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“ e a C h  a u t h e N t i C a l l y 
e M B o D i e D  s t e P  i s  t h e 
W a l K  o F  N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y ”
G l e n  M a z i s *
i. introduction: For Merleau-Ponty to be  
human is to be “Natural historical”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty taught a course at the Collège de France dur-
ing the academic year 1956–1957 entitled “The Concept of Nature” and 
began the course by asking the question of his students, “Can we validly 
study the notion of nature?”1 Whereas aristotle thought that the human 
being could not adequately describe the sense of the world without care-
fully observing the varieties of other living beings in the natural world 
and classifying them, by the time Merleau-Ponty asked this question of 
his students it had come to be assumed by many that the idea of nature 
was itself just a cultural artifact, an epiphenomenon. Merleau-Ponty ad-
dresses this suspicion he knows his students harbor by challenging their 
assumptions in phrasing his next question: “isn’t it [nature] something 
other than the product of a history, in the course of which it acquired a 
series of meanings by rendering it intelligible?” Whereas for aristotle, it 
was obvious that there are other orders of beings, which humans must 
confront as having another sort of nature and as part of a more encom-
passing natural world, a world of which the human is a part but which 
the human also transcended in virtue of its specific human capacities, 
for the students of Merleau-Ponty’s class, it seemed that the exercise of 
abstract reason and language traps humanity in a self-enclosure in such 
a way that it had become dubious whether the natural world could be 
encountered in its own terms. Merleau-Ponty’s students would suspect 
* Penn state university, harrisburg
1 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2003), Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (translated by 
robert Vallier). evanston: Northwestern university Press, p. 3.
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that either nature is mute, or the power of language and reason are so 
great that humans give nature whatever voice it might appear to have as 
a trick of human ventriloquism. This skeptical situation has deepened 
since Merleau-Ponty addressed his students. even though for aristotle, 
human being’s rationality was unique and uniquely valuable, human-
ity was still a part of an encompassing whole moving towards actualiza-
tion. as Merleau-Ponty points out in the beginning of his course as he 
discusses aristotle’s approach to nature, aristotle’s finalist understand-
ing articulated qualitatively defined regions of natural phenomena such 
that “nature is the more or less successful realization of this qualitative 
destining of bodies.”2 This understanding establishes the encompassing 
of humanity within nature. in realizing their potentialities, human and 
nature are woven together. it is through the meaning resulting from 
their structure and function that varied purposes emerge within this 
totality. even though this notion seems outdated, it is often the ratio-
nale of a “natural history:” to comprehend the variety of phenomena 
that encompass human being within this whole, and to grasp our place 
within its scheme—both within the history of its unfolding and in the 
comparisons of structure and function within it.
Merleau-Ponty at the beginning of the course distinguishes the other 
idea of nature that has been dominant with the tradition of philosophy 
from the Greeks to modern europeans—Descartes’ idea of “nature as 
the idea of an entirely exterior being, made of external parts, exterior 
to man and to itself, as a pure object.”3 This idea of nature also dates 
back to the Greeks, Merleau-Ponty notes, but became dominant with 
Descartes and Newton. in this vision, nature is something alongside 
us or stretching out before us and easily becomes something to be ex-
ploited for humanity’s purposes. The lack of meaning within nature 
and its loss as a voice to which to hearken is summed up by Merleau-
Ponty in stating that, “Nature thus becomes a synonym of existence in 
itself, without orientation, without interior. it no longer has orientation. 
What we thought earlier as orientation is now only mechanism.”4 if this 
2 ibid., p. 7.
3 ibid., p. 8.
4 ibid., p. 10.
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were to be the case, then Descartes’ dualism of an immaterial thinking 
substance confronting an extended material world means that natural 
history aims at the comprehension of those determinate processes that 
interact in causal chains and have an ongoing impact on the material 
conditions of human life. This conception of nature is resonant with 
the “two cultures” that evolved between the sciences and the humani-
ties, even though “natural history” usually denotes the more qualitative 
exploration of this material surround than the more strictly quantifiable 
approach of natural philosophy. Within this understanding, natural his-
tory is the study of a certain set of material entities and their interactions 
that lie in front and around human being, allowing them to be grasped 
as a system that might be manipulated and utilized for our ends. The 
attempted unification of nature and subjectivity as undertaken by the 
romantics is also explored by Merleau-Ponty early in this course, but 
for him, it does not break out of the dualisms inherent in the treatment 
of nature within a tradition that opposes mechanism to meaning, indi-
viduals to totality, and matter to spirit, always reducing the dichotomies 
to the favored term of the particular argument.
Merleau-Ponty followed this initial course with two other courses 
about the concept of nature: the 1957–1958 course entitled “animality, 
the human Body, and the Passage to Culture” and also the course of 
1959–1960 entitled “Nature and logos: The human Body.” By the end 
of this third course, Merleau-Ponty had sketched out an approach to 
nature that does not mesh with traditional perspectives on the human 
relationship with the natural world, dispenses with the dichotomies that 
comprise the traditional articulation of this relationship, and uses an-
other logic to recast its structure. in Merleau-Ponty’s path of thought, 
nature becomes something unimagined by the tradition. in accomplish-
ing this new formulation of the human relationship with nature, he ful-
filled the promise he had announced at the very beginning of the first 
course to discover another kind of nature: “Nature is the primordial … 
it is our soil [sol] — not what is in front of us, facing us, but rather, that 
which carries us.”5 The key for Merleau-Ponty for rethinking nature is 
the same key he used to unlock other philosophical problems: realizing 
5 ibid., p. 4.
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the primordiality of embodying being6 that led him to an “ontology 
of the flesh of the world.” in Merleau-Ponty’s articulation, the world 
comes forth within the layers of perception of an embodying being, 
such that there is a “vertical visible world,”7 and the natural world is 
comprehended as an interpenetrating layer with the human and cul-
tural world. Furthermore, this verticality of comprehension is also an 
unfolding process, in which the perceiver is perceptible and perceives 
in a fashion that the sense which emerges in perception seems to be also 
comprised by the additional sense offered as if perceived by the world 
itself of the perceiver and the world. This notion that the perceiver takes 
in what is beyond its own perception as a constitutive part of its own 
perception is Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “reversibility” of perception. 
as we will explore these ideas in their relationship to natural history, we 
will see that humans are not capable of taking in the world about them 
unless the world itself is part of that process. There is only a kind of co-
perceiving accomplished together by humans and world.
however, in contrast to the philosophical tradition that precedes 
him, Merleau-Ponty does not describe this interweavement, as he calls 
it, by postulating the subsumption of perception by an oversoul or a 
notion of spirit or even transcendental consciousness that would be to-
talizing and transcendent to the concrete circumstances of perception. 
rather, the co-perception of perceiver and natural world arises from the 
ongoing interplay of the contingent and necessary, not as simply op-
posed to one another, but rather as belonging to an ongoing dialectic. 
