CHAPTER 4

The Theme of the Animal Melody

Merleau-Ponty and the Umwelt

W ithout Heidegger’s knowing it, the untouched problem of the body that
he mentions in 1967 had already received a voice in “metaphysics.”
In a working note to The Visible and the Invisible, published posthumously
in 1963, Merleau-Ponty expresses “why I am for metaphysics”: “For me the
infinity of Being that one can speak of is operative, militant finitude: the
openness of the Umwelt—I am against finitude in the empirical sense, a
factual existence that has limits” (VI, 305/251). Merleau-Ponty’s aspiration for
metaphysics is in part to reconceive our understanding of the world not in
comparison to the infinite or eternal (the Unendlichkeit) but in terms of what
he repeatedly refers to as the openness (Offenheit) of the Umwelt (e.g., VI,
222/169; 238–40/185–86; 250/196; 266/213). We are not to understand this
as a contradiction of Heidegger’s explicit determination of animal Umwelten
as closed; Merleau-Ponty is not responding directly to Heidegger’s theses on
animal and human being. In fact, there is no indication that he ever knew
of Heidegger’s theses or of his engagement with Uexküll. Rather, in his late
thought Merleau-Ponty entertains a return to ontology rooted in nature
whereby being—what he will call “wild” and “brute” being—reveals itself in
the interstices of the body and the world. The openness of the Umwelt, and
not the infinity of the world, is the hidden source and ontological horizon
of the embodied animal subject.
His metaphysics, if we still wish to call it that, conceives of the body
not as a thing, substance, or essence, but as an unfolding relation to an
Umwelt through the phenomenon of behavior (N, 270/209). The question
is therefore that of understanding how the body relates to its environ-
ment, what this reveals of the ontology of nature, and how this addresses
that prickly issue of the human and animal. All of these issues involve

115
116 Onto-Ethologies

Merleau-Ponty’s recurrent analysis of behavior as a means of expressing the

living body, from his earliest writings on The Structure of Behavior through
to his final manuscripts left incomplete at the time of his death in 1961.
His focus provides us with a rich view in our mounting consideration of
onto-ethologies.
There are a few issues that I wish to highlight in this chapter. The
first is Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to Uexküll’s biology. As was the case with
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty’s writings on organisms and the structures of life
remain invested in the work of Uexküll, particularly in his consideration
of the Umwelt. The appearance of Uexküll is further associated with the
more general development of Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology, one that is
noticeably rooted in the being of nature. Such an ontology rests on the
significance of movement, and how the organism’s bodily behavior melds
with the “flesh” of the world.

THE STRUCTURE OF BEHAVIOR

After remaining overlooked for many years, The Structure of Behavior is

again finding a captive audience.1 Among those contributing to this re-
newed interest are scholars who have sought to retrace the development
of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, particularly owing to the many questions that
surround the fragmentary nature of his late writings. The Visible and the
Invisible, Merleau-Ponty’s famously incomplete work due to his untimely
death, provokes many of these questions, not the least of which is due to
the over one hundred pages of “working notes” that elliptically trail off into
the intellectual project of surmising Merleau-Ponty’s ‘unfinished’ thought.2
Not unlike Mozart’s Requiem or Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, The Visible and
the Invisible leaves us wanting more, hanging, as we do, on the final notes
of a compelling yet incomplete score. This text has left scholars pondering
where this work was headed, what may have lay in store for Merleau-Ponty’s
thought, and how he might have sought to reconstitute what he was calling,
in his final years, “the new ontology.” The restoration of Merleau-Ponty’s
final work has thankfully not overshadowed its tremendous implications:
Merleau-Ponty was in the process of working out a new direction in his
phenomenology, and it was a direction that sought to borrow from many
of the themes that one finds in his earlier thought, such as those involv-
ing the concepts of the body, behavior, perception, nature, being, and the
world. However, the reader also discovers many new and enticing concepts
as well, such as the flesh, chiasm, brute being, the importance of art and
language, and the increasing insistence on a new ontology. But this new
direction, I believe, was not a break from his past. One does not discover a
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 117

“turn” in his thought, no more than one finds a renunciation of his earlier
tenets.3 Even if one finds certain self-criticisms, such as the popular one
regarding his early dependence on consciousness—the often quoted note
“The problems posed in Ph.P. are insoluble because I start there from the
‘consciousness’–‘object’ distinction” (VI, 237/200)—these point to no more
of an explicit turn than do, for example, Nietzsche’s self-criticisms of his
earlier works. Rather, I am inclined to agree with Renaud Barbaras who
sees a gradual “evolution” in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and with Martin
Dillon’s assessment that “there is not so much a turn as a development in
Merleau-Ponty’s thought during the last fifteen years of his life. That is, I
see a continuity in his thinking rather than a leap to a new position; I see
modifications rather than reversals.”4
Added to the incomplete version of The Visible and the Invisible, we
could also note the appearance of new publications of Merleau-Ponty’s lecture
notes from the courses he offered at the Collège de France throughout the
1950s. These lectures have been appearing increasingly in France throughout
the 1990s, and have started to appear recently in English translations. These
publications contribute a further source of academic novelty, for they provide
a clearer depiction of Merleau-Ponty’s development, particularly in how he
works, from the years after the Phenomenology of Perception, toward an elu-
cidation of an ontology of nature. An example of such a publication, and
one that will be central to our exposition, is the three lecture courses that
Merleau-Ponty delivered in the late 1950s that have appeared fortuitously
even if fragmentarily: 1956–1957’s “The Concept of Nature,” 1957–1958’s
“The Concept of Nature: Animality, the Human Body, and the Passage to
Culture,” and 1959–1960’s “The Concept of Nature: Nature and Logos: The
Human Body.” These lectures provide a valuable source for reconstructing the
development of his later thought as well as for reconsidering the importance
of his earliest work on animal behavior. All of this is to say that there has
been good reason to return to Merleau-Ponty’s more neglected early work.
While the Phenomenology of Perception has always remained central to the
scholarship of his phenomenology, this has not always been the case with
his earliest publication. With our attention firmly oriented toward under-
standing the contours of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the animal, we will
begin with an examination of this early thought before passing on to the
developments of his final works.
The theme of the organism and nature is evident from The Structure
of Behavior’s opening sentence. “Our goal,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “is to un-
derstand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or
even social” (SB, 1/3). One of the primary reasons our attention is drawn
to this relation is because Merleau-Ponty finds an inadequate—or, at the
very least, doubtful—relation between the naturalism found in science and
118 Onto-Ethologies

the transcendental critiques of philosophy. On the one hand, the tendency

of science to lean toward naturalism has resulted in an overly empiricist
account of life, one that relies on physico-mechanical causes to “imply a
nature in itself.” On the other hand, one confronts similar problems from
less physical, more idealist domains, such as biology’s vitalism, psychology’s
dependency on the mind, and the idealist strain of transcendental philoso-
phy. In contrast to this mix, Merleau-Ponty evokes a third alternative to
describe the natural world: namely, by beginning with a “neutral” analysis of
behavior. By beginning in this fashion, Merleau-Ponty highlights how he is
“starting ‘from below,’ ” as if to suggest that a study of behavior will reveal
a more profound ontological basis for the emergence of nature. Though he
does not develop the metaphor of depth here, it can be read in conjunc-
tion with the indifferent ontological pretensions of physics that he notes
in his introduction, as well as his use of the term “archeology” to describe
the later ontological writings on nature. In The Structure of Behavior, be-
havior acts as a supposedly neutral catalyst for digging beneath the gloss of
empirical nature while at the same time avoiding the positing of an idealist
force. We will see that in the late 1950s he will again appeal for an act of
digging, but this time as an archeology of nature to get at the brute being
beneath perceptions.5
Of greatest interest for our present study is how the organism is charac-
terized within this early discussion of behavior. With respect to contemporary
biology, Merleau-Ponty notes that the study of behavior presents a novel
position to the two established trends of mechanism and vitalism, and he
does so in a manner different from Heidegger. Both mechanism and vital-
ism are said to be theories that “remain open”—that is, they are not closed
off and thus not surpassed or overtaken—largely due to their adherence to
a “realistic” view of life. The problem with both options, however, is that
“our picture of the organism is still for the most part that of a material
mass partes extra partes” (SB, 1/3). In contrast to the theory of nature that
Merleau-Ponty will develop, and particularly one that will appeal explicitly
to “structure,” this picture of the organism evokes a strong disparity. To think
of the organism as a “material mass partes extra partes” is to dissociate the
living being from any relational structure. What Merleau-Ponty refers to as
“our picture” is certainly not his picture, but rather the common scientific
view that reflects, whether intentionally or not, a view of the organism as
belonging to an atomistic universe. Cut off from the environment in which
it lives, every organism can be defined, classified, dissected, and studied as
a “material mass” existing external to everything else around it. This, we
will recall, is precisely the interpretation of the world and entities that
Heidegger so stridently opposes before entertaining his own postulation of
the being of the animal. There are no intrinsic relations; just material mass
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 119

abutting against material mass, each isolated from the other insofar as each
is its own self-contained unity.
But, in his emphasis on behavior, Merleau-Ponty appears susceptible to
the very same charges brought against “behaviorism,” the field of psychology
pioneered by Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, and B. F. Skinner that focuses on
the externally observable patterns of animal life. In other words, how does
Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on behavior abandon the atomistic and strictly
physiological approach favored by those who famously espoused the field
known as behaviorism? Here too, Merleau-Ponty draws exception to another
familiar distinction, namely, that between the “mental” and the “physiological”
in psychology. The problem with “behaviorism” is that it merely continues to
uphold an “atomistic interpretation” of the organism, albeit disguised under
its new name. In behaviorism, he notes, “behavior is reduced to the sum of
reflexes and conditioned reflexes between which no intrinsic connection is
admitted” (3/4). For Merleau-Ponty, one of the implicit tasks is to restore
meaning to the concept of behavior. It is “neutral,” he states, precisely
because it does not take sides between the mental or physiological theories
of organisms. Indeed, rather than rejecting both the mental and the physi-
ological outright, Merleau-Ponty’s version of behavior takes both sides as he
seeks to unite a physical view of life with the reintroduction of conscious-
ness. This unity is emphasized as one of “structure,” a term that borrows
heavily from the Gestalt theory of “form” as it emphasizes the whole of the
organism as being more than just the sum of its parts. There is something
unique in the structural whole of a living being that cannot be reduced to
its various organs, fluids, appendages, cells, reflexes, and so on. Even if we
were to interpret the organism as the accumulation of diverse parts, this
would amount to no more than resubmitting a mechanistic view of life. The
organism would just be a whole added up through the accumulation of its
parts, just as a machine is the totality of all of its gears, levers, and parts.
Therefore, there must be something about the organism that is irreducible
to an atomistic interpretation but that does not also slip in a vitalist life
force. Merleau-Ponty finds an initial answer in his look at the structure of
behavior, particularly as he weaves between the mechanism and vitalism of
biology, between the physical and the mental of psychology, and between
the empiricism and intellectualism of philosophy.
Behavior, therefore, is far from any old characteristic. Rather, it is
already evident that it has a special affiliation to the essence of organisms.
In a footnote, we read that “one says of a man or of an animal that he
behaves; one does not say it of an acid, an electron, a pebble or a cloud
except by metaphor” (2/225 fn.3). Perhaps an obvious point but a pertinent
one no less, and all the more so when we later consider Deleuze’s ontology.
For Merleau-Ponty, behavior is descriptive of the organism as a whole, with
120 Onto-Ethologies

