Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth
Format:
Journal Article
Publication Date:
Nov 30, 1987
Pages:
101 - 120
Sources ID:
34331
Collection:
Contemplation and Ecology
Visibility:
Public (group default)
Abstract:
(Show)
Ecologists and environmental theorists have paid little attention to our direct, sensory experience of the enveloping world. In this paper I discuss the importance of such experience for ecological philosophy. Merleau-Ponty’s careful phenomenology of perceptual experience shows perception to be an inherently creative, participatory activity-a sort of conversation, carried on underneath our spoken discourse, between the living body and its world. His later work discloses the character of language itself as a medium born of the body’s participation with a world experienced as alive. That living world is none other than the Earth