Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead on the Concept of Nature

Abstract

To be is to be "given" to a subject: that is a key-insight of phenomenology. Here Whitehead fully agrees: to be is to be a subject or to be "prehended" by a subject. For phenomenology, the subject to which the world is given, is the human subject (Dasein, être au monde). Whitehead, through the method of descriptive generalization, extends the subject-character to every actual entity (his rendering of the 'really real'). Merleau-Ponty starts from a strict phenomenological viewpoint. At the end of his career he realized however that the structure to see/to be seen, to feel/to be felt had to be generalized and had to apply to any reality whatsoever (the flesh of the world). This is a clear instance of what Whitehead would call descriptive generalization. In his search for an ontology of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty paid attention to Whitehead's The Concept of Nature (1920/1998). He reacts against scientific materialism for the same reason and along the same lines as Whitehead. The ontology of the later Merleau-Ponty and that of Whitehead have much in common. It is our contention that the Whiteheadian conceptuality is a great help in understanding the ontology-in-the-making of The Visible and the Invisible (1968b).