Existential fit and evolutionary continuities

Abstract

The reality of evolution is not only the connective tissue of the whole of biology; silently or not, it threads its way through all studies of animate being. Merleau-Ponty's existential analyses are particularly rich in this respect. They answer to the question of human uniqueness and in so doing engender a certain view of evolutionary continuities. Here we will take up that answer and view in the form of both a critique and an elaboration of Merleau-Ponty's thought. The essay is comprised of three sections. The first situates the question of human uniqueness in the context of scientific thought and pinpoints problems inherent in the Darwinian scientist's quest for human uniqueness. The second section is a critique of Merleau-Ponty's claims for human uniqueness. Those claims are implicitly and explicitly spelled out in his first work, La Structure du Comportement and they are also evident in his later writings, especially Phenomenology of Perception and 'Eye and Mind.' A rigorous review of these claims dramatizes the need for acknowledging the evolutionary dimensions of existence and the evolutionary problems attaching to analyses of human being-in-the world. In this sense the critique sets the stage for the concrete elaboration of the radically different view of human uniqueness pithily if fleetingly suggested by Merleau-Ponty in 'Eye and Mind.' In quite general terms, the critique shows that, failing a direct acknowledge ment of evolutionary dimensions of existence, existential claims regarding human uniqueness are left dangling: there is no viable framework in which to assess their truth. More importantly, the critique shows that existential accounts may themselves call out for completion: they may lack a coherent and developed evolutionary context of meaning. The third section attempts to provide this context but in such a way as to continue rather than oppose Merleau-Ponty's thought. Existential fit is a concept presaged in The Structure of Behavior in the heavily emphasized notion of "propriety" and its concrete expression is