ago, and we have seen a century of criticisms against this approach. So are we condemned to an eternity of a lifeless universe? This last section describes an alternative approach to nature that recognizes that it is processual; it is a nature in which we participate and in which we find meaning. To describe it, I will consult the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
What’s neat is that a lot of Merleau-Ponty’s later work has only recently been published. In his final years (before an unfortunate and early death), he was teaching courses at the distinguished Collèges de France. This is the kind of position that academic folks dream of; you get paid very well to research whatever you want and teach a single course on the topic. Merleau-Ponty decided to teach a series of courses on Nature. The notes from his students were eventually edited into a volume titled Nature decades after he had passed away. The notes of what he had been working on were also published posthumously into a book titled Visible and the Invisible. It is remarkable to think that one’s spiral notebook (or, more contemporarily, a personal computer desktop folder of unfinished notes) might find their way to publication without you.
In the first course he teaches on nature (2003), Merleau-Ponty devotes some class time to Whitehead’s insights. Whitehead, you recall from above, was the one who introduced the idea of living and lifeless conceptions of nature. Indeed, the section that Merleau-Ponty teaches on Whitehead provides the climax to the course! By considering these two men together, a conception of nature emerges that blends processes and things.
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