For Merleau-Ponty the “the perpetual reordering of fact and hazard by 
a reason non-existent before and without those circumstances,” as stated 
early in his project at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Perception, 
means that what is encountered within the situation becomes the very 
6 Throughout this essay when possible, i will use the phrase “embodying being” instead of 
the more common term “embodiment” in order to indicate this is a process, a continual move-
ment, and a dynamism of the becoming of embodied relations. it will indicate the sense of the 
body should be taken not as a description of “the body” as a noun, nor should “embodiment” 
be taken as the embodying of “something” as if it were a substance, but rather embodying is ge-
rundial—in the way that heidegger’s use of Sein is about the be-ing, the worlding of the world, 
without anything underlying as a foundation.
7 Merleau-Ponty, M., Visible, op. cit., p. 236.
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means of ordering our perception to comprehend the situation.8 Na-
ture in its perceived sense, as well as other dimensions of existence, is 
not the result of a priori universalizable and formal structures nor is it 
merely given, but rather emerges from the ongoing interweaving of the 
relationships in its historical unfolding such that “there is no longer any 
way of distinguishing a level of a priori truths from factual ones” (PP 
221). There is no realm of intelligibility of human beings or sphere of 
interiority that is not equally in the world and its materially grounded 
sense. yet, materiality is not mutely, obstinately confronting us, but has 
beckoned us to enter a dialogue of emerging sense with it through the 
unfolding of perception and our bodily matching of its rhythms and 
textures. human being in its relationship to the natural world can not 
be named by any term among the traditional dichotomies. The logic of 
Merleau-Ponty is not the logic of “the one” of monism or “the two” of 
dualism, but rather is a logic of “not-one-not-two” in which human be-
ing and the natural world come forth together.
Natural history is in part a recognition that the earth has a vast histo-
ry and that the natural world has rhythms and characteristics stemming 
from an ancient past to which humans and all living beings have had 
to adapt and that has molded the inanimate natural world into varied 
identities that are testimony to those eons of interaction. The study of 
natural history as revealing the essence or characteristics of various re-
gions of the natural world always shows itself against this background of 
this great expanse of time. yet, expressed and conceived in this manner, 
this sense of the historical dimension of natural history is a phenomenon 
comprised of cause and effect chains of events. it is a linear sense of time. 
it is also a conception of time that drives a further wedge into the dual-
istic disjunction between human being and the natural world. Whether 
we are considering the natural history of the cosmos, the galaxy, or even 
just our planet, the expanse of time of this linear sense of time dwarfs 
the comparable history of the human species. Within this asymmetry 
of histories, the natural world seems to be of a different temporal order 
and a different register of being than human being. Given the human 
pace of transformation of the surround in our short history, there seems 
8 Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology, op. cit, p. 127.
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a disjunction between the natural world as being merely there, evolving, 
transforming, certainly, but not with the alacrity that may seem to be-
speak a different order of purpose, intelligibility and value. There seem 
to be two temporal orders and two orders of being, as if there is human 
history as differentiated from natural history, that humans in their ac-
celerated and compacted history transcend natural history. in this sec-
ond history, it seems as if the being of the human is here to remake the 
being of the natural world as following its own destiny, one which may 
depart from that of the natural world. in general, the historical sense 
or historical being is taken to be the creation of human self-awareness, 
rationality and language. humans are often thought to be those beings 
through whom history first comes to consciousness and articulation—a 
presumption that also is taken to separate the history of humanity from 
the vast natural history of the world that is passing by unnoticed within 
the darkness of that night populated by all the nonrational beings of 
the natural world.
in looking at Merleau-Ponty’s comments about the relationship of 
human being and the natural world in his late 1950’s lectures about na-
ture, in his early work and in his last unfinished work, The Visible and the 
Invisible, this essay will assert that “natural history” emerges as a depth 
within the “lived time” of human temporality. Despite the human pre-
tension to introducing the historical sense into the world, the deepest 
history surrounds us in the natural world not as just a fact of linear time 
to be discovered by the human sciences, but as a presence—the sense 
of what each being is in the natural world resounds with a “natural his-
tory” that seems at the heart of perceiving the natural world for what 
it is. This is the founding sense of the history of the natural world and 
perhaps in some ways even of any sense of the historical. it is also the 
founding sense of natural history as the study of the natural world inso-
far as we find ourselves only as echoes of this resounding at the heart of 
the natural world. to walk through the natural world is to experience 
a density below one’s feet reverberating within the surround of an an-
cient temporality, a density of co-presences of untold and unfathomable 
comings and goings that still support and beckon to us. Merleau-Ponty 
suggests that to have a perceiving body of the kind we have as human 
beings is to be in some sense “natural-historical”. When a sense of this 
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being a dimension of our being is lost, a depth of humanity’s meaning 
here on earth is lost. Merleau-Ponty only moved towards suggesting 
these insights gradually, and in fragments within his work that this es-
say will attempt to assemble.
ii. embodying Being is time and time is in the Depths of the World: 
Phenomenology of Perception
in the beginning of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty 
poses many questions to be explored, most of them concerning the na-
ture of perception, but he acknowledges that the empiricist and intellec-
tualist distortions of perception and of embodying being have also lead 
to a false picture of nature and puts among his tasks that “We shall there-
fore have to rediscover the natural world too.”9 in actuality, Merleau-
Ponty will not get to this task until two decades later in his last years of 
lecture courses and writings, right before his sudden death. as he says in 
an often cited “working note” of July, 1959, included in The Visible and 
Invisible, the problems posed in the Phenomenology of Perception were in-
soluble using the traditional philosophical terms and concepts and had 
to await his finding new ones. This seems particularly true of describing 
the relationship between humans and the natural world. however, there 
are some interesting hints in the Phenomenology of Perception that should 
be noted as laying the ground for his later formulations.
in the beginning of the first chapter, in which Merleau-Ponty starts 
to sketch out his idea of perception and embodying being,10 he articu-
lates how the body’s role in the process of perception enacts a dispersal 
throughout its surround. This dispersal at first seems as if it might be 
merely spatial but is revealed to even be more fundamentally temporal. 
