In our time, Ted Toadvine observes, the philosophical question of nature is almost entirely forgotten— obscured in part by a myopic focus on solving "environmental problems" without asking how these problems are framed. But an "environmental crisis," existing as it does in the human world of value and significance, is at heart a philosophical crisis. In this book, Toadvine demonstrates how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’ s phenomenology has a special power to address such a crisis— a philosophical power far better suited to the questions than other modern approaches, with their over-reliance on assumptions drawn from the natural sciences. The book examines key moments in the development of Merleau-Ponty’ s philosophy of nature while roughly following the historical sequence of his major works. Toadvine begins by setting out an ontology of nature proposed in Merleau-Ponty’ s first book, The Structure of Behavior. He takes up the theme of the expressive role of reflection in Phenomenology of Perception, as it negotiates the area between nature’ s own "self-unfolding" and human subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’ s notion of "intertwining" and his account of space provide a transition to Toadvine’ s study of the philosopher’ s later work— in which the concept of "chiasm," the crossing or intertwining of sense and the sensible, forms the key to Merleau-Ponty’ s mature ontology— and ultimately to the relationship between humans and nature.
Advancing a phenomenological approach to deep time Our imagination today is dominated by the end of the world, from sci-fi and climate fiction to actual predictions of biodiversity collapse, climate disruption, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. This obsession with the world’s precarity, The Memory of the World contends, relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future. Not only does this mislead sustainability efforts, it diminishes our encounters with the world and with human and nonhuman others. Here, Ted Toadvine takes a phenomenological approach to deep time to show how our apocalyptic imagination forgets the sublime and uncanny dimensions of the geological past and far future. Guided by original readings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others, he suggests that reconciling our embodied lives with the memory of the earth transforms our relationship with materiality, other forms of life, and the unprecedented future. Integrating insights from phenomenology, deconstruction, critical animal studies, and new materialism, The Memory of the World argues for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously the multiple, pleated, and entangled temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and human durations.
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