Sedimentation and Primal Habituality. Merleau-Ponty on the Relation of Culture and Nature

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the relation between nature and culture in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. According to Merleau-Ponty, these concepts should not be reduced to one another. Instead, their continuity and difference must be conceived simultaneously. After tracing the transformations of this relation throughout his oeuvre, I return to a line of argument in Phenomenology of Perception, where the habitual character of our bodily being-in-the-world is interpreted through the phenomenon of repression. On this basis, I argue that (1) nature itself can be understood as a form of habituality, and (2) consequently, we must distinguish between two kinds of repression and two kinds of habituality: on the one hand, the process of cultural sedimentation, and on the other, the repression of a past that “has never been present,” which constitutes nature as primordial habituality.