For Merleau-Ponty, to become concentrated upon perceiving an object 
is “to respond to this summons” upon my body. our embodied being 
is solicited by aspects of the surround to be perceived. Furthermore, “to 
look at the object is to plunge oneself into it” such that “i become an-
9 ibid., p. 24.
10 after his introductory chapter deconstructing several key ideas from the tradition about 
perception.
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chored in it.”11 embodying being extends beyond its literal bounds to 
circulate within that which is perceived or as Merleau-Ponty will phrase 
this more powerfully in his last published essay, “Vision is not a certain 
mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given to me for be-
ing absent from myself, for being present at the fission of Being from 
the inside—the fission at whose termination, and not before, i come 
back to myself.”12 By contrast, within the traditional empiricist or intel-
lectual account of perception there is a gap between the object and the 
distanced perceiver that either results in a mechanical response through 
causal intermediaries or an immaterial mental representation. Merleau-
Ponty details how the body overlaps with the perceived, in the language 
of the early work, or is a fold of the flesh of the world back upon itself, 
in the terms of the later works. in the Phenomenology of Perception, this 
moment of perception is called one of “communion.”13 yet, this is not 
the coincidence of two objects in space, for embodying being is not a 
specific location in space as defined by locating it in a Cartesian grid of 
points, but is rather throughout its surround. if “to look at an object is 
to inhabit it,” as Merleau-Ponty says, and if “every object is the mirror of 
all others,” as he also says, then in this moment of seeing, the embody-
ing being is caught up in the mirror-play among all the objects within 
the surround.14 The body circulates within the surround to take up the 
vantage points of all the objects it perceives:
When i look at the lamp on my table, i attribute to it not only the qualities 
visible from where i am, but also those from which the chimney, the walls, the 
table can ‘see:’ the back of the lamp is nothing but the face which it ‘shows’ 
the chimney. i can therefore see an object in so far as objects from a system 
or a world, and in so far as each one treats the others round it as spectators of 
its hidden aspects which guarantee the permanence of those aspects by their 
presence.15
11 ibid., p. 67.
12 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), “eye and Mind.” in: The Primacy of Perception (translated by 
Carleton Dallery) evanston: Northwestern university Press, p. 186.
13 Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology, op. cit, p. 212.
14 ibid., p. 68.
15 ibid.
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The embodying being is dispersed throughout its surround as enact-
ing a perceiving that comes from the vantage of the objects and aspects 
that envelop it, a description of perception that already implies the idea 
of “reversibility” that Merleau-Ponty will make more explicit in the later 
writings. What is important here in working our way towards the per-
ceiver’s relationship to nature is that the perceiver perceives from within 
the contours of its surround.
also, in the first pages of describing embodying being, Merleau-Pon-
ty states that “we base our memory on the world’s vast Memory.”16 This 
seems to be a usage of language that fits the last works and not the early 
pages of the Phenomenology of Perception, and indeed, Merleau-Ponty 
doesn’t use a phrase similar to this until another working note of May, 
1959, when in describing how the perceiver and perceived are a “wind-
ing” (serpentement) around each other, he says that what has been is 
held within “The Memory of the World.”17 What Merleau-Ponty might 
mean by this develops later in the Phenomenology when he discusses how 
the horizon of any particular spatial surround is always located within 
other possible spatial horizons. When walking through a field, for ex-
ample, Merleau-Ponty states that “through my perceptual field, with its 
spatial horizons, i am present to my surroundings, i co-exist with all the 
other landscapes which stretch out beyond it”18 The perceiver co-exists 
with all these further fields, because they are all vantages from which 
to experience the world that my body inhabits as if it were perceiving 
from their vantage—however indeterminate this sense might be as part 
of my present perception. Merleau-Ponty points out, however, that “The 
synthesis of horizons is essentially a temporal process, which means, not 
that it is subject to time, nor that it is passive in relation to time, nor 
that it has to prevail over time, but that it merges with the very move-
ment whereby time passes.” There cannot be this spatial expanse without 
there being even more primordially a temporal one.
What is important to Merleau-Ponty’s later ideas about nature is that 
he explains this merging with a motion of time as an entrance to a differ-
16 ibid., p. 70.
17 Merleau-Ponty, M., Visible, op. cit., p. 194.
18 Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology, op. cit., p. 330.
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ent depth of time within the horizons of far off spaces coming together 
in a more global sense. all these other landscapes stretching beyond my 
local surround are my co-existences since “all these perspectives form a 
single temporal wave, one of the world’s instants.”19 a single temporal 
wave from within all landscapes suggests that there is a resonance or re-
verberation within my personal time that is of an impersonal planetary 
time—the time of the natural world. From within that great body of 
the earth, its extensive flesh within time, my own perceptual existence 
is but “one of the world’s instants.” indeed, Merleau-Ponty, goes on to 
say that in perceiving one’s surround the spatial horizon is subtended by 
a temporal horizon that has a depth far beyond my personal existence: 
“Through my perceptual field with its temporal horizon i am present 
to my present, to all the preceding past and to a future. at the same 
time, this ubiquity is not strictly real, but is clearly only intentional” (PP 
330–331). unlike God, the perceiver does not open unto a time that is 
literally all times, but this impersonal time of perception is marked by 
indeterminate vectors that are directed towards this vast depth of time. 
This time is not the temporal horizon of my projects at my disposal, 
but rather that which resounds in enveloping me in a presence i can 
never fathom.
although Merleau-Ponty will articulate how human history and cul-
ture envelop my personal time in a deeper temporality that forms a 
background to my personal acts, it is the natural world that provides the 
most primordial temporal depth to my life: “My voluntary and rational 
life, therefore, knows that it merges into another power which stands 
in the way of its completion, and gives it a permanently tentative look. 
Natural time is always there. The transcendence of the instants of time 
is both the ground of, and impediment to, the rationality of my per-
sonal history.”20 Deeper than the personal perceiver is the anonymous 
impersonal perceiver that Merleau-Ponty documents throughout the 
Phenomenology of Perception and to which again he returns decades later 
in the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible when he says we 
must think of “the self of perception as ‘nobody,’ in the sense of ulysses, 
19 ibid.
20 ibid., p. 347.