the understanding that behavior cannot be attributed to either an organism’s

organs or to other independent things that may nevertheless exhibit signs
of movement, such as a cloud or an electron. Although the cloud moves, as
does an electron or pebble, they remain caught within a causal mechanism
such that movement is dependent solely on external determinants. Likewise,
Merleau-Ponty will critique the theories of “reflex behavior” as positing a
similar causal relation between stimuli and reactions, whether it is between
the organs themselves or between the organism and environmental stimuli.
Neither form of causality is suitable for capturing the meaning of behavior
since both ignore the totality of the organism’s being. At issue, then, is how
to capture the meaning of the organism’s totality without reinvesting in a
mechanical or vitalist program, inasmuch as each relies on separated parts
acting on one another in either mechanical relations or as an entelechy.
We have already observed a similar stance in Heidegger’s writings, so where
and how they differ on the point of behavior will be important.
The phenomenological interest in mereology, and specifically with
respect to the organism, will remain with Merleau-Ponty throughout his
writings. For example, in the Nature lectures he emphasizes the importance
of the parts–whole distinction: “How are we to understand this relation of
totality of parts as a result? What status must we give totality? Such is the
philosophical question . . . at the center of this course on the idea of nature
and maybe the whole of philosophy” (N, 194/145). If we are to find the to-
tality of the organism in the phenomenon of behavior, then we must inquire
into its meaning.6 But to look for an explicit definition of behavior may be
an ineffective path. Merleau-Ponty doesn’t so much offer a clear formulation
inasmuch as he offers a variety of different views. Accordingly, behavior is
linked with a variety of other notions: behavior as structure, behavior as
form, behavior as signification, behavior as a manner or attitude of existing.
In each case, however, it is the ontological interpretation of the organism
that is conveyed. Behavior demonstrates a relational enclosure insofar as the
organism is structurally united with its world. This allows Merleau-Ponty
to escape two antithetical views: on the one hand, the atomism of being a
substance partes extra partes, and, on the other hand, the deceptive trap of
simply introducing the psychophysiological notions of “integration” or “co-
ordination” to link up the organism as a whole (SB, 84/76). The problem
with interpreting an organism’s behavior as the integration or coordination
of its diverse parts is that it too hastily determines the organism’s form as
one pertaining solely to its inner parts. Neither atomism nor integration
constitutes a totality of the organism, whose forms “are defined as total
processes whose properties are not the sum of those which the isolated parts
would possess” (49/47). As he will later note, “The genesis of the whole by
composition of the parts is fictitious” (53/50; cf. 163/150).
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 121

It is here that behavior assumes its relevance. Behavior is not “a thing”

nor is it an empty “idea”; rather, “behavior is a form” (138/127). It is a
form, moreover, that executes a “higher” relation between an organism and
its surroundings, uniting the two in an unprecedented way. “The relations
of the organic individual and its milieu are truly dialectical relations there-
fore,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “and this dialectic brings about the appearance
of new relations” (161/148). Above all, this appearance of new relations
takes place within the context of a world as the ontological vista for all
organic behavior. For this to be so, there must be a prior and fundamental
relation to the world out of which all other relations may be considered.
The world—or environment or milieu, since Merleau-Ponty has not yet
distinguished between these concepts—emerges as a Gestaltist framework
from out of which a picture of the organism may present itself.
When read in this way, there is no question that Merleau-Ponty is
influenced by Heidegger’s treatment of the concept of world. Heidegger
is not mentioned by name until the final pages of the book—and he is
referenced as an open question on the very issue of the world—but his
ontological elucidation of world certainly underlies Merleau-Ponty’s thought
throughout. Consider the following claim, where behavior is directly linked
to the animal’s being and world:

The gestures of behavior, the intentions which it traces in the

space around the animal, are not directed to the true world or
pure being, but to being-for-the-animal [l’être-pour-l’animal], that
is, to a certain milieu characteristic of the species; they do not
allow the showing through of a consciousness, that is, a being
whose whole essence is to know, but rather a certain manner
of treating the world, of “being-in-the-world” [être au monde] or
of “existing.” (137/125)

Behavior is not invoked here as the key that will open our eyes to “the
true world or pure being,” whether for the animal or for us. There are no
unrealistic expectations in this regard. Instead, behavior offers us something
far more exciting—namely, our means of accessing the mode of being-animal,
which, importantly, is expressed as a manner of being-in-the-world. This
relation between an animal’s behavior and the world is a reciprocal one,
each being dependent on the other. As Merleau-Ponty claims, it is “a truly
dialectical relation,” for just as much as behavior reveals the being of the
animal as found in the world, the world is equally uncovered in the behavior
of the animal. “The world,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “inasmuch as it harbors
living beings, ceases to be a material plenum consisting of juxtaposed parts;
it opens up [il se creuse] at the place where behavior appears” (137/125).7
122 Onto-Ethologies

Just as Heidegger critiqued the metaphysical view of the world as

composed of present-at-hand entities, Merleau-Ponty also aims to circumvent
a theory of the world that posits self-sufficient and closed material entities.
The world is not composed of isolated substances (e.g., atomism) that may
or may not link up with one another in a purely external manner (e.g.,
integration and coordination). Nor is the world the entirety or sum of all
extant entities. Rather, it is through the phenomenon of behavior that
an alternative view presents “as an expression of totality,”8 such that the
animal shows itself in its being. In the case of a chimpanzee, for example,
we are told that it may only be “a short and heavy manner of existing”
(138/126)—the chimp can stand upright but not always, it can grasp boxes
but only as a tactile object—but it is an existing in the world neverthe-
less. As we have just observed, behavior both traces the animal-being as
“being-in-the-world” and it carves out an opening on to the world itself.
It elicits, therefore, an ontological dimension of the animal in which the
animal’s totality converges with that of its milieu. This perspective leads
Merleau-Ponty to claim that “the organism has a distinct reality which is
not substantial but structural” (139/129).
Thus, what we see in Merleau-Ponty’s early investigations is a philoso-
phy of structure and form being substituted for a philosophy of substance.
Nowhere is the emphasis on form more clear than in his omnipresent use
of Kurt Goldstein’s 1934 study on the “so-called holistic, organismic ap-
proach” to the living organism.9 If there is one constant source on which
Merleau-Ponty draws in The Structure of Behavior, it is Goldstein’s unique
method of uniting biological, psychological, and physiological studies into
a unified Gestalt theory of the organism. Goldstein’s new method broached
an important way of treating the human being as a whole, particularly with
respect to the neurological and/or physiological disablement of individuals.
Goldstein’s work was largely conceived as a response to his treatment of
soldiers suffering from a variety of ailments brought on by war conditions.
As a physician, he found that most approaches to “abnormal” functioning
relied too heavily on a fractured view of the human; none of the theories
permitted an adequate view of the person as a whole. With this in mind, it
is clear how Merleau-Ponty might be influenced by such a novel approach
to the living being, especially in association with the Gestalt psychology of
Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. But as much as Goldstein figures into
Merleau-Ponty’s thought, it is the appearance of another theorist that I’m
particularly taken by. Jakob von Uexküll does not appear often in the pages
of The Structure of Behavior, but his thought is at least partially evident and
will continue to remain with Merleau-Ponty when he again takes up the
question of organic life in his lectures on nature.
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 123

Uexküll’s appearance possibly owes something to Goldstein himself, for

Merleau-Ponty will surely have read the short section that Goldstein pays
to Uexküll’s theory of the “tonus valley” (The Organism, 89–90). But, even
more directly, it may have been the following passage that led Merleau-Ponty
to look more closely into Uexküll. Goldstein writes:

We must make a clear distinction between the surrounding

world in which the organism is located, and the milieu that
represents only a part of the world—that part that is adequate
to it, that is, that allows for the described relationship between
the organism and its environment. Each organism has its milieu,
as Jakob von Uexküll has emphasized. Its existence and its ‘nor-
mal’ performances are dependent on the condition that a state
of adaptation can come about between its structure and the
environmental events, allowing the formation of an ‘adequate’
milieu. (105–106)

Such a relation between the organism’s structure and its milieu may have
led Merleau-Ponty to Uexküll, but there is no firm proof for this. Indeed,
Uexküll is never cited as such in The Structure of Behavior, and he won’t
be addressed until the second course on Nature. It may be just as likely
that Merleau-Ponty owes his introduction to Uexküll to the writings of
Buytendijk, the Dutch biologist who also featured in Heidegger’s 1929–1930
lectures, whom Merleau-Ponty does cite.10 If a connection to Uexküll isn’t
yet obvious, it becomes more definitive in the sole reference made by Mer-
leau-Ponty to Uexküll in The Structure of Behavior, whom he quotes only
through Buytendijk: “ ‘Every organism,’ said Uexküll, ‘is a melody which
sings itself’ ” (SB, 172/159).
It is not so much the fact that Uexküll appears in Merleau-Ponty’s
thought—and at the moment, he does so only secondhandedly—that is of
interest. The historical, biographical, and archival dimensions of this lineage
is certainly interesting, particularly as it also concerns the appearance of
Uexküll’s biology in the thought of Heidegger and Deleuze.11 But no mat-
ter how interesting these relations may be, this is not my primary interest.
Instead, I am more interested in what Merleau-Ponty does with Uexküll’s
biology and, in this respect, how his usage of Uexküll differs from that of
Heidegger and Deleuze.
We discover in Merleau-Ponty’s flirtation with Uexküll a particular
manner of expressing the being of the organism. If we are to understand
the organism as a totality and as a structure that exceeds its physiological
body, then the question is how best to express the intimate relation between
124 Onto-Ethologies

the organism and environment as a single form. How can the organism be
ontologically expressed such that one emphasizes the structural and relational
dynamic without reasserting a substantialist or mechanical view of the or-
ganism? I believe that Merleau-Ponty finds his language at least partially in
Uexküll’s elucidation of animal Umwelten. The first sign of this is in the only
claim attributed to Uexküll that I noted earlier: “Every organism is a melody
that sings itself.” The musical motif is barely a theme in this early work,
but it is important enough to Merleau-Ponty, specifically in its application
to the structural relation between organism and environment. It is also to
this musical theme that he will return in his Nature lectures.
What can we therefore discover in Merleau-Ponty’s use of musical
metaphors? To begin, on separate occasions Merleau-Ponty makes indepen-
dent musical references to both the world and the organism. For example:
“the world, in those of its sectors which realize a structure, is comparable
to a symphony, and knowledge of the world is thus accessible by two paths:
one can note the correspondence of the notes played at a same moment by
the different instruments and the succession of those played by each one
of them” (SB, 142/132). Despite the appeal in thinking of the world as a
symphony, however, we are instead confronted with the possibility that the
world, if known in this way, might relapse into an interpretation whereby
the symphony is really only the summation of all of the various notes. This
would imply a conglomerate world according to a mechanical view: each
note from each instrument creates the symphony as a whole, but a whole
that is just the sum of its parts. This clearly won’t work with respect to the
direction of Merleau-Ponty’s train of thought, as he himself is aware.
From another point of view, we find a comparable remark concern-
ing the organism, and this time it is a consideration of the organism as the
instrument of music. The analogy seems to work, at least at first glance:
if the world is a symphony, then living beings could be the instruments
producing this music. Might it then be possible to think of the organism
as a natural “keyboard”? One could imagine a multitude of keyboards, each
producing a countless stream of melodies. But this analogy ultimately doesn’t
work either: “The organism cannot properly be compared to a keyboard on
which the external stimuli would play and in which their proper form would
be delineated for the simple reason that the organism contributes to the
constitution of that form” (11/13). As opposed to a keyboard, which can be
played only by external stimuli, organisms actively contribute to the melody
itself. In other words, an organism is not a passive instrument that is excited
and stimulated in a reactive manner but a form that sings itself.
This would mean that the organism is actively engaged in the ‘play-
ing’ of itself as well as its environment. The environment and organism
are intimately related in some musical theme, though not one that can
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 125

