Merleau-Ponty and the Essence of Nature: A Return to Elemental Symbolism

by Taylor Knight

Overview

Taylor Knight reveals the way in which phenomenology initiates a return to ontology construed through a dialectical relationship between being and element. Within phenomenology’s return to the elemental, Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy is a key locus, opening critical paths forward into an ontology for the ecological age. With reference to his phenomenological forebears - Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas - his non-phenomenological influences - Bachelard, Schelling, Freud - and his dialogue with Greek thought - Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle – Knight shows what is authentically new in Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399529907
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2026
Series:	New Perspectives in Ontology
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Taylor Knight is an Independent Scholar who holds a DPhil in Theology from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Philosophy from the Institut Catholique de Paris. He has published on twentieth-century French philosophy and on the Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. He has journal articles in Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie et Religionsphilosophie and Sophia.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Emmanuel Falque

Introduction: The Return to the Element

1. The Powers of Becoming: Early Greek Thought and Contemporary Biology in Merleau-Ponty’s Elemental Ontology
2. The Correlation of Sensation: From Act to Power
3. The Elemental Bond: Surpassing Phenomenological Atomism
4. Cosmogonic Elementals in Phenomenology: From Husserl and Heidegger to Levinas and Merleau-Ponty
5. The Savagery of the Symbol: The Barbarian Principle and Elemental Negation
6. Symbolics of the Flesh: From Tautegory to Chiasm
7. What the Sea Left Behind: The Element as the Unconscious

Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

Knight works against the grain both of readings of Merleau-Ponty as a forerunner of Derrida or Foucault, and of the idea that many of his claims are strongly implicit already in the work of Husserl. Merleau-Ponty is instead situated in a line from Plato through some speculative idealism, as a philosopher turning endlessly around the knot of phenomenality and what it occludes.

Jeffrey Bloechl

A truly creative extension of Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished ontology.

International Journal of Philosophical Studies - Isaac Frisby