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as the anonymous one buried in the world.”21 The way the perceiver is 
buried in the world is that this lack of self is a joining up with that sin-
gle temporal wave or what Merleau-Ponty calls in this working note the 
“sinking into” a “temporal openness.” This echoes his conclusion at the 
end of the Phenomenology of Perception that the perceiver is really time: 
“i am myself time”22 and “we are the upsurge of time.”23 as time, we are 
enveloped within the “one single phenomenon of lapse”24 that is time.
i take my steps through the landscape and these steps echo with the 
whole of my personal history, since as Merleau-Ponty says “i am still 
that first perception” since “my first perception, along with the horizons 
which surrounded it, is an ever-present event”25 But for this meditation, 
it is more important to consider those surrounding horizons. since the 
core of perception is time, at the core of the perceiver there is the vast 
time of nature. as Merleau-Ponty phrases it, “since natural time re-
mains at the center of my history, i see myself surrounded by it.”26 The 
time we live within has another side, has a deeper background, and has 
reverberations within perceiving the natural world around me. We join 
up with a greater momentum and an ongoing unfolding that aristotle 
was attempting to articulate as an erotic pulse that moves throughout 
the natural world that also bears us along with it, especially if we hearken 
to it. Merleau-Ponty will turn towards this erotics of the unfolding of 
the natural world in his last lectures, but even within the early Phenom-
enology of Perception he concludes, “Because i am borne into personal 
existence by a time which i do not constitute, all my perceptions stand 
out against a background of nature.”27 The other fields and the other 
landscapes that trail off from the spatial horizon that i am now travers-
ing are temporal fields that resound with their deepest layer, the history 
of the natural world.
21 Merleau-Ponty, M., Visible, op. cit., p. 201.
22 Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology, op. cit., p. 421.
23 ibid., p. 428.
24 ibid., p. 419.
25 ibid., p. 407.
26 ibid., p. 347
27 ibid., p. 347.
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P o l i G r a F i
although in the natural attitude we may consider ourselves sur-
rounded by objects that stand in themselves and constitute the natural 
world that has been comprised of a vast chain of beings in cause and ef-
fect relationships, giving rise to one another and then being swallowed 
up by time, the truth of our experience is that the single wave of tem-
porality into which i am taken by perception shows up at the heart of 
my perception of an indeterminate and vast history, and i also have a 
sense of this deeper background to my existence: “i am thrown into a 
nature, and that nature appears not only outside me, in objects devoid 
of history, but it is also discernible at the centre of my subjectivity.”28 
The objects of the natural world may be taken as devoid of history, as 
if they are just inert matter, but what is more the case is that they are at 
the core of my being as a perceiver as resonating with a sense that they 
carry with them this single temporal wave at whose dim beginnings i am 
still somehow remaining and still beginning. The separation that seems 
fundamental to the very idea of a “natural history” is undercut to reveal 
that natural history is not a dimension i confront within the world, but 
is rather a depth of my own being, the depth of that temporality that 
does not contain me as something other, but rather as that which i am.
This awareness of being within a single temporal wave that is the 
natural world and the history of the natural world lines perception like 
the backing of a fabric or is submerged within the background of the ge-
stalt of what is present to us as perceivers, and only rarely may we have a 
sense of this unfathomable depth to our own presence. This background 
sense can become enriched with the scientific and reflective knowledge 
we have gained of natural history, since the process of Fundierung that 
Merleau-Ponty calls the “dialectic of form and content”29 works both 
ways: not only may the unexpectedly immediate experience become a 
structure that shapes intelligibility, but an abstract or reflective idea as 
we live with it can become “sedimented” into the flow of our experience, 
such that it is lived in an affective, kinesthetic, imaginal, memorial and 
altogether perceptual manner in our embodying being.
28 ibid., p. 346.
29 ibid., p. 127.
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in order to exemplify a moment of perception that instantiates the 
presence of the natural world, its ways of being and its history as the 
depth of the sense of my own embodying being as perceiver and as the 
depth of what i perceive, it is helpful to quote at some length the an-
thropologist and science writer, loren eiseley, and his experience one 
summer afternoon in the shallows of the Platte river. eiseley knows a 
great deal about natural history, but it is not a reflective experience that 
he entertains on this afternoon, but rather an adventure of embody-
ing being moving him deeply on an emotional, kinesthetic, memorial, 
proprioceptive, imaginal and sensual level. a man who has always been 
somewhat afraid of the water, eiseley, on this lovely afternoon, let go of 
himself and entered the flow of the water and the flow of time:
Then i lay back in the floating position that left my face to the sky and 
shoved off. The sky wheeled over me. For an instant, as i bobbed on the main 
channel, i had the sensation of sliding down the vast tilted face of the conti-
nent. it was then that i felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my fin-
gertips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward. Moving with me, 
leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me in dancing springs of 
sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was 
flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea. i was stream-
ing over ancient river beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported.
i was wearing down the face of time and trundling cloud-wreathed ranges 
into oblivion. i touched my margins with the delicacy of a crayfish’s anten-
nae, and felt great fishes glide about their work. i drifted by the stranded tim-
ber cut by beaver in mountain fastness; i slid over shallows that had buried 
the broken axles of prairie schooners and the mired bones of mammoth. i 
was streaming alive through the hot and working of the sun, or oozing se-
cretively through shady thickets. i was water and the unspeakable alchemies 
that gestate and take shape in water, the slimy jellies that under the enormous 
magnification of the sun writhe and whip upward as great barbeled fish mouths, 
or sink industriously back into the murk out of which they arose. turtle and 
fish and the pinpoint chirpings of individual frogs are all watery projections, 
concentrations—as man himself is a concentration—of that indescribable and 
liquid brew which is compounded in various proportions of salt and sun and 
time. it has appearances, but at its heart lies water, and as i was finally edged 
against a sand bar and dropped like any log, i tottered as i rose. i knew once 
more the body’s revolt against emergence into the harsh and unsupporting air, 
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its reluctance to break contact with that mother element which still, at this late 
point in time, shelters and brings into being nine tenths of everything alive.30
as an extremely gifted writer and man who has spent his life sharpen-
ing his awareness of his sensibilties, eiseley is able to articulate the felt 
dimension of being in ancient waters as a crayfish, of being part of the 
rhythm of the primeval sliding of great land masses, of being the hot 
fluid mixture from which life forms emerged, of being part of a school of 
large primitive fishes, and how even in the felt sense of the effort of our 
daily posture there is a reverberation of the effort of the first emergence 
from water into air, as well as many other eddies of the time of the long 
history of the planet. in the background of his own present time, there 
are these resounding voices, some of which he has come to know in his 
studies and is now able to recognize and name in coming to the level of 
his felt experience, but which were always already there in the depths of 
his embodying being as it is enmeshed in the natural landscapes around 
him. at the core of the perceiver, Merleau-Ponty tells us, in the depths 
of time that it subjectivity, lurks the rhythms and presence of the natural 
world, and eiseley’s experience is a testimony to its power.