be reduced to merely external stimuli. In the end, the world is not just a
symphony and organisms are not just keyboards, where each is dependent
on the other in only an external determination. In order to formulate the
nature of this structural relation, Merleau-Ponty appeals to the Umwelt for
the first time, and he does so through a revealing citation. He cites Gold-
stein as claiming that “the environment emerges from the world through
the being or actualization of the organism. Stated in a less prejudiced man-
ner, an organism can exist only if it succeeds in finding in the world an
adequate environment—in shaping an environment” (The Organism, 85; cf.
SB, 12/13). Despite the attraction of this claim, Merleau-Ponty neverthe-
less hesitates on this relation, believing that it still posits the organism as
merely ‘offering’ its keys to the environment, thus not entering a truly equal
relationship. Although I think he misinterprets Goldstein slightly—or, at the
very least, doesn’t yet take seriously the environment as the creation of the
organism—it is nevertheless an indicative reference for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it binds the organism and environment in an active sense. What I
mean by this is that he treats the behavior of the organism as reciprocated
by the environment: behavior is described as an “effect” of the organism’s
milieu (the environment forces the organism to behave in particular ways),
but the milieu is also already established by the preceding behavior of the
organism (the environment appears as it does due to an initial act of be-
havior). Each is locked together in the movement of the organism through
its environment, though not as symphony and keyboard. The second aspect
of this reference is its affiliation to Uexküll. The quotation on the Umwelt
that Merleau-Ponty pulls from Goldstein appears just a short paragraph
after Goldstein names Uexküll’s research as “so generally valid that it no
longer meets with much opposition” (84). This association further captures
the importance of Uexküll’s thought to Merleau-Ponty, even if comes via
Goldstein. Uexküll’s silent appearance is particularly striking insofar as he
seems to underlie many of the important claims made with respect to this
relational dynamic. What awaits further study, therefore, is how the organism’s
Umwelt may be reconsidered according to a different musical theme.
As opposed to the metaphors of a symphony and keyboard, Merleau-
Ponty finds something more appealing in the expression of a “melody.” Un-
fortunately, the concept of the melody is not formulated as such within The
Structure of Behavior, but the term does weave its way through his thought in
such a manner that is hard to ignore. More than anything else, the notion
of melody is used to express the unity of the organism as a whole and as a
theme that finds its rhythm flowing through the environment as well. The
notion of a melody, in other words, appears to be Merleau-Ponty’s manner
of explicating the relational structure of the living being as such. A sense
of this can be seen in one of his attempts to reinterpret the meaning of
126 Onto-Ethologies

‘coordination.’ Considering that he was previously critical of a particular

understanding of coordination (i.e., coordination as the antithesis of atom-
ism), it is not especially helpful that he maintains the same term to convey
his own interpretation of an organism’s unity. Nevertheless, he is clear that
he is offering a “very different” type of coordination, and it is one that is
expressed in terms of melody:

Here the coordinated elements are not only coupled with each
other, they constitute together, by their very union, a whole
which has its proper law . . . just as the first notes of a melody
assign a certain mode of resolution to the whole. While the notes
taken separately have an equivocal signification, being capable
of entering into an infinity of possible ensembles, in the melody
each one is demanded by the context and contributes its part in
expressing something which is not contained in any one of them
and which binds them together internally. (SB, 96/86)

At first it seems that Merleau-Ponty, despite his intentions, has reintroduced

a mechanical construction of the organism insofar as the whole is still a
product of interconnected notes. However, unlike a machine, this form of
unity is dependent on neither a prior construction in which each part (or
note) is necessarily connected to another, nor is this unity a material one.
The melody, by contrast, signifies the organism as a whole where each of
its parts resound through the entirety of the organism, though not in any
predefined way. Each note captures the whole. In an otherwise unremark-
able sentence, Merleau-Ponty later makes the same claim, but this time in
comparison to a soap bubble. As we will recall, the soap bubble is a favorite
analogy of Uexküll’s. “In a soap bubble [une bulle de savon] as in an organism,
what happens at each point is determined by what happens at all the oth-
ers” (141–42/131). This is not an innocent analogy. If we were not already
aware of Uexküll’s inclination to compare the Umwelt to a soap bubble,
Merleau-Ponty’s analogy may have been quickly passed over. Yet the soap
bubble in this passage functions in the same manner that the melody does,
and it cannot be by coincidence that both are found in Uexküll’s thought.
More important, however, both melody and soap bubble express the unity
of the organism as a reverberating totality.
This unity, moreover, is not material, despite the physical existence of
the organism. The parts fit together with one another, but the unity “is not
a simple consequence of the existence of organs or substrate. The process of
excitation forms an indecomposable unity and is not made up of the sum of
the local processes” (97/88). It is perhaps for this reason that the idea of a
melody ultimately proves to be more illustrative than a soap bubble, which
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 127

still retains a physical connotation. But what sustains this melody? When
Merleau-Ponty writes that “coordination is now the creation of a unity of
meaning which is expressed in the juxtaposed parts, the creation of certain
relations which owe nothing to the materiality of the terms which they unite”
(96/87), what holds this balance together? What is the “unity of meaning”
of which he speaks that creates the structural relation? Does Merleau-Ponty,
in eschewing materialism, open the door to a vitalist life force?
Despite these possibilities, the irreducible quality of the organism’s be-
ing does not reinvest in a vitalist force either. The organism’s unity is not
confined solely to its bodily apparatus due to its behavioral activities in an
environment. Thus, the organism is not solely a physical specimen because
it is itself only in its inherent relations with its milieu:

We are upholding no species of vitalism whatsoever here. We

do not mean that the analysis of the living body encounters a
limit in irreducible forces. We mean only that the reactions of an
organism are understandable and predictable only if we conceive
of them, not as muscular contractions which unfold in the body,
but as acts which are addressed to a certain milieu. (164/151)

The ‘immaterial’ aspect of the organism, if we may call it that, shows itself
in the manner that living beings engage with their surroundings. Their
environments contribute to their totality, but do not yet ‘complete’ them.
Accordingly, it is with this relational dynamic that the importance of the
melody comes into play.
Another way of putting this is that the structure of the organism—taken
as a whole, as a form—pushes one to another level of relation. Each structure
is only the node for many intersecting relations, almost approximating, albeit
quite loosely, the intersecting lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s strata and as-
semblages: “The form itself, the internal and dynamic unity which gives to
the whole the character of an indecomposable individual, is presupposed by
the law only as a condition of existence . . . the existence of such a structure
in the world is only the intersection of a multitude of relations—which, it is
true, refer to other structural conditions” (153/142). That the organism is a
whole (as form, as structure) means that it by necessity relates to still other
structures. And by this, Merleau-Ponty largely means the environment.
Despite the frequent references to the environment, Merleau-Ponty
seldom makes a strong distinction in his variable terminology for the world,
at least not in comparison to the nuanced usage of language that we observe
with Heidegger, who is at pains to distinguish between Dasein’s world and
the environments of animals. In many respects, Merleau-Ponty glosses over
this distinction in all but one explicit place. The environmental world of
128 Onto-Ethologies

organisms—which is alternately expressed as “ambiance,” “entourage,” and

more frequently, “milieu”—contributes to the organism’s being, but, as was
the case with the organism and its parts, the organism is not merely a part
within the world as a whole. “Science,” writes Merleau-Ponty,

is not therefore dealing with organisms as the completed modes

of a unique world [monde] (Welt), as the abstract parts of a whole
in which the parts would be perfectly contained. It has to do
with a series of “environments” [ambiances] and “milieu” (Umwelt,
Merkwelt, Gegenwelt) in which stimuli intervene according to
what they signify and what they are worth for the typical activity
of the species considered. (139–40/129–30)

We have already seen a similar claim made by Heidegger concerning the

objectivity of the world and we have also observed Uexküll’s critique of
physics for its one-world view. Likewise, Merleau-Ponty does so here by
invoking the significance of individual environments through a reference
to Buytendijk, who is himself utilizing Uexküll’s terminology of Umwelt,
Merkwelt, and Gegenwelt.12 Every living being does not live within one
‘unique’ world, but within a specific Umwelt that is significant to it. This
relation, moreover, is again what I believe Merleau-Ponty conceives as a
melodic construction.
However, instead of continuing to press into the domain of defining the
ontological conditions for the organism’s relation to an environment—and,
in so doing, expressing further the notion of the melody—Merleau-Ponty’s
discourse slides into an account of how we might perceive this relation. In
other words, his thought moves from the relation between organism and
environment to what conditions our perception of this relation. One could
say that he more or less stops addressing the organism as a living being in
favor of taking up the “the perception of the living body,” what he will
call the “phenomenal body” (169/156). This does not mark a new direction
within his text, for a phenomenological approach has been evident from
the start. It is just that the phenomenology of perception becomes more
pronounced—beginning with the third chapter “The Physical Order; The
Vital Order; The Human Order”—when Merleau-Ponty moves away from
his critique of previous paradigms and begins laying the groundwork for his
own contributions.
To this end, we are no longer dealing with what might be an ontological
interpretation of the organism and its inherent relation to an environment,
but with how this relation is constructed out of our own perceptive lives. It
is we, Merleau-Ponty notes, who form the relation through perception. Thus
“form,” “structure,” “melody,” and “meaning,” all important characteristics
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 129

for the being of the organism, give way to new formulations, where form,
structure, melody, and meaning are modes of perceptual knowledge of the
world in which organisms appear. For example, “It should not be concluded
from this that forms already exist in a physical universe and serve as an
ontological foundation for perceptual structures” (156/144). To be sure, form
is not a physical thing existing within the world. But rather than offering
a clarification of this “ontological foundation,” we instead learn that “form
is not a physical reality, but an object of perception” (155/143). Discussion
slides away from an ontological foundation toward how we might perceive
this foundation. In conjunction with the notion that form does not just
pertain to the organism but to the perception of the organism as a form,
Merleau-Ponty makes similar remarks concerning the structure of life as one
imminent to consciousness. Consider, for instance, that one must “describe
the structures of action and knowledge in which consciousness is engaged,”
particularly since “the problem is still to understand how the objects of
nature are constituted for us” (178/164–65). In part, they are constituted to
us according to a melody and rhythm. But whereas the melody may have
been at one time something uniting the organism and its environment, we
are led also to understand the melody as something that has a rhythm for
our knowledge: “there are melodic unities, significant wholes experienced
in an indivisible manner as poles of action and nuclei of knowledge”
(179/165–66). This is not the melodic unity or significant whole that belongs
to the organism in its relational being. The melody and significance of the
whole derives from our perception of this structure. Indeed, toward the end
of his analysis, “structure” (as well as “meaning”) is defined only in terms
of its association with our perception: “structure” is “the joining of an idea
and an existence which are indiscernible, the contingent arrangement by
which materials begin to have meaning in our presence” (223/206). Thus,
the attempt to express the living being becomes an investigation into how
we perceive the living being.
In many respects, this direction in Merleau-Ponty’s thought is evoked
in the same passage in which he raises Uexküll. “ ‘Every organism,’ said
Uexküll, ‘is a melody which sings itself.’ ” After citing this formulation,
however, Merleau-Ponty does not continue to dig into this metaphor. Instead,
he continues: “this is not to say that it knows this melody and attempts
to realize it; it is only to say that it is a whole which is significant for a
consciousness which knows it, not a thing which rests in-itself” (172/159).
The melody, which may have once been an interesting means for develop-
ing an ontology of the organism, gives way to its significance for conscious
perception. This is not to say that Merleau-Ponty abandons the view that
organisms sing the melody themselves. Nor that they are united with spe-
cific Umwelten. Nor even that an organism is a “unity of signification.” It is
130 Onto-Ethologies

