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Aristotle defined the human being as “the rational animal.” Philosophical efforts to understand what is human have had an overwhelming tendency to focus upon the “rational” side of the equation-in other words, what makes us different from the animal.
Even such widely divergent views as transcendental idealism and cognitive science are united in their focus upon the rational: the latter painting reason as the constituting principle of experience and the former modeling our consciousness upon the logical operations of a computer program.
To one we are God, to the other we are the machine, and to neither are we an animal. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy, which centers upon the body, may be seen as a return to the animal side of the “rational animal.” For just as it is our rationality which sets us apart from our evolutionary cousins and great-uncles, it is our embodied nature which unites us with them, for this much we have in common. Both to the eidetic eye of the phenomenologist and to the scientist with his prying scalpel and microscope, the flesh of man is akin to that of beast.
And those human actions and qualities which we associate with the body are those which we consider to be more “animalistic”: qualities such as sexuality, actions such as eating. Our animal being is our bodily being and vice versa. Despite this, Merleau-Ponty has surprisingly little to say about animals or about the animal in man.
Only in the Nature lectures does he deal with animals at any length and even here his remarks are obscure and in need of interpretation. Even more troubling is his approach to the topic in the lectures.
Here he eschews the phenomenological approach in favor of the analysis of scientific theory and research. Although his goal is ostensibly to speak from “within” a wild, pre-reflective Nature, his approach to animals follows that of the natural scientist, treating them as objects to be observed, manipulated, and theorized about.
As Elizabeth A. Behnke points out, “the working or companion animals we share our Umwelt with on an everyday basis are seldom mentioned, and then only in passing-typically, in contexts significantly different from those of our everyday commerce with them.”
Similarly, the question of the human-animal “relation” is treated only ontologically, and there is only fleeting reference to human-animal sociality.’” If our goal is to “retrieve this brute and savage mind beneath all the cultural material that is given,”2 then ought we not to seek it in a real and genuine encounter with the “brute”?
In other words, we should look to our lived relations with the working and companion animals that share our lives. Therefore, my goal in this essay will be to perform a phenomenological study of such an animal, situated in the context of MerleauPonty’s philosophy.
It is my intent to study an animal with which I possess as close a relationship as possible. This will allow me to bring all my perceptual powers into play, including those which operate on what we may call a bodily level, and which are normally effaced by scientific methods of inquiry. I have chosen the domestic cat as the subject of my inquiry.
Cats are very nearly ubiquitous in the Western world. For this reason my readers will very likely be familiar with the animals and with the situations I describe and therefore better able to ground my phenomenological reflections in their own lived experiences.
Moreover, there has already been some phenomenological work on cats which draws upon MerleauPonty’s philosophy: Elizabeth A. Behke’s article “From Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Nature to an Interspecies Practice of Peace.”
Now Behnke’s goals differ significantly from mine. Her primary goal is to exhibit what she calls her “intercorporeal/interspecies practice of peace.” Mine is to explore what MerleauPonty calls the “pre-objective” or the “pre-reflective” as it exists in both human and non-human animals.
Nevertheless, our projects overlap to some extent, and I will be making reference to her article, both to draw upon her work and to point out where mine can be of help to hers.
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