-
ral environment, see Abram, 1996b: p. 92.
11 The connections between Merleau-Ponty’s thought and environmental philoso-
phy have been explored in David Abram’s beautiful book The Spell of the Sensu-
ous (1996a) and Toadvine, 1999 (to whose discussion this article is greatly
indebted). See also Abram, 1996b; Toadvine, 2003; Brook, 2005; and Clark, 2002.
12 Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of these matters bears comparison with Heidegger’s
account in Being and Time of how, when some breakdown occurs in one’s unre-
flective dealings with the world, things reveal themselves as ‘present-at-hand’
(see Heidegger, 1997: pp. 102–3).
13 See Vogel, 2003; Abram, 1996a: p. 64; Heidegger’s essay ‘The Thing’ (1971: pp.
165–86).
14 See ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (Heidegger, 1996: pp. 143–203) and ‘The
Thing’ (1971: pp. 165–86).
15 For a recent discussion of this view, see Brady, 2003: pp. 128–9.
16 Cf. Michael Smith’s discussion of the idea that wilderness ‘offers us a chance to
escape a world where all we see reflects “humanity” back at us’ (1991: p. 152).
17 Furthermore, the nature depicted by Cézanne is ‘inhuman’ in the sense that it
depicts – or rather, directly presents to us (see Madison, 1981: p. 79) – a world
that is not carved up into discrete and familiar objects externally related to one
another, a world of things that are singularly ambiguous and fuzzy-edged and
which is in this quite particular sense starkly unfamiliar and so ‘inhuman’ (CD:
16; cf. Madison, 1981: p. 79). For a concise summary of Merleau-Ponty’s inter-
pretation of the works of Cézanne and its philosophical implications, see Toad-
vine, 1997.
18 In Merleau-Ponty’s account of the natural world we are touching upon an impor-
tant phenomenological theme: the possibility that a faithful account of percep-
tion might reveal the presence – as a horizon, perhaps – of something that cannot
in principle be thematized. This theme moves to centre stage in Merleau-Ponty’s
later ontological speculations. Indeed, several commentators have suggested
that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the natural world in Phenomenology of Percep-
tion provides a bridge between his explicitly phenomenological inquiries and his
later ontology of ‘flesh’ (see, e.g., Madison, 1981: p. 169; Barbaras, 2001: p. 37).
19 The reference to Wordsworth is taken from Alfred North Whitehead’s discus-
sion of the poet (1967: p. 83). For more on what it might mean to appreciate the
independent reality of nature, see the various discussions in the literature of
what it means to appreciate the otherness of natural things (e.g., Evernden, 1992;
Reed, 1999).
20 I regret that I do not have space in this paper to discuss the various ways (ethical,
say, or aesthetic) in which a sense of the independent reality or otherness of
natural things might bear upon human life. For further discussion of these issues,
see Abram, 1996a.
21 For a more detailed account, see Madison, 1981.
22 Though not an event to which humans are merely party. We are, on Merleau-
Ponty’s account, intimately involved with the intertwining of flesh so much so
that that intertwining could not occur without our involvement (see further,
Madison, 1981: p. 252).
23 That said, it is worth noting that Merleau-Ponty himself did not wish to defend a
position that was too divorced from human concerns. That is one reason why he

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rejected Heidegger’s later writings: they were, in his view, focused too much on
Being, and not enough on human beings (see Madison, 1981: p. 252).
24 There is a formal similarity between Merleau-Ponty’s sketches of an ‘ontology
from within’ (VI: 237) and Schopenhauer’s thought. For Schopenhauer, there is
no possibility of encountering anything in the world that does not disclose itself
according to the transcendental conditions brought into play in our experience.
But for all this, one’s experience itself, or more precisely, one’s ‘inner knowl-
edge’ of one’s own will, is non-anthropocentric in the sense that the will of
which we are aware is, at root, numerically identical with the Will that consti-
tutes the true nature of all things. See further, Jacquette, 2005: pp. 82–92; Toad-
vine, 2003.

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