just that he, in the words of Renaud Barbaras, “suspends” his inquiry into
“natural being” in favor of the domain of consciousness in which the natural
world comes to be perceived.13 For the present, it suffices to notice that the
organism as a melody that sings itself never receives fruitful exposition. It
indicates a novel dimension for pursuing the ontology of a living being,
though one that never seriously entertains the nature of this melody. The
suspension of natural being shall be removed in his later lectures to which
we will turn shortly.
To close this initial discussion, I find that Merleau-Ponty’s early position
with respect to living beings can be fairly summarized with the following
passage. While still seeking to extract his position from the mechanist and
vitalist distinctions, Merleau-Ponty writes: “to understand these biological
entities . . . is to unite the ensemble of known facts by means of their signifi-
cations, to discover in all of them a characteristic rhythm, a general attitude
toward certain categories of objects, perhaps even toward all things” (SB,
171/158). Signification, rhythm, and attitude are each laden with meaning,
and each refers to the being of the organism. However, the organism itself
recedes into the background in order to focus on how human consciousness
unites this ensemble of facts. But even if Merleau-Ponty does turn away from
the organism itself, he has laid the groundwork for a future study of nature.
Fortunately, the theme of the animal melody will again emerge as important
to the ontological unity of organism and environment.

A PURE WAKE, A QUIET FORCE

One such indication of continuity between Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of

Behavior and his late work on nature and ontology is the emphasis on the
relation. With the concept of “structure,” the notion of relationality almost
goes without saying. It is at once a structure of the organism as well as the
structure uniting conscious perception with the thing perceived. One can
find another, and not unrelated, passage that holds much in anticipation
of certain themes that will be announced in the late 1950s. I am thinking
primarily of the importance of the “flesh” and Merleau-Ponty’s development
of the “cleavage” between the body and the world. Toward these concepts,
we find a foreshadowing in his early text: “Life is not therefore the sum of
these reactions. In order to make a living organism reappear, starting from
these reactions, one must trace lines of cleavage [des lignes de clivage] in
them, choose points of view from which certain ensembles receive a com-
mon signification and appear” (SB, 165/152). I would like to suggest that
Merleau-Ponty conjures precisely such a reappearance of the organism in his
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 131

Nature lectures, and that he does so through tracing, if you will, the lines of
cleavage between the living organism and the environment it inhabits.
In so doing, Merleau-Ponty returns to a certain terrain that he departed
from in The Structure of Behavior and more immediately in Phenomenology of
Perception. Within these works, as partially discussed earlier, Merleau-Ponty
is concerned with describing the manner by which conscious perception
apprehends the world. But rather than advancing consciousness as just
another transcendental version of a disembodied cogito, he appeals to the
lived body as the source of a “rootedness” within the world. The embodied
world, and particularly in terms of the self-movement of the body, unites
the organism’s relation with its being in the world. For example, he remarks
that “our bodily experience of movement . . . provides us with a way of ac-
cess to the world and the object . . . which has to be recognized as original
and perhaps as primary. My body has its world, or understands its world,
without having to make use of my ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function’ ”
(PhP, 164/140–41). Though this emphasis on the living body ushers in a
new method of conducting phenomenology, it is also the case that Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology remains implicated in a philosophy of consciousness.
On this point, Renaud Barbaras notes in The Being of the Phenomenon: “its
[PhP] sole mistake is that it remains on the descriptive level, being content
with bringing to light this domain which still must be thought out. This
revision, which will ultimately consist in passing from a description of the
perceived world to the philosophy of perception, will be the objective of
later works” (17). What Barbaras and others latch on to is Merleau-Ponty’s
own recognition that he had not yet given an ontological account of the
perceived world. His earlier thought drew too much on the nature of a
subject’s conscious perception of the world in which it lives, as opposed to
providing the foundation for the nature of perception itself. It is the nature
of the world as original and primary that now becomes the main focus.
As noted, Merleau-Ponty was aware of the new direction set before
him. It is on this point that we discover a further deepening or burrow-
ing in the trajectory of his thought. In a working note to The Visible and
the Invisible he writes: “Results of Ph.P.—Necessity of bringing them to
ontological explicitation” (VI, 237/183). And again, just to emphasize the
direction of his thought: “Necessity of a return to ontology—The ontological
questioning and its ramifications: the subject-object question, the question
of inter-subjectivity, the question of Nature” (219/165).
Nowhere is this task of unfolding a “new ontology” more explicit than
in his final works. His aim from the outset of The Visible and the Invisible
is to invoke a prescientific understanding of the world in the language of
ontology, in terms of what he defines as “the meaning of being” (33/16). To
132 Onto-Ethologies

better carry out his investigation, he introduces his now famous formulations
of “flesh,” a term that has “no name in traditional philosophy to designate
it,” as it is neither material nor spiritual, neither matter nor mind, and thus
can be no better elucidated in ontological terms than as “a sort of incar-
nate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of
being. The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being” (184/139). In order
to derive an account of this element of being he must first reexamine how
the body can better lead us to understand, in a prereflective fashion, “our
living bond with nature” (34/17). But it is precisely the status of this “living
bond” that is always in question throughout this work: is Being a world that
truly underlies everything like “universal flesh”? If so, how can a body, when
“intertwining” and “blending” with other lives, in its “openness upon the
world” (57/35), in its “prepossession of a totality which is there before one
knows how or why” (65/42), be thought and located along an individual
plane? That is to ask, how can the cohesive relation, this “prelogical bond”
between living bodies and things, not be implicated in an organic or vital-
ist model that presupposes an all-encompassing unity that Merleau-Ponty
ultimately does not wish to uphold? And further, how does this bond with
nature either add to or depart from Heidegger’s descriptions of animals as
bound and captivated, whereas being human is unbound?
More specifically, Merleau-Ponty must be able to respond to the notion,
on the one hand, of “a cohesion without concept, which is of the same type
as the cohesion of the parts of my body, or the cohesion of my body with
the world” (199/152), while, on the other hand, state that “surely there does
not exist some huge animal whose organs our bodies would be, as for each
of our bodies, our hands, our eyes are the organs” (187/142). While there is
a lot at stake in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the living body in conjunc-
tion with other things of the world, it is the nature of this cohesive bond,
or this “cleavage,” that really addresses the tangible density of relationships
between bodies, both living and nonliving. What Merleau-Ponty clearly
wants to avoid is a descriptive account that would posit a world as having
a life in and for-itself, independent of the living beings that constitute it.
Thus, in claiming that there is a preconceptual cohesiveness between body
and world, he does not wish to claim that this cohesion implies a natural life
(an “animal” life, to be more specific) that our individual bodies belong to
in the manner that our organs belong to our bodies.14 There is a split then,
a chiasm if you will, in the fabric of the natural order. This gap apparently
distinguishes between certain living bodies, such as between my body and
that of an other, but on another level there is a cohesion between living
things, one, however, that does not amount to a great living force, the world
as one huge animal and we its organs.
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 133

And yet, as Merleau-Ponty asks, “[w]here are we to put the limit

between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?” (VI, 182/138).
How is it that there can be a cohesion between the organs of a body and
between this body and the world, but not to the extent that this cohesion,
the flesh of the world, would obtain something like an organic life unto itself?
In other words, how can the world be universal flesh, but not understand
the flesh as a ‘life’ independent of the bodies that constitute its totality?
Furthermore, how does the cohesive relation express a unity within nature
that leads Merleau-Ponty to speak of a “new ontology”? Does this ontology
bear on the difference, if any, between animal and human?
The nature of this cohesion between organic bodies, and between
bodies and a world, is already under way in his lecture courses on Nature.
In the second course, “The Concept of Nature, 1957–1958: Animality, the
Human Body, and the Passage to Culture,” Merleau-Ponty never really made
it beyond the first topic on animality. It is here that he most explicitly
addresses the work of Uexküll—who he teased us with in The Structure of
Behavior—to better elucidate how organisms produce and come to have a
cohesive relation to their environments in a decisive manner. Within this
course, Uexküll’s Umwelt proves to be an evocative manner for expressing
this structural relation. Indeed, as one commentator has remarked, and I’m
led to agree, “this chiasm is the philosophical payoff of Merleau-Ponty’s in-
terpretation of Uexküll’s work.”15 I therefore have two primary goals in the
remaining section, and both are interrelated. The first is to observe what
Merleau-Ponty gains from his reading of Uexküll and, correlatively, to see
how this reading may contribute to an elucidation of the flesh of the world
as the basis for his return to ontology.
After having begun by reviewing certain limitations of Cartesian
metaphysics—most notably, as a scientific paradigm enlisted to describe
the essence of nature’s beings—Merleau-Ponty addresses nature as a theme
in need of ontological clarification. To this end, he picks up on precisely
the same footing with which he began some fifteen years earlier, with the
concept of behavior. But this time his analysis of animal behavior is ori-
ented more explicitly by an engagement with modern biology than it was
previously, where behaviorism was the greater target (N, 187/139–40). It is
in this manner that Uexküll’s theories initially appear. Well, it is perhaps
misrepresentative to suggest “theories,” for it is really only the concept
of the Umwelt that takes pride of place in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis. The
description of the Umwelt is first set off against the notion of an objective
or scientific world (Welt) that exists in itself. By comparison, the Umwelt
is not only said to be the “purely subjective domain” of animal life, but,
more pertinently, it is “the environment of behavior” (220/167). This may
134 Onto-Ethologies

be the first sign that even though Merleau-Ponty appears to be reviewing

Uexküll’s thought before subjecting it to a philosophical interpretation, he is
nevertheless already imparting his own specific reading to these descriptions.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that the Umwelt is compared to behavior as well
as to consciousness: “Uexküll anticipates the notion of behavior,” Merleau-
Ponty writes. “This behavioral activity oriented toward an Umwelt begins well
before the invention of consciousness . . . . Consciousness is only one of the
varied forms of behavior” (220/167). More than anything else, consciousness
is only a type of behavior, which supports the view that all organisms, even
at the level of embryos, exhibit some behavioral patterns even though they
do not necessarily demonstrate any signs of consciousness. Otherwise put, the
Umwelt underlies the possibility of consciousness and, as such, an organism’s
Umwelt provides a more profound and universal depiction of the living be-
ing. Insofar as Merleau-Ponty aims to circumvent the priority of conscious
perception, a theory of the Umwelt may thus prove beneficial.
To this end, it is suggested that the unity of an organism “must rest
on an activity” (224/170) that simultaneously unites the organism as a
whole and acts as a cohesive bond between the organism and its Umwelt.
This suture does not occur after the fact, but is ontologically constitutive
of behavior itself. Movement is therefore central to our understanding of
the organism, as Merleau-Ponty explains: “Between the situation and the
movement of the animal, there is a relation of meaning which is what
the expression Umwelt conveys. The Umwelt is the world implied by the
movement of the animal, and that regulates the animal’s movements by its
own structure” (230/175). In this guise, movement is therefore a means of
reconsidering how we understand the animal and the world as a cohesive
structure. We are offered an evocative illustration of this, as Glen Mazis has
shown,16 when Merleau-Ponty describes the movement of a bird in flight in
Phenomenology of Perception:

If we want to take the phenomenon of movement seriously, we

shall need to conceive a world which is not made up only of
things, but which has in it also pure transitions. . . . For example,
the bird which flies across my garden is, during the time that it
is moving, merely a grayish power of flight and, generally speak-
ing, we shall see that things are defined primarily in terms of
their ‘behavior’ and not in terms of their static ‘properties.’ It
is not I who recognize, in each of its points and instants passed
through, the same bird defined by explicit characteristics, it is
the bird in flight which constitutes the unity of its movement.
(PhP, 318/275)
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 135

This “flurry of plumage” is a beautiful depiction of a “pure transition,” a

movement that evinces the unitary phenomenon of an animal with its
environment through behavior. With this example, we begin to see how
movement provides an opening onto Merleau-Ponty’s onto-ethology, such
that behavior is the locus for this transitory state that is also the site of
a new phenomenon. The way in which the bird in flight manifests itself
as a “unity” evokes a living being giving expression to itself. It holds itself
together as a fold of nature. Later in the Nature lectures, Merleau-Ponty
will explore further ways to arrive at an ontological expression of life, and
he will do so in a manner that reveals his Bergsonian background as well
as anticipates Deleuze’s ontology of the actual and intensive. Consider the
way he moves from a description of “unity” to one of “adhesion”:

It is less of the multiple in the living than of an adhesion

between the elements of the multiple. In a sense, there is only
the multiple, and this totality that surges from it is not a total-
ity in potential, but the establishment of a certain dimension.
From the moment when the animal swims, there will be life, a
theater, on the condition that nothing interrupts this adhesion
of the multiple. It is a dimension that will give meaning to its
surroundings. (N, 207/156)

The behavior of the bird in flight, this flurry of plumage, becomes the adhe-
sion of the multiple, the sustaining of a dimension expressive of life. But
each dimension of life is only a momentary adhesion held together through
behavior until interrupted by some other adhesion of the multiple. The
bird-in-flight encounters scurrying-brown-mouse. The oily-otter-swimming
emerges from the water to become slow-basking-otter. In each case, the
animal-environment is transformed and takes on new meaning.
The focus on behavioral activity leads us toward a general depiction of
life itself. More specifically, however, the activity and movement of organisms
shed light on the natural cohesiveness between living beings that itself leads
us toward Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. Beginning with the general view,

we must understand life as the opening of a field of action. The

animal is produced by the production of a milieu, that is, by the
appearing in the physical world of a field radically different from
the physical world with its specific temporality and spatiality.
Hence the analysis of the general life of the animal, of relations
that it maintains with its body, of the relations of its body to
its spatial milieu (its territory), of inter-animality either within
136 Onto-Ethologies

the species or between two different species, even those that

are usually enemies, as the rat lives among vipers. Here two
Umwelten, two rings of finality [anneaux de finalité] cross each
other. (227/173)

The interlacing of fields is suggestive, for it evokes the same penetration of

Umwelten that was observed in Heidegger’s analysis of the encircling rings.
The different Umwelten of different organisms cross one another like rings
‘opening’ each to the other and giving the appearance of life itself. If life
is opened up at all, it opens through such fields of action, which are more
or less synonymous with an Umwelt. Even more striking is the notion that
organisms are produced by the production of its milieu. The selection of
Merleau-Ponty’s phrasing is unambiguous: there is a reciprocal—and one may
even say passive—relation between the organism and its milieu. The animal
is said to be produced by the production of the milieu, but, in saying this,
both animal and milieu are produced by a production that goes unnamed.
Neither one is individually the producer, while both together are a product.
What then produces the animal-milieu structure?
This is precisely the question that Merleau-Ponty is led to ask. Three
or four times he attempts to formulate a question that will adequately ar-
ticulate this relation: “How then does Uexküll understand this production of
an Umwelt?” and again “But what is the subject that projects an Umwelt?”
(231/176). An answer to these questions is of the greatest importance be-
cause it directs us toward the relational dynamic, and the adhesion of the
multiple, within and between animals and their environments. Eventually we
arrive at an interesting response, and it appears as a concept that we have
already observed at work in his earliest text, namely, that of the melody.
We should not really be surprised to find Merleau-Ponty returning to the
same metaphor that he discovered in Uexküll fifteen years earlier, though
thankfully he now finds reason to describe it at slightly greater length. If
there is a production implicating both organism and environment at once,
it might best be described as the “unfurling [déploiement] of an Umwelt as a
melody that is singing itself.” Merleau-Ponty continues: “This is a comparison
full of meaning. When we invent a melody, the melody sings in us much
more than we sing it; it goes down the throat of the singer, as Proust says.
Just as the painter is struck by a painting which is not there, the body is
suspended in what it sings: the melody is incarnated and finds in the body
a type of servant” (228/173). The expression of this melody further reiter-
ates the passive connotation of this existing production. By formulating
the relation in this manner, Merleau-Ponty is clear to sidestep the possible
misapplication of a causal determination existing between the organism
and environment. Neither is the cause or effect for the other, but rather,
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 137

as he notes of the melody, it “sings in us much more than we sing it.” The
melody seems to swell up through living beings without any voluntary or
determinist implications, nor does the melody suggest the role of a higher
reality, such as that associated with pantheism or Naturphilosophie discussed
earlier in his course. In a manner of speaking, the Umwelt is a consistency
of the relational dimension itself, which unfurls through living bodies like
a melody. Subsequently, we may understand why Merleau-Ponty says “we
must dissociate the idea of an Umwelt from the idea of substance or force”
(231/176). The Umwelt is rather the “surging-forth of a privileged milieu,”
“a milieu of events,” from within which the animal appears “like a quiet
force,” though unlike any vitalist life force (232/177). A further attempt to
express this relation: “the unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that
is related to no boat” (231/176).
What I believe is at work within this philosophical interpretation of
Uexküll’s biology is Merleau-Ponty’s grappling with “something new: the
notion of Umwelt,” though in a way in which he has not yet formulated a
language for himself to express this relation. From one of his working notes,
it is clear that a reconsideration and overhaul of his language are at work.
“Replace the notions of concept, idea, mind, representation with the no-
tions of dimensions, articulation, level, hinges, pivots, configuration—” (VI,
277/224). It is also clear that an ontological relation is at play, and that
the relation involves neither substance nor force. The Umwelt unfurls like a
melody, the animal unfurls like a pure wake. Adhesion of the multiple starts
to sound pretty good but is never really developed. How can one describe
this relation then? Instead of substance or force, the natural relation relies
on a “melody,” “a pure wake,” or even a “surging-forth,” each expressing
the union of organism and environment simultaneously, but without appeal-
ing to mechanist or vitalist assumptions. The different attempts to explain
this new dimension indicate that Merleau-Ponty has not yet settled on
an adequate terminology, though it is very clear that something new is at
work. The melodic element of being could be characterized by a “tangible
density,” a phrase used by Alphonso Lingis to describe the thickness of the
world.17 For how else might we explain the manner by which the organism’s
body remains “suspended in what it sings?” The melody is also described
as incarnated (s’incarne), giving dimensionality and a certain thickness or
density to the Umwelt. The Umwelt has texture, adhesiveness; it acts as a
hinge, a dimension, a melodic production—indeed, I’m tempted to say that
it is simply an “element” of being, though this carries a special meaning
and would too quickly equate the melodic Umwelt with Merleau-Ponty’s
writings on “flesh.”
In a few years’ time, in his final course on Nature, we discover that
Merleau-Ponty will move more easily from an account of Uexküll’s Umwelt
138 Onto-Ethologies

and the living body to a “theory of the flesh” (270–71/209).18 But he does
not do so here, in 1957–1958. A formulation of the flesh of the world, the
sensible, the intertwining, and chiasm will have to await further introduc-
tion. For all this, however, the melodic Umwelt is not without its ontological
dimension, as Mauro Carbone notes in The Thinking of the Sensible. Carbone
draws attention to a type of “negativity” that underlies Merleau-Ponty’s inter-
pretation of the Umwelt, the melody as a theme that “haunts” the organism
(37; cf. N, 233/178). Twice Merleau-Ponty mentions the haunting of the
Umwelt melody, as ‘something’ that is present but only as an absence, as a
life structure that for the moment resists appellation, as the composition of
an environment that unfurls in the behavioral movements of the animal
but that are never seen as such. Carbone aligns the theme of the melody
with “the absent,” and this association is particularly appropriate when read
in view of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology where, for example, “totality is likewise
everywhere and nowhere” (N, 240/183), both present and absent. Another
way of expressing this dynamic in life is to note a relation between the
visible and the invisible, a theme that would soon be omnipresent in Mer-
leau-Ponty’s thought. In the meantime, the notion of the melody will have
to suffice to capture the meaning of the Umwelt. Merleau-Ponty concludes
as much in the final paragraphs of his reading of Uexküll: “In brief, it is
the theme of the melody, much more than the idea of a nature-subject or
of a suprasensible thing, that best expresses the intuition of the animal ac-
cording to Uexküll” (233/178).

A LEAF OF BEING

In the editorial notes to The Visible and the Invisible, Claude Lefort docu-
ments that Merleau-Ponty’s manuscript dates as early as March 1959 (the
“working notes” date from January) and continues through to the time of
his death in 1961. This text was therefore in the process of being composed
concurrent with when Merleau-Ponty was delivering his final lecture course
on nature (1959–1960). The parallel between these two projects—really it
is just one project, since “Nature” fits into the overall development of his
incomplete return to ontology—is evident from the beginning of the final
course, where themes that were pursued in the two earlier courses now merge
with a more explicit orientation toward an ontological formulation. This
formulation receives its impetus in nature, where Merleau-Ponty pursues
“Nature as a leaf or layer of total Being—the ontology of Nature as the way
toward ontology” (N, 265/204).19 In pursuing nature as ontological, Merleau-
Ponty is clear that he is not aiming to offer an epistemology or metaphysics
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 139