iii. Geological time is Beneath our  
Feet and resounds within our steps
in the last working note included in The Visible and the Invisible from 
March, 1961, less than two months before his sudden death, Merleau-
Ponty states that he needs to articulate “Nature as the other side of man 
(as flesh—nowise as ‘matter’).” at this point in his work, Merleau-Ponty 
had sketched out how “the flesh of the world” is the unfolding of the hu-
man, animals, and all the beings of the planet in an enfolding in which 
the beings of each register have their unique identities but are interlaced 
with others in such a way as to be both distinct yet inseparable, the logic 
of “not-one-not-two,” or of interconnected interdependence. The natu-
ral world lies on the other side of humanity in the sense of a Möbius 
strip, where there are two distinctive sides of the strip yet within their 
intertwining they are one unfolding being of both inside and outside. 
30 eiseley, l. (1959), The Immense Journey. New york: Vintage Press, pp. 19–20.
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This intertwining of the natural world as the other side of humanity—a 
depth of being that is both the primordial human dimension and later-
ally crosses over and through other species and beings—causes Merleau-
Ponty to reconsider the temporality of natural history in relation to the 
human experience of temporality.
in his last years, Merleau-Ponty is seeking an architectonic under-
standing of how the vastness of the past of the natural world infuses 
time. in april, 1960, in his working note in The Visible and Invisible, 
he points to another sort of time within linear time such that “the past 
as ‘indestructible,’ as ‘intemporal’” becomes visible to us once we have 
achieved the “elimination of the common idea of time as a series of 
‘erlebnisse.’”31 This “common idea of time” as a series of experiences, 
the propulsive movement of “inner time consciousness,” had been both 
the common sense of Western culture of how time is straightforwardly 
lived and the basis of phenomenology’s sense of the flow of the unfold-
ing of being-in-the-world, especially as laid out in husserl’s The Phenom-
enology of Internal Time Consciousness. however, Merleau-Ponty applies 
this to time’s unfolding, embracing the sense of depth that he had been 
elaborating since the Phenomenology of Perception, when he declared that 
“this being simultaneously present in experiences which are nevertheless 
mutually exclusive, this implication of one in the other, this contraction 
into one perceptual act of a whole possible process, constitute the origi-
nality of depth.”32 temporal depth in this sense that depth is comprised 
of the co-presence of incompossibles would mean that differing times 
might be enjambed or contracted into one time comprised of differing 
dimensions, and this contraction is what gives time greater depth.
in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty had cited hus-
serl’s famous analysis of time and had agreed with it. yet, towards the 
end of the book, there is a passage that might point ahead to his later 
departure from husserl’s analysis, especially when taking subjectivity as 
decentered into the natural world. When Merleau-Ponty declares that 
“we must understand time as the subject and the subject as time,”33 he 
31 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 243.
32 Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit. p. 264.
33 ibid., p. 422.
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is planting a seed that will take him beyond the traditional notion of 
subjectivity and beyond husserl’s analyses of time consciousness. When 
Merleau-Ponty declares “i am myself time”34 and likens it to a way that 
people have of talking about time as if it were almost a person or hav-
ing a proper name or “as a single concrete being, wholly present in each 
of its manifestations”, he is pointing towards a depth of time that tran-
scends our consciousness of time; but he is not yet ready to abandon 
the husserlian framework. it is a depth of time he will only be able to 
articulate with his last analyses of nature and the flesh of the world. yet, 
it is interesting that Merleau-Ponty already says here of perception that 
it occurs within an unfolding of the world as manifest where there is 
no time beneath, behind or ahead of it, but rather “temporal dimen-
sions, insofar as they perpetually` overlap and bear each other out and 
confine themselves to making explicit what was implicit in each, be-
ing collectively expressive of that one single explosion [un seul éclate-
ment] or thrust [ou une seule poussée] which is subjectivity itself.” 35 in 
the place of subjectivity instead is an invocation of an “explosion” from 
whose depths the world emerges continually. The term used here in this 
late passage of the Phenomenology of Perception in focusing on time and 
depth is yet another precursor. When in 1961 in “eye and Mind,” he 
uses the word “deflagration” in place of subjectivity in describing depth 
as the “dimension of dimensions,” this seems like the unfolding of the 
germ of his earlier thought. to use this word in this last published essay 
to describe how the painter and what he paints both emerge from the 
deflagration lit when each person comes into the world seems resonant 
with the idea of the relationship of perceiver to the perceived as one single 
explosion. These phrases suggest that both “the subject” and “states of 
consciousness” have been volatilized. This “explosion” is the site where 
what had been taken as subjectivity is now articulated as another face 
of time. The trajectory from the end of the Phenomenology of Perception 
is moving beyond subjectivity towards a becoming- or a process-view 
of embodying being as the unfolding within time of the depths of the 
world, especially the natural world.
34 ibid., p. 421.
35 ibid., p. 422
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returning to Merleau-Ponty’s working note of april, 1960, we find 
him calling for an exploration of existence outside the life of the ego, 
and also outside “interiority”, in a way that “the intentional analytic 
cannot grasp.”36 in taking reversibility seriously, our relationship to the 
natural world is not only about the way we intend it, but is also about 
the way it encompasses us such that we take up its indirect or silent 
voice. here Merleau-Ponty asserts we must go beyond the “whole hus-
serlian analysis” and description of internal time consciousness to con-
sider a “past that adheres to the present and not to the consciousness of 
the present” or as being a “vertical past” that “contains itself the exigency 
to have been perceived, far from the consciousness of having perceived 
bearing that of the past … a spatializing-temporalizing vortex (which 
is flesh and not a consciousness facing a noema).”37 This vortex that is 
the flesh of the world contains that which is “hidden” or “latent”, and 
emerges in “this philosophy of transcendence”, Merleau-Ponty’s final 
indirect ontology, no longer “compatible with ‘phenomenology,’”38 as 
Merleau-Ponty writes in these working notes. By this, he means that he 
must go beyond husserl’s phenomenology in focusing merely on the 
way in which time is the horizon of our world—the human personal, 
historical, and cultural world—to envision how this temporal horizon 
winds around the time of the natural world like the two strands of ge-
netic material in their chiasm. it is only in this way, he says, that he can 
investigate a time in which there is also a “past-present simultaneity” 
that is not found either in the natural attitude’s sense of time as suc-
cession or in the husserlian sense of internal time consciousness, but is 
rather within a “dimensional present or Welt or Being, where the past 
is ‘simultaneous’ with the present in the narrow sense.” it is the world 
or Being as a dimensional presence that exists as a present that is at the 
same time a past, a vertical depth that envelops us. a few months be-
fore, in another working note, Merleau-Ponty had described “the verti-
cal world” as “the union of incompossibles, the being in transcendence, 
and the topological space and the time in joints and members, in dis-
36 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, op cit, p. 243.
