Marc Van den Bossche - Professor of philosophy, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

In his courses on Nature, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty clearly does not agree with Kant's antropocentrism. In particular the Kantian notion of the disinterestedness of aesthetic perception is untenable in an aesthetics of nature which is inspired by Merleau-Ponty'sthought. Nature and human embodiment are seen as separated in this Kantian tradition. In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology on the contrary, we can find theidea of the chiasm of the body-subject and the world: an artist perceives objects and is perceived by them. So, there is no distance, no gapbetween them. This means that Merleau-Ponty leaves a generally accepted tradition of thought. With its time-honored origins in the work of Plato, the tradition starts from the opposition between what is assumed real and what is considered imaginary, namely the object itself and its representation. Art then, is the manifestation of an idea, and, while the idea had to express a unity, art itself cannot reach beyond the limiting diversity of manifestations. In Merleau-Ponty this ‘divided’ thinking is evaded by an 'embodied thinking', in which the body is the interaction of sight and movement. For him, the body is the ‘axe’ of our world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, Nature, Aesthetics of nature, Embodied thinking