of nature. It is natural being that he is after, and in particular the manner

by which nature shows itself in the intertwining of lives, what he refers to
as “inter-animality,” or in the folds and leaves of being itself. What he is
after, in other words, is what might be discovered in the “hollow” of be-
ing that remained unexcavated in his earlier works. He wishes to retrieve
the “brute” or “wild” being that lies beneath all the cultural sediment of
the intelligible world. As he notes, “there is no intelligible world, there is
the sensible world” (VI, 267/214). So as opposed to continuing to describe
the perceived world and the modes of perception, Merleau-Ponty intends to
dig beneath perceptual consciousness in order to discover what allows for the
possibility of perception itself. To do so, all the “bric-a-brac” associated with
the cultural and intelligible world—“Erlebnisse,” “judgments,” “consciousness,”
“ontic” things—need to be observed for what they are: realities that have
been “carved” out of “the ontological tissue” (VI, 307/253; cf. 324/270). It
is not so much an issue of removing these aspects of life as much as digging
back into the brute being of nature. Renaud Barbaras captures this inten-
tion: “He no longer takes consciousness as his starting point, which led
him immediately to the problem of the relationship between the perceived
world and nature; he begins with nature to show the identity in it of being
and being-perceived. Thus, it is indeed by the reflection on nature that the
transition towards ontology comes about.”20
It is not that Merleau-Ponty no longer upholds a phenomenology of
perception, but that perception and the perceived come to have a new sense
in their application to natural being. Most of his focus highlights a series
of divergences (écarts) that exists between things, but that, as difference,
unites nature within the texture of being. What is particularly striking about
his thought during these last few years is the language that he invokes to
capture the leaves of natural being. Consider, on the one hand, some of the
terminology to express divergence: chiasm, cleavage, folds, leaves (feuillets),
invisibility, hinges, pivots, fields, and layers. There are even “fields of fields”
(VI, 225/171), the folds may be “doubled, even tripled” (N, 275/212), or
there may be a “whole series of layers of wild being” (VI, 232/178). Such
folds in being may prove especially poignant when later compared with
Deleuze’s ontology. For the moment, the accumulation of layers manifests
the texture of the divergence that exists within nature. Now consider, on the
other hand, the terminology used to speak of the unity of such divergences:
one reads of intertwining, the flesh, of its thickness, texture, fabric, pulp,
the sensible, cohesion and adhesion, sutures, and seams. All of this language
breathes a sensuousness into natural being, such that one can’t help but feel
an affinity for the cohesiveness of all things. Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty says
at one point, it is not about “a hard nucleus of being, but the softness of
140 Onto-Ethologies

the flesh” (N, 302/238). Yet what are we to make of this language? More
specifically, what is suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology with respect
to Uexküll and the Umwelten of organisms?
The question that one really ought to ask here is: what is the onto-
logical meaning of the expression “the world is flesh”? As the touchstone
of Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy, the flesh is the element in which lives
are lived. By calling the world flesh, Merleau-Ponty is certainly not speaking
about human skin, though skin is also used as a parallel to the element of
which he speaks. Rather, as “an ‘element’ of Being,” the flesh is as if an extra
dimension has emerged in addition to the traditional elements of water, air,
earth, and fire. But the flesh is not just any old material or spiritual thing.
Rather it is the element that makes being possible. It is the cohesiveness
itself of the world, such that the world is rendered possible. One must keep
in mind that Merleau-Ponty is attempting to describe natural being prior to
conscious perception and intelligibility. This is “brute” or “wild” being; it
is being in the hollows of the world of reflection, values, and thought. The
prereflective, preconceptual, prespiritual Vorhabe of being, all find expression
in this one carnal being of the flesh. The flesh, then, is tantamount to the
sensible insofar as each alludes to the medium of what is. As already noted,
“there is the sensible world”: “The sensible is precisely that medium in which
there can be being without it having to be posited. . . . The sensible world
itself in which we gravitate, and which forms our bond with the other, which
makes the other be for us, is not, precisely qua sensible, ‘given’ except by
allusion” (VI, 267/214). Hence Merleau-Ponty’s reluctance to subscribe to
any one positing of this medium. There is flesh of the world, the sensible
world.21 They are but allusions to the il y a of wild being.
But if one cannot speak of the world but by allusion—“one cannot
make a direct ontology” (233/179)—how do we find our way there? How
does this ontological foundation become visible? Merleau-Ponty’s thought
does not stray that far from the insights he develops in Phenomenology of
Perception; it is just the perspective that changes. As before, he continues to
take the body as oriented in topological space as his cue for understanding
the medium of being. But while he was interested earlier in how the body
perceives the surrounding world, it is now more an issue of describing how
the world is such that the body may be located within it. It is in this man-
ner that Merleau-Ponty hastens to describe topological space as an especially
relevant “model of being,” particularly when compared to the harsh lines of
Euclidean and Cartesian space. As opposed to the geometry of res extensa,
Merleau-Ponty’s view of the world is, by contrast, full and thick, “a total
voluminosity which surrounds me, in which I am, which is behind me as
well as before me” (VI, 264/210; N, 275/213). A world that is configured by
the contours of a three-dimensional body exudes this sense of being replete.
“I am open to the world because I am within my body” (N, 279/217), writes
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 141

Merleau-Ponty. The topological manner of being bodily is what allows for

an initial penetration into the sensible being of the world’s flesh.
Nowhere is the fullness of the sensible more evident than in Merleau-
Ponty’s descriptions of the touch of one hand touching the other hand.22
This example—where one hand, say the right, touches the left hand while
it touches back—in effect captures the reversibility of the subject and object
in one and the same body, and even in one sole organ such as the finger
(VI, 314/261). The one hand touches the other simultaneous with the
other hand’s touching, such that each reverses the relationship with respect
to one another. Both are subject to the other’s object to the extent that
subject–object becomes a meaningless distinction, at least as defined by their
traditional parameters. This prereflective sensation proves to be an example
of intercorporeity in that it applies not only between two hands touching,
but also extends to the perception of other bodies and the corresponding
relations between two bodies. Merleau-Ponty writes:

this is also an opening of my body to other bodies: just as

I touch my hand touching, I perceive others as perceiving.
The articulation of their body on the world is lived by me in
the articulation of my body on the world where I see them.
This is reciprocal: my body is made up of [aussi bien fait de] their
corporeality. (N, 281/218)

As he describes elsewhere, I see myself seeing because I see others perceiv-

ing me. There is the visible for me only because I am myself possessed by
the visible; I am of the visible (VI, 177–78/134–35). Correspondingly, it is
never the case that there are “things” or blossen Sachen to be experienced
in themselves. We do not live in such an intelligible world of positivist or
present-at-hand entities. Rather, “our most natural life as humans intends an
ontological milieu” (S, 206/163) where the world is invested with meaning
due to the reversibility of experience, as expressed by the hand touching
touch, and the divergence such reversibility implies, namely, the separation
or chiasm between the hands. The écart is just as important as the relation
itself, for, as Merleau-Ponty notes, “the touching is never exactly the touched”
(VI, 307/254), and I never fully succeed in either touching myself touching
or in seeing myself seeing. As a living being, one is constituted through
the flesh of the world but there is just as much an “escape [from] oneself”
(303/249) due to the invisibility in the visible and the untouchable in touch.
In this respect, the touch might be distinguished from the intellectual grasp
associated with total possession of oneself and/or the object.
The world is flesh because our bodies are themselves of the flesh, as the
thickness that exists between the two hands, or between the perceiver and
the thing, or one body and an other. In the end, the reversibility of things
142 Onto-Ethologies

announces the need to rethink the ontological foundations of such relations:

“it is imperative that we recognize that this description also overturns our
idea of the thing and the world, and that it results in an ontological reha-
bilitation of the sensible” (S, 210/166–67). Such is the nature of the leaves,
layers, and folds in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The flesh or the sensible is
ultimately our navigation into understanding the structure of being, as it is
both the union and divergence between all things: “It is because there are
these 2 doublings-up that are possible: the insertion of the world between
the two leaves of my body[,] the insertion of my body between the 2 leaves
of each thing and of the world[.] This is not anthropologism: by studying
the 2 leaves we ought to find the structure of being” (VI, 317/264). The
flesh of the world emerges within these two leaves of the body, because
the body is the chiasm of being sensible and being sentient; the body is
the “sensible sentient” (179/136–37). The two leaves of the body are either
side of the hinge in the becoming-one of the body’s subject–object; the body
is a two-in-one, both sensing and sensed, both separation and cohesion,
visible and invisible. Such is also the case between more than one body,
where the separation (chiasm, divergence, etc.) between bodies implies just
as much their unity (intertwining, cohesion, etc.): there is “a surface of
separation between me and the other which is also the place of our union,
the unique Erfüllung of his life and my life” (287/234). The world is in the
body just as much as the body is in the world.
But even to note that the body has two leaves seems too contrived for
Merleau-Ponty, too flat and too oppositional. Instead, this notion might be
better expressed as segments of a circular whole that captures the body in
its behavioral movement. It is here that Uexküll once again becomes im-
portant to our interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology. For instance,
we discover in the third course on Nature that Merleau-Ponty repeats the
need for a rehabilitation of the sensible, and this time in direct reference
to Uexküll. “This being-there by difference and not by identity we think
only by the rehabilitation of the sensible world (compare Uexküll, the
melody), not as a ‘psychological fact’ to reconstruct in positive terms, but as
the visibility of the invisible. Compare Goldstein: the organism-milieu” (N,
303/238–39). As seen before with the notion of the melody, the body is not
a thing independent of the environment but rather forms a unique melody
as a whole. But now the body can be better appreciated for the activity
and passivity implied earlier by the melody: the melody sings through the
body because the body is perceptible. The body sings and is heard, just as
it touches and is touched, sees and is seen, each implying both a unity with
an environment as well as a fundamental divergence from it. The melody
that sings through the body appealed to Merleau-Ponty, I believe, precisely
because of the coupling of its activity–passivity (cf. VI, 183/139; 314/261;
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 143

318/265), a coupling that he expresses most forcefully in the case of the

two hands touching. The reversibility or chiasm of the hands touching finds
a similar expression in Uexküll’s account of the melody when the animal
both produces and is produced in its reciprocity with an environment.23 The
animal is neither subject nor object, but reciprocally producer–produced like
a pure wake, a quiet force in the leaves of being. The melody, therefore,
begins to approximate the flesh insofar as it extends and prolongs the body
into the environmental world and is likewise incorporated by it. Although
Merleau-Ponty does not resume an account of the melody here, he often
continues to appeal to Uexküll’s Umwelt as a particularly favorable manner
of considering a body’s immersion into the sensible; it sinks into and is
enveloped by the flesh of the world because it is itself flesh. My body, he
writes, is made of others’ corporeality, each giving expression to a new kind
of symbiotic ontology revealed through behavior.
In Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of space, the world does not play out
in front of oneself as if the eyes were there to behold a two-dimensional
spectacle. The body is enveloped by space just as much as other things are.
This entails that one neither perceives one’s own back and what happens
‘behind’ oneself nor does one perceive the other side of things in the world.
In part, this phenomenological approach abstains from a greedy epistemol-
ogy that seeks to grasp things as such. Even my own self is undercut by the
nonpositivity of an invisible visibility. And yet, within the sensible world in
which the body is immersed, one nevertheless encounters things. But how?
And what are these things?