37 ibid., p. 244.
38 ibid.
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junction and dis-membering.”39 The vertical world is a world that is 
topological, offering us the expanse of varied places of our planetary 
surround, but in the unique sense of depth he had articulated in the 
Phenomenology of Perception as the union of incompossibles; and rather 
than a seamless temporal wave, the verticality of the world is one of join-
ings in the midst of disjoinings. although he doesn’t mention it in these 
two notes, i believe it is his thinking through a conception of natural 
history and our relationship to the natural world that is moving him 
into this new idea, this deeper sense of a time as a “time before time, to 
the prior life,” a time akin to that “mythical time”40 towards which his 
thinking had pointed decades before.
By June, 1960, it is clear that Merleau-Ponty has been thinking about 
temporality in terms of the impact of the envelopment of the natural 
world and of history by natural history. he now speaks of a “transcen-
dental geology” as the way to think about the “authentic temporality” 
that one confronts in the sense of a history of what appears inert about 
us in the surround that emerges with taking in our geography. in con-
sidering the space of the planet that envelops us, Merleau-Ponty notes 
there is a layer of our being that emerges from this contact with another 
sort of time that is at the depths of this enveloping space of the natural 
world: “For history is too immediately bound to individual praxis, to 
interiority, it hides too much in its thickness and its flesh for an easy 
return to the whole philosophy of the person. Whereas geography—or 
rather “the earth as Ur-Arché”—brings to light “the carnal Urhistorie,” 
in fact “it is a question of grasping the nexus—neither ‘historical’ nor 
‘geographic’ of history and transcendental geology, this very time which 
is space, this very space that is time.”41 The earth brings out in our lay-
ered and dehiscent being (as one of depths, of incompossibles), a dimen-
sion of history before history that cannot appear other than through the 
embodying historical sense of humanity, but meets it within a nexus, 
within an entwining, in which encrusted within the space of the natural 
world is itself another sort of time. The depths of the world, as echoed 
39 ibid., p. 228.
40 ibid., p. 242.
41 ibid., p. 259.
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in the depths of embodying being as the natural world, is not before us 
or about us but is enmeshed within: “The antecedent unity me-world, 
world and its parts, parts of my body, a unity before segregation, before 
multiple dimensions—and so also the unity of time.”42 to have a hu-
man body is to have a body that perceives not only from its own vantage 
but with a welling up of presence from within an enveloping geological 
space and time of the natural world.
it is in the working note of November, 1960, labeled “Nature”, that 
it becomes clear that Merleau-Ponty has been thinking through the in-
tersection of the phenomenological sense of time with another sort of 
time of the natural world. This note begins with his citation of lucien 
herr’s phrase, “Nature is at the first day,” and adds for emphasis “it is 
there today.”43 Merleau-Ponty warns that this does not mean some sort 
of coincidence with the natural world, some sort of naturalistic mysti-
cism, but is rather how the flesh of the world folds back on itself within 
the embodying being of the perceiver: we are not the natural world, 
our human history does not coincide with natural history and yet the 
time of opening up to the natural world has an inescapable depth: “it 
is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world (and not 
in the past) an ‘ever new’ and ‘always the same’ —— a sort of time of 
sleep (which is Bergson’s nascent duration, ever new and always the 
same). The sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, real-
ize from within a passage from one to the other. … existential eternity. 
The indestructible. The Barbaric principle.”44 although we perceive the 
natural world as present, this perceiving is also of a co-existing past, not 
trailing along in a series of retentions, but within the present as a depth 
or verticality that makes it be the presence of something indestructibly 
still at it origin—a never-ending silent explosion. each new step may 
open up a new vista, so perhaps with a thud we come up against an un-
expected rock or discover the sight of hawks circling above; but each 
of these moments is at the same time a vast opening of vistas existing 
even before there were humans to see them but instead perhaps only 
42 ibid., p. 261.
43 ibid., p. 267.
44 ibid.
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an ancient reptile. and this suggests, too, that the thud on the rock is 
still sounding with that of mammoths upon that same rock ten thou-
sand years ago, and that the hawks are circling in gyres that contain 
within their spinning the gyres of ancient flying beings who no longer 
soar above the earth in new flights, but whose tracings still envelop the 
sky, and these circling artists of the wind are still tracing arabesques. 
Furthermore, explaining this verticality of time by referring to the time 
of sleep, Merleau-Ponty invites his readers to hear a passage from the 
Phenomenology of Perception describing at length the sense of the night 
as “pure depth” that “enwraps me and infiltrates through all my senses, 
stifling my recollections and almost destroying my personal identity.”45 
The time of night and sleep has unfathomable depths, takes one into an 
impersonality of something indefinable, but much more encompassing 
and labyrinthine. The time of nature is like this, barbaric, having some-
thing untamable, wild, outside human construction and order.
With each step upon this planet, there is not only a depth of space 
and of literal ground vital to our sense of grounding, but also as sense of 
the depth of time, such that differing times resonate within each other, 
are present in each other, not in a linear successive sense, but in another 
sort of reverberation or as Merleau-Ponty phrases this sense in the next 
paragraph:
“in what sense the visible landscape under my eyes is not exterior to, 
and bound synthetically to … other moments of time and the past, but 
really has behind itself in simultaneity, inside itself and not it and they 
side by side ‘in’ time.”46 The landscape of natural history is the same 
landscape of our everyday existence. it is not a separate object of inquiry 
and not a discovery of an “additional” dimension of our world. it is the 
presence of each landscape “behind itself in simultaneity”—the land-
scape within the landscape—the natural history at the depths of history.
andy Goldsworthy, a masterful “earth artist”, endeavors to express 
this dimension of time in his artworks. some of his pieces are made from 
sculpting ice into elaborate delicate biomorphic shapes, sewing leaves 
together in intricate patterns and then floating them down a stream in 
45 Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit. p. 283.
