Illustrating how Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic phenomenology lends itself beautifully to both theatrical and ecological analysis, this essay examines how his work heralds a call to engage with our world on an embodied, improvisatory level. Exploratory improvisation and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology mitigate notions of distance into a causal relationship towards engaging wholeness, by inviting the sensuous intimacies of interaction: with ourselves, with each other, with earth…. in distance, in proximity. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology must be embodied and experienced with a consciousness, an alertness and (...) perceptive awareness of the act of engagement. The call to action by Merleau-Ponty begets an improvisatory eco-theatre; however it is not a move towards environmental activism. This paper illustrates how improvisation is a means to experientially make clear this delineation, which is crucial to overcome the dichotomies of separation and otherness that have been so entrenched in the Western world. Re-engaging our sensitivity of improvising as tool for survival, in a world where our sensitivities are all too often socially-placated and dulled is where the work of Merleau-Ponty and where theatre can be an active tool for re-imagining a future, our future. Merleau-Ponty’s eco-theatre is holistic, is inclusive and is most definitely a form of activism : a phenomenology that, properly and fully grasped, can be embodied through a ‘theatrical’ practice, specifically through exploratory improvisation. (shrink)

Reference to Merleau-Ponty's ideas surfaces in environmental thinking from time to time. This paper examines whether, and in what way, his ideas could be helpful to that thinking. In order to arrive at a conclusion I examine in detail and attempt to clarify the notions of 'Flesh' and 'Earth' in order to see if they can carry the meanings that commentators sometimes attribute to them. With a clearer outline of what he was saying in place, I suggest that the new (...) ontology that Merleau-Ponty introduces could help to transform environmental thinking, but that careful argumentation is required to show this. (shrink)

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