What is there? First—visible or sensible being, things with their

hidden “sides.” Among the things are bodies which also have
their hidden sides, their “other side,” their being for the living
(that is, not in that it is a consciousness, but in that it has an
Umwelt). That is not constituted by our thought, but lived as a
variant of our corporeity, that is, as the appearance of behaviors
in the field of our behavior. (N, 338/271)

The Umwelt reveals that one not only approaches other things behavior-
ally—that is, not simply as a conscious perception—but that one also
approaches oneself in precisely the same manner. To better illustrate this,
Merleau-Ponty offers an enticing example of the perception of a cube.
Just as I cannot perceive the hidden side of the cube, neither do I see
myself seeing it because the reversibility, while always imminent, is never
completely realized (VI, 193/147). There is absence and invisibility within
the visible itself—not as the invisible part of the hidden cube, but as the
invisibility within the being of the visible itself—and this is precisely the
144 Onto-Ethologies

bodily dimension in which Merleau-Ponty roots the rehabilitation of the

sensible. The other—the cube, another organism, or any other thing—com-
pletes my own unity insofar as both participate in the flesh of the world.
I do not see myself seeing, but the other “closes the circuit and completes
my own being-seen” (256/202). I come to be myself because of the revers-
ibility provided by others. But it is a “blurring” of distinctions. The living
being becomes itself in the thickness of this union, though it is a union of
difference, separation, and invisibility.
The thickness of topological space also leads Merleau-Ponty to ap-
preciate its circularity as opposed to a depiction of linear planes and lay-
ers. The layers and folds will still be an important aspect of his thought,
specifically with respect to the ‘archeological’ image of digging into the
hollows of being and getting beneath the accumulation of cultural sedi-
ment. But in terms of the structures supported by the dimensionality of
being, circles and rings prove to be a more rewarding way of characterizing
the reversibility of living things. The circularity is what is enacted within
the reversibility of the flesh, where each body is circled because it extends
into and is enveloped by the sensible. To this end, the body constitutes
a “nexus” within the visible: “there is a relation of the visible with itself
that traverses me and constitutes me as seer, this circle which I do not
form, which forms me, this coiling over of the visible upon the visible, can
traverse, animate other bodies as well as my own” (VI, 185/140). Again we
glimpse a passive connotation of the body, where the body seems to simply
endure being circled within the traversing of the visible. The circle forms
the body, but the body is not wholly innocent either. Between activity and
passivity, the circling appears like the melody, and finds a better expression
as a “neutrality”: “the animal body defined by the Umwelt, i.e., as aspects
of the world cut up and organized by movements. Neutral between interior
and exterior of the body. Intertwining or movement and perception. Neu-
tral between centrifugal and centripetal” (N, 283/221). At the beginning
of each of the first three “sketches” to Merleau-Ponty’s third course, he
opens with such a remark concerning the animal body. The human body,
though different, is similarly characterized as receiving its Umwelt due to
the relational circularity that is both active and passive, hence the appro-
priateness of neutrality. And if we’re not mistaken, isn’t neutrality similarly
advocated in The Structure of Behavior to best exemplify the importance
of behavior? Only this time, neutrality addresses the passive–active con-
notation of the animal body, which has an ontological significance that
was lacking in the earlier assessment of behavior as simply being impartial
toward the existing sciences.
But it is not only the case that there is a circularity in the Umwelt’s
reciprocity with the body. Such an image connotes a circular process flow-
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 145

ing back and forth between Umwelt and body, or between the sensible and
the sentient. It is also the case, however, that we are led to envision the
body itself—and the Umwelt itself—as spherical, much like we saw in the
case of Heidegger’s writings on the “encircling rings.” For example, consider
the following:

My body as a visible thing is contained within the full spectacle.

But my seeing body subtends this visible body, and all the visibles
with it. There is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in
the other. Or rather, if, as once again we must, we eschew the
thinking by planes and perspectives, there are two circles, or
two vortexes, or two spheres, concentric when I live naively,
and as soon as I question myself, the one slightly decentered
with respect to the other. (VI, 182/138)24

Initially this reads rather peculiarly, for what does he mean by these two
circles being concentric or decentered? It isn’t immediately obvious. But on
further reading, Merleau-Ponty is depicting a circular model such that the
body and its Umwelt, each a circle (or vortex, sphere) of its own, together
form a concentric whole whereby the two circles invisibly overlap one
another as one. It is only when reflective thought intrudes, jarring oneself
out of ‘naïve’ being, that the two circles decenter and show each other as
separate, as if having been thrown into a world of the present at hand.
Again, it is a peculiar image, though no less a forceful one.
What are we to make of this circling? To better situate these circles, it
would be advantageous to recall a passage that we have already considered,
in which the animal is produced by the production of a milieu. We noticed
the neutral reciprocity involved here, but there is also the interanimality that
he expresses in the crossing of two Umwelten, the two rings of finality, such
as that between the rat and the viper (N, 227/173). Though this is just one
example, it is illustrative of the multiplication of circles that coincide in the
structure of being. The circle that each animal forms with its Umwelt—the
concentric circle lived naively—overlaps with the rings of other living beings,
all together intersecting and crossing with each other, each a chiasm with
the other. This does not mean that each animal is “open” to all others—as
critiqued by Heidegger in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics—but
that, as a living body, each animal lives within the sensible and therefore
is engaged in its own dimensional relation to the flesh of the world. Does
this mean that all beings together encompass a synthetic world? Not for
Merleau-Ponty, who notes that these multiple chiasms form “one” only “in
the sense of Uebertragung, encroachment, radiation of being” (VI, 315/261),
which is the sensible itself.
146 Onto-Ethologies

The circular corporeal schema owes at least a little bit to Uexküll’s

theory of the Umwelt. At the beginning of the first sketch, Merleau-Ponty
draws a direct connection between the body’s relation to the Umwelt and
the necessity to resume an interpretation of this reversible relation with
respect to the flesh (N, 270–71/209). After the analysis we have presently
undertaken, we are now in a position to better understand how such struc-
tural relations compose a view of the animal as a ‘self.’ The new ontology
is founded in the circles that extend and subtend one organ (e.g., a finger),
one organism (e.g., an ape, a human), and two or more organisms (e.g., a rat
and vipers, myself and other people). In every case, the unity of the organ-
ism is always one of simultaneous divergence due to its reversible relation
with an Umwelt, but such that it is also always immersed within the flesh:

The sensoriality, its SICH-bewegen and its SICH-wahrnehmen,

its coming to self—A self that has an environment, that is the
reverse of this environment. In going into the details of the
analysis, one would see that the essential is the reflected in offset,
where the touching is always on the verge of apprehending itself
as tangible, misses its grasp, and completes it only in a there
is— . . . The flesh is this whole cycle and not only the inherence
in a spatio-temporally individuated this. (VI, 313/260)

The being of the flesh is what completes each living being. Another way
of putting this is that each living being goes out into its environment, is
‘one’ with its Umwelt, but only finds itself in the sensible, fleshly being of
“there is,” like a melody unfurling itself through nature.

INTERANIMALITY

It has not been my intention to suggest that Merleau-Ponty owes an insur-

mountable debt of gratitude to Uexküll’s formulation of the Umwelt. This
is no more the case than it was for Heidegger. However, given the extent
that Uexküll’s Umwelt figures into Merleau-Ponty’s thought, it leads one to
suspect that there is more than a hint of interest present. By this I mean to
suggest that the Umwelt provides another source, or another layer if you will,
to Merleau-Ponty’s development of natural being. Far from being just any
old biological theory, Uexküll’s Umwelt aids Merleau-Ponty in considering
the structural relation between organism and environment in such a way
that he surpasses the subject-object distinction and instead posits a sensible
layer uniting all of life in the flesh of the world.
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 147

By broaching his phenomenological observations with certain develop-

ments in modern biology, Merleau-Ponty helps pave the way for what might
be learned from an interaction between philosophy and the sciences. Draw-
ing from the biology of Uexküll and others, we discover how the Umwelt
provides a source for his new ontology of nature, where being reveals itself
allusively in the leaves and folds between bodies. Being, in other words,
arises in the intersection that the Umwelt is—“Umwelt (that is, the world
+ my body)” (N, 278/216)—because the body, as intercorporeal, is full of
the world. More prominently, an articulation of the flesh of the world—as
a sensible there is—reveals how brute being is a structure—he speaks of “the
structure of being,” “structural ontology”—that emerges in the simultaneous
intertwining-chiasm effected by the living body. Such is the significance of
the in-between, of “interbeing.” As expressly seen in the opening pages of
his third Nature course, Uexküll’s Umwelt leads directly into a consideration
of the moving body as the basis for his theory of the flesh. Merleau-Ponty’s
new ontology thus finds a seed germinating in Uexküll’s theory of the Um-
welt, something already recognizeable in The Structure of Behavior but not
fully entertained until his Nature lectures.
Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty appeals to the Umwelt as carrying
philosophical import, but whereas Heidegger uses the Umwelt as the basis
for considering the ontological differences between animal environments and
human world, Merleau-Ponty’s interest is directed more to how its melodic
undertone parallels a theory of nature overall. The body’s cohesion with
its milieu therefore occupies a greater place of distinction within Merleau-
Ponty’s thought insofar as nature shows itself as an ontological leaf of brute
being. Unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty is not as conceptually rigorous
when it comes to defining and distinguishing between animal being and
human being, between environments and worlds. But this is also part of
his ontology’s novelty: his investigations of nature allow a more immediate
participation between humans and animals in the same source of life. The
point is not to argue that being human is the same as being every other
sort of animal, but that all manners of life partake in the whole of natural
ontology. For instance, “We must say: Animality and human being are
given only together, within a whole of Being that would have been visible
ahead of time in the first animal had there been someone to read it. Now
this visible and invisible Being, the sensible, our Ineinander in the sensible,
with the animals, are permanent attestations, even though visible being
is not the whole of Being, because it [Being] already has its other invis-
ible side” (N, 338/271). Thus, even though Merleau-Ponty will claim that
the human body presents another manner of corporeity than that of the
animal (N, 269/208; 277/214), the human and animal are not separated by
148 Onto-Ethologies

an ontological abyss.25 One can see that Merleau-Ponty highlights realms

of disparity, but, as shown in his final working note, he is more concerned
with “a description of the man-animality intertwining” (VI, 328/274) than
he is with highlighting differences between things. In the end, he is less
interested in staking a difference between animals and humans than he is
with revealing brute being in “one sole explosion of Being.”
This means, however, that no single definition emerges of the organism.
An organism comes to its self—is its self—in its sensible being. Instead of
a redefinition of the organism as Merleau-Ponty envisions it, we are more
inclined to find an account of “life.” This elision may not be accidental,
for “life” may in this sense be uncannily similar to what Heidegger called
“process” and “motion” in place of “organism.” For example, Merleau-Ponty
writes in one long meandering sentence:

Dissociate our idea of Being from that of the thing: life is not
a separable thing, but an investment, a singular point, a hollow
in Being, an invariant ontological relief, a transverse rather than
longitudinal causality telescoping the other . . . the establishment
of a level around which the divergences begin forming, a kind
of being that functions like a vault, statistical being against the
random, overcoming by encroachment, ambiguity of the part and
the whole (against Driesch: The machine is not actually reaction
of all its parts), thus being by attachment, that we cannot grasp
apart, not bring it close (like a hard nucleus), refusal of all or
nothing. (N, 302/238)

If this description does not help to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of

life, neither will this: “Life = being by sketch or outline, that is, territories,
regions = inherence in increasingly more precise places in a field of action
or a radiation of being” (303/238). Or does it? He already used the phrase
“field of action” in his second lecture course, and it arose, as it does here,
in his initial reading of Uexküll. It is as though Merleau-Ponty, rather than
pointing toward a specific definition of the organism, instead chooses to lean,
as he does so in this third lecture course, on an understanding of life in
general. It is not this entity or that being that is of interest (as if life could
be “a separable thing”), but rather the ambiguous, allusive, soft tissue of flesh
that forms a structural network within a certain “place” or “territory.” The
language he uses is intentionally ambiguous: place, field, territory, region,
each becoming increasingly more precise but never fixed as such. It is not
fixed, in part, because it depends on the moving body, behaviorally embed-
ded in being, but also in part because his sketches on nature are becoming
increasingly informed by theories of ontogenesis as he looks more and more
 The Theme of the Animal Melody 149

closely at the origins of life in all of its glorious fields, folds, envelopments,
divisions, encroachments, and mutations.
By emphasizing life, it is not that Merleau-Ponty wishes to abandon
the concept of the organism. He doesn’t abandon it and shows no strong
sign that he intended to. But even though the organism has been present
since his earliest publications, it is also fair to say that the concept emerges
transformed and cloaked in a new vocabulary by the end of his life. Uexküll’s
Umwelt aids in this transformation, as it also will in the case of Deleuze’s
interest in Uexküll’s biology. The unlikely adoption of Uexküll’s thought
within contemporary continental philosophy continues with Deleuze who,
like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty before him, is intrigued by the philo-
sophical utility of this biologist for ontological considerations. But whereas
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are more inclined to maintain the concept
of the organism despite their reservations with its terminological history,
Deleuze is not so hesitant. The organism is declared the enemy as he gives
full way for a thinking of virtual intensities, affects, bodies, milieus, territories,
rhythms and refrains, and for what might emerge within a poststructuralist
interpretation of living beings.
198 Notes to Chapter 4