46 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, op cit, p. 267.
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a graceful back and forth motion, making etched undulating pathways 
in the clay of a valley that snakes across its floor, or by making floating 
spherical objects of interlocking stones to be carried out and swirled 
apart by the tides. his artistic works are made of the materials taken 
from that environment and they return to their component parts with 
the participation of natural forces that are also part of the specific en-
vironment. Many of his pieces are meant to express and bring people’s 
attention to the fact that “time and change are connected to place,”47 as 
he states at the opening of his book, Time, in which he chronicles and 
displays photographs of many of his works. he states that in working 
with the natural world for a twenty five year period, “the more i worked, 
the more aware i became of the powerful sense of time embedded in a 
place.”48 one work in particular expresses pointedly Merleau-Ponty’s 
description of place as being a layered perception of geological time 
that is felt but not explicitly perceived until we celebrate the vertical 
time we take for granted. at scaur Glen in Dumfriesshire, scotland, 
there is a spot in the river near where Goldsworthy lives that contains 
pockets of red rock submerged within the rock face along the banks of 
the river. Goldsworthy realized that this red rock was a striking perdur-
ing presence of an ancient time in the river’s life that had now become 
submerged within the overall experience of the river. Goldsworthy ex-
cavated some of the rock, ground it into a powder, and mixed it with 
water in order to make several bright red pools among the rock crevice 
pools towards the upper range of the water’s depth, and waited for the 
river to rise.49 When it did, suddenly the deep past of the river that was 
always there to be seen and experienced but had become part of deep 
background of the sense of the river was splashed on its surface flow in 
bright red bursts to highlight the startling co-presence of the ancient 
strata of the river’s history now carried on the surface of its newest wa-
ter flow. The ancient time was always present in a still, red, submerged 
depth, but now it is brought to the literal surface to the perceiver’s atten-
tion to celebrate a depth of time we often pass by unnoticed—the way 
47 Goldsworthy, a., (2000), Time. New york: harry N. abrams, inc, p. 7.
48 ibid.
49 ibid., pp. 25, 49–51. also, Goldsworthy displays this piece and discusses it in his film “riv-
ers and tides.”
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in which natural history reverberates throughout the natural world. This 
is the function of the discipline of natural history in Merleau-Ponty’s 
perspective: to reveal our vertical being within the world and our vertical 
grasp of this being, and not to just display objects located at a distance 
from us in time or space that would spark our curiosity as other.
iV. interanimality and the life of the Planet as Natural history
even though the varied schema that have been used by natural his-
tory beginning with aristotle’s classifications to comprehend the world 
of living beings have in one sense always placed human beings within 
the whole as part of an encompassing web of life, at the same time, 
starting with aristotle, natural history has always placed human beings 
outside this web as uniquely different in the superiority of in human be-
ing’s special capacities. Whether it be linguistic capacities, the capacity 
for abstract reasoning, for symbolism, upright posture with opposable 
thumbs, relationship to mortality, a sense of history and cultural insti-
tutions, humans have been seen to transcend their place among other 
animals as above them and not of the same order of being. Merleau-
Ponty denies this long evaluative tradition, stating in his lectures on na-
ture that “the relation of the human and animality is not a hierarchical 
relation, but lateral, an overcoming that does not abolish kinship.”50 
rather than human being ranking above the animal, their relationship 
is lateral, on a shared level, despite whatever other capacities humans 
developed beyond the basic shared being together, being like kin, with-
in the natural world. This difference in Merleau-Ponty’s evaluation of 
the status of human beings in relation to animality also stems from his 
notion of the nature of embodying being as the key to understanding 
human being. he is also led by this analysis to reassess the capacities of 
animals as co-perceivers.
Merleau-Ponty’s next sentence elaborates that even the most distinc-
tive dimension of human being has its roots in the lateral level of shared 
being of human and animal: “even mind is incredibly penetrated by its 
corporeal structure: eye and mind. it is starting from the visible that we 
50 Merleau-Ponty, M., Nature, op. cit., p. 268.
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can understand the invisible.” The corporeal structure of human being 
is the ground of mind that emerges as an elaboration upon the world as 
already revealed and understood in a sensory and motoric grasp. This 
basic hodological sense of space is the lived understanding of the mean-
ing of the surround that overlaps with animals. even in his 1954–5 lec-
tures on the nature of institution, Merleau-Ponty had already started to 
rethink the human and animal relationship, given that the interwoven 
nature of embodiment and perception “reflected a certain animalization 
of the human” and that the “animal is a certain variant of the human.”51 
in the course of his three years of lectures on nature at the end of the 
decade, however, the intimate tie of the human with the animal further 
emerges as a major theme: “We must say: animality and human being 
are only given together with a whole of Being.”52 human being and 
animal being are not separable in our shared relation to the world sur-
round in which each is enmeshed and enters through perceptual being.
seeing humanity as Merleau-Ponty does, as an embodying being 
making sense of its world through a layered perceptual comprehen-
sion that is sensual, visceral, affective, kinesthetic, proprioceptive, as 
well as memorial, imaginative and rationally reflective, we are led to see 
that the areas of overlap, taking in the world with the animal, are large: 
“animal life refers to what is sensible for us and to our carnal life; sen-
sible, that is not our human kind of the present or timeless mind. in 
the order of Einfühlung, of the ‘vertical’ where our corporeity is given to 
us, there is precisely an opening to a visible.”53 in our sensible life, the 
world opens as a carnal engagement with what is around us and means 
something to us, just as it does for animals, and this opening does not 
occur through the human mind. This opening of the world’s sense car-
nally can be imagined, for example, as the discovery alike for humans 
or animals that the shade is a place of rest from the hot, glaring sun; 
that the icy, flowing stream is a source of refreshment from the weari-
ness and thirst experienced after a long trek through the forest; and that 
the oncoming night is a time to lie down and enter the world of sleep 
51 (2003), L’insititution dans l’histoire personelle et publique: notes de cours au College de France. 
Paris, Belin, p. 54.
52 Merleau-Ponty, M., Nature, op. cit., p. 271.
53 ibid.
