Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and the Question of Biological Continuism

Abstract

I THE LEGACY OF HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND MERLEAUPONTY'S TURN TO EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY Even as posthumanists seek to dismantle the legacy of human exceptionalism, a queasy reluctance among philosophers prevents full acknowledgement of our kinship with the rest of animalia. Heidegger's declaration that animals are 'poor in world' and his description of an abyss yawning between humans and all other animals established the best known and most influential position in this regard. (1) Even though Derrida challenged what he saw as Heidegger's dogmatic humanism and violent commentary on animals, (2) he could not acknowledge the biological continuism which evolutionary science, genomics, and microbiology make obvious. (3) Matthew Calarco takes 'Derrida's insistence on maintaining the human-animal distinction to be one of the most dogmatic and puzzling moments in all of his writings' (4) and wonders 'why he would use this language of ruptures and abysses when the largest bodies of empirical knowledge we have concerning human beings and animals strongly contest such language'. (5) Similar to Derrida, Giorgio Agamben decries what he calls 'the anthropological machine' but never moves beyond it. He urges us to work on the divisions of animal from human and suggests that 'even the most luminous sphere of our relations with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal'. (6) Only Cary Wolfe, Matthew Calarco, Donna Haraway, and Kelly Oliver among prominent recent animal theorists are moving away from abyssal distinctions between humans and other animals, Haraway the most decisively. (7) Yet more than fifty years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty had already gone far beyond Heidegger to seriously explore the philosophical consequences of evolutionary biology and ethology--the scientific studies of actual animals--and to anticipate the radical breakthroughs of the past several decades in studies of animal sentience, tool use, communication, and culture. Merleau-Ponty laid the theoretical groundwork for an understanding of human animality that is congruent with evolutionary biology and ethology. (8) In this essay I will briefly describe Heidegger's resistance to thinking of humans as animals within an evolutionary perspective, in order to demonstrate how Merleau-Ponty took a radically different direction through a thoughtful engagement with evolutionary science and ethology that affirms both biological continuity and the distinctive qualities of our species. At stake in these debates is the question of whether cultural theory can accept the legitimacy of modern science as an access to knowledge about the natural world, or whether we are trapped in a solipsistic bubble. Calarco thinks that persistent anthropocentrism is one of the chief blind spots in contemporary Continental philosophy, claiming that it is always 'one version or another of the human that falsely occupies the space of the universal and that functions to exclude what is considered nonhuman (which, of course, includes the immense majority of human beings themselves, along with all else deemed to be nonhuman) from ethical and political consideration'. (9) And as Derrida argued in his Geschlecht essays and also in The Animal That Therefore I Am, a central problem remains the failure of theorists to seriously pay attention to the life sciences, particularly the experimental studies of other animals. (10) He himself never got around to doing this, and neither have most participants in recent critical animal studies debates indebted to Derrida's work. (11) What makes Merleau-Ponty's philosophy unique and radical in this regard is his lifelong engagement with the sciences of his own era, including Gestalt psychology and cognitive neuroscience for his work on embodiment in The Phenomenology of Perception, and in his later writings, quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, embryology, and ethology. Close examination of empirical animal research in his late Nature lectures led to the beginnings of an understanding of a 'strange kinship' between humans and animals over evolutionary time, and the human-animality intertwining that defines our species' distinctive way of participating in the Brute being of the world's flesh. …