State University of New York Press, 1999), and in particular the subchapter “The
Time of the Augenblick.”
16. Françoise Dastur, Heidegger et la question anthropologique (Louvain-Paris:
Éditions Peeters, 2003), 62.
17. On touch (Rührung, beruhren), recall his notes on the lizard (GA 29/30,
290–91/196–97). On stimulation (Reiz, Reizen), see ibid., 372–73/256.
18. Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I Am,” 391. Derrida notes many
times throughout this essay that he will have to return to a more careful reading of
Heidegger and animals, just as he does here with respect to this passage on time.
Sadly, however, he may have been right when he states: “(my hypothesis is this:
whatever is put off until later will probably be put off for ever; later here signifies
never),” 391. I know of no sustained reading by Derrida on this lecture course out-
side of the present essay and brief remarks here and there (e.g., Of Spirit; “ ‘Eating
Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronnell,
Points . . . Interviews 1974–94, ed. Elisabeth Weber [Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995]).
19. McNeill, “Life Beyond the Organism,” 239. This essay has been reprinted
in William McNeill’s The Time of Life: Heidegger and Êthos (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2006).
20. This portion of the passage is cited from David Krell’s Daimon Life
(26).

CHAPTER 4: THE THEME OF THE ANIMAL MELODY

1. As just one explicit example, see Douglas Low’s “The continuing rel-
evance of The Structure of Behavior,” International Philosophical Quarterly 44, 3 (2004):
411–30.
2. Many have worked on these notes, but, as an explicit example, see Douglas
Low’s Merleau-Ponty’s Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of The Visible and
the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000).
3. Although I am largely sympathetic to Mark B. N. Hansen’s reading—whose
essay has many similarities to my own project—I don’t agree with his claim that there
is an “ontological turn,” or “failure,” in the early writings. See “The Embryology of
the (In)visible,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds. Taylor Carman
and Mark B. N. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
4. Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontol-
ogy, trans. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004). M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1997), 85.
5. For a particular look at the concept of “archeology” (and arche) and its
application to Merleau-Ponty’s thought, see Leonard Lawlor’s reading in Thinking
Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2003), chapter 2. Lawlor addresses not only Merleau-Ponty, but Freud, Husserl,
Kant, and, more specifically, Foucault.
 Notes to Chapter 4 199

6. I noted this earlier, but it bears repeating: “behavior” is the translation of

Merleau-Ponty’s “comportement.” This distinction is highly important when compared
with Heidegger’s terminology, where the English translation of Benehmen (behavior)
refers specifically to animal behavior and the English translation of Verhaltung (com-
portment) refers specifically to human ‘behavior.’ As we will see, Merleau-Ponty does
differentiate between the behavior of animals and humans, but he does not do so
conceptually. One shouldn’t confuse, therefore, Merleau-Ponty’s use of “comportement
[behavior]” with Heidegger’s “behavior” and/or “comportment.”
7. In keeping with Merleau-Ponty’s wish to “start ‘from below’ ” with
behavior, we can note how “il se creuse” might be more literally translated as “hol-
lowed out,” “breaks apart,” or even “dug up” as opposed to the more reader-friendly
“opened up.” I note this distinction for two reasons: first, as mentioned before, there
is a faint archeological theme already at play in The Structure of Behavior, and we
can read this in how behavior digs away at the natural world; second, as noted in
the chapters on Heidegger, the English translation of “to open” carries a strong
connotation in Heidegger’s thought, whereas Merleau-Ponty is not thinking of das
Offene (l’ouvert).
8. Renaud Barbaras, “The Movement of The Living as the Originary Founda-
tion of Perceptual Intentionality,” trans. Charles Wolfe. Naturalizing Phenomenology:
Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, eds. Jean Petitot et al.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 532.
9. Kurt Goldstein, The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from
Pathological Data in Man (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 18. This is Goldstein’s
own self-depiction.
10. As far as I know, the biographical answer to Merleau-Ponty’s usage of
Uexküll is undocumented. However, just to hazard another textual guess, Goldstein
may again appear to be the common denominator since he also pays lip service to
Buytendijk in a manner that would have been meaningful to Merleau-Ponty: “As we
have seen, animal behavior cannot be understood as a summation of single processes.
It points, rather, to an individual organization. . . .” In this general characteristic of
animal nature, I find myself in agreement with Alverdes, Frederik Buytendijk, and
others. Likewise for the animal, the environment is not given as absolute but arises in
the animal’s being and acting” (The Organism, 355). To hazard a guess, Merleau-Ponty
was probably drawn to Uexküll via Buytendijk via Goldstein. Georges Canguilhem
may also have had a role in this. (I am thankful to Charles Wolfe for bringing this
to my attention.) As for his later and more explicit treatment of Uexküll in Nature,
there is a more likely scenario: Uexküll’s A Stroll Through the Environment of Animals
and Humans and The Theory of Meaning appeared together in French translation in
1956 (Mondes Animaux et Monde Humain) just a year before Merleau-Ponty offers
his lectures on him. It is this collection that Deleuze will also cite.
11. The historical relations between Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze
in their textual references to Uexküll and to each other are certainly interesting,
but I’m afraid I don’t have much to contribute beyond speculations I have already
engaged in. For example, it is nearly certain that Merleau-Ponty did not have ac-
cess to Heidegger’s work in the 1929–1930 course. But while the publication of
200 Notes to Chapter 4

Heidegger’s lecture notes wouldn’t appear until the 1980s, this does not rule out the
possibility that Merleau-Ponty might have known of the lecture courses and their
content. Likewise, it is possible and even likely that Deleuze knew of Merleau-Ponty’s
references to Uexküll from his 1957–1958 course.
12. Merleau-Ponty will recognize these terms as Uexküll’s by the time of his
Nature lectures (cf. 227/172).
13. Barbaras argues along these lines in many of his works, including The
Being of the Phenomenon and “Merleau-Ponty and Nature.”
14. He falls more in line with Leibniz in this respect (cf. Deleuze, The Fold:
Leibniz and the Baroque, 9) than he does, for instance, with Philo’s hyperbolic remarks
about the world as animal in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
(Part VII).
15. Hansen, “The Embryology of the (In)visible,” 252.
16. Glen Mazis, “Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Nature: Passage, The Oneiric,
and Interanimality,” Chiasmi International. Merleau-Ponty: From Nature to Ontology
(VRIN, Mimesis, University of Mempthis Press, 2000), 232.
17. Alphonso Lingis, “The World as a Whole,” From Phenomenology to Thought,
Errancy, and Desire: Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson, S.J., ed. Babette Babich
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995).
18. The material that constitutes the third lecture course on nature is a series
of Merleau-Ponty’s “sketches” (eight in all), in which he retreats similar key ideas
in different ways. It is therefore the case that many of the sketches follow a similar
order, though repeated differently each time. The association between Uexküll’s
Umwelt and the flesh is found at the beginning of the first sketch, but can also be
found at the beginning of the second and third sketches as well.
19. On the issue of an “ontology of nature,” see John Russon’s essay “Em-
bodiment and responsibility: Merleau-Ponty and the ontology of nature,” Man and
World 27 (1994): 291–308. Russon draws primarily from Phenomenology of Perception
as well as The Visible and the Invisible (the Nature lectures were not yet available at
this time), so while he mentions the concept of the Umwelt, there is no connection
made to Uexküll.
20. Barbaras, “Merleau-Ponty and Nature,” 37.
21. For an account of Merleau-Ponty’s usage of “sense” in particular, and its
application to an ontology of nature, see Ted Toadvine’s “Singing the World in a New
Key: Merleau-Ponty and the Ontology of Sense,” Janus Head 7, 2 (2004): 273–83.
22. This example, which Merleau-Ponty reinterprets from Husserl’s Ideas II, can
be found in Merleau-Ponty’s “The Philosopher and His Shadow” (Signs, trans. Richard
C. McCleary [Evanton, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964]), the third course
on Nature, and the more well-known passages in The Visible and the Invisible.
23. For example, compare the remark on the rehabilitation of the sensible
world in Nature to his remark in “The Philosopher and His Shadow” (S, 210/166–67)
in which “the ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” is noted in the contact of
the touching hand.
24. See also: “The relation between the circularities (my body-the sensible)
does not present the difficulties that the relation between ‘layers’ or linear orders
presents (nor the immanence-transcendence alternative)” (VI, 321/268).
 Notes to Chapter 5 201

25. Compare the following claim with Heidegger: “Reciprocally, human being
is not animality (in the sense of mechanism) + reason.—And this is why we are
concerned with the body: before being reason, humanity is another corporeity” (N,
269/208). The first sentence is quite similar to Heidegger (cf. GA2, 50/75) whereas
the second sentence suggests a new direction. A more obvious site for further
study on their relation, which I cannot undertake here, is Merleau-Ponty’s lectures
on Heidegger in the first part of Notes des cours au Collège de France: 1957–58 et
1960–61 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Françoise Dastur addresses these lectures in Chair
et language (Fougères: Encre Marine, 2001).

CHAPTER 5: THE-ANIMAL-STALKS-AT-FIVE-O’CLOCK

1. Following the convention of many other commentators, I adopt the

practice of referring to the ontology in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative writings
as “Deleuze’s ontology.” Though this practice may not give Guattari his share of
the credit, most of the ontological ideas that appear in their collaborations can be
traced back to Deleuze’s earlier writings, such as Difference and Repetition, The Logic
of Sense, and his engagements with the philosophical tradition.
2. Another recent publication that takes up the theme of the ‘being of the
question,’ and the question of being, in light of contemporary thought is Leonard
Lawlor’s Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question. We might also
cite one of Derrida’s texts on Heidegger, in which the subtitle simply attests to the
importance of the question as such: Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question.
3. Deleuze invokes both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, albeit briefly, in his
theorization of the problem and the question for his own ontology of difference
(DR, 189–90/64). He will note: “We regard as fundamental this ‘correspondence’
between difference and questioning, between ontological difference and the being
of the question” (DR, 91/66).
4. Bonta and Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), vii–viii. As an overall evaluation of the
impact of Deleuze’s thought, we might recall Michel Foucault’s infamous declaration
that “perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian” (Michel Foucault,
“Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. and trans.
Donald F. Boucher [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977], 165). Foucault wrote
this at the beginning of his review of Deleuze’s two books, Difference and Repetition
and The Logic of Sense, which establish his ontological outlook.
5. Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 190.
6. Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze
(New York: Routledge Press, 1999).
7. The bulk of Deleuze’s lectures are not yet available in print, but they are
steadily appearing on the internet in French, as well as the occasional Spanish and
English translation: www.webdeleuze.com.
8. This essay can be found in Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans.
Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988). The first edition of this