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to become renewed for the next day. in the tradition of philosophy as 
in the tradition of natural history, this shared carnal life of the human 
and the animal is not grasped, since they assume that intellection is the 
ground and active ordering principle of sense-making. With rational 
discrimination taken as foundational, instead of being an ordering that 
only functions within the world already revealed and apprehended by 
perception (as Merleau-Ponty demonstrated throughout his work), rea-
son is overvalued. it is taken for granted that the human being’s compre-
hension of the surround by reason or mind transforms our relationship 
to the natural world to another level that is assessed as different in kind 
from other creatures. Merleau-Ponty denies this assessment: “an organ 
of the mobile senses (the eye, the hand) is already language because it is 
an interrogation (movement) and a response (perception as Erfühlung) 
of a project, speaking and understanding. it is a tacit language.”54 in 
the earlier lectures about institution and in the later lectures about na-
ture, Merleau-Ponty had already contended that the motor meanings 
communicated among animals have significances that verged on the 
symbolic and constituted a kind of “pre-culture:” “The architecture of 
symbols that the animal brings from its side thus defines within Nature 
a species of pre-culture.”55 Merleau-Ponty’s point here is that the same 
perceptual-motoric round of projects found in the surround of both 
humans and animals is a kind of tacit language, and our linguistic abili-
ties are an elaboration of this “”wild” meaning, grounded in this shared 
carnal sense of the world.
For Merleau-Ponty, not only is there a motoric and perceptual level 
of meaning that is more pregnant with possibilities than the tradition 
had allowed, but language itself relies upon the gestural and the per-
ceptual as the underside of its own sense, such that the tacit language 
of animality and the more explicit language ability of the human are 
sides of each other: “”The difference is only relative between a percep-
tual silence and a language that always carries a thread of silence.”56 
Merleau-Ponty states that to see this anchorage of the human mental 
54 ibid., p. 211.
55 ibid., p. 176.
56 ibid.
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capacity in the shared animality of perceptual life is not only vital to 
understanding our relationship with the natural world, but also is es-
sential to understanding what human beings are: “What we call mind 
is again a re-equilibration, a decentralization that is not absolute … The 
invisible, mind, is not another positivity: it is the inverse, the other side 
of the visible. We must retrieve this brute and savage mind beneath all 
the cultural material that is given … There is a logos of the natural es-
thetic world, on which the logos of language relies.”57 That mind is an 
emergent quality of the way in which embodying being gears into its 
surround through perception and action anchors humanity in the midst 
of the natural world and animality in a way that traditional philosophy 
has never envisioned; nor did european cultural and intellectual histo-
ry. Merleau-Ponty does not deny human difference, but he relocates it: 
“We study the human body in order to see it emerge as different from 
the animal, not by the addition of reason, but rather in short, in the 
Ineinander with the animal … by escape and not by superposition.”58 
Merleau-Ponty agrees with the tradition that humans do create a distinc-
tive level of meaning, but for him, such meaning emerges from within 
this shared matrix of sense within the natural world, this echo among 
beings open to the same world and this overlapping of sense from which 
the human can perpetually for a moment move outside, but to which 
they must return, remaining within a shared dwelling.
This sense of the meaningfulness of the carnal relationship to the 
natural world also means for Merleau-Ponty that seeing human appre-
hension of the world as an isolated phenomenon is a misjudgment. 
our human “seeing,” our “hearing,” our human sense of the threat of 
the predator lurking, our human sense of the inhospitable nature of the 
wind whipping sub-zero day outside is not purely “our” doing. once we 
understand that animals apprehend the surround with affective, intel-
ligible, and even imaginative dimensions in their own distinctive ways 
and take “the animal body defined by the umwelt”59 as analogous to 
human embodying being that first understands its world in the embody-
57 ibid., p. 212.
58 ibid., p. 214.
59 ibid., p. 221.
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ing hodological space of its own being-in-the-world, the emergence of 
sense moves in lateral circulation among surrounds within the natu-
ral world. of course, despite analogous relationships that are inscribed 
through its projects in dialogue with the world, the animal surround dif-
fers from the human way of having a world in that the human surround 
includes the “sedimentation” of reflective intellection’s structures within 
this more carnal relationship. as open to the same world, even though 
carving out sense in ways that are similar and different, the sense emerg-
es not only in the body’s being caught up in the “mirror play” among 
objects within the surround discussed at the beginning of this essay, but 
also from within the echoes of how other animals perceive the world: 
“as for esthesiology, it emerges from life without absolute break. as es-
thesiology emerges from the relationship to an Umwelt, human desire 
emerges from animal desire. already in the animal, in the ceremony of 
love, desire is not mechanical functioning, but an opening to an Umwelt 
of fellow creatures.”60 The human embodying being finds itself at the 
depths of the world, partly from the vantage and sense given indirectly 
to us by inanimate, but also as a shared being with other animals. Mer-
leau-Ponty says that “our ‘strange kinship’ with the animals … teaches 
pertaining to the human body” that this embodiment is “our Ineinander 
with sensible Being and with other corporeities.” in other words, the 
human body senses as if sensing through the trees and sky above it, but 
also as if in some sense its own body is extended through the senses of 
the other animal bodies enmeshed with it on the planet.
human embodied being cannot even be thought outside this rela-
tionship to animality. as Merleau-Ponty says: “life teaches us not only 
the union of our soul and our body, but also the lateral union of ani-
mality and humanity.”61 This means that within our deepest humanity, 
we are animals, we are creatures enmeshed in our being with a planetary 
home from which we distance ourselves. although, humans are tradi-
tionally recognized as within the natural world and within the family of 
animals in terms of finding objective characteristics that had vital con-
nections in the cause and effect unfolding of the planet’s history, and, 
60 ibid., p. 225.
61 ibid., p. 271.
167
“ e a C h  a u t h e N t i C a l l y  e M B o D i e D  s t e P  i s  t h e  W a l K  o F  N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y ”
therefore, having certain parallels in basic life functions, humans have 
been regarded in the european philosophical and cultural tradition as 
having an interiority and a spirit of mental substance that sets human-
ity apart from the material and creaturely world. if Merleau-Ponty is 
correct, then what we are studying by studying natural history is our 
own extended being—our being at its greatest depths—our own being 
that is not really ours in some sense, but eludes us like the animal in the 
brush. yet, in another sense, the animals in our world, these seemingly 
distant beings, spatially or temporally, are in fact at the very heart of our 
embodying being and are most closely what we are. Natural history is 
the unraveling of the sense of our own embodying being. The history 
of natural history is the present of each step we take on this planet in 
the sense of the ringing forth about us from the depths of what things 
around us mean, how we are directed, and even how our bodies miracu-
lously take in all the sense they do, in a reverberation sounded by time’s 
unceasing folding back on itself, as if natural history were a lyre whose 
strings could move spontaneously, sounding their own voice, without 
intermediary.